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Fig. I. Cover of Der Stern, October 1987

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Media as Modern Architecture
Co/amino
Thomas Demand sees media as architecture, in his words, "as a vast landscape, a
virtual domain with its cities of scandals, its towers of superstars, and its marsh
of murders."l
This may explain why he builds it, why he takes images from the world
of media-photographs of crime sites, most notably-and builds them as
scale constructions in paper and cardboard, strong enough to hold only until the
photograph is taken, after which he destroys the original modeL The new pho
tographs join the media world that originated them. A forensic image of the
German politician Uwe Barschel, found dead, fully dressed, in the bathtub of a
hotel in Geneva and published on the cover of Der Stern in 1987 (fig. I), becomes
Demand's photograph Bathroom of1997 (fig. 2); the hallway leading to serial killer
Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment in Milwaukee becomes Corridor (1995); the tunnel in
Paris where Princess Diana and Dodi AI-Fayed were killed in 1997, which was
repeatedly photographed and televised world
wide, becomes the site for Tunnel (1999), a
two-minute 35-millimeter film loop; a security
camera image of an escalator in London that
was passed by muggers before they murdered
someone becomes Escalator (2000); a press
photograph of the presidential election re
count in Palm Beach County, Florida, on
16 November 2000, becomes the photograph
Poll (2001); the kitchen in Saddam Hussein's
hideaway house in Tikrit, Iraq, becomes
Kitchen (2004); and so on. A steady succes
sion ofsupercharged and super-exposed images
are reconstructed. It is interesting to note that
if Demand takes images from mass-media
spectacle, he returns them in unspectacular
mode. The architecture he finds within
spectacle is completely unspectacular.
Media as Modern Architecture 59
The process is so laborious
and time consuming that Demand
can make only a few photographs a
year. The photographer is working
at the speed ofan architect, and yet
little by little he is building a city
made of diverse crime scenes (past
and present) and other media
charged sites, which now by
association look crime scenes.
These sites are almost always interi
ors: bathrooms, corridors, kitchens,
staircases, dining tables, offices,
TV studios, sinks. Even a forest
(Clearing, 2003), a hedge (Hedge,
1996), grass (Lawn, 1998) and the
night sky ( Constellation, 2000) be
come in his photographs interiors,
enveloping spaces. A city of interi
ors, then. A city devoid of people,
as if one massive crime had taken
place, with Demand as our tour
guide through the ruins. In fact, he
has said at one point, "I like to imagine the sum of all media representation of the
event as a kind oflandscape, and the media industry as the tour-bus company that
takes us through this colourful surrounds."2 To walk through a Demand
tion is to walk through such a city.
Why will a historian ofmodern architecture be interested in such art prac
tices? At an obvious level, all the spaces Demand reconstructs are modern. He is making
models of modern architecture and photographing them. More significantly, I find
myself in a symmetrical position to that of Demand, since I have been arguing
some time now that modern architecture is a form of media, that it is not just a
set of buildings in the streets but is built as image in the pages of magazines and
newspapers. This is not just because architects are trying to sell a product, making
advertising images of their spaces-although that is also dearly the case-but before
that, the image is itself a space carefully constructed by the architect.
Fig. 2. Thomas Demand (Gennan. born 1964), Bathroom, 1997. C.print.
63 x 48 in. (160 x 122 em)
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60 Beatriz Colomina
Fig, 3. Alison and Peter Smithson, Bathtub, House of the Futul'C, 1956. Daily l"'lail
Ideal Home Show, London
Modern architecture
is all about the mass-media
image. That's what makes it
modern, rather than the usual
story about functionalism,
new materials, and new
technologies. In fact, mod
ern architecture, as Reyner
Banham pointed out, is not
very functional at all. And
new technologies? Who can
forget the images of Le
Corbusier's houses under
construction exposing the
bricks before they were care
fully covered over with plaster
and paint to give the im
pression that the houses were
actually made ofconcrete? Or
the walls of the Barcelona
Pavilion, which were in the
end load-bearing, even if
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
claimed that it was there, in
the pavilion, that he first re
alized the independence of
wall from supporting structure (let alone the fact that the principle had been an
nounced five years earlier by Le Corbusier and that the practice was long in place
in American steel-frame structures). Or Alison and Peter Smithson's curving House
of the Future of1956 (fig. 3), which was not made of plastic at all but was a simu
lation, a full-scale mock-up in plywood, plaster, and emulsion paint, traditional
materials collaborating to produce the effect of a continuous moulded plastic
surface.
