Expanded Environments: Isozaki Arata and Hans Hollein, Architects of the City and Its Media in the First Electronic Age, 1955 – 1976

Sang Pil Lee is a PhD Candidate in Architecture History and Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

His dissertation, “Expanded Environments: Isozaki Arata and Hans Hollein, Architects of the City and Its Media in the First Electronic Age, 1955 – 1976,” explores the endeavors of postwar architects to create new living environments. It highlights Japanese architect Isozaki and his Austrian correspondent Hollein, who developed their designs and theories in response to novel modes of thinking, notably cybernetics, Gestalt psychology, and Marshall McLuhan’s media theory in association with electronic technology, as well as through their cultural exchanges with America. In these contexts I particularly focus on how the modern concept of space was reconceptualized by Isozaki and Hollein into environmental notions of architecture within discourses on the city and post-industrialism and, as a result, how the concepts of environment, architecture, the city, and media became, in certain decisive contexts, interchangeable.