Behind the Podium (and the Book): A few questions with guest speaker Alfredo Thiermann

Alfredo Thiermann is an architect and Assistant Professor for History and Theory of Architecture at the École polytechnique fédérale in Lausanne. Through his practice and theoretical research, he explores the intersection between architecture and different media.

Thiermann recently published the book Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin with MIT Press. Thiermann and the book offer a historical and theoretical account of the city of Berlin from the intertwined perspectives of architecture, environmental, and media studies. He presents the book at AUD on Thursday, October 17 as part of AUD's 2024-2025 public program. Ahead of that, Thiermann spoke with AUD about the book and the research and activities around it.

Congratulations on your new book. Today’s media landscape can feel boundary-less and very noisy. Take us back to the Weimar Republic era. What did radio represent or promise to the public at that time?

While the book is centered on the Cold War period, I quickly realized that a substantial part of the institutions, the knowledge, the actors, and even the buildings themselves had a history that could be traced back at least to the Weimar Republic, the interwar period. What is fascinating about that time in Germany is that we observe how radio—which until then had been used as a technical medium mostly for war purposes—became mass media. In that sense, radio, understood as mass media, promised to break with a number of dynamics that had kept access to information and entertainment exclusive to an elite and make those accessible to other segments of society. But at the same time, and by virtue of the same condition, many people realized the political danger intrinsic to radio and the mass dissemination of information. At that moment, we see architecture reacting to a condition of euphoria—in terms of science, culture, and even business—while simultaneously reacting to a series of institutions trying to understand and, to a certain degree, tame the vertigo this technology was bringing to society.

And today, as data centers continue popping up, and as AI demands more energy and resources, we’re reminded that so-called “invisible media” require quite a bit of hard infrastructure. As radio evolved in those early days, did it have an impact on architecture and urbanism?

One of the premises of the book deals precisely with this dichotomy of “material” and “immaterial” media. One of the interesting things about information is that it is neither energy nor form, yet it affects the way in which we relate to each other. If architecture is the discipline that organizes and orchestrates energy and matter through form, in principle, media revolutions could happen independently of architecture. That has been the historical promise of nearly every media revolution—that it will finally "kill" architecture.

Radio was no exception, and in that sense, was one of the most radical threats imposed on architecture as it is traditionally understood, as it promised to dissolve everything into ethereal waves, replacing the spaces of social gathering, the dissemination of culture, and even national boundaries. The book traces precisely the opposite trajectory: it looks at the immense amount of matter that had to be mobilized to make the ephemeral fantasy of radio exist. When looking at the material aspect of media revolutions like radio, one learns that every single one of these revolutions doesn’t “kill” architecture but rather radically transforms the potentiality and limitations of the built artifact. Instead of dissolving them into the ether, after radio, buildings are more relevant than ever before.

Are there other cities or regions in the world that have been shaped or designed, in some way, by sound, or by emerging media?

Well, this book has Berlin in the title, but it is, in reality, a global history of radio. It is not a global history in the sense that I try to encompass everything that happened everywhere, but it is a global history in the sense that radio is, by definition, a global—or even trans-planetary—medium. The book tells very interesting and rather overlooked global histories of radio, like the role that radio played in the colonial project of Wilhelminian Germany in Africa and Latin America, or the socialist solidarity that emerged from East Berlin to countries like Chile after the U.S.-sponsored dictatorships that defined Latin America in the 1960s and 70s. Most places in the world were affected by the advent of radio, radically shifting the dichotomy of centrality and periphery.

Radio-Activities brings together years of research, and there was an exhibition of this research as well. How did the physical experience of the exhibition influence the book or your research?

I did two exhibitions about the topic -- one when I was halfway through the process, more or less, and the other when the book was finished. The reason why I decided to work with the medium of the exhibition was because I encountered several sound archives that were fundamental for me to understand that story. Those archives were extremely interesting documents, but they were also simply good and pleasant sounds to experience. In that sense, as much as I like books, books are an extremely dumb medium when it comes to sounds. Sounds radically resist the tyranny of written language, and therefore I thought it was important to present this material in connection with the medium through which it was disseminated: sound. Beyond that, to make all this material available in a spatial way and not through the linearity of a book was important for me to test ways of organizing and understanding it. Both exhibitions were really interesting for me in that sense, as part of the thinking process, too.

What surprised you the most as you wrote the book—whether about the subject matter or about writing?

I learned a lot about buildings. I think buildings are really curious and particular objects. I honestly started the process with sheer curiosity to better understand how a series of buildings that interested me came to exist, and by unpacking that very simple question, a number of other issues came to the fore. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about writing a book about buildings is confirming how complex and intricate their histories are, and that one should remain curious about the nature of these strange objects that we inhabit.

Alfredo Thiermann is an architect and Assistant Professor for History and Theory of Architecture at the École polytechnique fédérale in Lausanne. Through his practice and theoretical research, he explores the intersection between architecture and different media. He has previously taught at Harvard University, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and other institutions. Alfredo’s work has been published in Harvard Design Magazine, A+U, Revista ARQ, TRACE magazine, Revue Matières, Potlatch, Real Review, Thresholds, Archithese, GTA Papers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and BauNetz, and has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, the Istanbul Design Biennial, gta exhibitions in Zurich, and the Venice Art Biennale among other institutions. He has been the recipient of the Rome Prize of the German Academy in Rome.

Alfredo studied architecture, receiving his professional degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile and a Masters degree from Princeton University. He received his doctoral degree from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. He has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich. He is the author of Radio-Activities: Architecture and Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin published by MIT Press. He lives, works, and takes care of Pedro Tristán and Juan Nataniel between Lausanne and Berlin.