Architecture as Media

Definition

Architecture as media is the understanding of a building as a communicative act — as a medium through which a culture perpetuates, transmits, and advertises itself — rather than as shelter or structure alone. The thesis, as Goldberger reconstructs it, originates in Frank Lloyd Wright's 1901 lecture "The Art and Craft of the Machine," which reread Victor Hugo's claim that "this will kill that" (the printing press will kill the cathedral): Wright argued that the printed book was itself "the first machine," that it had dethroned architecture as "the universal writing of humanity," and that "the book is about to kill the edifice." On Goldberger's reading this is "the beginning of the modern connection between media and architecture" — architecture conceived as a form of communication, and therefore as an image-bearing medium. The concept is the historical hinge between the pre-modern symbolic building and today's image economy, in which "we think of almost everything in terms of its image."

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — identifies Wright's lecture as "perhaps the early example" of architecture-as-media, and reads the modern history of symbolic building (banks, monuments, the World Trade Center) as a history of media power rather than of tectonic form.
• Frank Lloyd Wright — the origin point: the 1901 Hull House lecture and its claim that printing "dethroned" architecture (as reported by Goldberger).
• gehry-frank and koolhaas-rem — in Goldberger's account, the contemporary figures whose work most visibly operates as image and logo (the Guggenheim Bilbao, the CCTV tower).

Related Concepts

• iconic-architecture — the building that operates as an image; Goldberger supplies a pre-history of the type in the symbolic classical bank.
• the-image-economy — the contemporary regime in which the architectural image circulates as value.
• architecture-as-object — the physical reality that media representation nevertheless presupposes.
• architectural-intention — communication is one form of the "civilizing intent" that distinguishes architecture from mere building.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 1 locates the origin of architecture-as-media in Wright's "The Art and Craft of Machine" (1901) and traces its consequences through the bank-icon case and the World Trade Center's symbolic afterlife.

Open Questions

• If architecture has always been a medium, what is new about the image economy — the speed of circulation, or the replacement of the building's own symbol by its reproduction?
• Does the computer icon for "bank" (Microsoft Money's classical temple) mark architecture's continuing symbolic vitality or its reduction to a cartoon, as Goldberger asks?