Modern architecture was staged architecture, a masque, as Alison and Peter
Smithson put it. The Smithsons saw the tradition of such temporary theatrical
structures as a centuries-old tradition in architecrure:
t.
Media as Modern Architecture 61
The architects of the Renaissance established ways of going about
which perhaps we unconsciously follow: for example, between the idea
sketchily stated and the commission forthe permanent building came
the of the court masque; the architectural settings
and decorations for the birthday of the prince, for the wedding of a
ducal daughter; for the entry of a Pope into a state; these events
were used as opportunities for the nealisation of the new style; the
new sort of space; the new weight of decoration; made real perhaps
for a single day ... the transient enjoyably consumed, creating the taste
for the permanent.
3
As in the Renaissance, the Smith sons' House of the Future was staged architecture,
a shimmering masque, which doesn't make the proposal less provocative but per
haps more: "Like all exhibitions, they live a life of say a week or four weeks in
reality, then they go on and on forever. Like the Barcelona Pavilion before it was
reconstructed."
4
The temporary turns out to be permanent.
The most extreme and influential proposals in the history of modern
architecture were made in the context of temporary exhibitions. The Smithsons
saw their House of the Future following this tradition: Le Corbusier and Pierre
Jeanneret's Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau in Paris (1925), Konstantin Melnikov's
Market in Moscow (1924) and USSR Pavilion in Paris (1925), Mies and Lily Reich's
"Velvet and Silk Cafe" for the Women's Fashion Exhibition in Berlin (1927),
Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's Nestle Pavilion in Paris (1928), Walter Gropius's
Werkbund Exhibition in Paris (1930) and so on.
From Charles and Ray Eames, the Smithsons had learned how to transform
images on display into architecture. This was already evident in their 1953 exhibi
tion with Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi, Parallel ofLife andArt, in which
an architecture of images was inserted into a traditional room, creating a room in
side a room (fig. 4). And it would continue when the same team assembled Patio
and Pavilion in 1956, essentially another room within a room, except that now the
inside walls of the outer room (the patio) were lined in aluminium, making the
visitor, endlessly reflected on the walls, part of the exhibit. The space was filled
with found archaic objects treated as images, laid out like a large painting to be
walked through in the patio, with the visitors incorporated into the image, or look
ing from behind the wires that replaced the missing wall of the pavilion to keep
visitors out, or looking through the translucent corrugated plastic roof of the pavil-
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Media as Modern Architecture 63
62 Beatriz Colomina
Fig. 4. Alison and Peter Smithson. Nigel Henderson, and Eduardo Paolozzi. Parallel ofLife ondArt, 19511nstrtute of Contemporary
Arts, London
ion, which had the effect of an almost photographic vision. The House of the
Future, on the other hand, was a display case that, like the objects it displayed, was
pure image. Both the house and the objects inside were treated as images, and they
combined to produce one single smooth image, a glossy ad that could be placed
alongside any other ad, participating in the flow ofpopular imagery, intense images
that dominated for a moment only to be quickly replaced.
