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, and that in doing so it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. Privacy and Publicity boldly questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. 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 twentieth-century culture - the mass media - as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right. With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications, and exhibitions - a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls. This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Colomina argues; modernity is actually the publicity of the private. Modern architecture renegotiates the traditional relationship between public and private in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space. In a fascinating intellectual journey, Colomina tracks this shift through the modern incarnations of the archive, the city, fashion, war, sexuality, advertising, the window, and the museum, finally concentrating on the domestic interior that construct the modern subject it appears merely to house.

Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture As Mass Media

Politics & Social Sciences

Colomina, Beatriz

Sociology

Mit Pr

When American architects, designers, and cultural institutions converted wartime strategies to new ends, the aggressive promotion of postwar domestic bliss became another kind of weapon.
In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern architecture―not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the USA. In Domesticity at War, Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity―going from missiles to washing machines―American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller's words, turning "weaponry into livingry."This new form of domesticity itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic bliss―suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories―went around the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a plaid-shirt wearing homebody.
Colomina examines, with interlocking case studies and an army of images, the embattled and obsessive domesticity of postwar America. She reports on, among other things, MOMA's exhibition of a Dymaxion Deployment Unit (DDU), a corrugated steel house suitable for use as a bomb shelter, barracks, or housing; Charles and Ray Eames's vigorous domestic life and their idea of architecture as a flexible stage for the theatrical spectacle of everyday life; and the American lawn as patriotic site and inalienable right.Domesticity at War itself has a distinctive architecture. Housed within the case are two units: one book of text, and one book of illustrations―most of them in color, including advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural photographs, and more.

Domesticity at War (Mit Press)

Arts & Photography

Architecture

The MIT Press

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, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. Privacy and Publicity boldly questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. 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 twentieth-century culture―the mass media―as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right. With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications, and exhibitions―a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls. This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Colomina argues; modernity is actually the publicity of the private. Modern architecture renegotiates the traditional relationship between public and private in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space. In a fascinating intellectual journey, Colomina tracks this shift through the modern incarnations of the archive, the city, fashion, war, sexuality, advertising, the window, and the museum, finally concentrating on the domestic interior that constructs the modern subject it appears merely to house.

Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

MIT Press]

Essays by Beatriz Colomina, Peter Eisenman, Kurt W. Forster, Mark Jarzombek, Charles Jencks, Phyllis Lambert, Reinhold Martin, Detlef Mertins, Joan Ockman, Terence Riley, Vincent Scully, Michael Sorkin, Kazys Varnelis, Stanislaus von Moos, Ujjval Vyas, and Mark Wigley
Witty, wealthy, and well connected, the architect Philip Johnson was for years the most powerful figure in the cultural politics of his profession. As the Museum of Modern Art’s founding architecture curator in the early 1930s, he helped establish modernism in the United States; as the architect of New York’s AT&amp;T buildingthe Chippendale skyscraper”he gave postmodernism commercial viability on a large scale during the 1980s.
In this book, sixteen eminent voices in the architectural establishment present their ideas on Johnson, focusing on both his eclectic design approach and his vivid intellect. Among the topics covered are Johnson’s wide-ranging knowledge of art history, his endorsement of different versions of architectural modernism, his use of rhetoric and the mass media, his social persona, and his politics of patronage.
Owing perhaps to the control he exerted over critiques of his work, few scholarly treatments of Johnson exist. This unauthorized” account, the first in-depth study to follow his death, constitutes a milestone in the analysis of one of America’s most renowned architects.

Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change

History

Americas

Yale University Press

Since the 1997 completion of what many consider his greatest achievement—the stunning Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain—Frank O. Gehry has soared to the forefront of contemporary American architecture. Long recognized by his peers for his innovative designs, Gehry now enjoys a new level of prominence in the popular imagination. This book, the catalogue of the first large-scale retrospective of Gehry’s work in 15 years, examines the architect’s unique vision and provides the historical perspective with which to interpret his audacious accomplishments. 
Essays by noted museum curators and architectural historians explore his iconoclastic spirit and trace his melding of unconventional materials and forms. Photographs, drawings, plans, and scale models communicate the breadth and complexity of Gehry’s work and show how, in his view of architecture as sculptural space, Gehry has opened up a world of new possibilities for architecture.

Frank Gehry, Architect (Guggenheim Museum Publications)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Friedman, Mildred

Mitchell, William J.

Museo Guggenheim Bilbao

Gehry, Frank O.

Ragheb, J. Fiona

COHEN, Jean-Louis

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Guggenheim Museum Pubns

Thomas Demand

Kluge, Alexander

Photography & Video

Serpentine Gallery

How our medical obsessions and the image of the body influence modern architecture. This book explores the impact of medical discourse and diagnostic technologies on the formation, representation and reception of modern architecture. It challenges the normal understanding of modern architecture by proposing that the architecture of the early 20th century was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray. If architectural discourse has from its beginning associated building and body, the body that it describes is the medical body, reconstructed by each new theory of health. Modern architects presented their architecture as a kind of medical instrument for protecting and enhancing the body. X-ray technology and modern architecture were born around the same time and evolved in parallel. While the X-ray exposed the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern building unveiled its interior, inverting the relationship between private and public. Colomina suggests that if we want to talk about the state of the art in buildings, we should look to the dominant obsessions about illness and the latest techniques of imaging the body―and ask what effects they may have on the way we conceive architecture.
Beatriz Colomina is founding director of the program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University and Professor in the School of Architecture. She has written extensively on the interrelationships between architecture, art, media, sexuality and health.

X-ray Architecture

History & Criticism

Lars Müller Publishers

The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Colomina’s and Wigley’s field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges. Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.

Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design

Wigley, Mark

This volume investigates the historical and contemporary use of projected images in art, from the screen to the exhibition space and back again. Ten essays, written by leading art historians and critics, including Stan Douglas, Mieke Bal and Beatriz Colomina, address precedents for the projection of images in space, including nineteenth-century magic lantern shows and the novel spatial/temporal representations pioneered by Surrealists and experimental filmmakers during the early and mid-twentieth century. Central to the book's thesis are various alternatives--which were investigated by adherents of Expanded Cinema in the 70s and resurrected by video artists in the 90s--to the conventional portrayals of space and time promoted by the mainstream culture industry. Art of Projection serves as a timely reconsideration of media art's history.

Art of Projection

BAL, MIEKE

Eamon, Christopher

Reference

Hatje Cantz

Thomas Demand: Catalogue Serpentine Gallery London Thomas Demand is one of the most celebrated contemporary photo artists. At first sight, Demand’s pictures, say of a kitchen, an elevator, or a car park, seem like depictions of everyday places. Yet on closer inspection they turn out to be reconstructions of reality: Demand creates life-size environments made of paper and cardboard and accurate down to the smallest details, photographs these "re-creations" and then destroys them. The pictures that arise in this way put their finger squarely on the drab aesthetics of the modern office world and architecture. Demand’s sculptural and somehow filmic simulations, completely devoid of people, lead us into a world of models, in which a "faked" reality blends with the memory of a real reality to generate vividly cool images and to investigate the concept of virtual reality that plays such a key role in our technological multimedia age. Text by Beatriz Colomina Interview between Thomas Demand and Alexander Kluge Book design by Supermarket / Naomi Mizusaki Thomas Demand, born in Munich in 1964, studied in Munich and Düsseldorf and at Goldsmith’s College, London. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the US.

Thomas Demand: Catalogue Serpentine Gallery London

Individual Artists

Schirmer/Mosel Verlag Gmbh

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