Architecture as Media System: Konrad Wachsmann at California City

Abstract

In 1966, Konrad Wachsmann began to research and design a city hall for the new speculative development of California City. For six years, the Institute for Building Research at the University of Southern California (USC) worked on a design to signal California City’s transition to public authority while redefining architecture as a media system that actively transmitted, processed, and stored information. Incorporating emerging telecommunications technologies, architecture served as a feedback loop of governance. And while the project failed to secure funding, representation became a substitute for the building. Drawings and models were superseded by machined prototypes and full-scale mock-ups. The project reveals the collapse of fantastical design speculation and the real, all manufactured in the controlled environment of the laboratory. Just as the proposed televisual media system sought to deliver effects of the real—bodies and voices broadcast live—the mock-ups delivered evidence of the real that rendered the building unnecessary.