The past decade has seen increased interest in the rereading of postmodern architecture’s history. Mediated Messages is a timely publication that contributes to these efforts in admirable fashion. The volume’s editors, Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka, have both contributed important work to the topic of postmodernism in recent years, and here their collaboration has resulted in a valuable compilation of media-related case studies that explore how periodical publications and exhibitions in particular provided the conditions for the development of postmodern architecture.The book examines the relation between architecture and media, particularly the role played by exhibitions and periodicals in the discipline’s development during the 1970s and 1980s. The collection of essays makes evident not only how architecture found a multiplier in the media but also how postmodern architecture indeed manifested itself through and in relation to its various forms of distribution. This argument might at first appear obvious: one need only look back at the historical circulation of early postmodern ideas through the publications of Robert Venturi or Aldo Rossi to understand the importance of media to the movement. Yet Mediated Messages brings to the fore the crucial role played by architectural periodicals and exhibitions—distinctive forms of media that, the editors argue, need to be understood as not only significant but also formative factors in how “the relationship between media and architecture extended beyond publicity and circulation and became intrinsic” (2).The volume’s twelve essays are collectively international in scope and extensively contextualized through the editors’ insightful introduction, in which they argue for postmodernism’s initial emergence on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1960s amid consequential shifts in architecture’s institutional landscape, the publishing sphere, and the rise of new forms of media. More than expanded distribution networks or efficient and economical forms of technical production, Patteeuw and Szacka assert that it was through the media itself that architectural practices and production changed. Here, the volume is indebted to previous scholarship by figures such as Barry Bergdoll and Beatriz Colomina, both of whom have argued persuasively for the significance of printed representations of architecture as a subject for historical research.1 Following Jean Baudrillard’s assessment of the indistinguishability between the real and the unreal, the writing collected in this volume discloses how the postmodern period witnessed a consequential blurring between so-called real and fictional architecture. This occurred through media as well as through an expanded notion of scale relative to the sites where architectural production was historically understood to occur.The essays in this volume explore the discursive conditions of various distinct yet interconnected fields within which editing and curating practices contributed to the construction of postmodern architecture. These may be summarized through four central themes that structure the volume: the entangled relationship between architecture and its image; international postmodernisms and micronarratives; architects’ experimentation and their related capacities as writers, thinkers, and theorists; and the part that newly founded institutions played in shifting the role of the media from communication to spectacle.Of the carefully selected essays included in the volume, several notably provocative contributions are highlighted here as emblematic of the book’s overall significance and rigor. Eva Branscome’s discussion of Hans Hollein’s visual montages for the 1968 “Alles ist Architektur” issue of Bau magazine emerges through her study of the broader history of the reconceptualized periodical published by Austria’s national association of architects. Branscome argues for an understanding of postmodernism in response to manifold changing cultural contexts and new forms of communication as captured in Bau from 1965 through 1970.In her essay, Irina Davidovici examines the journal archithese as a publishing format employed by a professional federation. In doing so, she brings to light the periodical’s value as a platform for discourse that helped foster the translation of experimental, theoretical production into built architecture. Her discussion of archithese issues 13 (1975) and 19 (1976), both dedicated to “realism,” discloses how the interpretively far-reaching discourse on “realism” contributed to a theoretical and cultural transfer between Switzerland, Italy, and the United States. Davidovici’s analysis also makes visible Swiss architects’ troubled relationship with postmodernism as well as the sustained impact of the debate.Kim Förster’s chapter on the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies examines the relationship between elitism and populism and the role of newly founded institutions in shaping disciplinary ideologies. In his analysis of the institute’s strategic forms of knowledge production through exhibitions and publications, he not only makes evident how the IAUS was influential in forming the most prominent postmodern narratives but also illuminates how it helped shape postmodern architecture’s discursive formats. Förster details the IAUS’s profound and transformative efforts to edit and curate architecture and the far-reaching effects of those efforts on architectural culture in general, including the lingering influence of celebrity culture in architecture today.Mediated Messages stands apart from numerous other recent and notable publications on architecture’s relationship to exhibitions and journals in its focus on a particular discourse, a specific moment in architectural production, and a set of unique themes ranging from the crafting of self-image in architecture to shifts within specific institutions to ephemeral forms of media and their effects.2 What unites the contributions and differentiates this volume from other publications is the nature of its materials. Coinciding with an institutional turn that began to draw attention to the agency of things beyond the primacy of individual projects, this study examines the instruments of production and dissemination as well as institutional networks. The contributors do not scrutinize architectural production so much as they investigate the technological, social, economic, and cultural environments that provided the contexts for the emergence of postmodern architecture. In exploring how these conditions defined postmodern architecture, they successfully achieve a cross-reading of ephemeral yet also material objects of study, outlining the multiple spheres of influence at work in the construction of postmodern architecture.The extent to which the authors focus on certain fragments of postmodern architectural production within the context of particular journals and exhibitions helps to illuminate architecture’s interdependence with a limited selection of specific editorial and curatorial framing practices. As a related point, it is also important to note the absence of a grand narrative that we might definitively identify as the “history of postmodern architecture.” These two aspects lend a forensic quality to the volume, characterized by precise determinations based on available evidence, despite the challenge posed by the task of summarizing a rich and complex tangle of postmodern histories. In this regard, Mediated Messages approaches the topic of media not merely in terms of form but also in terms of a concrete, material object. Its detailed analysis affords a broad perspective on the emergence of postmodern architecture within the media. Beyond the particular period in question, the publication also demonstrates the value of a broad historical perspective for the study of postmodern architecture, with an eye toward achieving a more critical understanding of the contemporary.The volume is a model of scholarship for the history of postmodernism as well as for architectural history in general. The fragmentary artifacts of postmodern architecture captured and circulated through contemporary periodicals and exhibitions offer distinctive material histories that lend themselves not only to the study of postmodernism but also to our ongoing efforts to grasp the uncertain conditions of architecture today. One hopes that the methodological approaches developed here will be followed up elsewhere, given that such questions could also be asked of architecture’s relationship to our current media landscape and exhibiting culture.