the network architecture lab @
the columbia university
graduate school of architecture, planning, and preservation
Publish
As part of its Networked Publics project and in collaboration with Domus Web, the Network Architecture Lab announces Publish, a new (temporary) space for discourse on the role of architecture, the media, and the public. Read the entries on our aggregator blog: http://networkarchitecturelab.org/projects/publish and submit by sending a message via our contact form (please also tag with the hashtag #netdomus).
At a deliberately undetermined time in the future, we will chose entries for a special publication within Domus Web. If you don't have a blog, send your entry via the contact form and we will post it on the Netlab site. Comments are enabled so do join in the discourse here.
We received a great set of articles from around the world, and—well aware that other brilliant individuals haven't contributed because of time constraints—have reopened the call for papers. There is no closing date to this project at the moment although eventually one will be announced.
During the last fifteen years architecture and the media have been turned on their head as technologies of production and communication integrated into our daily lives. But instead of the delirious optimism of the last decade, we now also face panic and crisis. The media industry is in flux: as new media rise, old ones are victims of creative destruction. The tools of architectural production, meanwhile, have been thoroughly transformed; yet thanks to technological and legal innovations that made possible the securitization of buildings, architecture faces its greatest economic crisis since the Depression. If we can be certain of anything, it’s that as Karl Marx wrote, "all that is solid melts into air."
We invite brief submissions (under 1,500 words) addressing the consequences of these changes for the architectural community. What are the transformations taking place in the architectural profession, in architectural media, in criticism? How are these transformations interconnected? What do these mean to you? What do they mean to the future of architecture and cities?
We are keenly aware that it is the engagement with precisely these epochal transformations that will define the critical output of our generation, and that the legacy of the previous generation of critics and theorists is no longer able to deliver the kind of thinking necessary to help us address and catalyze these conditions. This publication is intended as forum for debate through which the accepted understanding of the word 'publication' itself can be challenged, redefined, dismantled and rebuilt. It will polemically frame our context, but it will also constitute a toolbox of ideas that outlines an agenda for criticism in network culture.
Domus, one of the earliest and historically most influential architecture magazines, sets itself as a case study for debate around the role of printed magazines in the contemporary era. If the magazine is no longer spontaneously embraced as a locus for debate, should the permanence of printed matter induce it to serve as a historical register for ideas developed elsewhere, e.g. on the Web (the magazine understood as an archive-in-progress of excellence)? Or, conversely, should it pursue agility, hybridizing across platforms? Does the notion of architectural criticism, understood in conventional terms, bear any relevance today? What forces designate the formal and conceptual frameworks of contemporary built architecture?