Exhibitions in the twentieth century acted as sites for the incubation of
new forms ofarchitecture that were sometimes so shockingly original, so new, that
they were not even recognized as architecture at alL Think, for example, of Mies
van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (fig. 5), widely understood in the architectural
world today as the most influential building ofthe twentieth century. It was in fact
seen by "nobody." Despite its prominent location in the layout of the 19
2
9
'l
Fig,S. Ludwig M,es van der Rohe, Bar'celona Pavilion, 1929. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Mles van der Rohe
Archive
International Exhibition in Barcelona, even journalists sent by professional archi
tectural magazines passed it over entirely, unable to detect its significance. Naive
visitors and local journalists provided the only testimony to its existence. They
commented on the "mysterious" effect, "because a person standing in front ofone
of these glass walls sees himself reflected as if by a mirror, but if he moves behind
them, he then sees the exterior perfectly. Not all the visitors notice this curious par
ticularity whose cause remains ignored."
5
It is necessary to go back to these kinds
of statements to understand the surprise that a glass building produced in I929,
something that the generation that has grown up around Hilton International hotels
may have difficulty imagining.
It was only in the 1950S, in the aftermath of the 1947 Mies exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York curated by Philip Johnson, that the
Barcelona Pavilion burst into every architectural publication.
6
A ~ glass architecture
became dominant, the pavilion was hailed as the most beautiful building of the
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64 Beatriz Colomina I Media as Modern Architecture 65 I,
--, ("
Fig. 6. ludwig Mles van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper, Berlin, 1922. Model (no
century, exemplifying the cult of transparency. A building that was known only
through magazine images (it was dismantled at the closing of exhibition in
Barcelona and its fragments misplaced during its return trip to Germany) became
the most significant monument of modern architecture.
What is crucial about the Barcelona Pavilion is that it was both real, a
one-to-one construction that existed for a time, and an image, a media construc
tion. All we knew about it, before its reconstruction in 1986, were the photographs.
It lived in the photographs.
If temporary buildings like the Barcelona Pavilion had their full force as
images, some images have the full force of buildings. Think of Mies's famous proj
ect of the Glass Skyscraper of1922, where the model is made to look like a building
that has already been constructed, with light, reflections, greenery, and adjacent
existing buildings (fig. 6). He
photographed it so as to give
the impression that the
ing is living, removing all traces
of it being a model and care
fully blurring the line between
the object and its background.
He had done the same
thing with drawing in the ear
lier version of the project, his
entry into the Friedrichstrasse
skyscraper competition of1921,
in which he tried to produce
effect that the building al
ready existed, photomontaging
a rendering of the building
onto a photograph ofthe street
cars and electrical cables,
and refining the design in a se
ries of photomontages that
culminated in a canonical ren
dering (fig. 7). It is important
to note that these images are
longer rhe Museum of Modem Art, NewYork. I Mres van der Rohe
Archive
so large that you find
Fig, 7. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Glass Skyscraper, Berlin,
1921. Photomontage with pencil and charcoal drawings. Fonds Peter Carter
Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal
yourself in the street when
ing at them, drawn into the image.
The viewer of the photomontage
experiences the space of the street,
then arrives at the new building
at the end.
These drawings and
models were not simply docu
ments of projects to be built. In
fact, Mies could not have built
any of them at the time, even if
given the opportunity. He didn't:
have the knowledge, the techni
cal expertise yet. In fact, Mies's
place in architectural history, his
role as one ofthe so-called fathers
of the modern movement, was es
tablished through a series of five
projects, none of them acrually
built (or even buildable-they
were not developed at that level),
he made public through ex
hibitions and publications during
the first half of the 1920S: the two
Glass Skyscrapers of 1921 and
1922, the Reinforced Concrete
Office Building of 1923, and the Concrete and Brick Country Houses of 1923
1924. The projects were exhibited and published in a long list of journals, avant
garde and professional, such as Fruhlicht, G, the Journal ofthe American Institute
ofArchitects, Merz, Wasmuths Monatshefte for Baukunst, L'Architecture Vivante, as
well as in many books on modern architecture written during 19205.
It was five projects, these five "paper" architectures, together with
the publicity apparatus enveloping them, that first made Mies into a historical
figure. The projects that he had built so far, and that he would continue to develop
during the same yea.:s, would have taken him nowhere.
