Mediated Space [1 ed.] 9781859469477, 9780429345777, 9781000699142, 9781000698787, 9781000698428

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D E T E A I C D A E P M S

OF E UR ING T C T I S NT E T HI V ER NME C AR , A D TAI E TH W S T E R N E D EN A N ES T C M JA N E D I BE OWN BR

Mediated Space © RIBA Publishing, 2018 Published by RIBA Publishing, 66 Portland Place, London, W1B 1AD ISBN 978 1 85946 947 7 The right of James Benedict Brown to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 sections 77 and 78. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Commissioning editors: Elizabeth Webster & Susannah Lear Project editor: Daniel Culver Production: Richard Blackburn Typeset by Academic + Technical Typesetting, Bristol Printed and bound by Page Bros, Norwich, UK While every effort has been made to check the accuracy and quality of the information given in this publication, neither the Author nor the Publisher accept any responsibility for the subsequent use of this information, for any errors or omissions that it may contain, or for any misunderstandings arising from it. www.ribapublishing.com

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

V

INTRODUCTION

1

PART 1

THE MEDIATED SPACE OF BROADCAST NEWS

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Chapter 1

W1A

12

Chapter 2

The Global Local

27

Chapter 3

The Island

39

PART 2

THE MEDIATED SPACE OF ADVERTISING

50

Chapter 4

Imported from Detroit

52

Chapter 5

Inject Some Positive Emotion

64

Chapter 6

The Open Road

73

PART 3

THE MEDIATED SPACE OF ENTERTAINMENT

82

Chapter 7

I’ll See You in the Boardroom

84

Chapter 8

Olympic Legacies

92

CONCLUSION

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

103

INDEX

111

IMAGE CREDITS

112

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I tend not to write anything from beginning to end in chronological order. This sporadic and at times chaotic creative process has benefited hugely from the deadlines and rich critical environment of academic symposia and conferences. To that end, I would like to acknowledge the following people for providing me with platforms to develop the ideas in this book, in order of the chapters in which their influence has been felt. My participation in many of these activities was supported in part by the Architecture Research Group of the Leicester School of Architecture (LSA) at De Montfort University. In Part 1, the idea behind Chapter 1, ‘W1A’, was developed through a paper at the Production Sites conference at University College London (UCL) in July 2015, organised by Sophia Psarra and Sandra Loschke. An earlier version of this chapter is to be included in Sophia Psarra and Sandra Loschke’s forthcoming Production Sites: Architecture, Media, Text, to be published by Routledge. Although this element of ‘W1A’ gradually diminished in importance for the narrative of the book, I have to acknowledge two great composers of music for television, Irad Eshel in Tel Aviv and David Lowe in London, who gave me so many useful insights into the composition of packages for television news. Chapter 2, ‘The Global Local’, was developed from a paper first presented at Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City, hosted by the Centre for Moving Image Research at the University of the West of England, Architecture MPS and Intellect Books at the Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts, Bristol, in April 2016. Sincere thanks to Steve Faguy, not only for planting the seed of this chapter, but also for his comprehensive and long-standing independent reporting on Montreal’s media community at blog.fagstein.com. This chapter wouldn’t have been possible without the input of Karen Macdonald at CKMI-TV in Montreal and Gerry Berec at Global News in Toronto, who helped me to understand the technology that is being employed to bring local news to television across Canada. Thanks also to Riina Autio and Juha Laakso. Chapter 3, ‘The Island’, and other elements of the book, were greatly informed by Simon Jago and Stuart A. Veech, who are each responsible for some of the most striking and innovative design for radio and television today. In Part 2, Chapter 4, ‘Imported from Detroit’, first saw the light of day as a guest lecture delivered at the University of Nottingham in October 2014 on the invitation of Dr Steve Parnell. Drs Steve and Rosie Parnell have provided unfailing encouragement of my work in many different academic avenues since I was a student, and I thank them both. Some of the ideas in this chapter were illuminated by a fascinating personal tour of Detroit given to me by Jon at detroiturbex.com. Although he no longer offers such tours, his website remains a fascinating chronicle of Detroit’s disappearing architecture. Chapter 5, ‘Inject Some Positive Emotion’, was developed from a paper presented to the Annual Conference of the All Ireland Architecture Research Group (AIARG) at the Cork Centre for Architectural Education in January 2016. Part of Chapter 6, ‘The Open Road’, was inspired by a blog post by Jonathan Bell at Things Magazine, a rich source of inspiration about design, objects and culture. In Part 3, Chapter 7, ‘I’ll See You in the Boardroom’, benefited greatly from the insight of Elizabeth Anderson, Business Editor of the i newspaper, to whom

ACKNOWLEDGEMEN TS

v

I cannot apologise enough for being both late and disorganised during a badly disrupted research trip to London. Chapter 8, ‘Olympic Legacies’, is one of three in this book which formed the basis of three partially completed but never broadcast radio programmes that were competitively selected by the Arts and Culture Unit for Resonance FM’s Modulations. Sincere thanks to Juliette Kristensen for her support and feedback during this process, in spite of the necessary funding not being found to broadcast the programmes. I am particularly indebted to Hannah and Mutley, two people I was privileged to meet through the Focus E15 campaign group while researching and recording material for these radio programmes, and whose input informed my writing. Dr Paul Watt at Birkbeck, University of London, and Olly Wainwright at The Guardian, were both instrumental in helping me shape this chapter. Many brilliant people have read drafts of Mediated Space or parts of it during its development, and their critical feedback and encouragement has been invaluable. Special thanks to Robert Arens, Sam Austin, Steve Parnell and Alan Powers, who each gave me valuable feedback on even the least coherent ideas or worst written drafts along the way. Thanks also to the peer reviewers appointed by RIBA Publishing who chose to remain anonymous. At De Montfort University, I owe a huge thank you to Rebecca Hames, Lucy Gregson-Green and Helen Weeks for helping me to refine and improve countless academic applications for funding, most of which were unsuccessful but all of which helped me to become better at articulating my ideas. Professor Raymond Quek set the ball rolling on much needed improvements to third year cultural and contextual studies at LSA, and I am indebted to him for handing me that mantle in the academic year 2016/17. I’d also like to thank the students of LSA, especially those who chose to study in my specialist seminar groups on gender and media in 2015/16 and 2016/17 respectively. Great books can’t happen without great publishers, and I am indebted to Elizabeth Webster and Susannah Lear at RIBA Publishing for their belief, encouragement and fastidiously polite way of saying ‘no’ to things that didn’t make this book the best that it could be. Writing a book is, at times, thrilling and elevating, but at other times it is lonely and demoralising. For almost a decade I’ve been privileged to share my life with a great writer, dramaturge and editor, and an inspiring life partner. This book is dedicated with love and thanks to Amanda Monfrooe.

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INTRODUCTION Just after ten o’clock on the cold winter’s evening of 23 December 2007, a car crashed through the windows of the ABC7 television news studios on North State Street in Chicago. 1 Newsreader Ravi Baichwal was on air, introducing his colleague Michelle Gallardo from the scene of a house fire. As Gallardo started her report, Baichwal was heard to scream as the glass behind him shattered. When Gallardo handed back to Baichwal, he was ready to divert from the script on his autocue and to introduce live pictures of the incident. 2 Like hundreds of TV channels around the world, ABC7 broadcasts its news and current affairs programming from a street-side studio. Through soundproof windows, the site of journalistic production and the process of mediation is made spectacle. From early morning until late at night, the production of different bulletins live on air invites pedestrians to become witnesses to the production of news, perhaps even become participants as they wave or perform as living background. With its street-side location, the ABC7 studio in Chicago demonstrates the currency of the station’s journalistic activity, and its physical proximity to the centre of the city. Located on one of the city’s busiest downtown thoroughfares, opposite Rapp & Rapp’s Chicago Theater (1921), the studio is highly visible and positioned near to important cultural landmarks. Housing the studio in a prominent ground-floor location places the space of news production in the same public terrain as the neighbouring shops, bars and restaurants. The floor-to-ceiling windows demonstrate this proximity in two directions: to passers-by on the street and to viewers watching from across the city and state. The production of the news itself is in the foreground of city life. Early morning commuters scurry past as breakfast television airs. Delivery trucks, tourists and business people

Exterior of ABC7 news studios, State Street, Chicago

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animate the lunchtime news, and as night falls, the hubbub of Chicago’s rush hour and the brightly illuminated marquee of the Chicago Theater provide a vibrant backdrop. That night in December 2007, when a silver Mazda came within a metre or so of pinning Baichwal to his desk, the studio became the site of an unfolding news event. Crowds gathered in the sub-zero temperatures to watch Chicago Police Department officers arrest the driver of the car. 3 As the glass shattered, the boundary between media production and consumption was transgressed.

WHAT IS THIS SPACE? While the title of this book is intended to work on multiple levels, the term Mediated Space has not been chosen just because all the examples in this book are from broadcast media, but rather that their co-production is key to their mediation. 4 In 2015 Reinhold Martin used the word ‘mediators’ in the context of architectural production to describe ‘infrastructural systems and artefacts through which ways of seeing and knowing are co-produced’. 5 In a similar vein, and by developing a taxonomy of a particular kind of space, this book sets out to describe how particular genres of mediated space, ways of seeing them and ways of knowing are co-produced between creators and consumers of the space. The mediated spaces described throughout this book have all been consciously ‘mediated’ through design, adaptation or disguise to assert a message or power structure. Mediated Space is not intended to be read as an exclusively academic or architectural text. Mediated space itself is not an academic or architectural product; it is also a cultural, social and economic product. This book considers the architectural and cultural implications of an everyday space that is co-produced through the screen. This exploration is made in three parts, each considering this relationship through a different genre of screen-based media: the mediated spaces of news, advertising, and prime-time entertainment. The twentieth century witnessed the birth and growth of the screen through the cinema, the television, the computer and the always-connected mobile device. Today, our lives are mediated by glassy, tactile and ubiquitous screens, from responsive advertising hoardings at bus stops to curved light-emitting diode screens. Anna McCarthy has explored the growth of television and video screens outside the home and Scott McQuire has written about the cultural implications of such screens for public space. 6 In the realm of architectural practice, architects such as Diller Scofidio + Renfro were among the first to critically employ closedcircuit video in their projects, such as the Brasserie of the Seagram Building, New York City (2000), or the Facsimile installation proposed for San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center (2004). As in all projects built around cutting-edge video technology, there is a danger that built projects can quickly appear obsolete. The implicit critique of the function of video in the urban environment made by such projects is regaining its significance, as video becomes ever more present and portable. The question is perhaps not how we can design spaces and places for the inclusion of video screens, but how we can design for users who already have at least one portable screen in their hand, and for whom the urban experience is largely mediated by that screen. In our pockets and on our limbs, interactive screens are all around us, first in the smartphone and now increasingly on watches and ‘wearables’.

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It is important to note that this book is not about the relationship between architecture and film. Many useful contributions have been made to that field by authors such as Richard Koeck, Les Roberts, Mark Lamster and Katherine Shonfield, to name just a few. 7 Nor is it concerned with the immersive cyberspace of virtual reality that characterised early spatial critiques of the internet, such as Elizabeth Grosz’s Architecture from the Outside. 8 Not least because of the inevitable obsolescence that any such discussion would lead to, this book deliberately avoids engaging too closely with the emerging realm of technology (including augmented reality) which, through mobile apps and handheld or wearable devices, reveals a digital realm overlaying our physical environment (although some of the implications of this technology are discussed in Chapter 6).

HOW TO READ MEDIATED SPACE While this book is intended to be read in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, it should be acknowledged that the ideas informing it first emerged as a collection of discrete essays, formed over a period of five years. Reflecting the method of writing and rewriting, the concept of mediated space emerged as these disparate ideas began to feed into one another and coalesce into a singular theoretical framework. Some of the examples that might have been included here have fallen by the wayside. Others have risen in prominence, while still others have spawned, through repeated writing and rewriting, entirely new explorations that have formed their own chapters. Throughout this process, an approach to reading space emerged that bears similarities to the ways in which a semiotician might approach a piece of film or television as a text. Mediated Space examines how the architectural and urban spaces of broadcast media can be read and critiqued not only as individual signs, but also as sign-systems between which comparisons can be drawn and differences can be elucidated. 9 Although the first task of this book is taxonomical, understanding the meanings of these signs goes beyond naming them. Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the grandfathers of semiotics, invited the reader to deconstruct a sign into its two component parts: the signifier (its form) and the signified (its concept). 10 It is necessary to unpick the two component parts of a sign to understand the active and complementary relationship between them. This is the process of signification, and it is the process of generating a theoretical framework from the text itself, and not applying one from outside. Perceiving how signs go about their signification requires an active and critical engagement from the reader of a text. In S/Z, Roland Barthes demonstrated how the reader is an active co-producer of meaning with the author, proposing five codes that enable us to navigate this co-production of meaning, and he instructs the reader to find these codes within the text that is being studied, rather than applying it from outside the text. 11 So, in its emergence through the development of a series of disparate examples, Mediated Space is not about the signs themselves, nor about the application and interpretation of an external theory to these examples. Instead, it is understanding about the processes of signification that interlink the signifier (the form) and the signified (the concept) of a kind of space experienced by millions of people every day. All the examples in Mediated Space employ signs and sign-systems that occupy the same planes of perception, namely the ubiquitous realm of the screen.

