Edited by Anthony Vidler

With essays by Mario Carpo, Beatriz Colomina, Mark Dorrian, Kurt W. Forster, Hal Foster, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Mark Jarzombek, Felicity D. Scott, Terry Smith, Anthony Vidler, and Mark Wigley

$24.95 Softcover

In recent times, critics have accused architecture of entering too fully into the “society of the spectacle” and falling prey to corporate advertisement and consumerist display. Are such judgments justified, or are the new buildings, projects, and ideas that have generated such excitement and public interest a creative response to the fundamental social, cultural, and economic needs of a wider public? Based on the 2005 Clark Conference, Architecture Between Spectacle and Use examines the ways in which architecture finds itself caught between the art of display and the accommodation of use—and asks whether the discipline has learned from the social idealism of earlier modern movements, from new technologies, and from environmental sensitivities, or whether it has abandoned its historical aims and ambitions in favor of celebrity and spectacularity.

Eleven authors from the professions of architecture, art history, and architectural criticism explore the problems and possibilities of contemporary architecture in the light of the global nature of practice, the history of architecture’s modern reception, and new approaches to the technologies of design, as well as philosophical issues about the “meaning” of architecture.

200 pages, 7 1/2 x 9 inches
71 black-and-white illustrations
2008
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

ISBN 978-0-300-12254-2 (softcover)