Overview

In a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively ‘mediated’ city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of 'hyper-mediation' – a qualitatively new phase in the city’s historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present ‘tele-technological-capitalist’ society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media – as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics – towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.

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9781138900776

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Reviews

Andreotti and Lahiji's compendium of reflections on the role of the phantasmagoria - commodity's ghost - on our understanding of city is not a treatise on urbanism. It explores something that today is much less common: a profound update of Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project set in relation to multiple contemporary theorists who offer insightfully apparati for understanding our technically anaestheticized city. Unflinching in its examinations of contemporary theorists who soft-sell the critical of critical theory and miss the Benjaminian insight, they make connections to many others who surprisingly add to and update our reading of Benjamin and Guy Debord. Peggy Deamer, Professor, Yale School of Architecture.

Author Information

Libero Andreotti is a Professor of Architecture at Georgia Tech, USA. Nadir Lahiji is an Adjunct Faculty at the University of Canberra, Australia.

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