Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

Alfredo Thiermann 

"Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin”

[Response: Rubén Gallo]

Tuesday, October 01, 2024 @5pm ET

N107 (School of Architecture)

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 this talk, I will present Radio-Activities, my recently published book, in which I investigate this spatial conflict by interrogating 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, in the book, I pay particular attention to Berlin’s buildings, walls, transmission towers, factories, research institutions, and territorial organisations 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 I reveal underresearched continuities between politics, technology, media, and architecture, reframing notions of national and transnational boundaries. In Radio-Activities I interrogate the status and agency of buildings during a period — not unlike today’s — of increasingly hyperconnected, ubiquitous, and apparently invisible modes of coexistence.

Alfredo Thiermann is an architect and Assistant Professor for History and Theory of Architecture at the École polytechnique fédérale in Lausanne. Before EPFL, he taught at Harvard University and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich. He is the author of Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin published by MIT Press. 

Rubén Gallo is the author of Mexican Modernity: the Avant-Garde and the Technical Revolution (MIT, 2005), Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (MIT, 2010), Proust’s Latin Americans (Hopkins, 2014), and the editor of Havana Modern: Critical Readings in Cuban Architecture (Arquine, 2023), among other publications. His next book, Cuban Modernity: Architecture, Film, Literature, explore the links between Modern architecture, print and visual media in 1950s Cuba. He serves on the board of the Freud Museum, Vienna, and directs Princeton’s Global Seminar in Austria. 

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