Twenty years ago, Nancy Stieber, then editor of JSAH, invited me to become the journal’s first multimedia review editor.1 It was an unexpected invitation but not an illogical one. I study the relations among film, architecture, and urbanism and thus was a plausible choice to introduce multimedia to the journal. Soon thereafter, SAH began to award a Film and Video Prize. On two occasions, I chaired the prize jury, and as I found myself watching even more documentaries about buildings and cities, I began filing away notes for the book I now am writing.
Today the field is largely unrecognizable from what seems like a Paleolithic media age twenty years ago. The packages of VHS tapes I received in the mail were such precious cargo that one distributor regularly badgered me to return all of the numbered copies, lest they be resold for the under-$500 price that institutions...
University of California Press