Beyond Space Wireless Sites: Architecture in the Space

Between 1927 and 1945 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired an average of two radio programs a month on architecture. This article explores the effect of these simulated wireless sites on a traditional mode of knowledge like architecture. What happened when architecture, framed within the institutional vision of the BBC, encountered the specific mode of production, reproduction and diffusion of the radio? I argue that early radio in Britain was not just another medium of representation, but one of simulation, which reinvented the social identity of architecture. This historical account of wireless sites enables us to rethink the perceptual category we call " tradition. " Since the early 1980s Jean Baudrillard has mesmerized the imagination of the intellectual community across disciplines and continents with his formulation of an order of things he insists is new. This order, he has demonstrated, is established by electronic mass media. In particular, modern media have destroyed the relationship of mimesis between a model and its representation characteristic of classical media like painting and the novel. This has freed images from the function of representing reality and enabled them to simulate messages with no reference in life. Baudrillard's inquiry has revealed a role reversal between image and reality. Images now precede reality, and, conversely, reality imitates images. We — the producers and consumers of simulations — misrecognize this role reversal and make our lives in the shadow of these autonomous images. We, thereby, create a reality that is based on unrepresentative images. This is what Baudrillard has called " hyper-reality. " This revisitation of the ideas of Baudrillard stems from a paper I presented at the tenth IASTE conference in 2006. The conference invited participants to consider the rise of hyper-traditions for the study of traditional built environments. Hyper-traditions are engendered by the confluence of globalization, electronic mass media, and the latest technologies like that of travel. These three forces have a common trait: they foster contact between " uninformed " and " fleeting " consumers (TV viewers, tourists, ordinary home Shundana Yusaf is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Theory Program at the School of Architecture, Princeton University, and a junior fellow at the Paul Mellon Center, Yale University.