Image, Text, Architecture

Illustrated by critically examining a range of architectural journalism, from an article by artist Paul Nash in The Architectural Review, 1940, to an early project by contemporary French architects Lacaton & Vassal (1996) published in the journal 2G in 2001, to recent photography by Hisao Suzuki published in the journal El Croquis, this book brings a radical and detailed analysis of the architectural media. It addresses issues of architectural criticism, architectural photography and the role of journal editors, and argues that the architectural media is a site of contestation and ambiguity regarding the role of critical and speculative thinking. The book highlights moments where a different type of critical voice emerges within the architectural media, indicating the possibility of a more progressive engagement with the media as a platform for critical thinking about architecture. The study is underpinned by theory about utopian thinking/discourse, primarily from the work of the French semiotician and art theorist Louis Marin and the American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. Through this, it builds a fresh theoretical approach to the architectural media and begins to reveal a hitherto unexplored dimension of 'latent' or 'unconscious' discourse within the media portrait of architecture. Following Jameson's charting of the role of the utopian imagination in the modern and post-modern periods, the book suggests that genuine utopian thinking has undergone comprehensive suppression in our current times and that the task of theory is to now to detect its presence and explore its meaning within new forms and sites of cultural production.