Architecture's relationship with its representations is peculiar, powerful, and critical. Though driven by belief in the characteristics of physical reality, architecture is identified, discussed, and explained almost entirely through representations. Indeed, the representations are often described as though they were the architecture itself. The status of the imaginary project, and the shifts in media technology which affect how we make and see architecture, are part of the construct of media representations, including photographs, exhibitions, journalism, books, critical theory, by which we define architecture.

Kester Rattenbury has assembled architectural writers of different kinds -- historians, theorists, journalists, computer game designers, technologists, film-makers, and architects -- to reveal the characteristics, cultures, limitations, and bias of the different kinds of media, and to build up an argument as to how this complex culture of representation is constructed.