Review: Broadcasting Buildings: Architecture on the Wireless, 1927–1945, by Shundana Yusaf

Abstract

Shundana Yusaf Broadcasting Buildings: Architecture on the Wireless, 1927–1945 Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014, 352 pp., 77 b/w illus. $29.95, ISBN 9780262026741 In 1932 the artist Paul Nash observed, “Whether it is possible to ‘Go Modern’ and ‘Be British’ is a question vexing quite a few people to-day.”1 Foreign influences such as the 1927 English translation of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture and a stream of architects from continental Europe as well as other parts of the world raised the question of how to align modernism, and the internationalism it suggested, with a desire to preserve what was valuable about Britain. Scholars of modern British architectural history have ably examined the topic of how the nation has maintained recognizable markers of British identity while embracing the ideas, arguments, and architects associated with the modern movement.2 In Broadcasting Buildings Shundana Yusaf shifts the perspective to provide an account of British architecture’s engagement with modernism as transmitted over the airwaves of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). With BBC radio broadcasts on architecture as her focal point, Yusaf provides an illuminating and well-detailed account that goes beyond simply reexamining the qualities that might have made British architecture “modern” to ask how media and communications technologies have shaped perceptions of the built environment. This attention to media puts forward a conceptual and methodological ambition: Yusaf argues that as a nonvisual medium, radio challenged the status of architecture by robbing it of “its defining qualities, like materiality, visuality, spatiality, and locality” (2). Despite the quandary of describing architecture without visual or material aids, or what Yusaf describes as “broadcasting buildings,” the BBC devoted many hours to architectural topics in the period covered in the book. Architects and city planners who appeared on the airwaves ranged from critics of the modern movement such as C. R. Ashbee, Edwin Lutyens, and Reginald Blomfield to its proponents, including Wells Coates, Amyas Connell, and …