1. This Didn’t Kill That:
Architectural History Through Media Ecology
Shannon Mattern
Presented at the College Art Association Conference
Seattle, WA, February 18-21, 2004
It was in a letter to Claire Boothe Luce, congresswoman, ambassador, and magazine
publisher, that Marshall McLuhan called for the management of the world’s “media
ecologies.” That term – Media Ecology – has since come to identify the Toronto and New
York schools of media studies, which are characterized by their examination of media and
communication systems as environments, both physical and symbolic. As Neil Postman,
founder of the New York University Media Ecology program, put it, “the word ecology
implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people”1. Those
environmental “impacts” include “human perception, understanding, feeling, and value.”
The ecological metaphor thus enables media scholars to examine not only “the media”
themselves, but also the physical and social environments within which they operate and
which they help to create. The metaphor seems equally appropriate for the study of built
environments – not only because architecture does indeed constitute a material ecology, but
also because, as many media ecologists have acknowledged, architecture functions as a
medium, a message system that shapes “human perception, understanding, feeling,”
behavior, and “value.”
My presentation will address how Media Ecologists viewed the history of architecture
through the lens of media history. I will draw upon the work of central figures in Media
Ecology to examine how these theorists have characterized the concurrent and interwoven
evolutions of architecture and communications media. Did architecture really arise, as

2. Sigfried Giedion claims and Marshall McLuhan concurs, with the advent of inscription?
How, according to Harold Innis, did the
emergence of paper-based bureaucracies
reshape built space? And if writing begat
architecture, why, then, should Victor
Hugo predict that this (the book) would
kill that (the edifice), and why was he
wrong? How has television reshaped the home and redefined, as Joshua Meyrowitz explains,
our “senses of place”? Instead of proclamations of revolution, media ecologists offer
historicized accounts of the co-evolution of mediated and built environments.
In his 1992 book, Conscientious Objections, Postman says that media ecology, “as a young subject,
…must address such fundamental questions as how to define ‘media,’ where to look for
cultural change, and how to link changes in our media environment with changes in our
ways of behaving and feeling”2. Lewis Mumford, an urban planner and historian who,
because of his book Technics and Civilization, has also been claimed by Media
Ecology, helps Postman expand the definition of media. Mumford regards the
city as a physical cognitive map, and a training ground for the mind. In The
Culture of Cities he wrote, “Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban
forms condition mind…. The city records the attitude of a culture and an epoch to the
fundamental facts of its existence.3 Mumford’s definition of city is not far off from
McLuhan’s definition of media, which he regards as extensions of the mind and senses. And
Mumford’s claim that “urban forms condition mind,” we hear echoed in McLuhan’s famous

3. phrase “the medium is the message”; the form of the medium shapes its content and how
that content is received.
Mumford also speaks of the city as a palimpsestic medium; he writes: “In the city, time
becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways, more open than the written
record, more subject to the gaze of many men than the scattered artifacts of the countryside,
leave an imprint upon the minds even of the ignorant or the indifferent”4. Here Mumford
provides an excellent introduction to the concept of media biases, an idea developed by
McLuhan’s mentor, economist Harold Innis. Innis presented two chief biases: one towards
space, and one toward time5. A stela etched with Mayan pictograms, for
example, is better relied upon for its longevity than its portability; thus, it
is biased towards time. Paper, however, is valued for its portability and
easy distribution, and it is likely to disintegrate more rapidly than many
other media; paper is thus said to be space-biased.
Postman’s colleague at NYU Christine Nystrom has identified several other biases in
addition to those of the two cosmic forces. Here are just a few: First, “because of the
different physical forms in which they encode, store, and transmit information, different
media have different temporal, spatial, and sensory biases.”6 Compare Shigeru Ban’s paper
house, for example, to Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s Building; in these two examples, differences

4. in physical form create different spatial and sensory biases.
Shigeru Ban, Paper House Richard Rogers, Lloyds Building
Second, “because their physical form dictates differences in conditions of attendance,
different media have different social biases.” Consider how one “attends” to the
transparency of a Neutra house, compared to the relative opacity of a Loos house; what are
the social implications of these different conditions of attendance?
Richard Neutra, Kafmann House Adolf Loos, Moller House