In that sense, Mies is a good illustration of the point that modern archi-
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66 Beatriz Colomina
tecture is a form of media. Modem architecture becomes "modem" not simply by
using glass, steel, or reinforced concrete, as it is usually understood, but byengag
ing with the media: with publications, competitions, exhibitions. With Mies, this
is literally the case. What had been a series of rather conservative projects realized
for "real" clients (the Riehl House, the Perls House, the Kroller-Miiller House, the
Urbig House) gave way in the context of the Friedrichstrasse competition, of G,
of Friihlicht, and so on, to a series of manifestos of modem architecture.
Further, in Mies one can see, perhaps as in no other architect of the modern
movement, a true case ofschiwphrenia between his "paper" projects and those de
veloped for his clients. In the 19205, at the same time that he was developing his
most radical projects, Mies could build such conservative houses as the Villa
Eichstaedt in a suburb of Berlin (1922) and the Villa Mosler in Potsdam (1924).
Can we blame these projects on the conservative taste of Mies's clients? Not so easily.
Mosler was a banker, and his house is said to have reflected his taste. But when in 1924
the art historian and constructivist artist Walter Dexel, who was very much inter
ested in and supportive of modern architecture, commissioned Mies to design a
house for him, Mies blew it. Unable to come up with the modern house his client
desired, he gave one excuse after another. The deadline was repeatedly postponed.
And in the end, Dexel gave the project to another architect'? For many years, Mies
was literally trying to catch up with his publications. Perhaps that is why he worked
so hard to produce a sense ofrealism in the representation ofhis projects, as in the
photomontage of the Glass Skyscraper with cars flying by on the Friedrichstrasse.
Mies photographed the model to give the illusion that it could be built
perhaps even to convince himself that he could build it. In fact, one could argue that
he did build it. The image is the project. In the imagination of architects the world
over, the Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper was built and was responded to by countless
other projects.
How is that possible?
The model, the photomontage, the drawing has to have enough detail to
sustain the illusion that it is real. This illusion is facilitated by the fact that mod
em architecture polemically removed most of the detail. In fact, it was criticized
at the beginning of the twentieth century for appearing like a model in photo
graphs, a critique articulated not simply by unsympathetic journalists and critics
but also by other modem architects. Adolf Loos, for example, criticized Joseph
Hoffmann's architecture in precisely those terms. It was hard to determine whether
the photographs of his work in architectural magazines depicted the real thing or
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Media as Modern Architecture 67
a model.
s
Even the drawings look like a model. The atectonic quality of the work
made it appear as if it were made of cardboard. We know it is a building, but it
looks like a paper model. With Demand's work, the opposite is true: We think it
is real until we look closely and realize that it is a photograph of a modeL
Loos himself built half-finished models to understand the complexities of
his own Raumplan. Drawings were not adequate representations of his three
dimensional volumes. When actually building a space, Loos refused to complete
drawings until the building was finished, and he continued to make changes dur
ing construction. According to Heinrich Kulka, one of his collaborators, Loos
would walk through the space and say, "I do not like the height of this ceiling,
change it!"9-in a way, treating the actual building as a model.
Loos criticized the way architects ofhis time had started to design so that
their buildings would look good in photographs. The building eventually came to
resemble the model in the photograph. Media was transforming architecture into
an image to be circulated around the world. Until the advent of photography and
the illustrated magazine, never had so many people become intimately familiar
with so many buildings they would never see. Architecture circulated throughout
the world in the pages of these journals. The impact of the images has been so
transformative that even when in the presence of an actual building, visitors in
evitably see it through the lens of the images they know, trying to match it
to the images, attempting to reproduce canonical photographs in their snapshots.
If modern architecture is produced within the space of photographs and
publications, this space is for the most part two-dimensional, and at a certain point
architecture somehow internalizes that space, that flatness. The three-dimensional
world becomes a photographic surface.
