T h i s D i d n ’ t K i l l T h a t : A r c h i t e c t u r a l H i s t o r y T h r o u g h M e d i a E c o l o g y

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

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

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

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

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,

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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”:

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

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.

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

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.

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).