Architecture In The Age Of Mediatizing Technologies

Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies

This book offers a novel perspective on contemporary architecture, exploring its position in mediatization, attained through technological apparatuses. It introduces the novel concepts of apparatus-centricity and mediatization of architecture, which have significant disciplinary and cultural ramifications. Highlighting key technological and theoretical developments, the book’s narrative traces the transformation of architecture from the modernist era to the present, digital age. En route, it reflects on how architecture becomes a crucial element of shifting dispositives through its confluence with technologies of aestheticization and virtualization, and by emblematizing ecological ideals. It also illuminates the reconfiguring of architectural practice through examining surprising interactions and analogies between architecture and music, whose developments in notation and codification continually change the relationship between composer and performer. The book explores how architecture is reshaped by broader theory and practice in media and ultimately serves as a cognitive agent. It underscores that architecture profoundly influences our phantasmagoric, image-driven affective world through its increasingly apparatus-centric approach to conception, design, production, and mediatization. Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies brings into focus the behavior of architecture in mediatization for researchers and advanced students in architectural design, theory, and history. As an investigation into the interdisciplinary impact of architecture in a mediatized culture at large, it also provides a valuable resource for cultural and media studies.

Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies

Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape

Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape explores the impact of photography at a pivotal moment in Italian architecture and culture, focusing on the period between 1910 and the mid-1970s. The book analyzes architectural photographs taken by Italian cultural figures who helped transform the Italian landscape into what we know today. This study charts the oscillation of Italians’ ideas about what progress signified. For example, the book demonstrates that for writers and artists familiar with ancient ideas about civilization in 1910, the Roman countryside exemplified the contradictions inherent in primitivism. On the one hand, their photographs praised the region’s primordial beauty, yet their images condemned the crudeness of local living conditions. More broadly, it traces the history of primitivism and photography in Italy to show how cultural leaders’ alarm at the nation’s pre-modern living conditions, their aspiration to modernize them, and their grasp of photography to catalyze the process helped forge the modern Italian landscape—its monuments, housing, infrastructure, and natural environments. At the same time, it explores a vibrant period in photographic history when the advent of photographic reproduction as a commercial process developed into a medium with its own visual style capable of shaping ideas about modernity. This new image-making and reproduction technology empowered Italy’s cultural leaders not simply to represent the Italian landscape through photography but to determine how it developed. Of interest to researchers and students from a range of disciplines, modern architecture, photography, and Italian studies, this book demonstrates the power of art to transform society and to reformulate our ideas of progress.