Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media.

Beatriz Colomina's title for her book, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, is misleading: she addresses not only modern architecture as mass media, but also through, by, in, and imitating mass media, without formally defining the term "mass media." Highly segmented, punctuated frequently by illustration and whole-paragraphs set off in bold, the book production feels like hypertext made concrete. Such a layout is a clever counterpoint to her ideas, yet the effects of each are as frustrating as they are refreshing.

Privacy and Publicity is part of a new genre of architectural study that intends to deconstruct and renew architectural theory. Colomina, who teaches architecture at Princeton, moves beyond conventional discussions of building materials and invites a new readership, including those such as myself, a photo-historian interested in film and cultural theory. Her aim is to reevaluate preestablished conceptions of the public and private realms of culture. As one problematizes public versus private, exterior versus interior, a wealth of questions arise about how these phenomena have been constituted at different points in history.

Clean-line modern architects Charles-Edouard Jeanneret Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos (1870-1933), major figures of twentieth-century architecture, are primary vehicles for Colomina's discussion. Swiss-born Le Corbusier is an easy subject to study in relation to mass media considering he was once described by noted art historians John Flemming and Hugh Honour as "an embarrassingly superb salesman of his own ideas." Loos, born in Moravia, trained in Dresden and, like Le Corbusier, opposed to decorative Victorian ornament, has often been viewed as a more successful theorist than architect.

Colomina's insightful interpretations of Loos and Le Corbusier are only part of the over-all impact of Privacy and Publicity. Considering the book as object, its artfully designed layout and typography demand independent consideration. Each element suggests the reevaluation of more conventional, grounded perspectives in architectural history and theory. Moving from the computer screen, where Colomina no doubt composed her writings, to the book itself, one is struck by its physical nature. Although the text may argue that the meaning of Loos's or Le Corbusier's architecture be reassessed in relation to the role of mass media, the weight of the book itself is a constant reminder of architecture as "mass," not media. It is the kind of book one leaves at home because it has the weight of stone, even if the content literally dematerializes architecture. The book is just a little too big to fit comfortably in one's hands, requiring that it be rested on a lap or a desk, however, its generous weight and the smooth matte texture of the pages make it sensual and appealing to the touch.

The layout, like the content, deliberately breaks with art historical convention: specifically, the text is not punctuated by parenthetical figure references. Colomina writes about Le Corbusier or Loos, then several pages later, introduces a series of grainy photographs relating to the two protagonists, almost as an alternative narrative. Some images connect directly to the text, while others seem ancillary. The text and illustrations have independent but sui-generic lives. As Colomina points out, this strategy was employed by Le Corbusier himself in Vets une Architecture (1923). In Privacy and Publicity, the illustrations are small and centered, one to a page, surrounded by a razor-thin black line border. Interestingly, the photos appear as previously printed images with the half-tone dots made large and evident. The techniques serve as a subtle reminder that this is, after all, a book addressing mass media, in which the reproduced image is formed as a half-tone - a system of dots. Many of the illustrations are archival photos rather than images made specifically for publication. The lack of specific notations in the text and the black line surrounding discrete illustrations allows one to be in whatever place one happens to be, rather than constricting the relationship between text and image to a linear, sequential one.

That Privacy and Publicity invites new readers, i.e. those who are not strictly architectural historians or theorists, is suggested by its chapter headings: "Archive," "City," "Photography," "Publicity," "Museum," "Interior" and "Window." Under each rubric one is given close, in-depth consideration of the two giants of modern architecture. And as Colomina states, "If the research into Loos is organized by the gaps in the archive, the research into Le Corbusier is organized by archival excesses." As one might anticipate from that opening comment, much of the text focuses on Le Corbusier. The discussion of Loos sometimes acts as a foil for that of Le Corbusier.

Colomina's thesis is that "modern architecture only becomes modern with its engagement with the media." Of course engagement "with the media" is not the same as architecture "as the media," but such distinctions are not clearly made in the text. Sometimes Colomina seems to infer that the experience of mass media is a model for the experience of architecture. Elsewhere, mass-produced publications, not the buildings, exist as the history of architecture. At still other points, the house is a "media center" or, quite differently, the house becomes the media, turning into a camera itself: "The house is a system for taking pictures."

The recurring theme is modern architecture as the publicity of the private. "What kind of space results from this redrawing of boundaries?," Colomina asks. Inquiries into definitions of privacy and publicity are woven into the archive-based discussion from the outset:

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.