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Understanding signification requires a critical eye, and in the case of Mediated Space, the lens through which that critical eye casts its gaze is architectural. Just as the disadvantage of being an oenologist is that a glass of wine is never just a glass of wine, for an architect, a building is never just a building. Whereas others may see a cosy restaurant dining-room, an architect will notice a mismatched cornice, a change in level between conjoined rooms, or a bond of brick that is out of keeping with the vernacular. Architects typically conclude a building project with a detailed process of ‘snagging’; checking their building for errors or disparities between their vision and its reality. This book emerges from a recognition that for those who design the built environment, it is always the details that snag our attention. We should cast that critical eye more widely, because these snags can reveal truths. These snags are traces of things overlooked, left behind or seemingly found out of place and time. Thus, this is a book inspired by some of the snags that catch the eye in spaces designed for screen-based media. Mediated space often works to conceal its origins and cultural impacts. In the same way that sociologists, cultural geographers and economists understand the wider implications of even the most minor innovations, those who practise or write about the discipline of architecture have a responsibility to name and critique the spatial implications of these changes. Just as Marshall McLuhan argued that it was necessary to develop the critical tools to make sense of the media, 12 this book argues for a need to understand mediated space and its attempts to conceal its origins. This book will assume and examine Henri Lefebvre’s position that space is a social product fundamental to the reproduction of society. As capitalism reigns as the dominant economic system in society, co-production of space is also fundamental to the continued reproduction of capitalism. 13 While the nature of the gaze of Mediated Space may be architectural, it is not intended to be impenetrable or unnecessarily academic. If you have ever watched a television programme or advertisement and wondered how the spaces you see on screen were created, this book is for you. As consumers of mass media, we have all become capable of remarkable dexterity and critique. Moreover, we are now so conditioned to consuming information via screens that we routinely do so on multiple devices simultaneously. As technology captures more detail, so the audience becomes more attentive to flaws. When the Granada Studios in Manchester were sold for redevelopment, a new outdoor television set had to be constructed for the British soap opera Coronation Street. In anticipation of highdefinition television broadcasts, the producers rebuilt the famous terraced street of houses with even more attention to detail than before, treating the brickwork, tiles, pavement and fenestration with dyes and mould to create an authentic impression of a one-hundred-year-old street. 14 Television audiences notice every flaw. Compiled by user contributions over almost three decades, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is a collaborative database of film and television production. Alongside detailed credits for cast and production crew are pages dedicated to millions of pieces of trivia, including continuity errors and filming locations. In this way, unpicking modern culture is no longer the reserve of the academic, and the modern audience is more critically engaged with its subject matter than ever before. Predictions for the information superhighway were many, and some, such as those of McLuhan’s, accurately predicted some of the social, economic and cultural revolutions that have transpired. McLuhan also hinted at the spatial implications of

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this technological and global shift, writing that the traditional hierarchy of broadcast media – between the broadcaster at the centre and the consumer at the margin – would disappear. As this book discusses in Part 1, the mechanisms of traditional broadcast media are confronted by an important erosion of their traditional hierarchy and the ways in which this relationship is spatialised. The verb to broadcast was first associated with radio in the 1920s. Its origin is agrarian, derived from the late eighteenth-century meaning of dispersing seeds on to the ground by hand. The adjective broad implies the reach of an arm that is swung wide from the seed sower. The verb to cast, and its Old Norse origin kasta, imply the force of this dissemination. The meaning of broadcast remains tied to the sense of a powerful origin of information that is cast out from a central point to a field of influence. In semiotics, an important distinction exists between codes that may be defined as either broadcast or narrowcast. John Fiske and Daniel Chandler define broadcast codes as being shared and understood through experience by a mass audience, whereas narrowcast codes are understood by a more limited audience, one that has most likely learned deliberately. 15 As the internet and related technologies evolve, some of the greatest threats to traditional broadcasting come from platforms which permit this kind of more specialist narrowcasting: podcasting as opposed to radio, live video streaming from mobile devices as opposed to television. The breakneck speed with which communications have become faster has facilitated these changes. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors that could be fitted in an integrated circuit would double every year. 16 As computers sped up, so did the flows of information between them. Providing citizens with reliable and fast broadband internet access is now a political issue, recognised as essential for the economic development of communities. Yet with all these changes, the traditional hierarchy that once existed between information producer and consumer, such as newspaper publisher and reader, is being subverted by peer-to-peer communication. Michel Foucault regarded this as a great test for society, one in which we would have to make sense of our own dense muddle of information. 17 The question for this book, as media consumers juggle internet-connected devices, smartphones, computers and televisions, is how architectural thinking can critique the spaces created by the globalised muddle. How have established media producers shaped their own working environments to respond to these new conditions? How are our cities being represented as inheritors of cultural meaning? How are buildings, spaces and places being designed, manipulated or used to derive authority and meaning from architectural cues that are common to all of us?

SPACE VERSUS PLACE Architects frequently refer to space as the great commodity of the discipline. Le Corbusier argued how his five points would liberate architectural space from containment according to singular activities; Louis Kahn taught a generation of architects to order buildings between served and servant space; and today Peter Zumthor measures the success of a building by its ability to create an ‘emotional space’. 18 In each case, the conceptions of architectural space are Cartesian, based on the mathematical abstraction, conception and description of space first published by René Descartes in the seventeenth century. 19 In introducing some of these famous approaches and the principles of Cartesian space to students of

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architecture, it has proved productive to explicate the oft-confused meanings of space and place. 20 This book considers the respective behaviours of space as if it were a noun and place as if it were a verb. 21 That is to say that space is necessarily conceived through some kind of abstraction, whereas place is always essentially dynamic, unfinished and composed of the many overlapping traces of human activity. These traces include the construction and adaptations of a building: the trees and bushes planted in a park; the graffiti tags on a wall; the tattered posters of a political party or nightclub; even the aromas emanating from a restaurant. Traces can be material (buildings, signs, works of art, graffiti) or non-material (events, performances or even emotions). A trace can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt. Although architects tend to conflate space and place, this book recognises place as constituted by countless overlapping, intersecting and interacting traces: they are the remnants and residues of cultural life which find durability in their materiality and immateriality. The nature of mediated space is emphasised as one that is captured without – and sometimes even cleansed of – these traces. We do not experience a mediated space, such as a television news studio, in the same way that we experience a mediated place, such as our favourite park, digitally enhanced by a smartphone that allows us to hunt for Pokémon in the bushes. Places are constantly composed and recomposed by human activity. These meaningful lived experiences are, by their very definition, always unfinished. 22 If spaces are the abstracted coordinates where place is made, then mediated space is where a media construction is co-produced, one that is quite distinct from the places which might have provided its foundations. Throughout, this book makes reference to the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s writing is, at times, wilfully opaque or elusive, but it is valuable for this study as it invites the reader to consider how to reveal power structures within which space is created. 23 Part 1 encounters Lefebvre’s distinction between absolute space and abstract space. Later, Part 2 considers Lefebvre’s spatial triad of representations of space, spaces of representation and spatial practices.

THREE GENRES OF MEDIATED SPACE To speak of space is always to speak of an abstraction, one that has been constructed within a particular set of power structures. To speak of mediated space is to discuss spatial abstractions in media imagery that, try as they might, cannot disguise the structures within which they have been created and the interests invested in them. Nick Couldry notes that media power is easily reproduced because it seems natural; this book seeks to use an architectural critique to name and examine the occasions when that natural authority is snagged on the spaces and places used to create them. 24 The three parts of Mediated Space explore these concepts through three different forms of screen-based media: the mediated space of television news, the mediated space of advertising, and the mediated space of entertainment. Part 1 considers the mediated space of television news, and the spaces designed, built or rendered for the broadcast of current affairs, through which television news producers demonstrate their sites of journalistic production in pursuit of consumer trust. When the threshold of the ABC7 studio in Chicago was broken by a car, the news programme’s director was quickly able to provide an overview of the unfolding incident from a camera mounted on another building

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further down the street. Remotely controlled from the production suite, this camera normally provided bumper footage around commercial breaks. Viewers of the programme were not only in the studio looking out, they were also in the city looking in. This camera demonstrated the location of the studio, passively reminding viewers of the urban centrality of the ABC7 operation, and the implied authority of the channel. ‘Look’, it implies, ‘we are right here in the Loop, at the centre of everything happening downtown.’ Chapter 1 follows beams of data as they converge on Europe’s largest newsroom in the recently expanded home of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) in the heart of London. The chapter examines New Broadcasting House as a spatial media construction designed to assert and reproduce the authority of the BBC. Completed at a cost of more than £1bn, New Broadcasting House is an exceptional building that sits at the opposite end of the spectrum of television journalism to a small Canadian local television station. Chapter 2 crosses the Atlantic to explore how technology and time zones have been exploited to help a local Canadian newscast punch above its weight. How are the acknowledged spatial codes of television news production used to the same ends, and how can even modest concrete spaces be designed to communicate the values of journalistic integrity and geographical proximity? Chapter 3 considers networked spaces spanning from Washington, DC, to Kuala Lumpur via London and Doha. It examines how one of the fastest growing 24-hour television news networks, Al Jazeera English, has developed a range of interior spaces from the traditional windowless television studio to authoritative skyscraper lookouts. Part 2 explores the mediated space of automotive consumerism through advertising for cars and associated automotive products. Chapter 4 uses one of the most viewed television commercials in history to explore how a representation of a particular city can expose the complex relationship of a private corporation and the city of its origin, and of capitalist structures to urban environments. Art deco skyscrapers and traces of industrial decline vie for attention as a complex patriotic narrative of resilience through adversity is aligned to the history of the big three US auto makers. Challenging a popular image of a city in ruins, the chapter introduces the heterogeneity of a specific city ‘that’s been to hell and back’. At stake are the tensions between urban centre and suburban satellites, between blue- and whitecollar jobs, and between the African-American and Caucasian history of the city. In Chapter 5, the geographic features that define Cape Town – from Table Mountain to the pristine blue of the South Atlantic Ocean – are cropped out of shot, and the homogeneity of a sunny postcolonial city is exploited to provide an urban landscape that is made familiar to consumers in the northern hemisphere. What does this mean for the evolving relationship between former colonial centres and postcolonial margins? Is it changing at all, or is it in fact taking on a new form? Chapter 6 drives through a de-localised landscape: a complex of urban and rural street scenes that has been photographically captured and edited to be completely free of any geographical, cultural or social identifiers, and even recomposed to imagine the ideal consumerist ‘autopia’. Finally, Part 3 draws together the lessons learned in the Parts 1 and 2 to consider the mediated space of prime-time broadcast entertainment, from the long-running British ‘reality’ game show The Apprentice to the Summer Olympics of London 2012. Chapter 7 takes a critical view of London’s architecture as it is cut, folded and re-presented in the British edition of the global television franchise

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The Apprentice. As Alan Sugar’s jobseekers are whittled down in both number and dignity, the viewer follows their journey from luxury apartment to cool boardroom, and then to dejected suburban industrial estate. What does the presentation and editing of these discrete spaces mean for our understanding of the mediated cityscape? Chapter 8 climbs high above the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park in East London to consider how the sporting venues of the 2012 Olympics were presented to a global audience of television viewers. Literally standing on the weakened shoulders of a working-class community displaced from the social housing that once defined these boroughs, the chapter considers not only the mediated space of the biggest sporting event in the world, but also what it reveals about the changing role of architecture in the global city.

1

ABC7. (2007a) ‘Driver Crashes into WLSCH. 7 Studio during News Broadcast’. Chicago Tribune, 24 December. http:// articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-12-24/ news/0712240022_1_newscast-driver-police; Anon. (2007b) ‘Minivan Crashes into ABC7 Studio during News’. ABC7 Eyewitness News [Online], 24 December. http://abc7chicago. com/archive/5852858/

2

A video of the broadcast is available at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZqng1s2v9E

3

ABC7. (2007b) ‘Driver Faces Felony in Studio Crash’. ABC7 Eyewitness News [Online], 24 December. http://abc7chicago.com/ archive/5853137/

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The plural noun media first appears in the first half of the twentieth century as a catch-all to describe newspapers, radio and television. It shares a stem with the verb to mediate, but the earliest instances of the noun and the verb in the English language have nuanced differences. To mediate first appears in the English language in the mid-sixteenth century, derived from the Latin mediare, ‘to halve’, ‘to be in the middle’. Media is instead derived from the Latin adjective medium, which emphasises the agency that comes from being in that intermediate state.

