Atmosphere in radio and architecture: Using The Revenge radio play in interdisciplinary teaching as a means to understand notions of abstraction and the tensions between materiality and immateriality in building physical and imagined spaces

Abstract

This article reflects upon an innovative international teaching collaboration between scholars and students in radio studies and architecture. In particular it presents an analysis of some of my work with a group of first-year architecture students in a workshop co-designed with two of their architecture lecturers, Dimitra Pavlakou and Athanasios Zagorisios. The focus of the workshop was Andrew Sachs’ binaural radio play The Revenge (1978). The aim was to investigate the relationship between perception and representation and to help students understand notions of scale, materiality, structure and form. The questions raised by the workshop concerned the degree of abstraction that penetrates the above relationships. This article offers an analysis of some of the student work that derived from that workshop. It looks at how our understanding of the core architectural concepts of materiality and immateriality might be subverted when considered through radio theory and practice. The idea of Atmosphere is used as a core concept crucial to both radio and architecture. Atmosphere is considered as an immaterial, abstract notion deriving from the material hypostasis of a building or a highly constructed audio story-world. Abstraction is considered as a notion that allows for atmosphere to be created in radio and architecture. Atmosphere and abstraction finally emerge as interdisciplinary concepts, connecting architecture and radio through the idea of space; the latter seen as a construct both material and immaterial, defined and yet in many ways free.