Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies

Book excerpt: 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.