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Martin, R. (2015) Mediators: Aesthetics, Politics, and the City. (eBook) Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, p. 26.

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McCarthy, A. (2001) Ambient Television. London: Duke University Press; McQuire, S. (2008) The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space. London: Sage; McQuire, S., Martin, M. & Niederer, S. (eds) (2009) Urban Screens Reader (Vol. 5). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures; McQuire, S. (2010) ‘Rethinking Media Events: Large Screens, Public Space Broadcasting and Beyond’. New Media & Society 12(4), pp. 567–582.

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Koeck, R. (2013) Cine-scapes: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities. Abingdon: Routledge; Koeck, R. & Roberts, L. (eds) (2010) The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections. London: Palgrave Macmillan; Lamster, M. (ed.) (2000) Architecture and

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Film. New York: Princeton Architectural Press; Shonfield, K. (2003) Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City. Abingdon: Routledge. 8

Grosz, E. (2001) Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

9

Eco, U. (1976) A Theory of Semiotics. London: Macmillan, p. 7.

10 de Saussure, F. (2013) Course in General Linguistics. London: Bloomsbury. 11 Barthes, R. (2007) S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang. 12 McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium is the Massage. London: Penguin. 13 Lefebvre, H. (1991) [1974] The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. 14 Crawford, S. (2014) ‘Coronation Street? More Like Transformation Street after £10million New Set is Built’. Daily Express [Online], 3 March. www.express.co.uk/life-style/ life/462739/Coronation-Street-More-likeTransformation-Street-after-10million-new-setis-built 15 Fiske, J. (1982) Introduction to Communciation Studies. London: Routledge, p. 78; Chandler, D. (2002) Semiotics: The Basics. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 170. See also the original (1994) hypertext version of the book at http://visualmemory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/ 16 Moore, G. (1965) ‘Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits’. Electronics, 19 April. Moore later revised this to doubling every two years; there have been recent signs that – in computer chips, at least – this rate of progress is unsustainable. See Simonite, T. (2016) ‘Intel Puts the Brakes on Moore’s Law’. MIT Technology Review [Online], 23 March. www.technologyreview. com/s/601102/intel-puts-the-brakes-onmoores-law/ 17 Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ in N. Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, p. 350.

18 Dezeen (2013) ‘Architecture Is Not About Form – Peter Zumthor’. Dezeen [Online], 6 February. www.dezeen.com/2013/02/06/peter-zumthorat-the-royal-gold-medal-lecture-2013/ 19 Descartes, R. & Clarke, D. M. (2003 [1637]) Discourse on Method and Related Writings. London: Penguin Books. 20 Lippard, L. (1997) The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentred Society. New York: The New Press. 21 Anderson, J. (2010) Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces. Abingdon: Routledge. 22 Lefebvre, op cit. 23 Merrifield, A. (2006) Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 109. 24 Couldry, N. (2000) The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age. London: Routledge, p. 61.

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D E T A I D E F M T O E S TH ACE DCA SP OA R B WS E N

ONE W1A

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The BBC’s constitution as a licence-fee-supported state broadcaster obliges the corporation to attempt to make its journalistic operations as transparent, and therefore spatially visible, as possible.

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n 2013, the newsgathering and broadcast operations of the BBC completed their move from various sites around London to the refurbished and expanded New Broadcasting House in London’s Portland Place. For the first time in the history of the BBC, news broadcasting for television, radio and online was brought under one roof. This chapter explores the abstract spatial constructions of this building, one that was designed around Europe’s largest newsroom to align journalistic transparency with a carefully controlled public visibility. Nick Couldry writes that ‘media power is reproduced through the spatial order of the media frame, “common-sense” patterns of thought and language about the media, barely articulated assumptions about what is likely to be true or not, who is of value and who is not’. 1 This chapter examines Broadcasting House as a spatial media construction that reproduces the media power of the BBC. It is a construction that preserves and promotes the authority of the corporation in an increasingly competitive information economy, one in which threats are posed both by commercial rivals and political parties hostile to the BBC’s constitution and model of funding. 2 In 1859, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx distinguished between concrete labour (that which directly generates a use value) and abstract labour (that which indirectly produces an exchange value). Henri Lefebvre developed a parallel distinction between absolute space and abstract space 115 years later, one that has proved especially beguiling to architects. 3 Outside his native France, Lefebvre’s influence in architectural theory was limited until Donald Nicholson-Smith’s 1991 translation of The Production of Space. 4 The continuing desire to interpret Lefebvre’s thinking is evidenced by Nathaniel Coleman’s Lefebvre for Architects (2015), suggesting that many who write and think about the architectural profession continue to experience significant unease with the role of architectural production in an increasingly capitalist society, more than 40 years after Lefebvre’s book first appeared in French. 5 In Lefebvre’s indistinct terms, it was in ‘the historical town of the West … that productive activity (labour) became no longer one with the process of reproduction which perpetuated social life; but, in becoming independent of that process, labour fell prey to abstraction, whence abstract social labour – and abstract space’. 6 Space is abstracted from the quotidian routines of absolute – or directly lived – space. This chapter looks at how the on-screen presentation of New Broadcasting House can be seen to situate the corporation in both the absolute space of a landmark building and a capital city, and the abstract space of the information economy.

THE URBAN INTERIOR New Broadcasting House is by no means the first building that seeks to ground television broadcasting in the British capital. The ITN Headquarters on Gray’s Inn Road, built for Independent Television News in 1990, was Foster and Partners’ first building in London. ITN provides newscasts and current affairs programming for the three principal commercial television channels in the UK. 7 ITN started broadcasting news bulletins for ITV from a fully glazed studio adjacent to the building’s atrium in 1991. A trailer aired at the time promised a newscast ‘direct from the newsroom of ITN, news as it happens’. This promise was accompanied by a moving camera shot that followed the journalist John Suchet walking from his desk to the studio, freely crossing the boundary from the site of journalistic production of knowledge

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Exterior of ITN Headquarters, Gray’s Inn Road, London

to the studio that disseminated it to the nation. 8 For the next eight years, national newscasts on ITV began with the ITN logo superimposed on an upward-looking view of the atrium, before panning down to acknowledge the relationship between the atrium and the studio, and between the studio and the newsroom beyond it. There was no apparent division between the television studio and the newsroom behind. Journalists and other employees of ITN could be seen at work throughout the broadcast. In this sequence, repeated before every programme, both the scale of the ITN operation and the proximity of the anchor to the production of journalistic knowledge was deliberately constructed for the viewer. The viewer is reminded throughout the broadcast of ITN’s evident journalistic capabilities and of the proximity of these capabilities to the newsreader in a modern open-plan office building. The architecture of the ITN Headquarters remained a fixture of all national news programming on ITV until 1999, when news production moved to a basement studio and ITN’s programming on Channel 3 was renamed ITV News, disassociating the news from its producers, but also from the site of production. 9 ITN has not completely relinquished the overt effort to authenticate journalistic activity through the demonstration of the ITN Headquarters’ absolute space, as occupied and activated by its journalists. More recently, the enclosed studios from which the ITV News is produced have been converted to a chroma-key green screen operation. Using increasingly sophisticated computer software

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Interior of ITN Headquarters, London

and robotically controlled camera hardware, the contemporary ITV News set is a computer-generated rendering of a studio surrounded on three sides by newsrooms and production suites with animated screens and clocks, albeit without human occupation (a new evolution of television news presentation that will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2). In the same year that ITV News chose to disassociate itself from the absolute space of its site of production and return to the black box of the television studio, 10 its main terrestrial competitor began to do the opposite. Whereas the flagship BBC News had previously occupied a traditional studio, a new set was constructed that featured a photographic background simulating a view onto the double-height BBC newsroom at the corporation’s complex at White City in West London. Such photographic representations of the newsroom, both printed and projected, were used on national news programming until the relocation of BBC News to New Broadcasting House. 11 In both instances, BBC and ITN used their sites of journalistic production as key elements in the design of the television news studio, a motif that became more explicit with the 1997 launch of the BBC’s rolling news channel, News 24, the earliest broadcasts of which came from a studio in the BBC newsroom. In each case, the architectural interior was exploited on screen to demonstrate the scale of the journalistic operations informing the newscast, and by association, the authority of the broadcaster.

THE URBAN EXTERIOR Whereas the ITN Headquarters – and to an extent the earliest iterations of the BBC News 24 studio – demonstrates how the architectural space of a building’s interior can be used to communicate to the television viewer the absolute space of journalistic production, so too can the urban exterior be used to situate the

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site of media production in a wider metropolitan context. Independent Television (later ITV) was founded in 1954, and by 1962 fourteen regional broadcasters took it to every corner of the country, as a network that shared a national schedule and portfolio of programming. As the advent of television heralded the decline in popularity of the theatre and cinema, some sites of television production displaced theatre and cinema sites of production and consumption. In Glasgow, Scottish Television acquired the Theatre Royal in 1957 for use as a studio, broadcasting live performances and variety shows in front of both cameras and audiences. The following year in Southampton, Southern Television went on air from the former Plaza Cinema in Northam. 12 Many of these regional broadcasters grew to become significant network producers in their own right, with prime-time programming emerging from a variety of regional centres. 13 By the start of the twenty-first century, this network of independent broadcasters had all but been subsumed into a single company in England and Wales. 14 Following the gradual acquisitions of regional ITV affiliates, the merger of Granada and Carlton in 2004 saw the de facto headquarters of a unified ITV move to Kent House, a 24-storey tower and studio complex on London’s South Bank built for London Weekend Television in 1972. Home to many large ‘black box’ television studios, the building acquired a new and visible role in on-screen presentation with the launch of a new breakfast television programme, Daybreak, in 2010. Broadcast from studios that used windows to overlook the River Thames, the programme was ridiculed not least for the panoramic view of London’s skyline behind the presenters’ couch, which was in darkness for much of the programme for much of the year. 15 London only enjoys about 1,500 hours of sunlight a year. When Daybreak was replaced by Good Morning Britain in 2014, a new set was constructed around a pseudo-window that addressed the limited aesthetic appeal of London – either at six o’clock on a winter’s morning or nine o’clock on an overcast autumn day. It did this by replacing a view of the absolute urban space of the city with a digitally enhanced abstraction of it. Good Morning Britain may be produced by people living and working in

Kent House, London, as seen in the title sequence of ITV’s Good Morning Britain

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London, but their broadcast depicts a London that pretends to be brighter and sunnier than it usually is. Those familiar with the city will spot the snags. Good Morning Britain introduces its alternative, bright and sunny London in its title sequence. A voiceover introduces the programme ‘live from ITV Studios in London’, with aerial footage filmed from above the River Thames, locating the tower of Kent House in the city. Filmed from a drone, this footage approaches and frames the 24-storey tower of Kent House against a bright blue sky and a warm orange sunrise. That ‘sunrise’, as the relative position of the Houses of Parliament and London Eye attest, is in the west. The site of production has been abstracted from the absolute space of the city, but in a manner that seeks to articulate and emphasise the centrality of the television studio to the centre of the capital city. 16

THE MEDIATED SPACE OF TELEVISION NEWS The original wing of Broadcasting House, designed by George Val Myer, was constructed between 1928 and 1932, with interiors by Raymond McGrath, Serge Chermayeff and Wells Coates. With the rationalisation of the BBC’s property

Exterior of BBC Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London

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portfolio at the turn of the twenty-first century (and the realisation of the greatly increased West London land values on which much of that portfolio rested), Broadcasting House emerged as a prime candidate for the unification of the longdivided radio and television arms of the ‘Beeb’. The refurbishment and expansion of Broadcasting House was completed in two phases, starting in 2003 and finishing in 2011. The late Richard MacCormac of MacCormac Jamieson Prichard (MJP) designed phase one – the refurbishment of New Broadcasting House and the construction of a new wing to the east, later named the John Peel Wing. Phase two involved the demolition of post-war extensions to the north of Broadcasting House, and the creation of a larger wing linking Broadcasting House and the John Peel Wing, forming a concave pedestrian piazza with continuous ground-level access from Langham Place through to Hallam Street beyond. The second phase was executed with alterations by the architects Sheppard Robson and interior designers HOK for Bovis Lend Lease (about which, more in Chapter 2). In the examples of the ITN and ITV headquarters, both the architectural interior and urban exterior have been exploited to enhance the image of television broadcasting. In the refurbishment and expansion of New Broadcasting House, we discover how interior and exterior can be demonstrated in television broadcasts to convey a sense of authority. What is significant about New Broadcasting House is that the absolute space of the building’s exterior and interior are used in the construction of a distinct abstract space. Whereas the first part of this chapter has considered the ways in which television producers have used the architectural interior and the urban exterior of London to establish and preserve their cultural and journalistic capital, the chapter turns now to the abstract space of New Broadcasting House. Considering it as a deliberate spatial media construction, its function can be explored more deeply through the conceptual ‘lenses’ of lines of sight and fields of vision.

