Desjardins 1

Richard Desjardins
Concentration Studies Urbanism
Anne-Catrin Schultz
01/21/17
Reading Response: The Overexposed City

Architecture was once built based on the geology and natural conditions of the location it was
being designed. The world is changing to a more digital realm and in the chapter The Overexposed City
of Paul Virilios The Lost Dimension he explains how this transformation is hurting the urban city. Virilio
claims this digitalization, as it is happening during his time, is causing the American middle class [to
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evacuate] the cities of the East. Following the transformation of inner cities. Architects and urban
designers need to respond to this dramatic and face paced change rather than allowing it to dictate the
outcome.
The evolution of the digital age started in the 1970s with airports. Virillio states the architecture
that resulted from this had little to do with the architects personality. It emerged instead from perceived
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public security requirements. Airports at the time became a place for emerging security technologies
and surveillance for anti-terrorism. Clothing and baggage began to be checked with metal detectors. The
architectonics of the airport laid the foundation for French penitentiaries, they used the magnetized doors
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that airports had had for years. The intent of these doors were to be used to unlock the freedom to travel
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anywhere, and now its the core of penitentiary incarceration. This was just the start of digitalization
dictating architecture, security has the possibility to be handled with architectural design but now as Virilio
states that the city is no longer entered through a gate nor through an arc de triomphe, but rather through
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an electronic audience system. There are surveillance systems everywhere leaving no boundaries.
The boundaries that once existed in cities have changed with the emergence of computer
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terminals. Virilio states the architectonic element begins to drift and float in an electronic ether , with
computers, televisions, and video monitors give the terms here and there no inherent meaning. A
person could feel as if they were in the city only through telecommunication technologies. Virilio states,
where once the polis inaugurated a political theater, with its agora and its forum, now there is only a

1
Virilio, Paul. 1991. The Lost Dimension: The Overexposed City. Translated by Daniel Moshenberg. Zone
Books.
2
Ibid
3
Ibid
4
Ibid
5
Ibid
6
Ibid
 Desjardins 2

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cathode-ray screen. These inventions like the camera allows us to participate in certain political and
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optical events are leaving no reason for citizens to stay within a city if they have access to the same
information through a television. Telephones and teleconferencing allow people to speak to one another
without being in the same room allowing for long distance communication, leaving no meaning for
intercity offices.
The city once relied on monumental gates, parades and processions through the streets and now
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Virilio states that urban architecture has to work with the opening of a new technological space-time.
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Once lit by flickering candles, these technologies have created an electronic false-day and now glows
with information that seems to have no relationship to time. The audio-visual age has created a gateway
in which the methods of audience and surveillance have transformed even the forms of public greeting
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and daily reception. Citizens now can watch the news at any point of the day and receive information in
their own homes as if they were there when it happened alienating them from society.
In Virilios eyes architecture is more than just a field that shelters dwellers, it is immaterial as well.
It is an instrument that becomes capable of organizing societys time and space. This geodesic capacity
to define a unity of time and place for all actions now enters into direct conflict with the structural
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capacities of the means of mass communication. Finding a solution to this conflict is not easy
especially since exterior architecture has not been invested in like interior technical equipment has. Its as
if over time architecture has become inverted.
Speaking agriculturally, atomization over took hardworking farmers and made them irrelevant in
the sense that machines could produce more product faster. Architecture is suffering the same way.
Virilio describes the home as a machinery gallery, a museum of sciences and technologies, technologies
derived from industrial machinism, from the transportation revolution and from the so-called conquest of
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space. Building interiors are geared up as if they are about to be launched into space. The urban
topography suffers from the disintegration of surfaces and of all references that tend towards all kinds of
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transmigrations and transformations. The engineering that launches us into space is becoming the new
architecture. Cities are dissolving by industrialization making them undesirable because of the focus on
atomization and pushing new technologies even further.
With industrialization looming over the city trying to blend new technologies with architecture is
difficult. Virilio believes Hollywood, the first city built around the production of film, merges technology and
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architecture perfectly. He describes it as, the city of living cinema where it is the best example of a
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synthetic space-time It allows people to live within the television screen. This paved the way for
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megalomaniacal urbanizations of Disneyland, Disney World and Epcot Center. Architecture is no
longer about geology its about the digitalization of the world. Today the metropolis is a phantom
landscape . . . of past societies whose technologies were intimately aligned with the visible transformation
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of matter. Architecture has to respond to this fast paced progression of technology by incorporating it
into a world that revolves around advances in technology.

7
Ibid
8
Ibid
9
Ibid
10
Ibid
11
Ibid
12
Ibid
13
Ibid
14
Ibid
15
Ibid
16
Ibid
17
Ibid
18
Ibid
 Desjardins 3

Questions:

How do you incorporate Virilios ideals into an urban design?

Is it possible for people to escape the digital world at this point in time? Or is it too late?

Works Cited
Virilio, Paul. 1991. The Lost Dimension: The Overexposed City. Translated by Daniel Moshenberg. Zone
Books.