Radio-Activities

Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin

Floor plan of the first level of the Haus des Rundfunks designed by Hans Poelzig in its design development face (1931). Source: TU Berlin Architekturmuseum, Inv. Nr. 4620.

Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin is a research project that investigates the intersection of architecture, information technologies, politics, and the environment. It has been exhibited in multiple venues and will be published as a book by MIT Press in July 2024.

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 Rundfunks in West Berlin, a monumental building designed by Hans Poelzig. These moves were crucial both symbolically andtechnically, as together they sparked what would become a veritable radio war between the Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. In Radio-Activities, I investigate this spatialconflict by interrogating the political, technological, and environmental dimensions of architecture at a time when buildings began to interact with the remote 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, I pay particular attention to Berlin’s buildings, walls, transmission towers, factories, research institutions, and territorial organisations 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 I reveal underresearched continuities between politics, technology, media, and architecture, reframing notions of national and transnational boundaries.

Ultimately, Radio-Activities interrogates the status and agency of buildings during a period — not unlike today’s — of increasingly hyperconnected, ubiquitous, and apparently immaterial modes of coexistence.

Radio-Activities

Learn More

Radio-Activities: Exhibition

Radio-Activities: Exhibition

Radio-Activities: Publication