Knowledge Worlds

Reviews / Votes

In this remarkable book, Reinhold Martin completely redefines what architectural history can do. The modern university emerges here as a media complex made not only of brick and stone but also of acoustic tiles and lighting fixtures, electric wires and handheld bells, lecterns and seminar tables. In a narrative that spans from the late Enlightenment to the twentieth century, Martin demonstrates with painstaking precision how this machinery functioned to suppress some voices and amplify others. What the machinery of higher education ultimately produced, it turns out, were spirits and ghosts of various kinds-of liberalism, neoliberalism, humanism, and that thing called the 'Western canon.' We are still haunted by those ghosts today, and this astoundingly original book tells us how we got here. -- Zeynep Celik Alexander, author of <i>Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design</i> In this sweeping account of the university's ivied halls, Martin lays bare the tangled underpinnings and conflicting ideals of higher education in America, across private and public, colleges and universities, and from liberal to neoliberal eras. -- Lisa Gitelman, author of <i>Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents</i> Reinhold Martin's Knowledge Worlds combines critical thinking with a rare sense for the entangledness of inconspicuous material things. By meticulously studying the genealogies of specific architectural sites, Martin teaches us to understand the worldliness of knowledge-a worldliness that consists of material infrastructures. As it weds infrastructure studies with media theory, this book not only takes architectural history to a new level but also discovers nothing less than the outline of a media philosophy that understands media as environments and vice versa. A milestone. -- Bernhard Siegert, author of <i>Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real</i> Combining historical detail with conceptual clarity, Knowledge Worlds shows how the modern university became the most important technology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by organizing material objects and humans toward common ends. In doing so, Martin has written the first media history of the university. -- Chad Wellmon, author of <i>Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University</i>