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 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, I will present Radio-Activities, my recently published book, in which I investigate this spatial conflict 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, in the book, 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 I reveal underresearched continuities between politics, technology, media, and architecture, reframing notions of national and transnational boundaries. 

In Radio-Activities I interrogate the status and agency of buildings during a period — not unlike today’s — of increasingly hyperconnected, ubiquitous, and apparently invisible modes of coexistence.

Alfredo Thiermann is an architect and Professor for History and Theory of Architecture at the École polytechnique fédérale in Lausanne. Through his practice and theoretical research, he explores the intersection between architecture and different media. He has previously taught at Harvard University, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and other institutions. Alfredo’s work has been published in Harvard Design Magazine, A+U, Revista ARQ, TRACE magazine, Revue Matières, Potlatch, Real Review, Thresholds, Archithese, GTAPapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and BauNetz, and has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, the Istanbul DesignBiennial, gta exhibitions in Zurich, and the Venice Art Biennale among other institutions. He has been the recipient of the Rome Prize of the German Academy in Rome.

Alfredo studied architecture, receiving his professional degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile and a Masters degree from Princeton University. He received his doctoral degree from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. He has been a fellowat the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich. He is the author of Radio-Activities:Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin published by MIT Press. He lives, works, and takes care of Pedro Tristán andJuan Nataniel between Lausanne and Berlin.