Thomas Demand takes us the other way around. He takes images fumiliar
to us through the media and turns them into three-dimensional paper-and
cardboard constructions, ephemeral materials like those ofthe media, and photographs
them only to destroy the model. He builds the architecture of the image. In that
sense, it can be argued that he is a modern architect.
Architects act as if their buildings were mainly images; they design the
image. Even if their designs are built, they are handed down, as it were, to the oc
cupants as a kind of used prop to inhabit. No architect has any deep interest in
how his or her buildings are occupied. Demand takes the opposite approach. He
takes the image, builds the model of that space in full scale, and destroys it after
producing another image.
I
I
68 Beatriz Colomina
Fig. 8. ludwig Mies der Rohe at the Museum of Modern Art, Newyo,-k, photogrdphed by William Leftwich in 1947. Edward
Duckett Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives. The Art Institute of Chicago
Perhaps the word "model" is misleading here. Demand is not simply
modelling something that is then transformed into an image; he is building the
image itself The procedure is different from that of the typical modern architect.
Mies, Le Corbusier, and the Eameses built models and photographed them from
many angles, day and night, then chose an image. In fact, architects never seem to
tire oflooking at their models. They even photograph themselves doing so. A pho
tograph of Mies at the Museum of Modern Art during the exhibition of his work
in 1947 shows the architect bent over, looking through the model ofhis Farnsworth
House as ifhe had never seen it before, his large head acting like a camera (fig. 8).
A photograph of the Eameses from around the same time shows the couple look
ing adoringly at the model of the first version of the Eames House as if it were a
newborn baby they are about to kiss.
Modern architects see everything through the camera. They make decisions
on the basis of what they see through the lens. With Demand, the position of the
camera is already determined. The camera is already part of the interior being pho-
L
Media as Modern Architecture 69
tographed; it is an extension of the lens that is then replaced with another exten
sion. In other words, it is not that he moves the camera into the model to photograph
it. The model only exists for the camera in one position.
Demand explains that at first he created these paper spaces as sculpture
and that he took photographs only to keep a record of them, since it was impos
sible to keep them physically as sculptures. But he didn't like what he saw. He tried
to learn photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher, who told him he would have
to attend photography school for three years before they could teach him anything.
It didn't seem very practical, so he started building a second sculpture that, when
photographed, would look like the first one. For a while he was building two ob
jects: one sculpture based on the media photograph and another that would
communicate better in a photograph the idea of the first. Note again the symme
try with modern architecture, which was built so that it would look good in
photographs, so as to better communicate the idea of modern architecture, which
meant looking like a cardboard modeL Photography in modern architecture re
produced the feeling of paper. Demand's photographs try to reproduce the feeling
of space created by the paper model, which reconstructs a space that existed as an
image at one particular point in time.
Most of these spaces have specific dates attached: the day the journal was
published; the day Diana died; the days of the vote recount in Florida; even dates
in the future, as in Constellation, which represents sky over Paris on 23 November
2300. Temporality is important in this work. It is not that the models are used and
then destroyed. They are already falling apart the moment they are finished. This
falling apart is already beginning in the photograph. We see a world not so much
freshly built as in the threshold of undoing itself-just like a newspaper, which
starts to disintegrate the moment we start reading it, or like modern architecture,
which starts to fall apart the moment it is built. The immaculate empty surfaces
of modern architecture immediately started to decay, revealing their own imper
fections all too clearly. Yet immaculate surfaces survive forever in photographs,
showing endless optimism, the utopian dream of the architect. Demand's vision
of the threshold ofdecay is more ofa dystopia and therefore fundamentally different
from that of the architect.