5. Finally, “because of their differences in physical
and symbolic form, different media have different
content biases.” In architecture, we might think of
“content” as “function” or “program.” Consider
how an architectural form might bias a structure towards particular functions. Why, for
example, might Rem Koolhaas’s Seattle Public Library not be well suited for a hospital?
Returning to Mumford’s review of the city’s biases: He deems it “more open than the
written record, more subject to the gaze of many men than the scattered artifacts of the
countryside,” and capable of leaving “an imprint upon the minds even of the ignorant or the
indifferent.”7 More open than a written record, capable of reaching a larger audience, legible
for the ignorant and relevant to the indifferent: here Mumford addresses the conditions of
attendance to and accessibility of architecture, and in so doing, reveals its social, particularly
its political, biases.8
The concept of media bias allows us to analyze the physical and symbolic properties of a
medium and how those qualities predispose a medium towards particular uses, conditions of
attendance, social meanings, etc., and hold particular social and cultural consequences.
“Bias” allows us to recognize that each medium form possesses a combination of qualities
unlike any other. And that is why Media Ecology focuses on the symbiotic – not parasitic --
relationship among the media9; as one scholar puts it, “…no medium has ever disappeared
from existence or use as a result of the introduction of a new medium.”10 But as McLuhan
argues, each new medium subsumes components or characteristics of the media that came
before it. According to McLuhan’s tetrad, from the Laws of Media , each medium enhances,

6. obsolesces, retrieves, and reverses something about the media and cultural
conditions that precede it.11 The same can be said for architectural media.
There is no basis for claiming that a new building technology or type will
eradicate those that have preceded it; it may take cues from its predecessors
– enhancing, obsolescing, retrieving, and reversing elements of each – but never entirely
doing away with them.
* * * * *
Let’s start at the beginning – the beginning of mass communication history, that is – in the
time before writing, when the human voice was the only medium. There is much agreement
that the rise of civilization – and all of its cultural productions, including architecture –
corresponds to the birth of writing. McLuhan notes that “in his monumental study of The
Beginnings of Architecture, Siegfried Giedion has many occasions to comment on the fact that
before script there is no architecture”.12 Groups of people settled in particular regions,
developed agricultural societies, and eventually grew a surplus of goods, which then enabled
them to trade with others. As trade increased, people needed a means of recording their
transactions, and thus writing developed as a
tool for accountancy. Clay tokens stored in clay
envelopes were used to record the trade of
sheep and grain13. It is significant that the first
writing materials – stone and clay – were also
among the first building materials.

7. Record keeping also promoted the growth of complex political and social institutions. And
as goods were distributed farther and wider, cultural contact and human interchange
increased, and the communication system grew ever wider and more complex. Both
Mumford and Innis credit the alphabet – a development attributed to the Phoenicians – with
promoting the rise of the Phoenicians’ trading cities and the “emergence of smaller nations
dependent on distinct languages.”14 Writing made possible the city-states and imperial cities
of the ancient world. Even the substrate on which the literate elites wrote these characters,
helped to shape their civilizations. Harold Innis writes, “Papyrus was produced in a restricted
area and met the demands of a centralized
administration whereas parchment as the
product of an agricultural economy was
suited to a decentralized system.”15 Thus
the development of writing systems and
writing substrates was essential to the rise
of ancient civilizations, and these new
means of record keeping shaped not only the communication environment, but also the
physical environment – particularly, the birth of city-states and the spread of empires.
But even these cultures, in which communication was controlled and writing stayed in the
hands of the elite, were primarily oral cultures. And here, architecture and speech were the
principal media for communication. Plato’s ideal city was limited in size by the number of
citizens who could be addressed by a single voice.16 “Even so,” Mumford writes, “there was
a more common limitation on the number who might come together within the sacred
precincts to take part in the great seasonal ceremonies….”17 The city could stretch as far as

