Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (review)

Mitchell Schwarzer defines his subject as "the impact of mechanized transportation and camera reproduction on the perception of architecture" (p. 12). Like much recent architectural writing, Zoomscape concerns itself with the ordinary and not the high-style built environment, and deals not with designing or building spaces but with how they are represented and mediated. Historians like Meir Wigoder, writing on early photos taken from skyscrapers, or Beatriz Colomina, analyzing how built spaces are shown in mass media, claim that such representations condition the ways people judge the spaces they make, live in, and move through. Schwarzer's interest in how both the mode of viewing and the spaces viewed have been shaped by machines is what makes his work relevant to historians of technology.

Zoomscape argues that since the advent of rail transportation and the daguerreotype, human consciousness has registered the spaces it looks at with increasing speed and increasing familiarity (or falsely assumed familiarity), and with increasing detachment. This promise of rapid, painless mastery of new visual stimuli is often thwarted. Railroads disappoint and dull our view as they pass through anonymous industrial zones, and the most carefully shaped spaces of auto transport make us forget that we are in actual places at all. Schwarzer's evocations of the resulting environments and texts—such as the closed-off world of the passenger train, brilliantly described as a self-sufficient spatial world in itself—make clear the disengagement and sporadic attention with which the gliding zoomscape registers on the spectator. Only the most perceptive writer or filmmaker, Schwarzer claims, can break through such passivity and inattention to show us the zoomscape as it really is, and critique how it registers on the ordinary participant.

Schwarzer's subject is timely. MIT scholar Henry Jenkins has used his research into video games to posit, as a crucial form in modern popular representations, a kind of industrial-positivist master (non-)narrative, based on the technologized mastery of space, almost irrespective of any storyline. This trope, which links the world of Jules Verne and Tom Swift with that of Grand Theft Auto, is fleshed out by Zoomscape's insights. Schwarzer's claim that the ordinary viewer or passenger has her/his view obscured by the filter of self-interest, or association with what is already familiar, resonates with Pierre Bourdieu's theories on photography and popular aesthetic consciousness. Neither Jenkins nor Bourdieu is cited in Zoomscape, however, and as a work of historical inquiry the book is disappointingly thin.

Schwarzer's attempts to convey the overall shape of historical change ("on the urban and rural landscape, rail was the epitome of the industrial revolution" [p. 31]) are sweeping and not terribly fresh. Quotes from and references to Wolfgang Schivelbusch and John Stilgoe are not built upon but used as a Greek chorus to Schwarzer's experiences of road and rail. Instead of research in primary sources, Schwarzer offers close readings (by no means deconstructions; Derrida must really be dead) of public works of representation: novels, photography books, cinema, and television programs. Explications of zoomscapes from classic literature, from E´mile Zola to Flannery O'Connor, are fine-grained to the point of tedium; workmanlike summaries of film auteurs' and photographers' oeuvres, and rather self-evident critiques of television's coverage of architecture and cityscapes, are solid but add little to the excitement of Schwarzer's initial engagement. Schwarzer's self-limitation to representations of "real" spaces (location shots but not sets or animations, literature as description and not creation) also restricts his insights. Well-peppered with radical architectural theory, and with cultural theory as used in the architecture academy, Zoomscape ultimately prefers the auteur's "high" discourse to the mass-culture world it claims to study.

Schwarzer has written masterfully elsewhere on nineteenth-century German aesthetic theory, especially its applications of psychologies of spatial perception to modern form. In its mix of brilliant personal impressions and sweeping historical dicta, Zoomscape at its best most resembles another book from that...