Book Description

"By bridging histories of technology, media studies, and aesthetics, Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America's White Imaginary weaves a critical narrative of the ways in which illuminated light and color play key roles in the formation of America's white imaginary over the course of the last century. The book sheds light on the central question to which media scholars, architects, and historians of technology repeatedly turn: how can we use and speak about light and color in ways that are productive and commemorative, while remaining critical of the systems of white power undergirding them? Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America's White Imaginary analyzes the history of electric light technologies in the aesthetic development of Times Square and Las Vegas. The book charts the rise of America's white walls, light empires, and neoclassical buildings in the early twentieth century, through the construction of polychromatic electrographic spectacles by midcentury, and their eclipse by informatically intense, invisible algorithms at the beginning of the new millennium. Drawing from histories of technology, media, and aesthetics, the book shows how the formation of America's electrographic surround runs isomorphic to a new world ethos of power, property, and possession. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis, Electrographic Architecture's introduction, six core chapters, and conclusion illustrate how Times Square's polychromatic surround serves as a complex symbol of America's deep-seated dreams of utopic transcendence on the one hand, coupled with fears of loss and obsolescence on the other. In America's twentieth-century imaginary, whiteness aims to become everything but itself: colorful, lit, vibrant, and vital"--