Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture As Mass Media

(Paperback)

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Description

Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media. Architecture is more than buildings that we can experience firsthand, it also exists as a representation through drawings, photographs, writings, films, or advertising. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define 20th-century culture - the mass media - as the true site within which modern architecture was produced.

Reviews

"An absorbing and quiet book. Absorbing in that it does not follow a single line of thought to its logical conclusion, but instead presents a series of meditations on diverse yet richly interconnected materials. And quiet in that the position of neither Le Corbusier nor Loos is ever actively argued against. They are, rather, studies in their respective habitats, and what we in turn observe is the construction of the look that sees them." --Michael Archer, Art Monthly

Author Bio

Beatriz Colomina is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. She is the editor of Sexuality and Space, which was awarded the International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects. She is the coeditor of Cold War Hot Houses- Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy. Her most recent book is Doble exposici n- Arquitectura a traves del arte.