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