Abstract:
 In the early twentieth century, the field of ‘public relations’ originated from a perceived need for the control of the mass dissemination of information. In the 1940’s, an early discussion of ‘public relations’ in architecture revolved around an obligation to expound to the public the virtues and benefits of architecture, a unidirectional informational broadcast. Today however, public relations as a field prefers to frame its relationship to a public as one that is interdependent and continuous, operating through a steady loop of negotiations and renegotiations between the company and a public. Public relations informs the company of a public, and informs a public of the company. Its role - it claims - is one of narration and calibration.

While there have been plenty of media studies on the image of architecture, what this research aims to explore is the idea of public relations as narration, and through that narration, the imagination of architecture. Architecture will be defined through this research as a space of imagination that is as equitably crafted by its architects as it is by its other interested parties. These disparate and at times conflicting voices are calibrated through, and narrated by, public relations not as a person or a firm but as a way of thought.  The unease with which we react to public relations as a practice has perhaps less to do with its field of operations and more with its foreign yet eerily similar modes of thought - one that re-categorizes, restructures and reorders not only our systems of value but also the very fabric of our reality.
In an interview towards the end of his life, the self-proclaimed father of public relations, Edward Bernays, was quick to avoid aligning public relations with mere fantasy building, briskly asserting that “of course, you know, we don’t deal in images… we deal in reality.”

What, however, is this ‘reality’? And where in it can we find architecture’s own imaginations and fabrications?