8. the voice could travel; it could grow as much as the church could hold. “At the beginning,”
Mumford says,” all [the city’s] creative offices were tied to religion, and the most significant
messages were sacred ones.” He continues:
These sacred messages, written in the stars or the entrails of beasts, in dreams,
hallucinations, prophecies, came within the special province of priesthood. For long
they monopolized the creative powers, and the forms of the city expressed that
monopoly…. [T]he great business of the citadel was to ‘keep the official secrets.’18
In these pre-literate cultures, architecture was thus a medium whose message was the control
of communication. As Mumford says, “the forms of the city expressed [the] monopoly” of
political and religious leaders over the creation of knowledge and its distribution.
Now, jump ahead a few thousand years to mid-fifteenth century France: The archdeacon
proclaims: "This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice." This “citadel” was about to lose
its monopoly of knowledge to an altered wine press. “To our mind,” Hugo writes, in The
Hunchback of Notre Dame:
…It was the affright of the priest in the presence of a new agent, the printing press.
It was the terror and dazzled amazement of the men of the sanctuary, in the

9. presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the pulpit and the manuscript
taking the alarm at the printed word…. It was the cry of the prophet who already
hears emancipated humanity roaring and swarming; who beholds in the future,
intelligence sapping faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome. It
was the prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought, volatilized by
the press, evaporating from the theocratic recipient…. It signified that one power
was about to succeed another power. It meant, "The press will kill the church."19
In overtaking the “controlled forms” of Mumford’s pre-
literate city, the printing press signifies a new awakening, a
new epistemology. The archdeacon encapsulates the
argument of Elizabeth Eisenstein, another central figure
to Media Ecology, in her book The Printing Press as an
Agent of Change.20 Hugo continues:
It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its
form, was about to change its mode of expression; that
the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same
matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was
about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable. In this
connection the archdeacon's vague formula had a second sense. It meant, "Printing
will kill architecture.”21
The printing press precipitated the evolution of the entire social ecology, as Eisenstein
argues. Thought was evolving. The modes of expressing that thought were evolving. And
these new modes of expression brought new biases: the book of paper offered solidity and

10. durability, and, although Hugo doesn’t mention it, portability and easy distribution. It
enabled literacy and self-empowerment and promised a religious and political revolution.
Hugo assumes that this new medium, with its new attributes, will “disappear” the old.
But in the mind of another, Gutenberg’s press would save architecture, provide new
possibilities for its teaching and practice. In his book Architecture in the Age of Printing, Mario
Carpo says that “starting in the early sixteenth century, architectural treatises began to diffuse
a new, media-savvy architectural theory that was consciously developed in response to the
new means of communication”
(e.g., the Five Orders)22. The
reproduction of architectural
images allowed Renaissance
builders to learn from the image
– not from visits to classical sites.
These images of classical
architectural elements fostered a
method of “recomposition” – creating spaces based on various combinations of a set
number of elements. Thus, Carpo says, design was standardized, and imitation was common
and legitimate. Printing would revolutionize the way architecture was taught and practiced;
but the book would not obsolesce the building.
Carpo mentions several characteristics of print – its capability of reliably reproducing images,
its standardization, etc. – that, according to Marshall McLuhan, also impact our conceptions
of spatiality. In his Understanding Media, McLuhan focuses specifically on the spaces of

11. housing. He links writing to the ascendance of the visual over the tactile, kinetic, and
auditory – what he calls the “specialization of the senses” – and the fragmentation of skills.
This newly visually-oriented, literate “sedentary specialist,” he says, can enclose space. “The
square room or house speaks the language of the sedentary specialist, while the round hut or
igloo, like the conical wigwam, tells of the integral nomadic ways of food-gathering
communities.”23
This increasing compartmentalization of
domestic space brought on, in part, by print
culture, is also of interest to Jurgen Habermas. In
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
Habermas addresses the increasing
compartmentalization of domestic activities into
different rooms, the new conceptions of privacy
and subjectivity that those architectural changes
indicate, and the arrival of new media forms – like the personal letter and the novel – that
also attest to these changing subjectivities and shifting notions of public and private.24
Gwendolyn Wright also addresses the impact of new popular print formats – particularly
plans books and domestic magazines -- on home design and decoration.25 Although they
characterize it differently, both Habermas and Wright have identified a relationship between
the evolution of media and the evolution of domestic space. Habermas in particular links the
growth of print culture to the spread of new physical spaces – namely, salons and coffee

