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 Sublime, a study that aims at reworking the categories of abstraction, risk, and the sublime as the basis for an aesthetic philosophy of the contemporary city.
Dated from 2011
Fields of research
The history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism; American architecture since the 18th century; cultural theory and globalization; architecture and technical media.
IKKM Research Project
The Architecture of Knowledge: Universities as Technical Media 1750-1950
In 1897, the architect Charles Follen McKim designed a large wooden sphere, painted a dull white, to hang suspended from inside the monumental dome of the newly completed Low Library at Columbia University, over the undergraduate reading room. The sphere was illuminated by eight arc lights encircling the dome’s perimeter, to simulate the light of the moon.
Moments such as this suggest that the development of universities in the United States during the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries belongs in part to a history of technical media. Architecture, understood as a material complex with its own internal logics that integrate formats of vision, audition, cognition, and communication into a semi-coordinated ensemble, lies at the center of this history. The architectures of reading, writing, observing, speaking, and listening that gave form to American universities during the “long” nineteenth century further correspond to a set of overlapping, post-Enlightenment public spheres. For not only was Benjamin Franklin a protagonist in the development of print capitalism; he was also among the founders of the University of Pennsylvania. McKim’s electric “moon” and its domed reading room figure this dull afterglow of Enlightenment as belonging to an enigmatic media apparatus in which knowledge and power glide in and out of the shadows together.
To comprehend this “moon” and the many other lights, domes, reading rooms, lecture halls, library stacks, and other instruments that comprise the architecture of universities, I aim for a general history of intermediation among different spatial and technical formats in the production, storage, and transmission of knowledge. Rather than posit abrupt paradigm shifts shaping these processes, I concentrate on gradual, partial, and overlapping modulations in the epistemic field. And rather than limit my scope to individual media, I take up specific architectural elements—libraries, classrooms, auditoria, museums, chapels, observatories, laboratories, and the campuses themselves—as apparatuses of intermediation.
Publications
Monographs
Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010.
with Kadambari Baxi: Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries. Barcelona: ACTAR 2007.
The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge: MIT Press 2003.
Articles
"The Problem of the MIT Chapel". In: Arindam Dutta (ed.): CounterModernisms: Architecture and MIT in the Postwar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2011. (forthcoming)
"Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City". In: Felix Vogel (ed.): Pavilion 15 (2010): "Handlung: On Producing Possibilities" (special issue on Bucharest Biennale 4), p. 260-275.
"Fuller's Futures". In Hsiao-Yun Chu and Robert Trujillo (eds.): New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009, p. 176-190.
"Mass Customization: Architecture and the 'End' of Politics". In: William Kaizen et al. (eds.): Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics in Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2009, p. 172-193.
"Liquidity: Architecture and Oil". In Emmanuel Petit (ed.): Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change. New Haven: Yale University Press 2008, p. 110-119.
"Computer Architectures: Saarinen's Patterns, IBM's Brains". In: Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (eds.): Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture. Montreal and Cambridge: CCA / MIT Press 2000, p. 141-164.
"The Organizational Complex: Cybernetics, Space, Discourse". In: Assemblage No. 37 (Dec., 1998), p. 102-127.