In the 1972 documentary film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, Banham drives an automobile equipped with a fictional "Baede-Kar" visitor guidance system, a humorous "tribute to Karl Baedeker, the father of the modern guidebook," that purportedly helps him navigate the city. Some forty years later we could be just one app away from self-driving cars featuring voice-activated GPS systems that not only tell us where to go but also describe the historical significance of the buildings we see along the way. More than simply being influenced by multimedia publications, architectural history has arrived at producing hypermediated experiences. From engaging media as part of architecture's intellectual history to adapting multimedia projects to the conventions of historical research to producing spatial stories through interactive delivery systems that allow participants to construct narratives across divergent sequences, hypermediated histories may more clearly define the historian's role as an active participant in, rather than passive observer of, the delineation of our built environment.
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