McLuhan’s Environment: The End (and The Beginnings) of Architecture
<p>Marshall McLuhan’s appearance within architecture’s vanguard institutions in the mid-1960s might be seen, in retrospect, as a mere inevitability; he did seem to be everywhere after the 1964 publication of <em>Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man</em>. But his participation at venues like Constantinos A. Doxiadis’s Delos cruises or the Graham Foundation, and his publication in <em>Perspecta 11</em>, for instance, mark a very particular juncture in the disciplinary development of architecture in the postwar period. For some historians, his arrival at this moment was a sign of the beginning of the end for a particular modernist conception of architecture and its subsequent colonization by the logic of communications, networks, systems, and signs.</p>
Authors: Larry Busbea
Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative