Mi 14.12.2022
15:00
• Hybrid
Campus Westend SH 3.102,
Goethe University,
Frankfurt a.M.
Vortrag
British Breakfast on Air
Léa-Catherine Szacka
Between February 1, 1983 and December 31, 1992, a television company named TV-am went on air, every morning, from an ostentatious studio building, a refurbished garage located in Camden Town London. The building, designed by the architect Terry Farrell, soon became a symbol for the new television station and an emblem of postmodern architecture (featuring, amongst others, in the fourth edition of the Charles Jencks‘ seminal book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture).
Creating a shock wave within British conventional society, the expansion of television broadcasting hours in the early 1980s, went hand in hand with a rapid Americanisation of the UK. Using the eventful history of TV-am – both the history of the station that of its iconic studio building – this lecture explores the changing nature of broadcasting, architecture and, more generally, media representation in postmodern Britain, a period that coincided with Thatcherism and the rise of Neoliberal economy.
Léa-Catherine Szacka is an Associate Professor in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester and a visiting tutor at the Berlage whose work focuses on the history and theory of postmodern architecture, with a particular focus on media and curating.
Szacka is the author of Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (Marsilio, 2016), for which she was awarded the 2017 Alice Davies Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB). She is also the author of Biennials/Triennials: Conversations on the Geography of Itinerant Display (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019) and co-author of Le Concert: Pink Floyd à Venise(B2, 2017), as well as co-editor of Mediated Messages: Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2018). Together with Silvia Micheli, she is currently completing the manuscript of Paolo Portoghesi: Architecture Between History, Politics and Media (Bloomsbury, forthcoming August 2023).
Image Caption: The TV-am studio interior designed by architect Terry Farrell, 1982.
