The Architecture of Phantasmagoria
Specters of the City
Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design Series

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.

Foreword (Graeme Gilloch), Preface, Introduction: Specters of the City and the Task of Critique, Part I: Phantasmagoria, Modernity, and the City, 1. Urban Modernity and the Politics of Historical Memory, 2. Specters and Fetishism, 3. Phantasmagoria and Gesamtkunstwerk, Excursus I:The Specters of Baron Haussmann, Part II: Media, Technology, and Modern Experience, 4. Walter Benjamin and Media Theory, 5. From Aisthesis to Anaesthetics, 6. Poverty of Experience and the Architecture of City, Part III: Spectacle and Phantasmagoria, 7. The Ghosts of Guy Debord, 8.Spectacle Critique and Architectural Theory, 9. From Spectacle to Phantasmagoria, Excursus II: The Architecture of Phantasmagoria, Part IV: The Architecture of Phantasmagoria and the Contemporary City, 10. Virtual Technology, Apparatus, and Anaesthetics, 11. The Phantoms of Architectural Theory, 12. The City as Phantasmagoria of the World Interior, Epilogue: Specters of the city and the Critique of Ideology, Index

Libero Andreotti is a Professor of Architecture at Georgia Tech, USA.

Nadir Lahiji is an Adjunct Faculty at the University of Canberra, Australia.