Impostor Cities - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Thomas Balaban, Nikolaus Hirsch, David Theodore, Jennifer Thorogood

Contributors Janine Marchessault, Matteo Mastrandrea, Randolph Jordan, Simone C Niquille, Craig Buckley, Peter Sealy

Impostor Cities is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto within the context of its eponymous exhibition, which was initially commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

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7 essays

Angels in No Man’s Land

Peter Sealy

At a time when the Berlin Wall had largely lowered the city’s temperature and shifted the focus of the Cold War elsewhere, its symbolic presence was multiplied exponentially by films that cemented Berlin’s reputation as a city of intrigue and action.

Screening Techniques

Craig Buckley

What does it mean to engage the architectural worlds of cinema at a moment when cinema no longer dominates the experience of moving images, when celluloid film has been displaced by digital video, and when atomized online streaming has largely eclipsed the collective reception of movies on the big screen?

Daily Life Noise

Simone C Niquille

While The Lion King was praised for its realism, automated vacuum cleaners are ridiculed for their inability to navigate the home. Both, however, rely on virtual environments, digital twins created in game engines to replicate the real world.

The Sonic Glaze of Architectural Imageability

Randolph Jordan

It’s August, 1971. Things are generally quiet on campus at Simon Fraser University (SFU), the newly constructed modernist icon from architect Arthur Erickson, set upon a grand hill overlooking Vancouver’s downtown core and its backdrop of the ocean harbor and north shore mountains.

Fake Plastic Trees

Matteo Mastrandrea

Hollywood’s botanical apathy has often borne radical fruit, enabling motion pictures to represent vegetal life in ways which trouble orthodox systems of thought “bent on setting knowledge and existence within exact epistemic and ontological limits.”

Fluid Cities

Janine Marchessault

Material and design elements of the built environment that are durable rather than ephemeral, distinctive in their shape and tied to the unique character of places are what he calls “constituent facts” and exert a semiotic force. They are “those tendencies which, when they are suppressed, inevitably reappear.”

Editorial

Thomas Balaban, David Theodore, Jennifer Thorogood, and e-flux Architecture

Impostor Cities is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto within the context of its eponymous exhibition, which was initially commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Subject

Architecture, Mass Media & Entertainment

Contributors

Peter Sealy Angels in No Man’s Land
Craig Buckley Screening Techniques
Simone C Niquille Daily Life Noise
Randolph Jordan The Sonic Glaze of Architectural Imageability
Matteo Mastrandrea Fake Plastic Trees
Janine Marchessault Fluid Cities
Thomas Balaban, David Theodore, Jennifer Thorogood and e-flux Architecture Editorial

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