Name: X-Ray Architecture
SKU: 51461326
Price: 39.76 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Beatriz Colomina

Type

Physical Book

Author

Beatriz Colomina

Publisher

Lars Muller Publishers

Year

2019

Language

English

Pages

200

Format

Hardcover

ISBN13

9783037784433

Synopsis "X-Ray Architecture "

How our medical obsessions and the image of the body influence modern architecture. This book explores the impact of medical discourse and diagnostic technologies on the formation, representation and reception of modern architecture. It challenges the normal understanding of modern architecture by proposing that the architecture of the early 20th century was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray. If architectural discourse has from its beginning associated building and body, the body that it describes is the medical body, reconstructed by each new theory of health. Modern architects presented their architecture as a kind of medical instrument for protecting and enhancing the body. X-ray technology and modern architecture were born around the same time and evolved in parallel. While the X-ray exposed the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern building unveiled its interior, inverting the relationship between private and public. Colomina suggests that if we want to talk about the state of the art in buildings, we should look to the dominant obsessions about illness and the latest techniques of imaging the body―and ask what effects they may have on the way we conceive architecture.Beatriz Colomina is founding director of the program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University and Professor in the School of Architecture. She has written extensively on the interrelationships between architecture, art, media, sexuality and health.

Beatriz Colomina

(Author)

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Beatriz Colomina is the founding director of the interdisciplinary program Media and Modernity at Princeton University and professor of History and Theory at the School of Architecture of this university. She has written extensively about architecture, art, sexuality, and media. Her books include Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg, 2014), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X (Actar, 2010), Domesticity at War (ACTAR 2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (CENDEAC, 2010), and Sexuality and Space (Polytechnic University of Barcelona, 1997). She has curated several exhibitions, including "Clip/Stamp/Fold" (2006), "Playboy Architecture" (2012), and "Radical Pedagogies" (2014). She is co-curator (with Mark Wigley) of the third Istanbul Design Biennial (2016)

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