Introduction

The book builds on the work I have engaged with for the past twenty years, in which I have investigated and published on architecture as a phenomenon integral to our understanding of twentieth century visual culture. Specifically, the origin of the book’s concerns come from this particular approach to examining this architectural-visual culture interplay. It is an approach in which the tropes of the technologies through which we see and represent the world around us, and thus the architecture we conceive and build, is interrogated as a factor informing the nature of human vision at any given time. By extension, these ‘technological tropes’ are seen as then manifesting themselves – through modifications to sight – in architectural discourse and production. It is an approach I have defined as neo-formalist.