Highways and Horizons

Places · 2025-06-17

The Interstates created a national polity defined by auto-centric consumerism and typified by corporations from GM to Tesla. Can the United States rethink the governing logic of our vast highway network — the largest public works in the nation’s history — for a century in which decarbonization and democratization are defining social and political goals?

A World of Ideas: Selected Encounters in Architectural History and Philosophical Aesthetics, 1940–80

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2025-02-20

Abstract This article reconstructs a series of encounters between architectural history and philosophical aesthetics in the postwar decades by comparing the discourse of two journals: the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Shared hermeneutic concepts including “space,” “style,” and “symbol” gained new meaning as historians of architectural modernism drew on, and contributed to, developments within Anglophone analytic thought. For philosophers as well as historians of art and architecture, including early advocates of social history, Panofskian iconology introduced a tension between idealist and materialist approaches that reappeared in the work of figures bridging these discourses, such as James Ackerman, Nelson Goodman, Susanne K. Langer, and Paul Zucker. This tension was temporarily resolved, on the one hand, by a critique of architectural ideology inspired by the New Left, and on the other, by a politically conservative aesthetics of cultural training, most notably advanced by the philosopher Roger Scruton.

Polis-Oikos

2024-01-01

On the Fence: Media, Ecology, Marx

Critical Inquiry · 2023-03-01 · 2 citations

This article considers the expropriation, description, and cultivation of land as a central problem for media history and political ecology. Recent work in the history and theory of media has posited the cultivation of land as a primordial cultural technique or a material operation that underlies signification. Such work stops short, however, of considering that operation—which begins with the drawing of lines on the ground—as a form of labor and hence a dimension of political economy comparable to Rousseau’s account of the origin of property. John Bellamy Foster has shown how Marx’s early development of a neo-Epicurean materialism led, when informed by mid-nineteenth-century scientific agriculture, to what Foster calls Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” the disruption of the metabolic interchange between nature and society mediated by human labor. This article returns to the unfinished business of critical theory that rejoins the critique of culture with the critique of nature, by showing how a mediapolitics of land governs the dialectical processes described by eco-Marxists like Foster. Specifically, the article considers the material production of land for both agriculture and industry, informed by scientific agriculture and with plantation slavery as a limit case, through the work of Henry Charles Carey. Rethinking the political economy of land in this way extends the cultural materialism predominant in media history and theory into a more fully historical materialism adequate to an ecological situation in which all that may once have been solid has truly melted, or burned, into air.

Architektur als Medienkomplex. Vom Raum zur Luft

2023-07-24

Chicago Schools

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-13

This chapter follows microcosmic worlds figured in the skyscraper across three "Chicago Schools": in architecture, in urban sociology, and in political economy. Three novels map three historical phases: Frank Norris's The Pit (1902), the financialization of wheat in Chicago's early skyscrapers; Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), the "color line" and the public sphere on Chicago's South Side; and Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt (1984), the landscapes of oil and steel in Dubai. In each the skyscraper appears fleetingly on the horizon, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as it shifts scales from stage to prop. The three corresponding "Chicago Schools" are: the architects of early skyscrapers assembled around the slogan "form follows function"; the group of urban sociologists that included St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis (1945); and the economists who supplied the neoliberal precepts by which oil wealth was converted into speculative real estate in Dubai and elsewhere. The article concludes with a coda that records, with reference to the work of urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod and the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, the stark divisions of labor that haunt these three "Chicagos" and their skyscrapers, from Lake Michigan to the Persian Gulf.

Dank an die Gutachter

Aktuelle Rheumatologie · 2022-12-01

Der 47. Jahrgang der Aktuellen Rheumatologie ist mit dem vorliegenden Heft abgeschlossen.

Housing and History

2022-05-05

This text revisits the “housing question” as posed by Friedrich Engels in 1872 through the category of the “specific intellectual” proposed by Michel Foucault in 1977. In the one hundred years that separates these interventions, architecture developed a discourse of expertise around housing which has shaped the historiography on the subject to a considerable degree. Rather than continuing to reproduce this discourse, historians must revise its terms. For architects as well as for scholars, housing offers a specific point of entry into “universal” political and economic concerns. Reading key texts in a manner that puts Foucault in dialogue with Engels (and Marx) allows historians to revisit the discourse of expertise and rewrite its assumptions, in order to pose the housing question with greater precision, and in a manner that heightens its urgency and reinforces its contemporary relevance.

4. Sources: A Political Ecology of Cultivation

Columbia University Press eBooks · 2021-03-15

Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University

2021-03-02 · 1 citations

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women's colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld.Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university-the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans-reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason