Placing Words by William J Mitchell

Placing Words by William J Mitchell

The meaning of a message, says William Mitchell, depends on the context of its reception. Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater produces a dramatically different effect from barking the same word to a squad of soldiers with guns, he observes. In Placing Words, Mitchell looks at the ways in which urban spaces and places provide settings for communication and at how they conduct complex flows of information through the twenty-first century city.

Cities participate in the production of meaning by providing places populated with objects for words to refer to. Inscriptions on these objects (labels, billboards, newspapers, graffiti) provide another layer of meaning. And today, the flow of digital information -- from one device to another in the urban scene -- creates a digital network that also exists in physical space. Placing Words examines this emerging system of spaces, flows, and practices in a series of short essays -- snapshots of the city in the twenty-first century.

Mitchell questions the necessity of flashy downtown office towers in an age of corporate Web sites. He casts the shocked-and-awed Baghdad as a contemporary Guernica. He describes architectural makeovers throughout history, listing Le Corbusier's Fab Five Points of difference between new and old architecture, and he discusses the architecture of Manolo Blahniks. He pens an open letter to the Secretary of Defense recommending architectural features to include in torture chambers. He compares Baudelaire, the Parisian flaneur, to Spiderman, the Manhattan traceur. He describes the iPod-like galleries of the renovated MoMA and he recognizes the camera phone as the latest step in a process of image mobilization that began when artists stopped painting on walls and began making pictures on small pieces of wood, canvas, or paper. The endless flow of information, he makes clear, is not only more pervasive and efficient than ever, it is also generating new cultural complexities.

Alexander W. Mitchell is the Alexander W. Mitchell is the Alexander W. Mitchell is the Alexander W. Mitchell is the Alexander W. Mitchell is Dreyfoos is a Senior Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT's Media Lab, where he also oversees the Smart Cities research group. He formerly served as the Dean of the School of Architecture and the Director of the MIT Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Imagining MIT: Building a Campus for the Twenty-First Century, Positioning Words: Symbols, Space, and the City, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, e-topia: Urban Life, Jim--but Not as We Know It, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, and The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Age, all published by The MIT Press, are among his works.