Architecture no longer exists as an autonomous discipline concerned only with buildings. Frankly, it hasn’t for some time. Architecture is deeply entangled with politics, economics, media, and technology, all of which shape how we experience the world today. In the 21st century, architecture becomes less about built objects and more about how the built environment helps us read contemporary conditions. My recent paper, published in AMPS Volume 33, explores architecture’s expanded role as a lens through which to understand late-stage capitalism and the spatial conditions that it produces.

The paper first establishes a conceptual framework for thinking about architecture within today’s digitally saturated culture, before turning to a seemingly unlikely case study: the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) in the eastern United States. The NRQZ is a geopolitically regulated territory where everyday digital devices are restricted to protect sensitive radio telescope research. At first glance, it appears as though the 21st century has bypassed this place entirely. Yet when viewed through an architectural lens, the NRQZ reveals something quite different: late-stage capitalism is not absent here, but omnipresent, operating through infrastructure, surveillance, policy, and cultural imagination rather than screens alone. This contradiction is what makes the NRQZ productive, and potent for architectural speculation.

The paper was originally presented at the AMPS conference SOCIETY. SPACES. SCREENS in Phoenix, Arizona in December 2024. Being an interdisciplinary venue, AMPS provides an ideal platform to explore how architecture can help us critically engage with the varying conditions of contemporary life.

Interrogations of consumption: the territory of late-stage capitalism in the National Radio Quiet Zone by Michael Frush (Oklahoma State University, USA) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 33

Michael Frush is a practicing architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Oklahoma State University’s School of Architecture. His research and teaching practice explores the intersections of digital culture, contemporary and popular media, and subjective agency, examining their hybridization within architectural discourse and practice. Michael approaches architecture not only as a building discipline, but as an expanded, post-disciplinary framework; one that positions design as a critical lens through which to understand cultural, political, and spatial conditions shaping the present and future.

architecture surveillance infrastructure postmodernism risk