BROADCASTING BUILDINGS

In the years between the world wars, millions of
people heard the world through a box on the dresser. In Britain, radio
listeners relied on the British Broadcasting Corporation for information
on everything from interior decoration to Hitler’s rise to power. One
subject covered regularly on the wireless was architecture and the built
environment. Between 1927 and 1945, the BBC aired more than six hundred
programs on this topic, published a similar number of articles in its
magazine, The Listener, and sponsored several traveling
exhibitions. In this book, Shundana Yusaf examines the ways that
broadcasting placed architecture at the heart of debates on democracy.

Undaunted by the challenge of talking about space and place in
disembodied voices over a nonvisual medium, designers and critics turned
the wireless into an arena for debates about the definitions of the
architect and architecture, the difficulties of town and country
planning after the breakup of large country estates, the financing of
the luxury market, the expansion of local governing power, and tourism.
Yusaf argues that while broadcast technology made a decisive break with
the Victorian world, these broadcasts reflected the BBC’s desire to
continue the legacy of Victorian institutions dedicated to the
production of a cultivated polity. Under the leadership of John Reith,
the BBC introduced listeners to the higher pleasures of life hoping to
deepen their respect for tradition, the authority of the state, and
national interests. These ambitions influenced the way architecture was
portrayed on the air. Yusaf finds that the wireless evoked historic
architecture only in travelogues and contemporary design mainly in
shopping advice. The BBC’s architectural programming, she argues,
offered a paradoxical interface between the placelessness of radio and
the situatedness of architecture, between the mechanical or
nonhumanistic impulses of technology and the humanist conception of
architecture.