A Catalog of Silent Effects: On Dreams, Fear, and the Nuclear Reactor

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[Excerpt]
By Peter Zuspan

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Nuclear Control Room
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An Austrian reactor showing complex construction staging, location unknown

“...The first American nuclear reactors operate as a specific sort of collection, a new typology.  They constitute a failed project, one assembled entirely outside the realm of architects, which in its anxious assemblage of complex agendas and diverse meanings, offers a critical contribution to a discourse of architectural design that too often turns to its canonical monuments for its sustenance.

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A Mannerist Transparency: Architecture, Distraction and Tabloid

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By Peter Zuspan
Originally published in MUSEO VOL. 8, Winter 2008

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Mariah Carey
Still from Entertainment Tonight
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Katsushige Nakahashi
Zero Project (with viewers), 2006
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Katsushige Nakahashi
Zero Project (detail), 2006
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Katsushige Nakahashi
Zero Project (detail), 2006

I’ve regained the ability to watch “Entertainment Tonight.” I couldn’t watch it for a while. It wasn’t that my Hollywood news index had weakened or that I’d lost an appreciation for the content. My reluctance to view the program came from a frustration with the method of its presentation. The problem was that each story, when finally revealed, would more often than not feature the same content and last the same amount of time as the countless teasers before to the commercial breaks. I felt swindled. But when a bit distracted from my disappointment, I noticed that beyond whatever capitalist agenda drives these unfortunate narrative decisions, there is actually a beautiful model of transparency in this form of presentation. The body of the broadcast is almost identical to that which lies on its flashy cover: the façade is a copy of the interior. The news magazine operates with a sort of mannerist transparency, by which inside and outside are not negotiated and theorized around a border of politicized reciprocity, but rather they are more or less simply repeated, using recognizable pop conventions of glitz, glamour, and celebrity exposure.

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