The Architecture of Phantasmagoria ─ Specters of the City

In a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively ‘mediated’ city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of "hyper-mediation" – a qualitatively new phase in the city’s historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture of the contemporary city.

Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of contemporary architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the configuration of the city in the current ‘mediatized-tele-technological-capitalist’ society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin to explore both the concepts of Phantasmagoria and of Media – as theorized also by Theodore Adorno, Sigfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics - to develop a socio-critical analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.

Nadir Lahiji is an architect, educator and a critical theorist.

Libero Andreotti is a professor of architecture at Georgia Tech, USA.