ABSTRACT
This chapter explores critical architecture media practices enabled by the image-sharing social media platform Instagram. Drawing on architecture-focused Instagram feeds, it examines the ways in which online image-based social media networks are critically broadening the way we imagine architectural practice. These forms of digital media have the potential to produce alternate narratives of architecture and architecture culture and enable the development of counter publics for architecture beyond those structured by traditional forms of architecture media. In this context, new forms of digital architectural criticism are revealed that are both intentionally critical and emergent in their criticality. To investigate image-sharing social media’s capacity for criticality, the chapter addresses the forces that produce images in architecture. It explores the concept of audience and the creation of new architectural publics enabled as architecture media respond to the development of digital media platforms. Finally, it focuses on critical architecture media practices on Instagram that explore the changing relationship of the public and private realms of architecture. It examines the opportunities that these digital sites of publication afford for a critical rethinking of the image in relation to architectural production and therefore a rethinking of the way we imagine and represent architecture.
