ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine how current journal (newspaper) media presents an idea/image of architecture that preconditions the public to assume our discipline is elitist and non-quotidian. In this way, media’s production of the public imaginary of architecture is proto-political; not political per se, but preconfiguring a political attitude that subliminally shapes what is and is not asked of architecture. Just as the ransacking of the Capitol building on January 6 offered a chance for the non-architectural media to foreground architecture-cum-symbol, general architectural “news” is simultaneously divorced from the difficult reality of architectural production and complicit in its falsely “grand” representation.
The chapter examines the current state of architectural journalism in US newspapers to expose its self-imposed failures—its false emphasis on aesthetics and “builderism”—as well as those systemically imposed from the outside in an era of neoliberal “write-what-sells.” These conditions set the stage for the “political” reading of architecture, precisely via its absence from a more direct political/economic public discourse.