LINES OF SIGHT Flashes of red appear throughout Broadcasting House, both in the absolute space of the building itself and the abstract space of its representations. The shade’s association with the BBC originates in the 1999 re-branding of the corporation, with a colour palette anchored by rich shades of claret red and vibrant orange. HOK, which was appointed to design the interiors of New Broadcasting House, referred to this palette to ensure that any part of the building caught on camera complemented the on-screen branding of the corporation. 17 This comprehensive exercise in brand maintenance even found its way into the BBC Two sitcom W1A, in which various characters employed by the corporation are identifiable by one piece of uniform: the bright red lanyards that carry ID cards necessary to pass the building’s security cordon. In an undated sketch reproduced in publications describing the project prior to its completion, Broadcasting House is indicated at the northern end of an important pedestrian route from Piccadilly Circus along Regent Street and via Oxford Circus. 18 The route is shown as a thick red line against the black outlines of city blocks. 19 Broadcasting House is located in the commercial and entertainment heart of London. Following this red line from Piccadilly Circus to Broadcasting House, the northern end of Regent Street presents an unusual urban composition. All Souls Church (designed by John Nash and completed in 1824) sits in front and slightly to the east of Broadcasting House, and at an angle of approximately

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Sketch of the location of New Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London

Sketch of the internal circulation of New Broadcasting House

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45 degrees to the street. Val Myer’s prow of Broadcasting House is offset slightly to the left. The two buildings, built around a century apart, provide a dual landmark at the end of a major urban thoroughfare. MJP architect Jeremy Estop describes designing the John Peel Wing: ‘as a small brother of the famous bull-nosed end of the 1930s building, we created a yin and yang with the courtyard space which visually holds the spire of All Souls.’ 20 The World Piazza, as the space behind All Souls and between the old and new wings of Broadcasting House would become known, serves as a pedestrian route from Langham Place to Hallam Street beyond. The piazza features a pavement artwork by the Canadian artist and architect Mark Pimlott which references the many distant towns and cities – fictitious and real – that have featured in BBC broadcasting. 21 Responding to a culture of internal competition and tribalism that emerged during the tenure of his predecessor John Birt (1992–2000), BBC Director General Greg Dyke (2000–2004) introduced a series of aims to unify the operations of ‘one BBC’ 22 – not least by reducing the duplication of newsgathering activities across television, radio and online departments. From an early stage in the design of New Broadcasting House, horizontal and vertical circulation through the building was conceived in such a way as to bring employees from different departments into frequent and close contact with one another. MJP acknowledged an explicit concern in the era of ‘one BBC’ for nurturing conviviality between employees and across departments. 23 MJP situated elevators, stairwells and kitchenettes to maximise interactions between staff. 24 In an undated interior sketch, circulation routes through the interior of New Broadcasting House are shown by more red lines. A culture of hot desking at the BBC has been lampooned both by W1A (in which employees of the BBC struggle to find desks, or meetings taking place in a meeting room named after Frankie Howerd) and by the BBC broadcaster Jeremy Paxman, who described New Broadcasting House’s clients as ‘buffoons’. 25 It is apposite to consider one final and important instance of notable red lines of sight in the mediated image of New Broadcasting House. Every hour, on its domestic and international news channels, BBC News programmes begin with prerecorded countdowns. Journalists and camera crews are shown on location around the world, transmitting information back to Broadcasting House, their invisible feeds of data flying over recognisable global cities before converging above the streets of the British capital. Streams of data flow above the streets surrounding Buckingham Palace and the Swiss Re Building. So, if Lefebvre’s abstract space is meaningless outside of absolute space, outside of some physicality, 26 then these visualisations of the digital flows of information can be interpreted as attempts to make tangible (in a televisual sense) the transmission and reception of news, while situating the BBC in London, and London at the hub of the global news economy.

FIELDS OF VISION Lines of sight, routes of circulation and streams of information might be found in any large contemporary building, but what is significant about New Broadcasting House is the way in which various fields of vision are manipulated by the corporation to reinforce the journalistic authority and power of the BBC. The majority of BBC news broadcasts originate in Studio E, located on the lower ground floor. Having panned across the City of London in hourly countdowns, the gaze of BBC television viewers ‘enters’ New Broadcasting House via a remote-control ‘trundle’ camera that pans over the so-called ‘global newsroom’, the largest such newsroom in Europe and the

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spatial anchor of all BBC News television broadcasts. 27 As discussed, the sequence of views that precedes newscasts on the BBC locates Broadcasting House in Central London before revealing its interior. Having located New Broadcasting House at the hub of multiple streams of data converging on Central London, the penultimate view presented before the start of a newscast is captured from ground level, panning over the lower ground newsroom and zooming in on Studio E. 28 Reminiscent of the studios in the Foster-designed ITN Headquarters, this wide view of the newsroom provides a living backdrop to television newscasts, animated by the activities of BBC journalists preparing material for television, radio and online. The newsroom is located behind Studio E in both absolute and abstract space, as a passive reminder to viewers of the journalistic activity that is both physically and metaphorically ‘behind’ the programme they are watching. The field of vision of Studio E is not a passive one, but an activating gaze that does more than link to activities of newsgathering and delivery. In March 2013, a few days before the last newscasts from BBC Television Centre in West London, The Guardian reported that ‘BBC journalists have been briefed on “newsroom etiquette” in preparation for their move and given maps of where they can and cannot stand in their capacious new work place, after the filming of pilots for BBC1’s news bulletins at New Broadcasting House [revealed] that a large part of the live newsroom – and its clutter – will be seen by viewers’. 29 A document leaked to the newspaper recommended walking routes through the space, as well as items of clothing and particular activities that should be avoided so as not to disrupt live broadcasts. The difficulties with which human occupation was found to disrupt the carefully choreographed construction of New Broadcasting House’s space of journalistic production might hint at some of the reasons that encouraged ITV News to choose the abstract space of a chroma-key studio over the absolute space of their newsroom. Certain activities in the newsroom have, however, been permitted to ‘disrupt’ the carefully controlled image of the BBC. In June 2013, the New Broadcasting House was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II. During a tour of the building, a live newscast was interrupted as both anchors turned their back on the cameras to acknowledge the head of state. 30 While this event was an act of deference by the public-service broadcaster to the head of state nominally responsible for the issuing of its Royal Charter, at other moments modest acts of wilful subversion have been permitted. On Christmas Day 2014, a group of employees was briefly glimpsed dancing with linked arms around a Christmas tree in the newsroom. 31 These glimpses of the disruption of the spatial media construction of New Broadcasting House can be seen as opportunities taken by the BBC to demonstrate its authenticity and control of its implicit authority. The activating gaze of the television camera’s field of vision on the inhabitation of New Broadcasting House is not limited to the global newsroom. Drawings and models published by MJP prior to their dismissal from the project describe a public space formed by the concave extension as ‘lined by cafés and shops, which can be used as a performance space’. 32 This piazza finds itself within the fields of vision controlled by the BBC on a regular basis. In January 2014, the prime-time magazine show The One Show moved from television studios in BBC White City to Studio V on the ground level of the World Piazza. This space, with its prominent position, had originally been conceived and designed as a retail unit, perhaps for the retail arm of the corporation to sell memorabilia and physical box sets of BBC programmes.

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The World Piazza, between the old and new wings of Broadcasting House, with The One Show studio on the right, London

The World Piazza configured for a live outdoor music performance during a broadcast of The One Show

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Relocating to the repurposed Studio V enabled The One Show to use the World Piazza as an additional location for special events and performances. A producer likened the move to the introduction of portable pitch-side cameras to football coverage, writing that ‘filming outside looking in gives the show an identity as a landmark. And being inside shooting out, the public passing through the back of shot … or stopping by to witness the event live, creates an atmosphere, an experience, a buzz’. 33 This producer’s comment demonstrates how the television camera’s field of vision is an activating one that generates just as much as it observes, and that conflates the abstract and absolute spaces of New Broadcasting House and the World Piazza. The principal field of vision determined by The One Show being ‘inside shooting out’ has, in turn, shaped the occupation of the World Piazza. While much has been written in recent years on the nature of public space in an increasingly privatised urban realm, the relationship between public and private interest is manifested in the World Piazza in a uniquely subtle way. As a pedestrian space, the background of The One Show is not troubled by passing traffic, but nor is it lined with the cafés and shops predicted by the architects – or at least not as they’d imagined. As a licence-fee-supported public-service broadcaster, the BBC has placed certain obligations on the single commercial tenant on the World Piazza. Directly opposite Studio V is a branch of the café chain Caffè Nero. Caught in the field of vision of Studio V’s cameras, and for fear of passive advertising on the BBC, this is the only branch of the familiar coffee-house chain that is externally anonymous, without signage and with only unbranded pavement dividers dyed in the corporate blue of the chain. In The Place of Media Power, Nick Couldry describes the media’s symbolic power in terms of five hidden dimensions: framing, ordering, naming, spacing and imagining. 34 Of these hidden dimensions, two in particular present useful insights to the spatial media construction of New Broadcasting House: ordering and spacing. For Couldry, ordering ‘implies a difference in kind between worlds: between the “world” of the media (everything involved in it: stories, studios, work practices) and the “world” of ‘ordinary life.’ The “media world” is “larger than life” … the “ordinary world” is automatically mundane’. 35 The production of this binary division between the media world of New Broadcasting House and the ordinary world outside can be found inscribed not only in the spatial organisation of the building, but also in the way in which the public is permitted to view the building’s spaces of production. In Media Houses: Architecture, Media, and the Production of Centrality, Staffan Ericson describes how (before the refurbishment of New Broadcasting House) the former reception in Broadcasting House put up a barrier to entry to all but the accredited. Then, as now, choreographed public tours of the building enabled BBC radio listeners to witness the sites of production of their favourite programmes – even to participate in a mock radio drama. 36 Since the refurbishment of Broadcasting House and the construction of New Broadcasting House, these tours commence in a ground-level café that overlooks the global newsroom. We have seen how the top-of-the-hour panning view of the newsroom locates the site of journalistic production within New Broadcasting House. This field of vision originates from an automated camera that moves along a track parallel to the windows of this café. A selection of pre-programmed tracks covering movement, angle and zoom – rather than the human hand of a camera operator – ensures a consistent introduction to the space. Participants on organised tours begin their

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visit and orientate themselves with a panorama – framed by soundproof windows and the occasional passage of that automated camera. The view is recognisable to any visitor familiar with BBC News broadcasts. The ‘binary division’ between the ‘media world’ and ‘ordinary world’ is constructed by this framing at the start of the tour. It familiarises the visitor with the constructed media world that they know and emphasises the division between it and their own world. Beyond this window, there is no further public access, with security guards and revolving doors activated by smart cards protecting the inner sanctum of the building. 37 The difficulty one encounters in trying to enter New Broadcasting House – and the matter of those distinctive red lanyards – is used as a satirical plot point at the start of the first and second seasons of W1A. Referring to complaints of inflated managerial salaries at the BBC, Hugh Bonneville plays the newly appointed Head of Values Ian Fletcher, who is introduced to the viewer as he struggles to enter the building on his first day at work. He is eventually let into the building by intern Will Humphries (played by Hugh Skinner). Humphries is, in turn, denied access to the building at the start of the second season of W1A having been found to have worked at the corporation for almost a year without pay, alluding to the popular outcry over the sons and daughters of well-connected individuals securing privileged access to top jobs through unpaid internships. Both newcomers to the closed world of the BBC, these two characters represent two attempts to establish a foothold in the corporation, one that they can plainly see through the glass doors but which they both struggle to fit into. Their privileged access to this world lasts only as long as their red lanyards can open the door. Another of Couldry’s hidden dimensions – spacing – is articulated in the separation between the private (media) and public (ordinary) realms of New Broadcasting House. While a visitor to the building may start a guided tour by looking through the window into the newsroom, only the news broadcast fully allows them to enter that space. Couldry writes that, ‘in fact, this separation [of the spaces of media production and media reception] itself is normally disguised. A basic feature of broadcasting is that it gives us “de-spatialised” access to other places. The media frame’s actual spatial organisation, by contrast – its rigid separation of producers from consumers – normally goes unremarked’. 38 In spite of the increased visibility of the newsroom in the new building, the design of New Broadcasting House’s glazed public spaces serves to emphasise the outsider’s physical separation from the spaces of media production. This problem becomes more apparent, because as the production of media changes, so too do the sites of media production, and as consumers become closer to the production of media, they become more aware of its mechanisms of production. New technologies are allowing those once limited to consuming media to become producers; whether blogging on WordPress, vlogging on YouTube or broadcasting on Periscope. These hybrid consumer-producers are increasingly invited to supply content to traditional media producers, such as the BBC, through eye-witness footage captured on smartphones or digital cameras. Just as Couldry reminds us that there is no division between a ‘media world’ and the ‘ordinary world’, producers and consumers occupy a single social world of which the binary division is a product. 39 In all its architectural attempts to make visible the spaces of production, the concrete spaces of New Broadcasting House occasionally snag our experiences of the absolute and abstract spaces of production.

