Networked Publics

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."

 

In 2008, Columbia University's Network Architecture Lab published Networked Publics (Cambridge: MIT, 2008), a book produced in collaboration with the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication that examines how the social and cultural shifts centering around new technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure. 

 

For the spring of 2010, the Netlab returned to explore the ramifications of these changes, giving particular attention to architecture and cities. In a set of four panels—culture, place, politics, and infrastructure—held at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning's Studio-X Soho facility, we discussed the consequences of networked publics in detail. Our goal was to come to an understanding of the changes in culture and society and how architects, designers, historians, and critics might work through this milieu. Discussions were broadcast live over the Internet using uStream and individuals outside of worldwide submitted questions via Twitter. Discussions were recorded for playback on the Internet and posted on the Netlab Web site. 

 

Out of these discussions, starting in the Summer of 2010, the Netlab is collaborating with Domusweb on Networked Publics: Publish, a new collaborative publication. We invited brief submissions 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? On June 24, an editorial board composed of panelists from the earlier discussions together with the Netlab staff met at Studio-X and reviewed the initial round of submissions.  

 

In working with Domus at this key moment, the Netlab envisions that this publication will have various forms, both online and off, evolving and mutating over time. 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?