This is Not Architecture: Media Constructions

by Rattenbury; Kester

• ISBN13: 9780415231800
• ISBN10: 0415231809
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2002-05-31
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Architecture's relationship with its representations is peculiar, powerful, and critical. Though driven by belief in the characteristics of physical reality, architecture is identified, discussed, and explained almost entirely through representations. Indeed, the representations are often described as though they were the architecture itself. The status of the imaginary project, and the shifts in media technology which affect how we make and see architecture, are part of the construct of media representations, including photographs, exhibitions, journalism, books, critical theory, by which we define architecture. Kester Rattenbury has assembled architectural writers of different kinds -- historians, theorists, journalists, computer game designers, technologists, film-makers, and architects -- to reveal the characteristics, cultures, limitations, and bias of the different kinds of media, and to build up an argument as to how this complex culture of representation is constructed.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
Notes on contributors	xii
Illustration credits	xvii
Acknowledgements	xix
Introduction	xxi
Part 1 A partial history of virtual reality	1	(54)
The revelation of order: perspective and architectural representation	3	(23)
Alberto Perez-Gomez
On the origins of architectural photography	26	(11)
James S. Ackerman
Architectural cinematography	37	(8)
Patrick Keiller
The revenge of place	45	(10)
William J. Mitchell
Part 2 The shape of representation	55	(70)
Iconic pictures	57	(34)
Kester Rattenbury
Catherine Cooke
Jonathan Hill
Think of it as a farm! Exhibitions, books, buildings	91	(8)
Peter Smithson
Diagrams: interactive instruments in operation	99	(11)
Ben van Berkel
Caroline Bos
The height of the kick: designing gameplay	110	(11)
Philip Campbell
Foto-graph, Foto-shop	121	(4)
David Greene
Part 3 The reporting of architecture	125	(80)
Framing icons: Two Girls, two audiences. The photographing of Case Study House #22	127	(9)
Pierluigi Serraino
Naturally biased: architecture in the UK national press	136	(21)
Kester Rattenbury
The architectural book: image and accident	157	(17)
Alan Powers
Post-Modernism and the revenge of the book	174	(24)
Charles Jencks
Architectural publishing: an alphabetical guide	198	(7)
Paul Finch
Part 4 The construction of theory	205	(48)
Architectureproduction	207	(15)
Beatriz Colomina
From dematerialisation to depoliticisation in architecture	222	(9)
Clare Melhuish
Wallpaper* person: notes on the behaviour of a new species	231	(13)
Neil Leach
Everything counts in large amounts (the sound of geography collapsing) FAT	244	(9)
Index	253