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The refurbishment and expansion of Broadcasting House represented an unprecedented opportunity for a dominant state media broadcaster to rationalise its sites of production. Unlike the privately owned ITN or ITV, the BBC’s constitution as a licence-fee-supported state broadcaster obliges the corporation to attempt to make its journalistic operations as transparent, and therefore spatially visible, as possible. New Broadcasting House also represented an opportunity to cement the authority of the corporation in a competitive media landscape, one in which the inherited authority of the BBC has come under increasing political threat. By inscribing New Broadcasting House in both the absolute space of London and the abstract space of the information economy, and by reimagining the established televisual codes of architectural lines of sight and televisual fields of vision, the presentation of New Broadcasting House becomes a key component in the spatial media construction of the BBC.

1

Couldry, N. (2000) The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age. London: Routledge, p. 61.

2

Rawlinson, K. (2016) ‘Scrap BBC Charter and Keep Channel 4 Public, say Tory Peers’. The Guardian [Online], 17 February. www. theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/17/scrapbbc-charter-and-keep-channel-4-public-saytory-peers

3

Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.

4

Ibid.

5

Coleman, N. (2015) Lefebvre for Architects. Abingdon: Routledge.

6

Ibid., 49.

7

ITV, since 1955; Channel 4, since 1982; and Channel 5, from 1997 to 2005 and from 2011 to date.

8

TV Ark. (n.d.b) ‘Early Evening News Promo from 1991’. TV Ark [Online] www2.tv-ark.org. uk/news/itvnews/other.html

9

The atrium continues to serve as a backdrop to this day on Channel 4 News, although the relationship is limited to one way only, providing a view of the atrium from the studio but not vice versa.

10 TV Ark. (n.d.a) ‘BBC News Bulletins 1999’. TV Ark [Online] www2.tv-ark.org.uk/news/ bbcnews/news_1999.html 11 The rolling news channel BBC News 24 launched in 1997 with a newsroom set, one which located the news anchors in front of the workspaces of the journalists who provided content for the programming. The flagship newscasts of the main BBC One channel remained in isolated studios until their move to New Broadcasting House. 12 Southern Television eventually outgrew the old cinema and built a brand-new studio complex on an adjacent site, on land reclaimed from the River Itchen. It was the home of Southern’s successors TVS from 1981 and Meridian

Television from 1992, until the latter downsized to a suburban office park in 2004. 13 For more than a decade from 1972 to 1983, the ITV game show Sale of the Century was produced by Anglia Television and introduced to audiences of up to 20 million with the improbable catchphrase ‘and now, from Norwich, it’s the quiz of the week’. 14 The emergence of a singular channel three, centred on London, was previewed in the evolution of breakfast television. This came about as an oddity of ITV’s regional franchising model, introduced in 1983 and awarded separately without a delimited regional boundary. TV-am introduced the concept of breakfast television to the UK. The bold identity of this new company was reflected in no small part by its headquarters, designed by Sir Terry Farrell and located in Camden, North London. The parapet of the studio complex, facing Regent’s Canal, was decorated at intervals by a dozen large egg cups. 15 Dunbar, P. (2010) ‘Daybroke: Why Viewers Are Deserting ITV’s Much-hyped New Breakfast Show Programme’. Daily Mail [Online], 10 October. www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ article-1319200/Daybrake-flop-Why-viewersdeserting-ITVs-new-breakfast-show.html 16 In February 2017, ITV announced plans to sell Kent House and the London studios for redevelopment. It was indicated that ITV’s network headquarters would return to the site, but that dedicated studio space would no longer be part of the complex. 17 Anon. (2013) ‘BBC New Broadcasting House/ HOK’. ArchDaily [Online], 25 June. www. archdaily.com/391150/bbc-new-broadcastinghouse/ 18 MacCormac, R. (2010) Building Ideas: MJP Architects: Essays and Speculations. London: Right Angle Publishing, p. 107. 19 This sketch could also be read to imply that the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA),

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two blocks north of Broadcasting House at 66 Portland Place, is firmly in the ‘residential/ historic’ district of Central London. 20 Jeremy Estop, interview by author, digital recording. London, 4 June 2015. 21 Anon. (2015) ‘BBC Broadcasting House – What to See Outside’. BBC [Online], www.bbc. co.uk/broadcastinghouse/visitorinformation/ whattoseeoutside.html 22 Robins, J. (2000) ‘Dyke Unveils His Vision of “Inspired” One BBC’. The Independent [Online], 4 April. www.independent.co.uk/ news/media/dyke-unveils-his-vision-ofinspired-one-bbc-282035.html 23 This has occasionally been evidenced, during the writing of this chapter, by passing references by BBC Radio 1 DJs to their colleagues at Radio 4, who frequently share elevators. 24 Estop, op. cit. 25 Paxman, J. (2014) ‘If I Were King for a Day, I Would Ban Open-plan Offices’. The Guardian [Online], 12 September. www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2014/sep/12/jeremy-paxmanking-for-a-day-ban-open-plan-offices 26 Merrifield, A. (2006) Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, p. 132. 27 Seatter, R. (2014) Welcome to Broadcasting House. London: BBC, p. 24. 28 Secondary studios with simulated backdrops onto the newsroom are used when Studio E is offline or in use for other programming. 29 Conlan, T. (2013) ‘BBC Races to Iron Out Glitches as New Newsroom Reveals All’. The Guardian [Online], 15 March. www. theguardian.com/media/2013/mar/15/bbcnewsroom-etiquette-broadcasting-house 30 BBC News. (2013) ‘Queen Officially Opens BBC’s New Broadcasting House Building’. BBC News [Online], 7 June. www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-22804844 31 Burrows, T. (2014) ‘Rocking Around the Christmas Beeb! Red-faced Staff Caught on Camera Dancing Round Tree in the Middle of Newsroom during Live Report (and Is That a Staff Member in a Bear Costume?)’. Daily Mail [Online], 26 December. www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-2887202/Rocking-ChristmasBeeb-Red-faced-staff-caught-cameradancing-round-tree-middle-newsroom-livereport.html 32 MacCormac, p. 107. 33 Newman, B. (2014) ‘The (West) One Show’. About the BBC Blog [Online], 16 January. www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/ e0fd579c-437a-37a2-bd91-1a1781c232c9 34 Couldry, p. 41. 35 Ibid., p. 47.

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36 Ericson, S. (2010) ‘The Interior of the Ubiquitous: Broadcasting House, London’ in S. Ericson and K. Riegert (eds), Media Houses: Architecture, Media, and the Production of Centrality. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 19–58. 37 A similar opportunity for a carefully choreographed tour is offered in Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s (OMA) headquarters for China Central Television (2002–2012). See Spencer, D. (2016) The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture became an Instrument of Control and Compliance. London: Bloomsbury. 38 Couldry, pp. 54–55. 39 Ibid., p. 41.

TWO THE GLOBAL LOCAL

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At what point – especially in the legal terms of television broadcast licences – does a local newscast cease to be local?

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n the evening of Monday 3 March 2008, television viewers in the Canadian city of Montreal sat down to a choice of six local newscasts on six channels: three in French and three in English. On CKMI-TV, part of the Global Television network, the local news began as a dark teal map of Canada zoomed into the province of Quebec, and a red ribbon wove across the screen. As the titles dispersed, a studio camera moved through a brightly lit studio towards Global Quebec’s senior anchor, Jamie Orchard. Orchard was behind a redesigned desk, formed by a pair of intersecting segments, in a redesigned studio. The same palette of teal, blue and steel grey of the title sequence was used on a series of overlapping panels, some transparent, behind the anchor. In the distance, the recognisable Montreal skyline was visible through a frosted glass window. As Orchard delivered the first item, the view changed to a closer shot, and over her shoulder through another frosted glass panel engraved with a map of Canada, multiple monitors in the production gallery flickered. The Evening News had a new look, one that placed Orchard in the foreground of a sleek, modern news studio: one that with each segment reminded the viewer of the proximity of the bustling control room and the journalistic expertise behind the stories. In much the same way as BBC Broadcasting House would soon demonstrate its journalistic authority to viewers through the careful creation of a mediated space of journalistic production, this local newscast was employing well-worn codes of television production to demonstrate expertise. And yet, behind these same codes, things were very different. Just five months earlier, Global Television had announced more than 200 redundancies from a dozen local newsrooms, including that of CKMI-TV in Montreal. Whereas local news had previously been produced in each market, by taking advantage of high-speed data networks, automated camera tracks and the multiple time zones of Canada, successive 5 p.m. local newscasts in each time zone across the country could now be produced by remote control from

CKMI-TV (Global Montreal) chroma-key television news studio, Montreal

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thousands of kilometres away. As part of this process, tangible studio sets were replaced with chroma-key green screen environments in which virtual reality spaces could be digitally inserted. In the first generation of virtual environments created for these local newscasts, the space behind the newsreader was designed to appear as a bustling newsroom and control suite. While Global was not the first television network to take advantage of either virtual reality studios or remote-control production of a newscast, it was among the first to take advantage of the multiple time zones of a large country to reduce the duplication of roles. These innovations were particularly prescient in Montreal, a multilingual city in which the least watched of three local newscasts in English was trailing the market leader. 1 Yet it also had significant implications for the broadcast of national news. The dispersed population of Canada (35 million spread across the world’s second largest country by area) creates many problems for traditional network television. As Global’s prime-time national news – Global National – targets an early evening audience across the country, the programme must be pre-recorded and time-shifted in each market. Produced in a studio in Burnaby, British Columbia (on Canada’s west coast) in the early afternoon, Global National is broadcast live at 6:30 p.m. in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (on the east coast) and 5:30 p.m. in Quebec and Ontario. Unless late breaking news necessitates a rerecording, the programme is then broadcast one hour later in each of the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones.

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION As old media gives way to new, Montreal represents a difficult context for Englishlanguage media producers, especially those that rely on the sale of commercial advertising to support their activities. 2 Despite being the fourth bestselling

Dominion Building (George Allen Ross and Robert Henry Macdonald, 1930), Montreal

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newspaper in all of Canada, the Montreal newspaper La Presse (founded 1884) was the first daily newspaper in the world to scrap its weekday print edition in 2016 (and its weekend edition a year later). Its editor reported that since the launch of the newspaper’s digital apps, subscriber numbers had increased and readers were engaging with both editorial and advertising content for longer. 3 The design of a custom suite of apps for different mobile platforms was engaging a larger audience, and also providing advertisers with more detailed information about which readers were engaging with their advertisements, and for how long. Montreal’s mainstream television outlets have also had to adapt. With television channels divided according to their audience’s language, English-language broadcasters have struggled to remain economically viable in the face of a small anglophone audience and limited advertising revenue. In 2009, Global Montreal constructed its new studio in office space on the seventh floor of the Dominion Square Building in downtown Montreal. Completed in 1930 and designed by Montreal architects George Allen Ross (1879–1946) and Robert Henry Macdonald (1875–1942), 4 the building is known informally as the Gazette Building after its anchor tenant, the Montreal Gazette. The limited resources of CKMI were perhaps perceptible in the presentation of the station’s local newscasts. A graphic title sequence, including a narrated summary of the headlines, gave way to a mid-shot of the anchor behind a desk, in front of a window that viewed the darkened spaces of the studio’s control suite. As the camera zoomed in, viewers retained a blurred but animated view of the production staff, and their monitors. The flickering and changing of these screens anticipated the packages that were about to be presented, providing the audience with sight of the journalistic and technical activity that informed the local news. When CKMI moved to its new studio, it was notable that the first iteration of the set continued this motif. The frosted glass panel engraved with a map of Canada gave an indistinct view of the control room, with multiple monitors flickering in the production gallery. However, this new representation was a forgery. The studio was, apart from the desk and the anchor, composed digitally. Of the 200 redundancies announced in 2007, most were production staff and half of all the redundancies were made in the eastern provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Global Quebec lost staff in Montreal and closed its bureaus in Quebec City and Sherbrooke. While 200 jobs were to be lost in Global’s local stations, 50 new jobs were created in four production suites at television stations in Toronto and the western cities of Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary. A memo circulated to staff admitted that Global Quebec and Global Maritimes were ‘underperforming financially’. 5 Media commentator Steve Faguy connected the widespread redundancies with the motives of the network to focus on its most profitable programming, namely its prime-time imports. 6 While American imports dominated prime time, Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) stipulations to local broadcasting licences obliged stations such as CKMI to produce a minimum number of hours of Canadian content and locally produced programming. 7 Although traditionally produced local newscasts are expensive, several hours of daily news remained one of the most effective ways of meeting these obligations. The new technology afforded by the virtual studio and remote production allowed the network to employ visual and spatial codes familiar to viewers, but without recourse to building a new physical set.

