The Street and the Screen charts the development of a global screen landscape in the first half of the twentieth century. Through the lens of five cities—Paris, Casablanca, Berlin, São Paulo, and New York—the book argues that media buildings open up divergent histories of architectural modernism while also offering new understandings of architecture’s role in processes of cultural globalization. Rather than emphasize familiar questions of style, the book analyzes buildings as media for coordinating human and celluloid circulation, examining how architecture materialized ideas of class, race, and gender in structuring encounters between spectators and moving images.

Craig Buckley is an associate professor of modern and contemporary architecture in the History of Art Department at Yale University. His scholarship emphasizes the close examination of the material techniques and processes that condition architectural form, and stresses comparative approaches to media cultures. He is the author of Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and has edited numerous volumes, including Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium (University of Amsterdam Press, 2019), with Francesco Casetti and Rudiger Campe, and Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X–197X, with Beatriz Colomina (Actar, 2011).