As Seen On TV
The screen is entirely black. A catchy soundtrack fades out to an image of a living room set. The audience applauds and the presenter walks in. It is The Greg Lynn Show; a series of interviews conducted by Greg Lynn, the curator of a recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.1 Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention is the third exhibition at the CCA regarding a central topic in contemporary architecture: the impact of digital technologies in the design process. Comparing and contrasting fifteen projects from the 1990s and 2000s, the exhibition is also accompanied by a series of 10-minute interviews with eleven of the big names in the digi-tech architecture produced during this period. However, more than the architecture and the exhibition itself, it is the format of the latenight talk show chosen to discuss the work on display, that presents an interesting opportunity to reflect on the relationship between architecture and television. The late-night talk show was born almost at the same time as television started to be developed in the United States in the late 1930s. The format migrated to TV from radio, first as entertaining variety shows, eventually evolving into the now common one-hour show of monologues, interviews, audience participation and comedy sketches. Even though architecture was not a central topic for this type of show, disciplinary content was certainly produced for the broadcast media. Perhaps, one of the most iconic instances of mediatized architecture was in Nikolaus Pevsner’s lectures. Starting out first as a radio show on the UK’s BBC, Pevsner’s monologues later made it to TV. Although consisting of only two television programmes, the BBC’s The English Eccentrics, showed Pevsner visiting buildings in the British countryside to demonstrate their unique eccentricity. It was in the 1950s that TV became massively popular in the USA. Almost every single suburban family home had in the centre of its living room a television set. Apart from documentary programs, like Pevsner’s, in which a host lectured about buildings presented to the viewer, architecture (or rather architects) mainly appeared on TV as the subject of an interview. Frank Lloyd Wright’s 30-minute interview with Mike Wallace for The Mike Wallace Interview in 1957, is one such instance. Appearing on the screen right next to Wallace, an 88 years old Frank Lloyd Wright answered a series of rather personal questions.2 It was through this format that architects and their architecture became televised. The success of the interview was based in the opportunity that the set of questions provided architects to expand on their ideas, their work, and their perceived role in society, that was interactive and engaging. This appeal of the interview was also present in Lynn’s more recent The Greg Lynn Show, which played with the format of the late-night show, on a studio set to be broadcasted online. The Greg Lynn Show also belongs to the tradition of architects’ television appearances, as instrumental to the production and distribution of their work. Architects would use the television interview as the prime means in which to express themselves. Philip Johnson, one of the first architects who was perfectly fluent in media and television, managed to establish an even closer relationship between his architecture and the TV. In one of his many
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuPy4MGWibo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeKzIZAKG3E
television appearances, we see Johnson walking through his Glass House together with art critic Rosamond Bernier. Here, the interview takes a live action format. The spectators are presented with the sensory illusion of being present in between both the conversation of two interlocutors and the glass walls of the building. Our appreciation of the architect through the interview is now complemented by simultaneously understanding the buildings and spaces he has created. The architectural experience is merged with and amplified by television broadcasting. This explains interpretations like Beatriz Colomina’s, who suggested that the Glass House was designed for the media, understanding the building as a stage set in a broadcasting studio.3 In 1973, a group of architects and students of architecture built a television studio which sought to be a site for the production and transmission of multimedia content exclusively about architecture. TVAA was a closed-circuit television network created by the Communications Unit at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Everyday at 1pm, TVAA would air diverse material including films, TV programs, interviews as well as school announcements, students’ work, and past lectures.4 Alvin Boyarksy, the newly elected, Canadian-born chairman of the school, was the driving force behind the multimedia expansion of the pedagogical apparatus, which included seven serial printpublications, a gallery, and the television station. Boyarsky himself appeared on TVAA on multiple occasions, including a thirteen-minute interview with Peter Eisenman on the work of another multimedia educational institution that was operating through several forms of media, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies.5 Architecture as a cultural product found its own way to becoming part of and making use of television broadcasting technologies, reframing discourses, pedagogies, institutions, and architecture itself. As conversation and oral history became fundamental to assemble the exhibition at the CCA, The Greg Lynn Show can be seen as the latest development in this micro-history of the relationship between architecture and its representation on television. The Greg Lynn Show, was however, not broadcasted on television, but on an online platform: the CCA’s YouTube channel. By using the mediatic techniques of television, while at once circumventing television in its initial form, the show performs a meta-reflection on both systems of communication – TV and architecture – by questioning the future productivity of this relationship. Ultimately, The Greg Lynn Show questions not only the role of the digital in the practice of architecture but also the preservation of these technologies in archival and curatorial practices, questions which are central to the interests of a cultural institution like the CCA. As broadcasting evolves from television to online, with almost every social medium adding live streaming services to their platforms, the format of programs will change and so will architecture.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0C-J9NCSHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs4RJTg3r00 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhQLaM0Q11g 4