12. houses – that serve as a testing ground for new media, and provide a forum for rational
critical debate. These new spaces were essential to the formation of a public sphere.
Far from “disappearing” architecture, as Hugo’s novel proposed, the book and print culture
spurred evolution in the media and urban ecologies. The introduction of a new medium –
the book – sparked changes in the design of physical space, so that those spaces could
accommodate the new perceptions, understanding, behaviors, and values of a literate society.
After Gutenburg, photography elicited claims
of another media revolution. Much has been
written on the relationship between
photography and built space. Beatriz
Colomina26, Shelly Rice27, Kester
Rattenbury28, and host of others have
examined the parallels between photography, the new visuality and subjectivities it promotes
– and the new forms of visuality and subjectivity embodied in birds-eye or panoramic urban
images, and promoted by the picture window and the glass-box houses of the twentieth
century. Some have suggested that architecture has surrendered itself to photography;
architecture, they say, exists to be photographed, and often certain canonical architectural
photographs – like those of Julius Schulman – become more real, more “architectural,” than
the built space itself. And as architecture surrenders to the image, architecture becomes image;
it turns itself over to the role of imaging.29 But today, over a century-and-a-half after the
introduction of an image-making machine, architecture survives, even exploiting imaging

13. technologies to enhance itself. Borrowing from McLuhan’s tetrad, it could be argued that the
immateriality of the image only enhances, or retrieves, the materiality of physical place.
<<Photo: Fox Talbot, Bridge of Sighs, 1845>>
Lewis Mumford refers to an
immaterial dimension of the city:
“Not by accident…have the old
functions of the urban container been
supplemented by new functions,
exercised through that I shall call the
functional grid: the framework of the invisible city.”30 One such grid is that of a television
cable network, which, like the book, further altered conceptions of public and private by
bringing outside events into the home. Joshua Meyrowitz, a graduate of the Media Ecology
program at NYU, claims that electronic media have so completely altered our spatial
perception that we are left with “no sense of place.”31 He identifies three consequences of
electronic mediation: First, the merging of public spheres – adult and child, male and female,
etc.; second, the blurring of public and private behaviors; and third, the separation of social
place from physical place. The telephone and television circumvent geographic boundaries,
bringing voices and images from anywhere, everywhere, into the family room. Beatriz
Colomina, Lynn Spigel32, and others have written about the impact of television on the
design of domestic spaces – and our perceptions of, attitudes about, behaviors in, and values
attributed to them. But it’s not only domestic space that has been touched by televisual
mediation; in her book Ambient Television, Anna McCarthy writes about how the ubiquity of

14. television – in airports and laundromats and at grocery store checkouts – alters public and
private spaces and public and private roles33.
Virtuality, many theorists would at one time have had
us believe, spelled the end of architecture, of
geography, of space altogether. Since then, geographer
David Harvey and sociologist Manuel Castells, among
others, have argued that that isn’t the case; virtual
technologies may have entered and altered the media
and physical ecologies – but they haven’t wiped out all
the other species. Still, curator Terence Riley, in his
introduction to the catalog for the “Unprivate House” exhibit at the Museum of Modern
Art, writes: “Today, the private house has become a permeable structure, receiving and
transmitting images, sounds, texts, and data.”34 Is the home really nothing but a membrane,
a substrate, a channel for communication, a viewing screen, a sounding board? Has the
concept of privacy been rendered obsolete?

15. William J. Mitchell, former dean of the MIT School of Architecture and current director of
the MIT Media Lab, says no:
Ubiquitous interconnection does not mean the end of controllable territory, or
elimination of distinctions between public and private turf, but it does force us to
rethink and reinvent these essential constructs in a new context. The emerging
system of boundaries and control points in cyberspace is less visible than the familiar
frontiers, walls, gates, and doorways of the physical worlds, but it is no less potent.35
Publicity and privacy still exist – they just
mean something different now – as in the
case of two projects from the “Unprivate
House” exhibit: the Frank Lupo and Daniel
Rowen’s Lipschutz/Jones Apartment (see
right), and Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall
House (see above).
And instead of “disappearing” architecture,
virtual imaging technologies have allowed for the design of buildings that probably would
not have been possible had it not been for the computer. Many of Frank Gehry’s and Greg
Lynn’s designs, for example, owe their existence to the computer.
Lewis Mumford, in The City in History, suggests how we might rethink the role of the “visible
city” in an era dominated by the “invisible”:

