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Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin
384![Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin
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Overview
In 1945, having occupied German territory, Soviet troops made two strategic moves: they dismantled the Deutschlandsender III radio transmission tower, the single tallest structure at the time in Europe, and they seized the Haus des Rundfunks in West Berlin, a monumental building designed by Hans Poelzig. These moves were crucial both symbolically and technically, as together they sparked what would become a veritable radio war between the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. In Radio-Activities, Alfredo Thiermann Riesco investigates this spatial conflict as he interrogates the political, technological, and environmental dimensions of architecture at a time when buildings began to interact with the remote transmission of information.
By its very nature, the medium of radio promised to evaporate the intrinsic material aspect of architecture; in fact, it did no such thing. By way of transscalar analyses, Thiermann Riesco pays particular attention to Berlin’s buildings, walls, transmission towers, factories, research institutions, and territorial organizations during the Cold War period, which enabled the production, reproduction, and transmission of sonic-based content across the divide of the Iron Curtain. In doing so he reveals underresearched continuities between politics, technology, media, and architecture, in the process reframing notions of national and transnational boundaries.
A timely and fascinating study, Radio-Activities brilliantly interrogates the status and agency of buildings during a period—not unlike today’s—of increasingly hyperconnected, ubiquitous, and invisible modes of coexistence.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780262048705 |
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Publisher: | MIT Press |
Publication date: | 08/06/2024 |
Pages: | 384 |
Product dimensions: | 7.38(w) x 10.13(h) x 1.21(d) |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
“While speculative parallels between the virtual and the material help connect architecture to culture at large, more often than not such studies appear more interested in legitimizing the discipline than advancing architecture itself. Alfredo Thiermann Riesco’s proposition of an architecture of radio stands out as a contrary to this trend. A meticulous examination of Berlin’s prescient environmental history, the book posits the broadcasting house as a new typology, incorporating ideology and media back onto a terrain that actively affects the conception and production of architecture.”
—Mark Lee, Professor in Practice, Department of Architecture, Harvard University
“Radio Activities is not only a media history of Cold War Berlin; it is a richly illustrated environmental history of electrified sound—of signals transmitted by radio waves that penetrated through walls and across vast distances. It traces the movement of these invisible frequencies as they gave shape to cities, reconfigured buildings, and activated bodies. This book is for anyone interested in the material and political life of information.”
—Michael Osman, Associate Professor, UCLA; author of Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America