Product Description

Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. "Privacy and Publicity" questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Columina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define 20th-century culture - the mass media - as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right. With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications and exhibitions - a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls. This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Colomina argues; modernity is actually the publicity of the private. Modern architecture renegotiates the traditional relationship between public and private in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space. Colomina tracks this shift through the modern incarnations of the archive, the city fashion, war, sexuality, advertising, the window, and the museum, finally concentrating on the domestic interior that constructs the modern subject it appears merely to house.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2331973 in Books
• Published on: 1994-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 389 pages

Review
"An absorbing and quiet book. Absorbing in that it does not follow a single line of thought to its logical conclusion, but instead presents a series of meditations on diverse yet richly interconnected materials. And quiet in that the position of neither Le Corbusier nor Loos is ever actively argued against. They are, rather, studies in their respective habitats, and what we in turn observe is the construction of the look that sees them."
—Michael Archer, Art Monthly

About the Author
Beatriz Colomina is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Princeton University.

Customer Reviews

Every designer should read this
The best way, somtimes, to talk about a larger condition is to delve into specifics. Colomina uses Loos and Corbusier to draw out comparisons about the use of information.

Considering the amount of architectural monographs being churned out on a daily basis, and the creation of terms such as "information architecture," it's extremely valuable to look at how modern architecture might have started from an alliance between types of publicity and design.

Both Loos and Corbusier come out, biography-wise, as extremely creepy, though shrewd in shaping how their work is percieved by the traces that they leave behind. In Corbusier's case, he leaves an archive stuffed with minutia, an overabundance of information to supplement the built work. Loos, on the other hand, leaves very little, and thus what little remains of his work requires imagination to fill gaps in his story. What a designer can gather from this is to ask the question: how does what we do effect what our work is? Colomina's work functions reflexively as well as she works from "evidence" to create representations of both architects.

It is a compelling argument, passionately written, and not the least boring.