16. Many of the original functions of the city, once natural monopolies, demanding the
physical presence of all participants, have now been transposed into forms capable
of swift transportation, mechanical manifolding, electronic transmission, worldwide
distribution. If a remote village can see the same motion picture or listen to the same
radio program as the most swollen center, no one need live in that center or visit it in
order to participate in that particular activity. Instead, we must seek a reciprocal relation
between smaller and larger units, based upon each performing the sort of talk for which it is uniquely
fitted. The visible city then becomes the indispensable place of assemblage for those
functions that work best when they are superimposed one on another or within close
range: a place where meetings and encounters and challenges, as between
personalities, supplements and reduces again to human dimensions the vast
impersonal network that now spreads around it.36
Thus the physical city – and its architecture – are charged with providing a place for the
face-to-face, for the interpersonal. Architecture allows for this “space of flows” to “reverse
into” a public sphere – providing amid the IM’ing and texting a space for speech, among the
earliest of communication technologies.
Mumford saw this opportunity for interaction and communion as a defining characteristic of
the city. In The Culture of Cities, he addresses the effects of the transformation from “the
passive agricultural regime of the village” to “the active institutions of the city”:
The difference is not merely one of magnitude, density of population, or economic
resources. For the active agent is any factor that extends the area of local intercourse, that
engenders the need for combination and co-operation, communication and communion; and that so
creates a common underlying pattern of conduct, and a common set of physical

17. structures, for the different family and occupational groups that constitute a city37
(italics mine).
Decades later, MIT’s William Mitchell, who is heavily invested in the increasing mediation of
experience, echoes Mumford. In e-topia, he writes:
If public life is not to disintegrate, communities must still find ways to provide, pay
for, and maintain places of assembly and interaction for their members – whether
these places are virtual, physical, or some new and complex combination of the two.
And if these places are to serve their purposes effectively, they must allow both
freedom of access and freedom of expression.38
So while Mumford refers to a “common set of physical structures” and emphasizes the
“local,” Mitchell extends this space for communion and communication to include the
physical, the virtual, and hybrid spaces. Mitchell, although he doesn’t use Innis’s terms,
advocates for an assessment of the biases of particular communication environments.
Describing what he calls a “new economy of presence” – a ecological concept that McLuhan no
doubt would have appreciated – Mitchell writes:
In conducting our daily transactions, we will find ourselves constantly considering
the benefits of the different grades of presence that are now available to use, and
weighing these against the costs.39
Mitchell makes no proclamations of revolution or obsolescence. Different media forms and
spaces can coexist – and should coexist in order to allow people the choice, to give them
agency in shaping their physical and media environments.

18. In an article in Communication Research, Eric and Mary Ann Allison suggest that there is a need
for harmony between physical environments and media environments. They warn the reader
that “a city in which most of the inhabitants spend more than half of their waking hours in
symbolic space,” by which they mean engaged in communication or engaged with media –
that city “becomes ineffective when the norms shared in virtual reality are not those
delivered in the city”40 Are they proposing that the identity-shifting, the obliteration of
privacy, and the ego-driven behavior that are supposedly commonplace in virtual reality
should be mirrored in the city’s physical architecture?
Consonance between our symbolic and our physical existences does indeed provide a sense
of harmony and stability; as planner Eduardo Lozano says, “the concept of isomorphism
implies an active functional relationship between the built environment and the human
mind, in which the individual senses and culture are intertwined”41 But what “model of the
mind” would architects use as a design model? Our symbolic environment is not entirely
virtual – nor is it likely to become so. There are a plethora of examples of retrieval and
reversal in popular culture: Through the popular website meetup.com, people with similar
interests and beliefs find one another online, form a virtual
community, then extend that virtual community into the physical
world, meeting for debate at local bars and coffeehouses. These
virtual meeting spaces retrieve the public spheres of 19th century
coffeehouse and pubs. The presidential candidate Howard Dean
owes much of his campaign’s strength to Meetup.com constituents.
Consider a few other examples in which physical space has either supplemented or
triumphed over virtual spaces: flash mobs (see below), telecommuting, online dating services

