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Making Media and Modernity — A Conversation on 25 Years of Princeton’s M+M Program

INTERVIEWEES: Beatriz Colomina, Eduardo Cadava, Hal Foster, Paul B. Preciado, Craig Buckley, Lydia Kallipoliti, Joaquim Moreno, Pep Avilés, Evangelos Kotsioris, Iván L. Munuera, Iason Stathatos, and Foivos Geralis
INTERVIEWER: Valerio Franzone
MAGAZINE: PIN–UP Magazine
PUBLISHED: July 1, 2025

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Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber. Courtesy of the Princeton School of Architecture

Beatriz Colomina, Eduardo Cadava, Hal Foster, Paul B. Preciado, Craig Buckley, Lydia Kallipoliti, Joaquim Moreno, Pep Avilés, Evangelos Kotsioris, Iván L. Munuera, Iason Stathatos, and Foivos Geralis.

Founded in 2000 by architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, Princeton University’s Program in Media and Modernity — known simply as M+M — has become one of the most influential and idiosyncratic forums for thinking about architecture not as an autonomous discipline, but as a field constantly shaped by images, technologies, politics, publishing, exhibitions, and other forms of mediation. Over the past 25 years, the program has operated as part seminar, part research platform, part curatorial laboratory, bringing together architects, historians, artists, theorists, editors, and filmmakers to test how architecture circulates, communicates, and transforms in the world.
To mark this 25-year collective experiment, Princeton’s School of Architecture presented M+Mx25, an exhibition curated by Beatriz Colomina, Foivos Geralis, and Antonio Cantero, and designed by Agency—Agency, the practice led by Tei Carpenter. The conversation that follows took place inside the gallery, surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling iridescent silver curtain imprinted with the vertiginous density of all the event posters produced by the program: a chronological record of more than 351 visiting speakers over 25 years, and of an interdisciplinary alchemy of bodies, practices, modernities, media, environments, and geographies.
Gathered around the table (with me, Valerio Franzone) were some of the faculty who launched the program — Beatriz Colomina, Eduardo Cadava, and Hal Foster — and some of the Ph.D. scholars who helped run it, among them Paul B. Preciado, Craig Buckley, Lydia Kallipoliti, Joaquim Moreno, Pep Avilés, Evangelos Kotsioris, Iván L. Munuera, Iason Stathatos, and Foivos Geralis. Together, they reflected on M+M as a 25-year experiment in radical pedagogy, research, production, community, and communication.