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, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present ‘tele-technological-capitalist’ society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media – as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics – towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary 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, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present ‘tele-technological-capitalist’ society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media – as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics – towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.

Architecture, and its pedagogy in the academy, is dominated by the technology of image production that veils the ‘naked power’ behind its operation. It conforms to the principles of cultural logic of the society of the spectacle, consistent with neoliberal capitalism. The problem with this dominant pedagogy is that it violates the fundamental ethical imperative, putting architecture in direct contradiction with the ‘common good’. In addition, it has let architecture enter the brothel of pornographic capitalism which turns every object into an object of obscene gratification of the senses. In this book, Nadir Lahiji adopts Alain Badiou’s thesis from The Pornographic Age to demonstrate that contemporary architecture is in absolute complicity with the pornographic present. The traits that Badiou identifies in this age are manifestly visible in architectural surfaces which are subordinated to the same ‘regime of images’. Similarly to Badiou’s political indictments of the society which has given rise to the pornographic present, the book condemns the architecture that has lent its service to the same society with a license to consummate its transgression to better cater to the imperative of the ‘regime of images’. Transposing the conceptual categories in Badiou’s analysis to the critique of architecture’s pornographic turn in contemporary society, the book constructs a conceptual framework by which to demonstrate the specific manifestations of pornography in building. The book is aimed at architecture students at higher graduate and post-graduate levels.

By linking building theory to the emancipatory project of critique advanced by radical thinkers in our time, this work investigates the key conceptual and historical elements that culminate in an emancipatory theory of building entitled: 'Toward a philosophy of shelter’. Taking Marx as its only resource, this work proceeds with the conviction that our era is contemporaneous to Marx’s historical era. This means ‘not judging the validity of Marx from the perspective of the historical situation’, but rather, ‘demonstrating the validity of a Marxian perspective for a singular historical situation’, as ours. This work will therefore translate this perspective into seeing the situation of architecture through the eyes of Marx. All those concerned with the predicament in our current condition in which architecture must play a major social role in upholding the universal value of what Alain Badiou calls 'generic humanity' will take an interest in this work. In particular, architects, critics, scholars, and students inside the field of architecture who would be seeking the application of this universal value to a new theory of building will be a welcoming audience for this work.

In Analogical City, Cameron McEwan argues for architecture’s status as a critical project. McEwan revisits architect Aldo Rossi as a paradigmatic figure of the critical rational tradition, studying a neglected aspect of his thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential. McEwan develops a grammar of the analogical city under the headings of Imagination, Transformation, City, Multitude, and Project. McEwan argues that the analogical city is critical, collective, and emancipatory. Analogical thought and understanding cities as analogical might open the conditions of possibility for rethinking the critical project in architecture. At a time when the humanities and the sciences are threatened by irrational thought, from climate denial to post-truth narratives, and when architecture has seemingly disavowed its critical capacity and political possibility through its commodification as an instrument of the neoliberal city, McEwan offers critical strategies, conceptual tools, figures of thought, and knowledge practices to articulate modes of thinking and acting differently within architectural criticism and practice. Today, knowledge is a common terrain of struggle and thought requires constant reinvention. The task of architecture, and critique more broadly, must be to interpret the world in order to change it. Consequently Analogical City proposes modes for imagining the city, the subject, and the world otherwise — towards a more egalitarian and critical architecture of the city. Ultimately, the analogical city is not a fully developed theory, nor is it only an intuitive, poetic, or purely formal practice, as some critics propose. McEwan argues that the analogical city is poetic and political: it always refers beyond itself towards a collective and critical project of the city, and yet it invites a series of formal, spatial, and graphic operations comprising erasure and negativity followed by substitution and remontage.

Philosophers on the art of cinema mainly remain silent about architecture. Discussing cinema as ‘mass art’, they tend to forget that architecture, before cinema, was the only existing ‘mass art’. In this work author Nadir Lahiji proposes that the philosophical understanding of the collective human sensorium in the apparatus of perception must once again find its true training ground in architecture. Building art puts the collective mass in the position of an ‘expert critic’ who identifies themselves with the technical apparatus of architecture. Only then can architecture regain its status as ‘mass art’ and, as the book contends, only then can it resume its function as the only ‘artform’ that is designed for the political pedagogy of masses, which originally belonged to it in the period of modernity before the invention of cinema.

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture brings together a respected team of philosophers and architecture scholars to ask what impact architecture has over today's culture and society. For three decades critical philosophy has been in discourse with architecture. Yet following the recent radical turn in contemporary philosophy, architecture's role in contemporary culture is rarely addressed. In turn, the architecture discourse in academia has remained ignorant of recent developments in radical philosophy. Providing the first platform for a debate between critics, architects and radical philosophers, this unique collection unties these two schools of thought. Contributors reason for or against the claim of the "missed encounter" between architecture and radical philosophy. They discuss why our prominent critical philosophers devote stimulating writings to the ideological impact of arts on the contemporary culture - music, literature, cinema, opera, theatre - without attempting a similar comprehensive analysis of architecture. By critically evaluating recent philosophy in relation to contemporary architecture, The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture presents a thorough understanding of the new relationship between architecture and radical philosophy.