UCLA AUD Fall 2024 Events: BOOK TALK: Alfredo Thiermann presents "Radio-Activities"

Alfredo Thiermann, architect and Assistant Professor for History and Theory of Architecture at the École polytechnique fédéralein Lausanne, presents new book Radio-Activities at UCLA AUD.

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 Rundfunksin 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, Thiermann will present Radio-Activities, his recently published book, in which Thiermann investigates this spatial conflict by interrogating the political, technological, and environmental dimensions of architecture at a time when buildings began to interact with theremote 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, Thiermann 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, Thiermann reveals underresearched continuities between politics, technology, media, and architecture, reframing notions of national and transnational boundaries, and interrogates the status and agency of buildings during a period—not unlike today’s—of increasingly hyperconnected, ubiquitous, and apparently invisible modes of coexistence.