The Mediated City 05 (Re-release): Media Architectures

Publicly Sited

If you live in a city which is changing rapidly, construction sites might begin to seem like processes of erasing, copying and pasting, remixing or remediating the city. And it also may be that the new buildings being put in place have more and more forms of media or communication, such as illumination or interactive screens, built directly into their exterior surfaces. The apparent embedding of media forms into architecture has become one of the most prominent themes in recent debates about the relationships of media and cities. While buildings have long been communicative, novel uses of illumination, screen interfaces and inventive building materials seem to be underscoring a new age where buildings are media. And yet, the interconnections of media and architecture run even deeper than this. Not only might we consider sites whose explicit function is some kind of communication – such as museums, art galleries or libraries – but also the buildings inhabited by media industries, sometimes known as 'media houses'. And then from there, we could observe that architecture more broadly is a discipline building spaces for communication in general, both domestic as well as of labour and organization. As a discipline, architecture itself is defined by mediation, from the age of print, to the computational practice it has increasingly become. In this episode, we explore just some of the numerous intersections of media and architecture, with a broad conception of architecture, both as practice and realised design, as both mediated and mediating.

Thinkers discussed: Friedrich Kittler (The City is a Medium); Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media); Scott McQuire (Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space); Zlatan Krajina (Negotiating the Mediated City: Everyday Encounters with Public Screens); Dave Colangelo (The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media / We Live Here: Media Architecture as Critical Spatial Practice); Adam Greenfield (Against the Smart City); Shannon Mattern (A City is Not a Computer); Aurora Wallace (Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City); Staffan Ericson and Kristina Riegert (Media Houses: Architecture, Media, and the Production of Centrality); Staffan Ericson (The Interior of the Ubiquitous: Broadcasting House, London); Sven-Olav Wallenstein (Looping Ideology: The CCTV Center in Beijing); Reinhold Martin (The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space); Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler (Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office).

Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)