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THE ETHICS OF REMOTE PRODUCTION The ‘operational efficiency’ to which the Global Television press release referred meant that local evening newscasts would no longer be produced in the city where they were broadcast. Four centralised control suites would now produce 13 different local newscasts. From March 2008, the Montreal Evening News was produced from a control room more than 3,000km away in western Canada. A smaller staff of permanent reporters, complemented by freelance journalists, would research, record and file local news stories to be broadcast each evening. Those packages would be transmitted via high-speed digital connection to the control suite on the opposite side of the country, where they would be prepared for transmission as part of the local newscast. Sitting down at her new desk before the start of the Evening News, Orchard fitted the familiar in-ear headphone and began talking to her producer, not on the other side of a soundproof window, but on the other side of the continent. 8 In order for pictures recorded in the Montreal studio to be broadcast to television viewers in the same city – even the same building – as Orchard, video was transmitted across Canada, packaged into a broadcast-ready signal, and then returned to the local market for over-the-air and cable transmission. Even with the fastest ISDN lines, at the launch of the new system Orchard and her colleagues were required to accommodate a two-second time delay at the start and end of prerecorded packages. Given that the manipulation of still photographs in newspapers continues to inspire scandal, Steve Faguy asks whether it is fundamentally dishonest to show a newsroom that doesn’t exist. Similarly, is it dishonest for local weather and sports segments, traditionally delivered by separate contributors, to no longer be in the same studio, let alone city, as their colleague, the anchor? 9 Today, in most markets including Montreal, Global’s local morning news and prime-time evening news are anchored by a local newscaster, but produced remotely. From 2015, late-night and weekend local news production was moved in its entirety to the newly created ‘Multi-Market Content Unit’ at Global’s studios in Toronto, Ontario. 10 With the exception of Global’s more profitable stations in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, one anchor in one studio in one city is now the face of local news in half a dozen different parts of Canada. Each time, the virtual studio allows producers to digitally insert the skyline of the appropriate city. There are still occasional slip-ups. On one occasion a meteorologist accidentally pointed to the province of Manitoba and referred to it as southern Ontario. On another, a newsreader received criticism from his anglophone viewers in the prairies for pronouncing the name of the city of Portage la Prairie ‘the French way’. 11 Defending the consolidation of local late news production in Toronto in 2015, Global’s Senior Vice President of News Troy Reeb explained that ‘It’s really to respond to the change in both the viewing habits of Canadians, the way people consume and the way we are actually able to pay for our news content’. 12 But at what point – especially in the legal terms of television broadcast licences – does a local newscast cease to be local? And what role does the on-screen presentation of a newscast have to play, especially if it includes a virtual reality set that appears to locate the production both in a particular city and in the context of media producers?

ARCHITECTURE AND AUTHORITY Through the frame of 24-hour news, the daily cycle of the news broadcaster’s bulletins has been replaced by an hour-by-hour, even minute-by-minute, programme

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of immediate news and reaction. Allan Bell pinpoints the Cable News Network’s (CNN) reporting of the 1991 Gulf War as a prototype for rolling news television coverage that was offered in as close to real time as possible. 13 With the advent of CNN in 1980 (which is discussed further in Chapter 3), the instantaneity of current affairs broadcasting reshaped consumer expectations of television news and prompted rolling news broadcasters to follow suit. With the shift from celluloid film to digital video, the economics and logistics of television production have changed irreversibly, and with the advent of high-speed satellite links and broadband fibre-optic data networks, the speed of media production changed for ever. 14 As Chapter 1 demonstrates, representations of concrete architectural space continue to play an important role in traditional broadcast media. There exist unwritten codes for journalistic authority which indicate that large studios and newsrooms and prominent downtown locations imply authority and power. Bryan Lawson writes about how nineteenth-century banks employed a weighty marble and stone classicism to reassure customers of their permanence and fiscal security. 15 In much the same way, twenty-first-century television news providers use visual representations of architectural scale and journalistic activity as evidence of the dependability and veracity of their reporting in an era of rapid and dramatic change. The sight of a large newsroom bustling with journalists and editors – such as that at the centre of BBC Broadcasting House and BBC Television newscasts – acts as a reassurance that whereas news broadcasters may no longer be the first to bring news to your attention, they have the resources and capacity to process and analyse it. Yet as the oldest and largest broadcaster in the world, the BBC is a somewhat unusual example. New Broadcasting House, which cost more than £1 billion to renovate and expand, 16 is an exceptional manifestation of the relationship between architecture and broadcast media. Therefore, in what ways can these conditions be perceived in spatial and architectural terms in less economically privileged contexts? If a ten-figure budget isn’t available for bricks and mortar to communicate these messages, how can new technology be exploited to support established spatial and architectural codes of authority, accuracy and integrity?

THE CODES OF TELEVISION NEWS Why is television news an appropriate avenue for critical enquiry in this critique of mediated space? Quite simply, because news (regardless of its medium) enjoys a highly privileged position in our society’s hierarchy of value systems. 17 It is one of the most familiar systems of meaning, and viewers are actively engaged in its content, values and language. Its mediated space, that which we perceive during broadcasts, is co-produced by an attentive audience fluent in the codes of news. A critical understanding of the mechanisms of spatial and architectural design in the presentation of television news reveals the vested interests and meanings of texts that are both highly visible and widely read. Given their very different social, economic and political contexts, how can the world’s largest public broadcaster be compared with a commercial network that relies heavily on imported programming and cost-effective production of mandated local programming? In spite of their different financial models, what do the BBC and the Global Television Network have in common? As this chapter has shown, the importance of the mediated space of television news is no longer predicated on the resources of the producer.

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In a generation in which YouTube, Periscope and other internet platforms allow anyone anywhere to speak to a global audience, and in which fake news can be legitimately accused of swinging an election, media producers can use the spatial design of their on-screen environments, new technology and the mechanisms of globalisation to make their content more distinctive and – importantly – authoritative. As consumers, we are culturally trained to associate authority with architectural scale and grandeur. The four codes that form these associations, all manifestations of cultural phenomena formed by long-established convention: at the beginning, we enter the studio; the studio shows us the site of production; the studio is the home of the anchor; and at the end, we leave the studio. 18

AT THE BEGINNING, WE ENTER THE STUDIO Most television news programmes bring the viewer into the studio through a combination of camera movements. In the case of Broadcasting House, we first see the building from one of a number of different aerial shots. We enter the building and view the newsroom from a camera that follows one of many pre-programmed paths, taking in the scale of the building’s atria and newsroom, before zooming in on the principal studio. A wide shot of the studio locates the newsreader in this space, and then a mid- or close shot from another camera brings the viewer even closer. This arrival, and the introduction of the scale, grandeur and importance of the bulletin or channel, can be conveyed through the gravity of the verbal introduction to the programme, either in the preceding continuity announcement or in the opening seconds of the programme. In the case of Global’s Evening News in Montreal, this was first achieved with an animated map that focused in on the city, and in subsequent evolutions of the title sequence with images of the city.

THE STUDIO SHOWS US THE SITE OF PRODUCTION Both the BBC News and Global News studios seek to demonstrate the site of journalistic production, both externally (locating the building in the city) and internally (locating the studio in proximity to the newsroom). With the first iteration of its virtual reality studio, Global News opened its local newscasts with a stylistic ribbon weaving across a map of the country and zooming in on the province and city. In its most recent iteration, the title sequence of Global News in Montreal (and in every other market) begins with a series of still photographs of recognisable local landmarks. While the framing and structure of these sequences are shared between stations, familiar architectural landmarks not only identify the location of the news, but also some of the societal preferences of the audience. Of the landmarks visible in the opening sequence of Global News in Montreal from April 2016 onwards, including Baie-D’Urfé Town Hall, the control tower at Montreal Trudeau Airport and the commuter rail station at Beaconsfield, all but one are located on the West Island, reflecting the popularity of the newscast in the more anglophone suburbs to the west of the city. In both the BBC’s New Broadcasting House and Global’s green screen studio, there are visual codes that provide the consumer with evidence of the journalistic activity informing the newscast. In New Broadcasting House, the newsroom is visible behind the anchor. In Global’s current virtual set, there are views either of an exterior skyline or a (simulated) interior control room.

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THE STUDIO IS THE HOME OF THE ANCHOR The studio is the space of the newsreader or anchor, and having entered it the viewer is introduced to this figure. Although the newsreader may, from time to time, move in a controlled manner from one position to another, they are contained within this space and, with very rare exceptions (discussed below), do not leave it. The tone and formality of the newscast can, in part, be read by the way in which the anchors use the space. One month before the 1997 general election landslide that brought the New Labour government of Tony Blair into office, Channel 5 launched in Britain. The pre-launch countdown and the first programming on the channel introduced the colourful visual palette of the channel, with five vertical strips of bright blue, orange, pink, yellow and green. These five colours appeared throughout the channel’s early continuity, including in the hybrid newsroom studio of Channel 5 News. With it, a more mobile form of news presentation appeared. Styling itself as ‘the modern alternative to old style television channels’, in a trailer for Channel 5 News, its lead anchor Kirsty Young acknowledged the decline in television news audiences among those under the age of 50. She described instead a news that ‘lives every night, that breathes, that is not simply a man in a suit sitting behind a desk with a blue background, as you can see here’. 19 Young’s colleague Scott Chisholm explained that ‘if it [news] is presented in an exciting way it’ll be accessible to more people’. Channel 5 connected the visual presentation of television news to its accessibility, suggesting that a brighter, more colourful and less spatially formal newsroom would attract new viewers. In the same trailer, Young explained how ‘the studio is the newsroom and the newsroom is the studio’. The programme elevated the importance of correspondents by emphasising that the nightly bulletin would include interviews both with guests and journalists working in the room not just behind Young, but alongside and around her.

Journalists and reporters, including anchor Kirsty Young, in Channel 5’s hybrid newsroomstudio, London, shortly after launch in 1997

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AT THE END, WE LEAVE THE STUDIO Mirroring but not necessarily repeating the opening sequence, the visual code articulating the conclusion of a segment, bulletin or programme is generally that of the field of vision zooming out or moving away from the newsreader. This action serves to communicate that while the viewer may be leaving, the newsreader is not, and that the newsroom is an environment of ongoing activity which will continue to prepare for the next bulletin, whether it is in a few moments’ or a few hours’ time. The closing shot of the anchor opens or changes to reveal the news studio, perhaps from a fixed or moving camera mounted above the usual sightline, perhaps revealing the wider context of the studio lighting and equipment. In some cases, we may even leave the building, to be shown an exterior view, such as that used by ABC7 during the automotive incursion of its studio. This code, whether it features a single zoom out or a sequence of progressively more distant views, provides a spatial sequence that is the equivalent of the viewer physically exiting a room. During our departure, newsreaders may shuffle papers, scroll a tablet screen or turn their attention to a computer screen on their desk. In all but a handful of news programmes, at the end of a newscast the viewer will withdraw while the newsreader or anchors will remain in the studio. There are rare but revealing exceptions to this rule. In Finland, for many years the newsreader marked the end of his or her broadcast by leaving the studio before the viewer. From 1999 until 2007, the studio used for Uutiset, the national news programme of public broadcaster YLE, featured a set of doors between the studio and newsroom beyond. As the broadcast ended, a moving camera would follow the anchor leaving the studio and returning to their office beyond, or perhaps even beginning their journey home. Juha Laakso, Technical Operations Manager for YLE, explains that ‘this feature clearly reflects a Finnish way of thinking. Why stay standing around when you have nothing more to say?’ 20 Meanwhile, in Germany, on the non-commercial news channel Tagesschau 24, transitions between broadcasts feature a slowly roaming wide-angle view of the slightly darkened studio which might last several minutes, during which time newsreaders might change shifts or have a sip of water. Although there are variations, sometimes reflecting social or cultural norms, these four spatial codes are common to television newscasts around the world. The spatial codes are demonstrated by the Global Evening News in Montreal. They’re demonstrated, in fact, by most television news programmes, with only minor adaptations to tie the programme in to the aesthetic palette of the network. These codes are almost universal, and they are widely understood by the consumers of television news.

