Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image explores architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture. It looks closely at how changes produced through technologies of mediation alter disciplinary concepts and produce political effects. Through both historical and contemporary examples, it focuses on how conventions of representation are established, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Critical investigations are conjoined with inquiries into aesthetics and technology in the hope that the tensions between them can aid an exploration into how architectural images are produced, disseminated, and valued; how images alter assumptions regarding the appearances of architecture and the environment.

For students and academics in architecture, design and media studies, architectural and art history, and related fields, this book shows how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies.

Michael Young is an Assistant Professor at The Cooper Union. He has taught design studios and seminars at Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, and SCI-Arc. He has published numerous articles in academic journals and publications including the book The Estranged Object, published by the Graham Foundation in 2015. Michael was the recipient of the 2019–2020 Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. He is also a founding partner of the architectural design practice Young & Ayata.