Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies

This book offers a novel perspective on contemporary architecture, exploring its position in mediatization, attained through technological apparatuses. It introduces the novel concepts of apparatus-centricity and mediatization of architecture, which have significant disciplinary and cultural ramifications.

Highlighting key technological and theoretical developments, the book’s narrative traces the transformation of architecture from the modernist era to the present, digital age. En route, it reflects on how architecture becomes a crucial element of shifting dispositives through its confluence with technologies of aestheticization and virtualization, and by emblematizing ecological ideals. It also illuminates the reconfiguring of architectural practice through examining surprising interactions and analogies between architecture and music, whose developments in notation and codification continually change the relationship between composer and performer. The book explores how architecture is reshaped by broader theory and practice in media and ultimately serves as a cognitive agent. It underscores that architecture profoundly influences our phantasmagoric, image-driven affective world through its increasingly apparatus-centric approach to conception, design, production, and mediatization.

Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies brings into focus the behavior of architecture in mediatization for researchers and advanced students in architectural design, theory, and history. As an investigation into the interdisciplinary impact of architecture in a mediatized culture at large, it also provides a valuable resource for cultural and media studies.

Sang Lee is an architect and a University Docent of the Public Building group at the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. He teaches design and theory, focusing on technology, media, and sustainability in the master’s program. Lee is also a research mentor for the master’s thesis projects. Apart from his contributions at TU Delft, Lee has served as a visiting faculty member, a critic, and a speaker at various institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Bauhaus University Weimar, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, Università IUAV di Venezia, Bergen School of Architecture, and TU Berlin. Lee has actively contributed to international conferences, journals, and books. He has also served as a peer reviewer for academic journals. His research on architecture focuses on examining the impact of digital technology, the concept of apparatization and technological dispositives, cultural identity in a technocentric world, and the integration of sustainability within aesthetics. In the past, he received funding for research and publication from several sources, including the US Department of Education, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Education and Culture, the Creative Industries Fund NL, TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, and the Municipality of Eindhoven.