THE CARTESIAN SPACE OF TELEVISION NEWS Global Television demonstrates how it might be possible to employ the four spatial codes in the delivery of its mandatory local news programming without recourse to building vast newsrooms and large studio spaces. At the heart of the computer software and hardware that produces Global’s studio is a complex digital rendering of Cartesian space, the precise matrix of three-dimensional points by which a computer can generate a three-dimensional space on camera. Chroma-key studios have been used in film and television for several decades. The most familiar demonstration of this technology in television is the weather map. The creation of a mediated space of meteorological forecasting is, by today’s

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Automated camera frame in the CKMI-TV (Global Montreal) chroma-key television news studio, Montreal

standards, relatively primitive, with a backdrop of a specific (usually blue or green) colour being digitally replaced by a computer-generated image. Weather forecasts have rarely needed more than a single static camera, which captures video of the meteorologist and digitally inserts the still or moving image generated by the computer. The significant technological innovation demonstrated by Global News in the deployment of its studios has been the combination of multiple moving cameras that share and engage with the Cartesian coordinates of the virtual studio. At Global, and at other television stations which employ this technology, the principal studio camera is mounted on a pre-programmed and motorised dolly that can move horizontally and vertically. Combined with the zoom action of this camera, these two-dimensional movements can be used to simulate movement through space, as if the camera were mounted on a crane that allowed it to be moved closer towards or further away from its subject, such as the newsreader. The familiar code of the mediated space of television news, that we begin a broadcast by entering the studio, can now be simulated in a much smaller studio than was once necessary. In this and the preceding chapter, we have witnessed two different approaches to the production of a mediated space of television news. In London, the multimillion-pound budget and multi-platform remit of a public broadcaster allowed New Broadcasting House to use deliberate urban, architectural and interior design to create a mediated space of journalistic transparency and authority. In Montreal, by virtue of the integration of the new software and camera technology, a virtual studio can be overlaid upon a green screen and navigated around by the camera. In each case, familiar codes of television news are employed, including the viewer’s arrival and departure, and the demonstration of the site of journalistic production.

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Both broadcasters have created these new mediated spaces of journalistic activity with fewer staff than was once required to put a television newscast on the air. Automated cameras in both London and Montreal now follow pre-programmed tracks, replacing the need for an individual operator to interpret the instructions of the director. The virtual studio of Global News in Montreal can be rebuilt in seconds, without the inconvenience of any actual building works. As discussed in Chapter 1, the refurbishment and expansion of BBC New Broadcasting House was completed in two phases, with the architects MacCormac Jamieson Prichard (MJP) designing the overall scheme and executing phase one, and the second phase revised and executed with alterations by Sheppard Robson and HOK for project management company Bovis Lend Lease. It is not within the scope of this book to discuss the change in architectural authorship of this landmark building, but at the time the dismissal of MJP was variously attributed to ‘creative differences’ and the architect’s refusal to agree to ‘a series of value-engineering exercises’. 21 Just as architects and interior designers have adapted to new modes of architectural procurement, notably those in which the role of the architect is subjugated to project managers, the rapidly changing technology of television news foreshadows a future in which the expertise of designing the built environment is no longer the exclusive preserve of the architect.

1

CKMI-TV came on air in 1957, licensed to Quebec City, where fewer than 2 per cent of the population speak English in the home. Entirely dependent on English advertising, CKMI struggled for much of its existence. In 1997, a controlling stake in the station was sold to Canwest Global, which by the piecemeal acquisition of smaller television stations across Canada was building the Global Television Network. Although CKMI’s revenues were poor, with this acquisition Global could claim the important ‘network’ status of a channel with coast-to-coast coverage from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Canwest moved CKMI’s production to the more populous Montreal and, in 2009, succeeded in persuading the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to move the station’s licence from Quebec City to Montreal, allowing CKMI-TV to tap into the bigger anglophone local advertising market. Canwest filed for bankruptcy in 2009, and Global is now part of Corus Entertainment.

The Montreal Gazette [Online]. www.canada. com/montrealgazette/news/business/ story.html?id=3fb56e05-d75d-4fed-8ab2cc5892e6d9ae 6

Faguy, S. (2007) ‘Global TV Outsourcing Local News Production’. Fagstein [Online].

7

Among the American imports for the 2007/08 season on Global was Back to You from the Fox Television Network, in which Patricia Heaton and Kelsey Grammer starred as two bickering anchors reunited on a local television newscast in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The show ran for one season and was not renewed.

8

Following the restructuring, Global’s control suite in Vancouver, British Columbia, produced the local newscasts for the cities of Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, Montreal, and for the Global National, anchored from a studio in Ottawa. Toronto’s control suite produced newscasts for markets in Toronto, Hamilton, Regina and Saskatoon. Edmonton produced the newscasts for Edmonton, Halifax, Saint John and Red Deer. Calgary, Alberta produced the newscasts for Calgary and Lethbridge. Faguy, S. (2009) ‘Inside Global’s CKMI-46’. Fagstein [Online].

2

In the 2011 census, more than 70 per cent of the population reported French as their mother tongue, as opposed to 14 per cent English.

9

3

Bouchart, M. (2016) ‘La Presse’s Successful Shift away from Print’. Global Editors Network [Online], 17 February. www. globaleditorsnetwork.org/press-room/ news/2016/02/la-presses-successful-shiftaway-from-print/

10 Global. (2015) ‘Global News Announces Significant Changes to How News Is Produced’. Global News [Online], 9 April. http://globalnews.ca/news/1930342/globalnews-announces-significant-changes-to-hownews-is-produced/

4

The office space into which Global Montreal moved had been vacated by the downsizing of the Gazette’s advertising staff.

11 https://peterchura.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/ global-news-and-its-long-distancerelationship-with-viewers/

5

Anon. (2007a) ‘Canwest to Cut TV Jobs’.

12 Global, op. cit.

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13 Bell, A. (1995) ‘News Time’. Time & Society, 4(3), pp. 305–328. For more on the need for a contemporary understanding of the many kinds of time we encounter in our daily life, see Adam, B. (1990) Time and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity. 14 Graham, S. & Marvin, S. (1995) Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. Abingdon: Routledge. 15 Lawson, B. (2001) The Language of Space. London: Architectural Press, pp. 50–54. 16 BBC (n.d.) ‘Broadcasting House: About the Building’. www.bbc.co.uk/corporate2/ broadcastinghouse/aboutthebuilding 17 Hartley, J. (1982) Understanding News. London: Methuen., p. 5. 18 Ibid., pp. 32–33. 19 Channel 5. (1997) ‘Channel 5 Launch’. TV Ark [Online], 30 March. www.tv-ark. org.uk/mivana/mediaplayer.php?id= ae7a0060ae313f2ff744643c68f6f269&media= channel5_launch1997&type=mp4 20 Personal communication, August 2017. 21 Anon. (2005) ‘Frustrated MacCormac Leaves BBC’. Architects Journal [Online], 27 October 2005.www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/ frustrated-maccormac-leaves-bbc/585895. article

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THREE THE ISLAND

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The opportunity to enter the newsroom and studio is, in itself, the next logical step in the engagement of the news consumer.

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ew Broadcasting House is omnipresent in BBC News broadcasts, from its exterior to its interior. Externally, we are shown the building situated in the centre of London and in the centre of the global information economy. Internally, we are brought into the building in a sequence of pre-recorded and live camera shots that frame the BBC television news in the context of this dramatic building. In this, the most highly visible example of how architecture can be brought into the service of a journalistic agenda, New Broadcasting House is demonstrated to the viewer as an active component in the construction of a mediated space of journalism. However, it is not the first, nor the only, example of a prominent building being used to situate the presentation of news. This chapter considers the architectural and spatial representation of two of the most recognisable international brands in television journalism: Al Jazeera and CNN. It begins in the deep south of the USA, before considering the high-profile architectural landmarks used by an emerging powerhouse of journalism with an agenda to serve the Global South from its headquarters on the ‘island’ of Qatar.

CNN AND DOWNTOWN ATLANTA Launched on 1 June 1980, the Cable News Network (CNN) was the first television channel in the world to offer 24-hour rolling news broadcasts. CNN was joined five years later by an international channel, broadcasting around the world. CNN has subsidiary studios and bureaus around the world, but its network centre has always been located in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of its parent company, the Turner Broadcasting System. CNN’s connection to Atlanta is as well known as that of the city’s other famous export, Coca-Cola. The way in which a global news brand has become associated with one of the largest cities in the southern United States reveals much about the shifting values of urban real estate and economic activity. These changes are deeply implicated in parallel social change. In a manner experienced by countless other American cities (including Detroit, as discussed in Chapter 4), Atlanta underwent a seismic ethnic, social and economic shift in the second half of the twentieth century. Whereas two-thirds of citizens of metropolitan Atlanta in 1960 were white, by 1980 roughly two-thirds were African-American. The term ‘white flight’, which gained popular awareness in the 1960s, describes quite simply the large-scale relocation of white citizens away from the cities to independently incorporated suburbs. Atlanta’s suburbs – which collected the taxes of these generally wealthier and more mobile citizens – profited at the expense of the declining downtown. 1 The culmination of many attempts to reinvigorate Atlanta’s downtown were the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, arguably the most commercial in the history of the Olympiad, infamous for their high-profile sponsorship by Coca-Cola. In the three decades prior to the Games, the defining urban moves in the redevelopment of Atlanta’s downtown core included the construction of a number of mixed-use developments that formed new urban enclaves. Architect and developer John C. Portman’s notable contribution in this period is the Peachtree Center, a network of convention centres, hotels, malls and office buildings. The Peachtree Center sought to move the city’s urban focus away from Five Points, an infamous intersection rife with homelessness and begging that had become emblematic of the white flight from downtown. The Peachtree Center was designed to facilitate access by car, and elevated pedestrian walkways allowed occupants and visitors to move easily between buildings and city blocks without recourse to the public realm of the sidewalk below.

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The Peachtree Center inspired other smaller developments in Atlanta, including the Omni Complex (1976), which was to become as important to the architecture of American television as 30 Rockefeller Plaza or the studio complexes of Los Angeles. When it opened, this large development featured office space, indoor shopping, entertainment, an ice skating rink and, for a brief period, an indoor children’s amusement attraction. Marketed as the World of Sid and Marty Krofft, the attraction was an attempt to compete with outdoor amusement parks by building a multi-storey indoor theme park centred around the animated puppets and children’s programmes made by the Krofft siblings for broadcast across America. A book of tickets to the four themed areas of the attraction gained access via a 60m-long freestanding escalator to the uppermost floor of the attraction, before visitors worked their way back down. From the outset, the attraction struggled to attract visitors, and closed within six months of opening in November 1976. 2 The space it vacated, however, was to be redefined as a site of television production. By 1987, CNN was outgrowing its studios in Midtown Atlanta. With large areas of the Omni Complex vacant, an opportunity was seen to relocate the news channel to a more publicly visible location. Although most of the upper levels of the Omni Complex were designed for offices, the high ceilings and open-plan spaces provided for the World of Sid and Marty Krofft were suitable for conversion to television broadcasting. Unlike CNN’s former studios, the proximity and visibility of these spaces to the building’s atrium showcased the activities of the network to visitors and passers-by. CNN slotted into a multi-purpose urban centre of commerce and entertainment. The Omni Complex had been designed in tandem with the adjacent Omni Coliseum (1972), with arenas for the Atlanta Flames hockey team and Atlanta Hawks basketball team. 3 Designed with an innovative Cor-Ten steel-clad spaceframe roof by the Atlanta firm Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates, the Coliseum was demolished in 1997 after structural problems worsened, and the changing demands of the major leagues rendered the arenas and equally important corporate hospitality suites outdated. As part of the reimagining of the CNN Center as a

Philips Arena and CNN Center, Atlanta, Georgia

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Interior of CNN Center, Atlanta, Georgia

mediated space of entertainment and tourism, the demolition of the Omni Coliseum was broadcast live on CNN in 1997, the controlled news event sending vibrations into the neighbouring studios that were felt by the anchors on air at the time. 4 Today, the CNN Center continues to serve not only as a site of journalistic production, but also as a visitor attraction with shops, restaurants and tours. Whereas public tours of BBC New Broadcasting House don’t transgress the sacred boundary of the television studios, standard and ‘VIP’ versions of the CNN Tour promise visitors the opportunity (major news events permitting) to see inside the very studios used in news production, and the possibility of rubbing shoulders with personalities recognisable from CNN broadcasts. The famous escalator – listed as the longest freestanding example in the world – was preserved in situ following the closure of the World of Sid and Marty Krofft. Just as CNN brings its viewers the world, and CNN brings the American worldview to its viewers, the addition of a 15m diameter globe at the top of the escalator provided a literal entrance to the world of CNN and guided tours of the complex. The opportunity to enter the newsroom and studio offered by such guided tours is, in itself, the next logical step in the engagement of the news consumer. Against a troubled socioeconomic urban context, CNN took advantage of an opportunity to re-interpret

