As Crystal’s sponsorship of the Stirling Prize  causes controversy, writer and teacher Penny Lewis argues in defence of computer visualisations and glossy architectural images

The subject of paper has been weighing heavily on my mind recently. While publishing a yearbook of students’ work we were confronted with the extraordinarily difficult dilemma of using coated or uncoated stock? The romantics among us wanted to feel the texture and grain of the paper, the pragmatists were concerned about the reproduction quality of the colour of the images.

It sounds ridiculous but I was particularly sensitive to the broader implications of this decision, because the kind of paper we selected said something about the school’s values. And I was sensitive to the fact that a post-print gloss coat would have us marked down as a bunch of charlatans. Glossy images are really taking a bashing at the moment. The attack is no doubt inspired by our current culture of austerity and issues of sustainability – but I think it is also connected to a particular crisis in architectural ideas.

In his book Two-Way Mirror Power, Dan Graham provided a compelling critique of America’s post-war commercial buildings. These glass blocks were, he argued, far from transparent, but secretive places from which US corporations could assert their autonomy from their immediate urban context and American democracy. Graham’s words, which provide a heady mix of political and architectural analysis, returned to me recently when I was looking at the website of CrystalCG, the Chinese architectural visualisation company, that has recently been named as a sponsor for the Stirling Prize. CrystalCG carries pages of lonely towers, modeled according to some arbitrary expressionist criteria and set down on an almost perfect tabula rasa.

These sparkly buildings and their brilliantly executed representations are popping up everywhere and creating a good deal of anxiety. Last week I listened to two individuals lamenting the rise of ‘archiporn’: the glossy, seductive architectural image and subsequent anonymous building. How often have you heard someone complain that the real building looks ‘scarily’ like the early computers simulations?

While I find Graham thought provoking, if ‘mirror power’ is a useful metaphor, it should be used to illicit a moment of self-reflection. Why should the Chinese’s crisp images of sharp buildings on shiny paper make us feel so uncomfortable? Why do we baulk at such images when they appear in the UK’s architectural press? Indeed, why has there been so much fuss about CrystalCG becoming a Stirling Sponsor?

There are many answers to that question. One answer is that much of what passes for architecture today is nothing more than an anthropomorphic or naturalist metaphor made real by Sketch Up and contract management. Having sat through a number of extremely superficial show-and-tell lectures by internationally-renowned architects at the recent RIAS (Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland) convention, I am sensitive to the fact that some of the UK’s most successful architects have lost the ability to talk about their work in any way other than marketing patter. The glossy image belies the gaping hole at the heart of a profession. But is the dull image on highly absorbent, uncoated stock morally superior? Does it inform us any better than the crisp image?

The uncoated types often infer that glossy images on coated paper stock are the architectural equivalent of false expense claims, symbols of the rampant individualism and immorality at the heart of public life. I must take exception to the suggestion that to print a strong image of a tall tower is the architectural equivalent to The Sun’s page three. (‘Get your cladding out for the boys’.) The idea that the profession is being seduced into producing images rather than buildings by the architectural press is ridiculous. It is not a new argument, but it seems particularly unhelpful at a time when architects desperately need to reflect upon their own output rather than lamenting the failures of publishing.

To blame the media is the refuge of the uncritical. Ever since Alison and Peter Smithson drew beautiful images of streets in the sky people have been twittering on about the power of the image. Images can be powerful, but you should never underestimate the intelligence of the reader or the public. Beautiful images demonstrate what might be possible not what will happen and most of us understand them as such. When architects stop using images to aid them in imagining what might be possible we are in trouble.

I can’t help thinking there is a parallel here between the concern about the Telegraph’s bloodlust for political scandal over expenses and the trade magazine’s interest in 3D-modelled mega-towers (actually the architectural press still tends to give a large amount of space to noble and modest work). The truth is the media prints what it is given. If it has a disproportionate influence it is only because there is a political or intellectual void which has been left by the key players deserting their posts.

If contemporary architectural journalism lacks vigour the source of the problem lies in the arbitrary and incoherent character of architectural theory and in architecture itself. I’m sympathetic to Manfredo Tafuri’s approach to understanding the relationship between architecture and society: it’s a relationship in which architecture follows social processes rather than leading them. By the same logic architectural criticism follows architecture. So the world is not shiny, far from it, but nor is it uncoated.

Penny Lewis teaches at Scott Sutherland School of Architecture in Aberdeen. She is former editor o Scottish architecture magazine, Prospect