Privacy and publicity : modern architecture as mass media

Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media.

Architecture is more than buildings that we can experience firsthand, it also exists as a representation through drawings, photographs, writings, films, or advertising.

Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define 20th-century culture - the mass media - as the true site within which modern architecture was produced.