An exception is a project by the architect Bernard Tschumi, who in 1976
produced Advertisements for Architecture, a series of postcards juxtaposing words
and images, each a kind of manifesto of modern architecture. In one of them, un
der an image of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in a state of disrepair, the text reads:
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70 Beatriz Colomina
"The most architectural thing about this building is the state of decay in which it
is" (fig. 9). Paradoxically, although the building has now been fully restored, the
decay survives in Tschumi's advertisements, as well as in Rene Burri's photographs
for Magnum.
Like Demand, Tschumi appropriates media images and treats them as
architecture. And, as with Demand, it is not the building in the images that makes
them architecture but the event: in Tschumi's advertisements, somebody thrown out
of a window or a body tied up with ropes; in Demand's photographs, a dead body
in a bathtub or the hallway leading to Jeffrey Dahmer's Milwaukee apartment.
The event in Tschumi's "advertisement" of Villa Savoye is the decay of
modern architecture, even the decay of the very image of modern architecture, of
which the Savoye is the canoni
cal symbol. Tschumi exposes
not simply the fate of the
building but the image culture
in which the building was,
the beginning, sus
pended. In this almost surgical
move, he approaches exactly
same limit as do Demand's
photographs. While Demand
lifts an architecture out of a
media image only to destroy
that architecture immediately
after the photograph is
Tschumi constructs a new ar
chitecture out of the moment
an earlier one collapses. More
precisely, if the Villa Savoye
was designed to produce a cer
tain image for the media, the
decay of the building is the
decay of that image. The crack-
flaking facade is literally
the cracking and flaking of a
photograph. Fig. 9. Bernard T schumi, Advertisements for Architecture, 1976
f
Media as Modern Architecture 71
Images are the new architecture, "the unclassified background material
against which we pass our lives," as Alison and Peter Smithson stated in the 1950s.10
This represents a fundamental transformation of the urban condition of even
the previous fifi:yyears. If Walter Benjamin described architecture as that art form
that is perceived only unconsciously, in a state of distraction, that role is now being
taken over by images. An endless flow of images now constitutes the environment.
Buildingi> become images, and images become a kind of building, occupied like any
other architectural space. The significance of architects like Mies, Le Corbusier, and
Eameses lies in their particular sensitivity ro this transformation. They understood
that what it meant to be an architect in the twentieth century was completely different
from what it had meant for the previous century. Images had become the raw material
of their craft. It was just a matter of time for photographers to become architects.
In his recent installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London, Demand
has taken the walls of the structure, almost domestic in scale, of the classical tea
pavilion of 1934 that serves as the gallery and covered them with ivy wallpaper in
manner of William Morris. The inside becomes an ourside, as if the pavilion
had been turned inside out.
The wallpaper is produced and hung in a way that emphasizes the mate-
of the paper, the sense that it has been cut from a roll, leaving visible scams.
"I feel the importance," Demand writes in his notes for the project, "that it does
not appear as printed offset (like phoro wallpaper or billboards) bur matte, paper
ish and on rolls. A consumer item. If photographs hang on it we need the uncoated
of the material to make a visible distinction. Also the pattern will not match
on the sides: so the cuts will be prominent. Which makes it more collage-ish."ll
The Serpentine Gallery has been turned into a one-to-one model, a pa-
structure turned outside in. That's why Demand so much wanted it to feel like
paper, to look like paper, to bare its seams as if following Gottfried Semper's mid
nineteenth-century dictum that architecture is actually defined by the cladding on
the walls rather than by the structure that holds the cladding up. It is the thinnest
decorative layer that produces space. Semper, like the Smithsons, traced the ori
gins of permanent architecture back to temporary installations of fabrics on a
scaffolding in the open landscape for festivals:
The festival the scaffolding with all the special
and frills that indicate more precisely the occasion forthe fes
tivity and enhance the glorification of the with decorations,
L
72 Beatriz Colomina
draped with dressed with boughs and flowers, adorned with
festoons and garlands, fluttering banners and trophies-this is the motive
of the monument.12
All the monumental force of architecture is generated by the most insubstantial
means. In working with images, and decorative images of ivy precisely, Demand
engages directly with the greatest force of building. In building his images, he is
really building. Not by chance, one of the new works shown on these ivy walls is
Tavern, a ofphotographs based on the press images ofa building
in which a young boy was held hostage
never and the crime had no witnesses,
gate" image disseminated by the press. Demand's series symptomatically includes
an image of ivy growing over the murderous building in Burbach.
