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.