Thesis ID: CBB001567647

Architectures of Global Communication: Psychoacoustics, Acoustic Space, and the Total Environment, 1941--1970 (2014)

unapi

Touloumi, Olga (Author)


Galison, Peter
Harvard University
Mills, Mara
Hays, K. Michael
Mills, Mara
Picon, Antoine
Hays, K. Michael


Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Advisor: Picon, Antoine; Committee Members: Hays, K. Michael, Galison, Peter, Mills, Mara.
Physical Details: 390 pp.
Language: English

This dissertation examines architectural engagements with communication technologies, within the framework of mid-twentieth-century efforts to institute a global community and engineer media democracies. I interrogate the sound modernities that architects constructed in collaboration with engineers, officials, and acousticians, and I demonstrate the architectural strategies that informed them: the theater, the concert hall, the cinema. These interiors, I argue, reconfigured the international community as a networked audience, and the institutions of world organization as the main stages of international diplomacy. My research interrogates key episodes in the development of these sites and the "global space" they hoped to create around two institutional constructions of globality. First, I examine the design and organization of the United Nations. I follow architects, engineers, interpreters, and diplomats as they assemble humans and nonhumans in communication organisms. These actors brought debates on technological amplification, automation, translation, and intelligibility, inside the space of global governance. They implicated infrastructural concerns with aesthetic considerations regarding the atmospheres and intimacy. In this way, the UN was engineered as a media-transparent, instantaneous global network. The second part examines the "stereophonic environments" constructed by the Bureau Internationale des Expositions. This experience of multiple perspectives in World Expo pavilions, furnished the myth of a "global village" with narratives of fluidity, simultaneity, and heterogeneity. The design of these spaces reveals the architects' role in framing the relationship between subjectivities and the electroacoustic spaces of communication in the post-World War II period. Loudspeakers, multichannel consoles, and microphones, I argue, point to dialogues between networks and environments, engineering and mid-century aesthetic theories. These dialogues were set in motion by architects. Their ultimate result was to reconfigure the public sphere as a multimedia environment, and its experience as the experience of a mixed reality interior. Through the design and construction of these spaces, architects participated in the mythopoetics, the myth-making, of "global village" narratives in the post-World War II period.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/10(E), Apr 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1557745167.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567647/

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Authors & Contributors
Selcer, Perrin
Hamblin, Jacob Darwin
Andersen, Caspar
Trapp, Ralf
Pearson, Jessica Lynne
Benton, Bruce
Concepts
International cooperation
Science and politics
International relations
Cold War
Engineering
Public health
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
21st century
20th century, early
19th century
Places
United States
Africa
Great Britain
Syria
Timor Island
Germany
Institutions
United Nations
UNESCO
World Health Organization (WHO)
League of Nations
World Bank
UNICEF
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