19. are only a few. Our analog lives still require physical places – not spaces designed as an
afterthought, or as a backup for when the server crashes, but spaces thoughtfully designed to
enhance our multiple conditions of being – both mediated and immediate. Architecture
should promote built environments that balance and enhance our media environments; it
should complement, and provide
alternatives to, our communicative
and mediated experiences.
1
Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum.” in A.C. Eurich, ed., High School 1980: The Shape of the
Future in American Secondary Education (New York: Pitman, 1970): 5.
2
Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education
(New York: Vintage Books, 1988): 5.
3
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1966: 5.
4
Ibid., 4.
5
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951).
6
Christine Nystrom, "Symbols, Thoughts, and Reality: The Contributions of Benjamin Lee Whorf and Susanne
K. Langer to Media Ecology" The New Jersey Journal of Communication 8:1 (Spring 2000).
7
Mumford, Culture, 4.
8
Consider Walter Benjamin’s discussion of architecture’s reception in a state of “distraction.”
9
Casey May Kong Lum, “Introduction: The Intellectual Roots of Media Ecology,” The New Jersey Journal of
Communication 8:1 (Spring 2000): 1.
10
Thomas F. Gencarelli, “The Intellectual Roots of Media Ecology in the Work and Thought of Neil
Postman” The New Jersey Journal of Communication 8:1 (Spring 2000): 97.
11
Ibid; Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: The University of
Toronto Press, 1988.
12
Marshall McLuhan, “The Role of New Media in Social Change” in George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald,
Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1989)): 36; Siegfried Giedion, The
Eternal Present. The Beginnings of Architecture. A Contribution on Constancy and Change (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1964)
13
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
14
Innis, 39.

20. 15
Innis, 48.
16
“For the city, as it develops, becomes a center of a network of communications: the gossip of the well or the
town pump, the talk at the pub of the washboard, the proclamations of messenger and heralds, the confidences
of friends, the rumors of the exchange and the market, the guarded intercourse of scholars, the interchange of
letters and reports, bills and accounts, the multiplication of books – all these are central activities of the city. In
this respect the permissive size of the city partly varies with the velocity and the effective range of
communication.” (Lewis Mumford, The City In History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961) 63-5.
17
Mumford, City, 63.
18
Mumford, City, 99.
19
Victor Hugo, “This Will Kill That” The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
http://www.freebooks.biz/Classics/Hugo/Hunchback/HunchbackC24P1.htm
20
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early Modern Europe. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1979).
21
“In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is
the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a
force or as an intelligence.” (Victor Hugo, “This Will Kill That” The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
http://www.freebooks.biz/Classics/Hugo/Hunchback/HunchbackC24P1.htm)
22
Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and printed Images in the
History of Architectural Theory Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001: 6
23
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994):125; see also Marshall
McLuhan, “The Role”, 36.
24
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of
Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
25
Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in
Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Building the Dream: A Social History of
American Housing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).
26
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, PA: The MIT
Press, 1994); “The Media House,” Assemblage 27 (August 1995): 55-66.
27
Shelley Rice, Parisian Views (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997).
28
Kester Rattenbury, “Iconic Pictures” In Kester Rattenbury, Ed., This Is Not Architecture: Media
Constructions (New York: Routledge, 2001): 57-90.
29
In addition, much has been written on the pageantry of the movie palaces and other such theatrical
architecture; about the consumer messages written into the grands magasins and the early department stores,
architecture serving as advertising.
30
Mumford, City, 564.
31
Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985).
32
Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992); Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Console-ing
Passions) Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
33
Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Console-Ing Passions) (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2001).
34
Terence Riley, Unprivate House (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999): 11.
35
William J. Mitchell, e-topia: “Urban Life, Jim – But Not as We Know It” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999:
28-9
36
Mumford, City, 563.
37
Mumford, Culture, 6.
38
Mitchell, 97.
39
Mitchell, 129.
40
(Eric W. Allison, Mary Ann Allison, “Using Culture and Communications Theory in Postmodern Urban
Planning: A Cybernetic Approach” Communication Research 22:6 (December 1995): 640.
41
Eduardo E. Lozano, Community Design and the Culture of Cities: The Crossroad and the Wall (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).