ABSTRACT
Today it is more difficult than ever to isolate the reproduction of the built environment
from what has been called ‘the economy of images and signs’.1 Inevitably inscribed in
ever more all-embracing circuits of communication, architecture and urban planning are
practices in transformation, in search of both their societal function and their inner
logic. Nevertheless, repeated attempts are being made from within the spatial profes-
sions to develop a tectonically or historically formulated immunity to this shift, or to
dismiss it as superficial aestheticization. Yet, what characterizes the change is perhaps
not so much the transformation of urban space into a matter of visual representation or
more or less pleasant sceneries. Rather it is its mediatization that is conspicuous; the
integration of architecture with new, distributed and extra-architectonical forms of
spatial reproduction; a process of convergence which, as far as architecture is con-
cerned, constitutes a destabilizing of grounds.
