Knowledge Worlds

Reinhold Martin is professor of architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He is the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (2003); Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (2010); and The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City (2016).

• PrefaceIntroduction: Knowledge and TechnicsPrologue, c. 1800Part I. Figures1. Student Bodies and Corporate Persons2. Greek Lines: The Geometry of ThoughtPart II. Temporalities3. Bricks and Stones: Time-Based Media4. Sources: A Political Ecology of CultivationInterlude, c. 1900Part III. Voices5. Diffuse Illumination: The Silence of the Universal6. The Dialectic of the University: His Master’s VoicePart IV. Symbols7. Frontier as Symbolic Form8. Technopoesis: Human Capital and the Spirit of ResearchEpilogue, c. 2000NotesSelected BibliographyIndex

In this remarkable book, Reinhold Martin completely redefines what architectural history can do. The modern university emerges here as a media complex made not only of brick and stone but also of acoustic tiles and lighting fixtures, electric wires and handheld bells, lecterns and seminar tables. In a narrative that spans from the late Enlightenment to the twentieth century, Martin demonstrates with painstaking precision how this machinery functioned to suppress some voices and amplify others. What the machinery of higher education ultimately produced, it turns out, were spirits and ghosts of various kinds—of liberalism, neoliberalism, humanism, and that thing called the ‘Western canon.’ We are still haunted by those ghosts today, and this astoundingly original book tells us how we got here.