Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media

Afterimage, March-April, 1996 by Lucy Bowditch

To think about Loos one has to occupy a public space, the space of publication. . . . To think about Le Corbusier is necessarily to enter a private space. But what does private mean here? What exactly is this space? (p. 4).

Colomina relies regularly on old favorites, Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin. She integrates their observations into a view of architecture. For example:

The point of view of modern architecture is never fixed, as in baroque architecture, or as in the model of vision of the camera obscura, but always in motion, as in film or in the city. Crowds, shoppers in a department store, railroad travelers, and the inhabitants of Le Corbusier's houses have in common with movie viewers that they cannot fix (arrest) the image. Like the movie viewer that Benjamin describes ("no sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed"), they inhabit a space that is neither inside nor outside, public nor private (in the traditional understanding of these terms). It is a space that is not made of walls but of images. Images as walls. (p. 6)

This passage from the chapter "Archive" is characteristic of the rest of the text in that there is often slippage, not just between public and private but also among the chapters. This is admittedly part of Colomina's polemic. The above passage might just as easily be found in the chapter "City." Similarly, passages from "City" would make sense under "Photography." Just as Le Corbusier's house has an early twentieth-century mass-media movie referent, Colomina's theory has a late twentieth-century mass-media, cyber-space referent - hypertext.

One intermittently senses an arbitrariness in Colomina's outlay of engaging insights. The chapter "City," which focuses on the modern mask, concludes:

Surely, one look at the architectural avant-garde in these terms (Benjamin's terms of mechanical equipment and mass movements) suggests that modern architecture becomes "modern" not simply by using glass, steel, or reinforced concrete, as is usually understood, but precisely by engaging with the new mechanical equipment of the mass media: photography, film, advertising, publicity, publication, and so on. (p. 73)

Here another book, William Taylor's In Pursuit of Gotham, a 1992 Oxford University Press publication, would provide the New York perspective for Colomina's more theoretical text that rarely uses the word "city." Taylor's book has a similar thesis, that the idea of the city was created through images, including media images. It is not surprising to note that Colomina was, at one point, in her career, a research scholar at the New York Institute for the Humanities, where Taylor might have mentored such an emerging scholar.

As is often the case, a scholar in one area who does imaginative, provocative interdisciplinary work will make curious generalizations when discussing material outside familiar territory. This is what occurs in the chapter titled "Photography." The section opens with a reference not to still photography but to film: Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). It is followed by arguments based on the claim that the traditional definition of photography is "a transparent presentation of a real scene." This information is presented in quotation marks with no endnote, in a text otherwise well fortified by notes. Despite the address of the omission and such obvious oversimplifications, the elegant discussion relating photography to psychoanalysis to Le Corbusier makes up for the occasionally imprecise stroke.