Thesis Supervisor: Ghalya Saadawi

Thesis:Dream Homes: The Speculative Aesthetics of Luxury Real Estate Marketing

August 2020

Abstract

This thesis critically examines the contemporary forms and motifs of luxury real estate marketing as reflections of the modes of production typical to the commodity landscape from which they emerge. In particular it focuses on the CGI videos used for the sale of off-plan property. It argues that these speculative images do not only project a particular image of the world, but that the very mode of imaging used in their production reflects the technoaesthetics of the neoliberal ideology. 

Whilst this thesis is ostensibly concerned with architecture, it does not engage in form through an analysis of style typical to a history of architecture, nor through a phenomenological or affective understanding of space. Instead, it engages with form through a Marxist analysis of the commodity form as well as a politico-aesthetic understanding of ideology.

Author: Wilf Speller