ZoomScape:
Architecture in Motion and Media
Mitchell Schwarzer

Although a few among us are intrepid architectural tourists, visiting buildings and landscapes our cameras at the ready, most of us experience architecture through the windshield of a moving vehicle, the architectural experience reduced to a blurry and momentary drive-by. And the rest of our architectural "tourism" is through the images of cameras, movies, and television programs—that is, through the lens of another's eye.

Architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer calls this new mediated architectural experience the "zoomscape." In this thought-provoking book, he argues that the perception of architecture has been fundamentally altered by the technologies of transportation and the camera—we now look at buildings, neighborhoods, cities, and even entire continents as we ride in trains, cars, and planes, and/or as we view photographs, movies, and television.

Zoomscape shows how we now perceive buildings and places at high speeds, across great distances, through edited and multiple reproductions. Nowadays, our views of the architectural landscape are modulated by the accelerator pedal and the remote control, by studio production techniques and airplane flight paths. Using examples from high art and popular culture—from the novels of Don DeLillo to the opening credits of The Sopranos—Mitchell Schwarzer shows that the zoomscape has brought about unprecedented and often marvelous new ways of perceiving the built environment.


Mitchell Schwarzer is a professor of architectural history and visual criticism at California College of Arts and Crafts.
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Editorial Reviews

Architectural Record:
"While architecture's role in movies and other media has been surveyed before, Schwarzer goes much deeper in exploring the connections between how we see and what we see . . . (and)brings a needed jolt to the task of architectural criticism. He reminds us not only that buildings cannot be viewed in isolation-they're no longer inanimate objects, either." (July 2005)

Journal of Architectural Education:
"In six gracefully written chapters on the railroad, automobile, airplane, photography, film, and television, Schwarzer argues for the centrality of these technologies as mediations that have forever changed our experience of built form." (May 2005)

San Francisco Chronicle:
"Schwarzer [is] an uncommonly insightful professor at CCA. . . What makes Zoomscape compelling is the range of what's explored: Not only are thereobvious starting points such as 'On the Road' (cities 'loom, recede, and churn together in feverish motion,')... but Schwarzer also captures the role buildings play in The Sound of Music with its 'ongoing visual dialogue between liberating nature and stultifying architecture.'" (11/2004)

Arcade:
"Zoomscape challenges our visual reality and makes real a vision of speed that becomes a prelude to architecture. This book introduces a compelling new visual perception mediated by mechanical instruments such as trains, planes and automobiles or media technologies such as television. The perception of zoomscape is not simply here, it is everywhere we want to be, on the move, incessantly going somewhere, in search of freedom, pushing back that envelope." (Summer 2004)

The Architects' Journal:
"...nuanced and thoughtful...A clumsy attempt to merge architecture with media studies it ain't." (10/2004)

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