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