Architectures of Global Communication

About this book

This dissertation examines architectural engagements with communication technologies, within the framework of mid-twentieth-century efforts to institute a global community and engineer media democracies. I interrogate the sound modernities that architects constructed in collaboration with engineers, officials, and acousticians, and I demonstrate the architectural strategies that informed them: the theater, the concert hall, the cinema. These interiors, I argue, reconfigured the international community as a networked audience, and the institutions of world organization as the main stages of international diplomacy.