Nadia ALAILY-MATTAR

Project at the MaCI

January 2024 - July 2024

MASCoF is a research project about architecture, digital communication media, and power relationships. Against the backdrop of the increasing encroachment of social media in people’s everyday lives, MASCoF will explore how powerful actors mobilize architecture for the production of representations of futures, which, when mediated and circulated, contribute to social constructions of reality.

Using case study research MASCoF will delve into the diverse ways in which large-scale architectural projects—both realized and conceptual—emerge as focal points for wider sets of social claims regarding the future. This will entail teasing out the contradictions between the portrayal of the selected case studies as value-neutral and technical and their instrumentalization and politicization to serve power interests. The focus of the investigation is the circulation of renderings and promotional videos of the selected case studies on social media. What narratives of futures are these projects promoting? How is architecture used to communicate these narratives? What role does mediated architecture play in sustaining the conversation about such futures?

MASCoF connects architecture, media, and power; it argues that the speeds, volumes, scopes, and nature of the distribution of architectural representation afforded by digital communication contribute to social constructions of reality. The objective of MASCoF is to generate new thinking about architecture in the age of social media and enable cross-fertilization from media studies, digital humanities, sociology, political science, future studies, and architecture. The overarching goal is to contribute knowledge about the potential role that mediated architecture can play in perpetuating power structures.