Cladding on cladding. Image on image. Building on building.
A version of this essay first appeared in Thomas Demand (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006).
I. Thomas Demand, quoted in franc,:ois Quintin, "There in No Innocent Room," in Thomas Demand
(London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 53.
2. "A Thousand Words: Thomas Demand Talks about Poft," Artforum 39 (May 144-45.
3. Alison and Peter Smithson, "Staging the Possible," in Italian Thoughts (n. p., r6. See also the
earlier version of the same argument in "The Masque and the Exhibition: Toward the Real,"
International Laboratorv ofArchitecture and Urban Design Yearbook
4. Robert Smithson, in Beauiz Colomina, "Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter
Smithson," October 94 24
from Barcelona reviewing the DaVlllon. in J. "Fear of
Glass: The Barcelona Pavilion," Revisions 2, guest-edited Beatriz Colomina
5. Unnamed local
Princcton
Architectural Press, 1988), 130.
6. For the reception of the Barcelona Pavilion, see Juan Pablo
A Study Systems in Architecture (Ncw York: Rizzoli International, 131-74
7. Wolf Tegethoff, "From Obscurity to Maturity," in Franz Schultze, ed., Mies van ckr Rohe: Critical
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 57-58.
8. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, (994), 56-57.
9. Heinrich Kulka, quoted in ibid., 269.
(
Media as Modern Architecture 73
10. Alison and Peter Smithson, Without Rhetoric: An ArchitecturalAesthetic (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1974), 10-11.
II. Thomas Demand, conversation with the author, May 2006.
12. Gottfried Semper, "Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts or Practical Aesthetics," in The Four
Elements ofArchitecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
, ~
r
This publication is based on the proceedings of the Clark Conference "Architecture
Between Spectacle and Use," held 29-30 April 2005 at the Sterling and Francine Clark
Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. The conference was supported by a grant
from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. For information
on programs and publications at the Clark, visit www.clarkart.edu.
2008 Sterling and Francine Clark An Institute
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
that copying permitted by Sections 107 and ro8 of the u.s. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for
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Produced by the Publications Department of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
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Curtis R. Scott, Director ofPublicati(}ns
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clark Conference (2005 : Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institure)
Architecture between spectacle and use I edited by Anthony Vidler.
p. cm.-{Clark studies in the visual arts)
"This publication is based on the proceedings of the Clark Conference 'Architecture Between
Spectacle and Use: held 29-30 April 2005 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Mass." verso.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-o-93I102-66-0 (Clark pbk. : alk. paperl-ISBN 978-0-300-12554-2 (Yale pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Architecture, Modern-20th century-Congresses. 2. Architecture, Modern-21st ccntury
Congresses. 1. Vidler, Anthony. II. Title.
NA680.C5822005
724'7-dc22
200704690I
Contents
Introduction
VII
Vidler
Questioning the Spectacle
Spectacle Architecture Before and After the Aftermath:
3
Situating the Sydney Experience
Terry Smith
Their "Master's Voice": Notes on the Architecture of
25
Hans Scharoun's and Frank Gehry's Concert Halls
Kurt W Forster
"The Way the World Sees London":
4
Thoughts on a Millennial Urban Spectacle
Mark Dorrian
Media as Modern Architecture
58
Beatriz Colomina
Histories and Genealogies
The (Trans)formations of Fame
77
Mark Jarzombek
Monumentality in the Pictorial Still
89
Sarah Williams Goldhagen
"Acid Visions"
107
D. Scott
Redefining Spectacle
Nonstandard Morality: Digital Technology and Its Discontents
127
Mario Carpo