Reinhold Martin

Reinhold Martin is a historian of media, technology, and architecture at Columbia University, in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His books include The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (MIT, 2003), which shows how architecture, the visual arts, and the social and natural sciences intersected with cybernetics to formed an organizing nexus within the post-World War II military-industrial complex; Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010), which returns to the architectural “ghosts” of utopian thought and praxis that survived the postmodern injunction
against structural change; and Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia, 2021), a history of American colleges and universities as components in a media complex defined by a series of epistemological, technological, and symbolic boundary problems. A former, founding co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Grey Room, Martin is also the co editor with Claire Zimmerman of Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (Minnesota, 2024).

Martin is currently working on two books:

The first, titled “The Idea of Use: Technology as Symbolic Form from Petroleum to Photovoltaics,” is an intellectual and cultural history of technology and media that cuts a cross-section through the twentieth-century American technosphere: from oil underground in Texas, to atmospheric microwaves in Silicon Valley, to solar- powered communications satellites at Bell Laboratories. The second book, on philosophical aesthetics, modern architecture, and technology, returns to the study of architecture as one among many worldmaking media, to revisit problems of meaning and interpretation posed by concepts like style, symbol, and space. At Columbia, Martin is currently co-chair of the Center for Comparative Media. Previously, he has chaired the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Committee on Global Thought. From 2024-2026, he served as president of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).