The study is bursting, crackling, by the time one reaches "Publicity." Colomina does what she tells us she is going to do: reveals modern architecture as mass media. The chapter takes its lead from L'Esprit Nouveau, the magazine published in Pads between 1920 and 1925 by Le Corbusier and the French painter Amedee Ozenfant. Colomina addresses a multivalent "culture of the consumer age" as opposed to the "culture of the machine age" in relation to architecture. At one point, she compares Duchamp's Fountain by R. Mutt (1917) with Le Corbusier's strategy in L'Esprit Nouveau:

Duchamp's artwork is a mass-produced object turned upside-down, signed, and sent to an art exhibition. Le Corbusier's "raw material" is an advertising image, obviously taken from an industrial catalogue, and placed in the pages of an art journal. (p. 171)

In this chapter, media terms are again used in a very loose manner. On one page she writes, "The Modern Media are war technology," and on the next, "Le Corbusier's concern with the contemporary conditions of production is necessarily a concern with the mechanisms that sustained that production: advertising, mass media, and publicity." Despite the lack of definitions, "Publicity" together with "Museum" would be useful in any inquiry into the rise of consumer culture and the effect of mass media as seen through architecture. It would enrich a more conservative bibliography that would include less theoretical works such as historian Lawrence W. Levine's Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, (1988), and historian William Leach's Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993).

In "Museum" Colomina succinctly states "The house is now a media center, a reality that will forever transform our understanding of both public and private." For those who wonder about the redefinition of public and private spheres, while at home on the phone, receiving e-mail or sending a fax, Colomina provides a fertile discussion of a topic addressed by Jean Baudrillard in his well-known 1983 article "The Ecstasy of Communication" published in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983). In little over a decade, the drama of Baudrillard's reaction to the telematic takeover, which one of my 19-year-old students recently compared to the public's hysterical reaction to Edwin S. Porter's 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, has been tamed and given a pedigree. Privacy and Publicity is part of that pedigree.

With the collapse of public and private, what becomes of the interior? Of intimacy? The chapter "Interior" concentrates on Loos. Here the illustrations begin to have a tighter relationship with the text. If one reads, "A sofa is often placed at the foot of a window so as to position the occupants with their back to it, facing the room, as in the bedroom of the Hans Brummel apartment," the illustration is placed on the opposite page. Ironically, one of the strengths of the chapter on interiors is the way Colomina describes Loos's dissatisfaction with photographs and in so doing reveals Loos:

Loos privileges the bodily experience of space over its mental construction: the architect first senses the space, then he visualizes it. . . . Loos's critique of the photography of architecture and its dissemination through architectural journals was based on the same principle, that it is impossible to represent a spatial effect or a sensation. (pp. 265, 270)

Colomina uses the "theater box" to explain Loos's interiors:

It is no longer the house that is a theater box; there is a theater box inside the house, overlooking the internal social spaces. The inhabitants of Loos's houses are both actors in and spectators of the family scene - involved in, yet detached from, their own space. The classical distinction between inside and outside, private and public, object and subject, becomes convoluted. (p. 244)

Actually, the technique, to nest one level of perception within another, equally describes the 1894 play Interior by Belgian symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck, of which Colomina is apparently unaware. In the discussion of interiors, the topic of fashion and architecture is introduced, and one cannot help but reach for Mark Wigley's essay "White Out: Fashioning the Modern" in Architecture in Fashion (1994). The chapter "Window" contrasts Loos with Le Corbusier. Loos's houses turn inward: windows are covered with curtains and the focus is toward the interior. Le Corbusier's houses, by contrast, "throw the subject toward the periphery of the house." Here again one could refer to the chapter on "Photography" or "Interior." The vertical window located versus the horizontal screen window, the house strategically placed for a view. Much of the chapter is also given over to a discussion of looking at "the gaze" and implications of gender for the two architects with relation to architectural spaces and fashion. It is clear that Colomina finds the attitudes of Loos and Le Corbusier towards women and fashion, and women and architecture, "troubling."

Colomina's examination of architectural theory, describes and reveals shifts in her examination of the public and private configurations that dramatically mark the twentieth century. It is a topic that seems to attract a specific generation - those who live in a telematic world but who were not born into it. Straddling these two worlds, that of the self-contained modern typewriter and the "postmodern," on-line computer, there is a need to describe a phenomenon that fundamentally resists closure, which is precisely what Privacy and Publicity does.

LUCY BOWDITCH is Assistant Professor of Art History at The College of St. Rose, Albany, New York.