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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 468-470



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The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. By Reinhold Martin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xix+304. $39.95.

Nearly forty years have passed since Marshall McLuhan's essay "The Medium is the Message" appeared in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Reexamining the relationship between media and message, McLuhan suggested that the content of the medium is always another medium. His essay introduced another way of understanding the connections between media, technology, and society. He examined this social construct against the technological setting of the 1950s and 1960s, a time of uncertainty and accelerated development. McLuhan connected major [End Page 468] industries and their growing self-awareness with the observation that "when IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision." He went on to point out that General Electric "has not yet discovered that, quite as much as AT&T, it is in the business of moving information" (p. 9).

In The Organizational Complex, Reinhold Martin extends McLuhan's ideas to offer a compelling examination of corporate architecture and its inherent message. Looking specifically at the built environment that emerged in the United States after the Second World War, Martin suggests that architecture itself is a medium, capable of both receiving and transmitting information. After an introductory overview, the first chapter elaborates on the idea of the organizational complex. Referring to the technological extension of the military-industrial complex, Martin looks to visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes to explore issues of control and communication, in which architecture is only one of the media that enable the exchange between science and art. In the second chapter, Martin uses Kepes's writings to offer his own analyses linking cybernetics with aesthetics, or science with art. The third chapter examines more closely the physiognomy of the office. Using examples such as Rockefeller Center and the United Nations building, Martin offers fresh insight in Kepes's declaration, "Every feature of the man created environment has [an] inherent physiognomy [and] thus is an object of communication" (p. 81). The curtain wall is reconsidered as the mediating edge, communicating information at multiple scales from the urban (macro) to the interior (micro).

In subsequent chapters, Martin considers the General Motors Technical Center (Eero Saarinen, 1956), an IBM manufacturing and training facility (Eero Saarinen, 1958), the Bell Telephone Laboratories (Eero Saarinen, 1962), Lever House (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1952), Inland Steel headquarters (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1958), and Chase Manhattan Bank (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1961) as examples of architecture offered under the rubric of modernism even as these buildings acted as visible carriers of control and communication. The organizational complex is found in the curtain wall—in its modularity and in its corporate message. Martin ends the book with an epilogue in which he revisits and recapitulates his thesis about the significance of the nature of the organization as an agent of a horizontally calibrated landscape, in how it effectively joined specific conditions where there might have been opposition.

Martin argues that organization is precisely what was being communicated from the visible repetitive rhythm of the curtain wall. The intertwined, sometimes subversive, relationship between architecture, computers, and corporations resulted in an invisible network of control and knowledge. As McLuhan intoned in 1964, the character of the message can mask the content of the message. By reexamining corporate architecture in [End Page 469] the United States after the Second World War, Martin attempts to make the content visible; the seemingly blank facades of office buildings were silent dynamic carriers of cybernetic, military-industrial, philosophical, and aesthetic information. The Organizational Complex is a significant contribution to the ongoing discourse of technology and culture. Martin invites us to reconsider and reevaluate curtain wall architecture as a medium of exchange, the message made visible through this provocative and compelling study.


Julie Ju-Youn Kim is associate professor of architecture...

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