Radio-Activities

Exhibition at ETH Zurich, November 10 to December 17, 2021

Presenting sounds, archival drawings, and cartographic representations, Radio-Activities aims to raise awareness of the contemporary role of the built environmentby examining the time when the intricate worlds of politics, aesthetics, and information technologies began to populate the ether. The exhibition is the outcome of research conducted by the Chilean architect Alfredo Thiermann on the built infrastructure of radio in Berlin, starting in the Weimar Republic and running up to the Cold War period.

Exactly sixty years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Radio-Activities re-examines the material conditions under which two fundamentally opposing politicaland aesthetic worldviews coexisted within a single city. Inhabiting this apparentlydivided territory, both these forms of conceiving space conquered, shielded, andcompeted over constantly fluctuating borders through the means of electromagnetic waves and sonic signals. Crossing over the seemingly impenetrable Iron Curtain andthe Berlin Wall, radio was paradoxically a highly material form of construction, albeit built using very different architectural means. Combining sonic and visual material, the exhibition presents Berlin’s disputed architecture of radio in three different scales: the city, the building, and oscillations.

A series of maps and cartographic representations show the city of Berlin as it was understood from the perspective of the transmission, reception, and blocking of information. Ranging from structures designed by canonical figures such Hans Poelzig and Heinrich Muthesius to anonymous buildings, military facilities, and research laboratories, the building scale is presented through extensive graphic documentation originating from different archives. Inside the gallery, visitors walk through an array of radio receivers hanging from the ceiling. These devices interceptand amplify the sounds emitted by three FM radio transmitters installed within the space, meaning that the scale of oscillations is presented by the very electromagnetic waves radiating inside and beyond the limits of the gallery. This arrangement offers the public the possibility to listen to the intricate and noisy relationship existing between sounds, buildings, and the city, as well as to early experiments in electronic music developed within and for radio institutions.

Radio-Activities proposes a material understanding of seemingly invisible informationinfrastructures, revealing overlooked continuities between politics, electronic technical media, and architecture. Based on extensive archival research, theexhibition problematizes the stability inscribed in buildings and walls by reconsidering them in an age when the historic solidity of architecture was radically challenged by the entangled crossovers between technology, ideology, and mass media. In so doing, it also raises the same question in terms of where we are now by interrogating the relevance and agency of buildings with regards to our increasingly hyper-connected, ubiquitous, and apparently ephemeral modes of existence.

The exhibition Radio-Activities is a collaboration between architect Alfredo Thiermann, gta Exhibitions, and the Collegium Helveticum. It opens to the public on November 10 and will be on display until December 17 at the GTA Gallery in the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich.