Reinhold martin knowledge worlds

Public scholarship on architecture, landscape, and urbanism

Somewhere in the United States, a White man stands before a state capitol holding an assault rifle. As an act of political speech, the too-familiar scene lays siege to institutions and aims to paralyze democratic accountability. It is a performance, a show of force that speaks symbolically, but to real effect. The state capitol stands here for its national counterpart, and the lone weapon for the millions of others across the country. The building is a stage, the rifle a prop. Playing the righteous insurgent, the actor threatens war. His threat is not a principled, defiant gesture; it is the aggrieved cry of emasculated power, weaponized — a cry from which he appears to derive existential meaning. And the war he threatens is a holy war, a deadly, all-out assault by one set of symbols on another.

The sham originalism

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Reinhold Martin

Interview with with Reinhold Martin on the recent history of architectural discourse during its “theory moment” and Martin’s role within that history.

• location

  New York

• Date

  July 19, 2018

• duration

  39:03

• biography

  Reinhold Martin is Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Martin is a founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room and has published widely on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture. He is the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (MIT Press, 2003), and Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010).

In This Topics

Sylvia Lavin

Sylvia Lavin is Professor, History and Theory of Architecture and
Co-Director of the Program in Media and Modernity. Prior to her appointment at Princeton, Lavin was a Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where she was Chairperson from 1996 to 2006 and the Director of the Cri

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Reinhold Martin Former Senior Fellow

Vita

Reinhold Martin (born 1964) has been Associate Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University since 2004, where he directs the PhD program in architecture, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He received a PhD from the School of Architecture at Princeton University (1999) for his dissertation titled “Architecture and Organization, USA c. 1956”. He is founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room and has published widely on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture. In addition to his academic work, Reinhold Martin is also a partner in the firm Martin/Baxi Architects and has participated in several exhibitions together with Kadambari Baxi. His current projects are The Architecture of Knowledge: Universities as Technical Media 1750-1950, a study of the American university that combines architectural history with the history of technical media, and A Philosophy of the City: Abstraction, Risk, and the Sub