Material networks: architecture, computers, and corporations

Abstract

Reinhold Martin has been writing about industrial corporate architectures and the ways in which they function as technologies of organisation. Looking at the military industrial complex of the postwar period, he connects the discourses of cybernetics, system theory, and architecture. His studies offer a historical and theoretical understanding of architecture as a material complex with its own internal logic that integrates formats of vision, hearing, cognition, and communication into a semi-coordinated ensemble. In his publications on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture he deals with structures that characterise the design, the perception, and the communication of architecture, but are often beyond visibility and control. Rather than limit his scope to individual media, he takes up architecture as ‘apparatus of intermediation’.