Robles Spring 2011
E58.2030
Architecture as Media
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication
New York University
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers,
“but by the line of the arch that they form.”
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting.
Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones?
It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Course Information
Professor: Erica Robles
Class Meetings: Wednesdays 7.15 - 9.25
Location: Silver 504
Contact Information
Email: [email protected]
Office: 239 Greene St., 7th Floor, Rm. 725
Office Hours: Thursdays 2.00 - 3.00 and by appointment
Course Description
This class reads architecture and the built environment through the lenses of media,
communication, and culture. The course takes seriously the proposition that spaces communicate
meaningfully and that learning to read spatial productions leads to better understanding how
material and technological designs are in sustained conversation with the social, over time.
Through analyses of a range of spaces – from Gothic Cathedrals to suburban shopping malls to
homes, factories, skyscrapers and digital cities – students will acquire a vocabulary for relating
representations and practices, symbols and structures, and for identifying the ideological and
aesthetic positions that produce settings for everyday life.
Course materials
Most course materials are available on Blackboard in pdf format. There are, however, a few fulllength books we’ll be reading and these can be purchased from any fine Internet purveyors of
books. These works include:
Edwards, Paul. The closed world: Computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America
Friedberg, Anne. Window shopping: Cinema and the postmodern.
Giedon, Siegfried. Space, time, and architecture.
Martin, Reinhold. The organizational complex.
Venturi, R., Brown, D.S., Izenour, S. Learning from Las Vegas: The forgotten symbolism of
architectural form.
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Robles Spring 2011
Expectations and Assessments
Full engagement in conversation. Be prepared for and fully present in classroom discussions.
This is valuable time for us to work together as an intellectual community. Knowledge-building
contributions make a fundamental difference to the possibilities for learning in the course. A
discussion board will be available online, via Blackboard, as an alternative mode of engagement.
One paper. This paper is an opportunity to render new thoughts as original work. We should be
in conversation in advance about the argument, and, if pertinent, the case. I’ll expect a
maximum of 20 pages. Due May 11. (50%) 1
Students with special needs should be in contact with me at the beginning of the semester so that
we can insure accommodations. Moreover where appropriate students should register with the
Moses Center for Students with Disabilities at 212-998-4980, 240 Greene Street, http://
www.nyu.edu/csd.
The Schedule
Week 1: Wednesday, January 26 -- Introductions
Week 2: Wednesday, February 2 -- Structures as Communications
• Innis, H. (1951). The Bias of Communication. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, pp. 33 –
60.
• Lefebvre, H. (1974). Plan of the present work. The production of space. Wiley Blackwell,
pp. 1 – 35.
• Heidegger, M. (1971). Building, dwelling, thinking. Poetry, language, thought (Trans.
Albert Hofstadter), New York: Harper.
Week 3: Wednesday, February 9 -- Class cancelled.
You are encouraged to come to the BRIC Rotunda gallery for a panel discussion on the
neo-nomads exhibit and to read ahead.
Week 4: Wednesday, February 16 -- Seeing Like a State
• Mukerji, C. Ch 5. Social choreography and the politics of place. Territorial Ambitions
and the Gardens of Versailles, 198 – 248.
• Scott, J. (1998). Soviet collectivization, capitalist dreams. Seeing like a state: How
certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CN: Yale
University Press, pp. 193 – 222. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/nyulibrary/docDetail.action?
docID=10210235
Week 5: Wednesday, February 23 Surveillance and Containment
• Edwards, P. The Closed World: Computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War
America.
As members of the Steinhardt community you are expected to uphold the standards of Academic Integrity http://
steinhardt.nyu.edu/policies/academic_integrity .
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Robles Spring 2011
Week 6: Wednesday, March 2 – Monuments and Media Events: Organizing Remembrance and
Forgetting
• Berman, M. (1988). “Geometry has appeared”: The city in the swamps, and Pushkin’s
“Bronze Horseman”: The Clerk and the Tsar. In All that is solid melts into air. New York:
Penguin, pp. 176 – 188.
• Dayan and Katz. Contests, conquests, and coronations.
• Calvino, I. (1974). Cities and memory. In Invisible cities. New York: Harcourt, Inc.
bachelard poetics of space
Week 7: March 9 Architectures for Worship : Cosmology and the Sublime
• Panofsky E. (1951). Gothic architecture and scholasticism. Latrobe, PA: The Archabbey
Press, pp. 20 – 88.
• Kilde, J.H. (1999). Architecture and Urban Revivalism in Nineteenth-Century America.
In P. WIlliams (Ed.), Perspectives on American Religion and Culture (pp. 174 - 186).
New York: Blackwell.
• Nye, D. (1994). Bridges and skyscrapers: The geographical sublime. In American
technological sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 77 – 108.
MARCH 14 - 19 SPRING BREAK NO CLASS -- READ AND WRITE
Week 8: Wednesday, March 23 -- Material Imaginaries in the Machine Age
• Giedon, S. (1941). Space, Time, and Architecture.
• Scheebart, P. The gray cloth: A novel on glass architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(excerpt).
Week 9: Wednesday, March 30 – Architectures of Calculation
• Yates, J. (2005). Early engagement between insurance and computing. In Structuring the
information age: Life insurance and technology in the Twentieth Century. Johns Hopkins
University Press, pp. 113 – 146.
• Wigoder, M. (2002). The “solar eye” of vision: Emergence of the skyscraper view in the
discourse on heights in New York, 1890 – 1920. Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians, 61(2), 152 – 169.
Week 10: Wednesday, March 30 – Scripted Spaces
• Friedberg, A. Window shopping: Cinema and the postmodern.
NB: Guest speaker, so April dates may shift
Week 11: Wednesday, April 6 – A View of One's Own: Mediating Domesticity
• Colomina, B. (1994). Window. In Privacy and publicity: Modern architecture as mass
media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 283 – 335.
• Spigel, L. (2008). Setting the stage at television city: Modern architecture, TV studios,
and set design. In TV by design: Modern Art and the rise of network television. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, pp. 110 – 143.
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Robles Spring 2011
Week 12: April 13 -- Cybernetics: Architecture as Conversation
• Martin, R. (2003). The organizational complex.
• Wiener, N. The human use of human beings, excerpts.
Week 13: April 20 -- Guest Speaker: Molly Wright-Steenson on Cedric Price and the Fun Palace:
Cybernetic theory and the architecture of performance.
Readings TBD
• Sadler, S. (2005). Beyond Architecture: Indeterminacy, systems, and the dissolution of
buildings. In Archigram: Architecture without architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Medina, E. Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's
Chile
Week 14: Wednesday, May 4 – Postmodern aesthetics and space-less place
• Venturi, R., Brown, D.S., Izenour, S. (1972). Learning from Las Vegas: The forgotten
symbolism of architectural form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (pp. 3-72).
• Castells, M. (1996). The social theory of space and the theory of the space of flows, The
architecture of the end of history, and Space of flows and spaces of places. In The rise of
the network society, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 440 – 458.
• Jencks, C. (1991). The language of postmodern architecture. New York: Rizzoli.
(excerpt).
Wednesday May 11 – Last day of class. Paper Due.
• Muschamp, H. (2000, July 23). Architecture’s claim on the future: The Blob, TheNew
York Times.
• Mitchell, W. The Revenge of Place. This Is Not Architecture, 45-53
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