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the new model of the urban mixed-use development as a mediated space of consumption and spectatorship. As a nationally and internationally recognised broadcasting brand, CNN has been able to create a complete tourist attraction – with easy parking, dining, entertainment and shopping – in the CNN Center. This evolution of Portman’s mixed-use development is a model of how the mediated space of television production can be turned outwards to become a mediated space of urban attraction and activity, all within the confines of a semi-private urban space. The emergence of the first international satellite news channels, including BBC World in 1995, NHK World in 1998 and the China Global Television Network (CGTN) in 2000, has been interpreted by some commentators as heralding a trend towards a new global public sphere, one in which current affairs and major events are shaped according to a global homogeneity. 5 Todd Gitlin argues that instead of the formation of a single global public sphere, we have witnessed the formation of a plethora of ‘sphericules’ in which competing international media outlets consistently seek to appeal to discrete communities of similar mindsets. 6 For Shawn Powers and Mohammed el-Nawawy, ‘satellite networks have the ability to cross national borders, but this ability is curtailed, to a large extent, by the cultural nuances and the social and historical intricacies that characterize and identify each society’. 7 In their own study of media viewing habits and political dispositions of satellite television news viewers across six countries, Powers and el-Nawawy found that viewers tend to turn to particular channels to affirm rather than inform their opinions, supporting the opinion that the globalisation of television news has not delivered the utopian ideals once expected of it. 8 At a global level as well as at a national level, it appears that mainstream media follows rather than leads public sentiment. 9 In the hyperpoliticised and partisan landscape of American television news networks, CNN has been perceived to struggle to maintain its centrist political standpoint between the conservative Fox News Channel and the progressive MSNBC. 10 In some respects, this mirrors the political reality of CNN’s hometown, one of many US cities to have tipped towards favouring the Democratic party as the rural districts of their surrounding states become more strongly Republican. 11

FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH Alongside CNN, the emergence and growth of Al Jazeera (literally translated as the island, after the peninsula of Qatar) is worth closer examination, given the network’s explicit agenda to report the news with greater attention to the southern hemisphere. Launched on 15 November 2006, Al Jazeera English (AJE) was the first English-language satellite news channel to broadcast globally from the Middle East. Al Jazeera’s headquarters and international network control is located in Wadi Al Sail West, a neighbourhood of central Doha, Qatar. The channel came on air ten years after the network’s Arabic news channel and is now one of a family of specialist television channels available in more than 100 countries. 12 From launch, AJE adopted an explicit editorial agenda to counter the traditional North/ West to South/East information flow characterised by the international channels of Western producers such as CNN, BBC World and Sky News. It does this with a larger network of local correspondents than its competitors, typically nationals of the country from which they report. Studies of the content and geographical origin of news items in its prime-time Newshour programme confirm the realisation

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of this intent, with the majority of news items originating in the Global South, and with the fewest stories originating in the Americas and Europe (although even fewer come from Qatar itself). 13 Al Jazeera’s definition of the Global South is not limited to geography; according to one deputy manager at the station, ‘it is symbolic … the South denotes the voiceless in general’. 14 Al Jazeera has been a major part of Doha’s growing media community, although commentators and critics believe there are continued obstacles to developing a global media hub in the country, especially given continuing concerns about press freedom. 15 While the non-profit Doha Centre for Media Freedom (DCMF) was established to ensure press freedom internationally, 16 one of its first director generals, Robert Ménard, resigned little more than a year after his appointment, complaining that Qatari authorities were attempting to restrict the freedom of speech of the centre itself. 17 In 2016, Reporters without Borders (of which Ménard was co-founder) ranked Qatar 117th out of 180 countries for press freedom. 18 Thus, there exists in Al Jazeera’s media sector an inherent contradiction. As a news producer that is directly funded by the state of Qatar, with no commercial shareholders to report or deliver a financial profit to, Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English news channels are in a unique position to exploit the historic weaknesses of commercially funded Western news producers, by building a comprehensive network of correspondents and bureaus across the Global South in countries that CNN and others could not economically cover. Yet in so doing, they operate from within the confines of a country that is highly repressive of press freedom, limiting journalists’ abilities to provide independent reporting on any subject centred on Qatar itself. Although AJE is arguably the first satellite news channel to counteract the traditional flow of news from the Global North to the Global South, Tine Ustad Figenschou argues that AJE’s ability to influence audiences and other media producers will depend on its ability to build audiences in the important international media markets, particularly the UK and the USA, where it faces competition from state and commercial broadcasters which are, to varying degrees, both partisan and biased towards the reporting of events from the perspective of the Global North. Al Jazeera’s ambitions for their English-language network to become a channel with a global reach were not founded on a single broadcast centre in the Middle East. Unlike many international news channels, Al Jazeera’s 24-hour schedule of television programming comes from a number of broadcast centres around the world. In building a global English-language network beyond its established base in the Gulf, Al Jazeera prominently acknowledges its studios and newsrooms in three other cities. Top-of-the-hour title sequences locate these on a map of the world, focusing in on the city producing the newscast that follows. From its launch, AJE opened broadcast centres in Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington, DC. Larger than its dozens of regional bureaus, these broadcast centres were equipped with the studios and production facilities necessary to broadcast a live newscast. Whereas Al Jazeera Media Network’s home in Doha is a cluster of freestanding buildings in a discreet suburban campus, these overseas broadcast centres have been deliberately located in more prominent mixed-use buildings in central urban locations. The Kuala Lumpur and London studios are situated in two notable skyscrapers, César

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Pelli’s Petronas Towers (1996) and Renzo Piano’s Shard (2012). The prominence of these studio locations is notable, connecting Al Jazeera’s implied journalistic authority to a global footprint and to internationally recognised high-rise buildings. The low-rise nature of Washington, DC’s skyline prevented Al Jazeera from securing a similarly lofty studio, but in 2015 the company moved its existing bureau in Washington, DC to a 3,700m 2 leased space close to Dupont Circle, building new television studios modelled on the London broadcast centre, both of which are worthy of examination. 19

THE MANY SHADES OF JOURNALISTIC TRANSPARENCY Of all its overseas broadcast centres, Al Jazeera’s most prominent is in London. In 2014, the network opened a new office and studio in a 2,700m 2 space on the 16th floor of the 95-storey Shard. The Shard is a Qatari landmark in London, jointly owned by the (British) Sellar Property Group and the Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign investment fund of the State of Qatar. 20 Offices designed by the London-based practice of John McAslan & Partners, and television studios designed by the specialist firm Veech x Veech are described as offering innovative workspaces and a ‘revolutionary’ studio that eschews the enclosed, windowless studio of the network’s home. 21 Just as in Montreal, where Global News had to build a fully automated television studio in an 80-year-old office building, with bulky lighting rigs suspended from the ceiling, so Al Jazeera had to find innovative solutions to suspend lighting between structural beams just 2.7m above the floor. 22 The limitations of converting a generic office space to a television studio drive some of the architectural and aesthetic decisions in this design, with overhead studio lighting visible on camera. The obvious appeal of a television studio in a skyscraper is the panoramic view afforded by the lofty position. Situated in the lower third of the building, the floor-to-ceiling glazing allows studio cameras to catch glimpses of London’s historic and economic centre, with St Paul’s Cathedral and the office towers of the City of London visible in opening wide shots. The studio is high enough to be afforded privileged views over the city, but not so high up that an eye-level camera doesn’t capture the rooftops and skyscrapers

Al Jazeera Studio at the Shard, London

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The Stream studio, Al Jazeera, Washington DC

of the City of London beyond the limits of the studio. Located on the South Bank of the River Thames, Al Jazeera’s studio, like the ITV Studios a mile to the west, takes advantage of the open space above the River Thames to offer a wide-angle panorama of the city. Whereas a direct source of daylight is desirable for the office workers and hotel guests on other floors of the building, the continuously changing daily and seasonal weather of London necessitated the application of a polarising filter to the studio’s windows. The commanding view out over the City of London is moderated by this film to ensure that the extremes of the British weather don’t disrupt the aesthetic of the programming. While Al Jazeera’s London studios look out over the city they report from, across the Atlantic in Washington, DC, the network has taken a different approach to the spatial design of its studios. The Al Jazeera United States broadcast centre and studios occupy a street-level office space close to the city’s bustling Dupont Circle, but the network’s two principal ground-floor studios have been designed to turn inwards, away from the street. Neither takes advantage of the apparent currency that is implied by offering viewers a background view of urban activity. Where other broadcasters do choose to demonstrate Washington, DC as the site of production in the broadcasts, it is most commonly through the instantly recognisable backdrop of the US Capitol or White House. Instead of the established architectural code of the streetscape as demonstration of urban context and journalistic currency, Al Jazeera seeks instead to demonstrate its journalistic currency by designing one studio around a visualisation of social media. The enclosing walls of the studio used for the production of the daily show The Stream is dressed with a simulation of distressed whitewashed brick, against which tall, flat-screen monitors animate discussions

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with either full-height imagery or a scrolling view of posts written by viewers, commentators and critics on social media. In this environment, the demonstration of engagement with an audience comes not from the visible proximity of a metropolitan location, but from the visual rendering of viewers’ opinions located around the country and around the world. 23 In these two international broadcast centres, AJE deploys two very different architectural codes in the construction of its mediated space. In both the USA and the UK, Al Jazeera is a new entrant to broadcast journalism, one which arguably needs to demonstrate its journalistic authority and integrity to a sceptical, even overtly hostile, audience. The early history of Al Jazeera as an Arabic language network unafraid to broadcast material deemed sensitive to US military interventions in the Gulf and Middle East has not been forgotten in the USA. For its London studio, Al Jazeera demonstrates its authority through the prominence of its studios, offering an unparalleled view over the City of London. For Washington, DC, an unusual capital city with only a limited selection of architectural landmarks suitable for animating a newsroom background, Al Jazeera faces a more sceptical audience. The inwardness of the studios there offers an alternative and emerging architectural code: one that visualises graphically the many opinions and contributions of the viewers. A faux brick wall, against which glossy screens present a gliding stream of opinion, insulates the studio from the wider urban environment.

THE MANY SHADES OF JOURNALISTIC VISIBILITY For its commitment to a journalism that more accurately represents the interests of the Global South, Al Jazeera is a notoriously private organisation. Casual visitors are not entertained at any of its broadcast centres, and there is no touristic attraction in the Doha headquarters. The treatment applied to the glazing of the Al Jazeera studios in the Shard is a reminder of the need to carefully manage the visual permeability of journalistic sites of production that seek to demonstrate an urban context. The different ways in which CNN and Al Jazeera embed their network controls in their respective urban contexts is worthy of closer examination, as are the different ways that Al Jazeera’s regional broadcast centres demonstrate different degrees of architectural and urban engagement with their contexts. The CNN Center in Atlanta and the Doha headquarters of Al Jazeera represent two distinct approaches to the mediated space of journalistic production. Their visibility, and perhaps also their potential resistance to public intervention or disturbance, reveals much about the organisations they house. Built in the spaces vacated by a failed children’s amusement park, the CNN Center is a theme park of news. Atlanta’s pioneering architectural typology of dense, urban mixed-used development, in the style of Portman’s Peachtree Center, has been adapted in the former Omni Complex to create a journalistic tourist attraction. Like the chocolate factory that provides a view of the site of production of a famous product, so the CNN Center allows viewers familiar with a journalistic product from home and hotelroom TV screens to see the product being manufactured. The versatile volumes of the flexible retail and entertainment space of the building now accommodate and present the journalistic activities of CNN as a spectacle that can be witnessed, and the sites of journalistic production as zones which the privileged visitor can visit, transgressing the glossy surface of the screen. CNN repurposed an interior designed for the entertainment of children familiar with animated television

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characters for a wider age range of viewers familiar with CNN’s output. Al Jazeera, meanwhile, adopted a wholly different approach to the spatial visibility and accessibility of its sites of journalistic production. Al Jazeera’s journalism and global repute have enabled it to become a landmark in the city of its birth. Surrounded by open-air car parks, their pavements sheltered from the intense Gulf sunshine by tensile fabric parking shades, the complex is a secured enclave in the city of Doha, accessible only by car and by those with the appropriate credentials. In London and Kuala Lumpur, Al Jazeera has established studios with commanding views over their surrounding cities. However, for the British or Malaysian pedestrian, it is impossible to peer in through the studio windows as they are dozens of storeys up in the sky. The mutually assured observation afforded by street-side studios such as those of ABC7 in Chicago is not offered here: it is the privileged position of the news producer that can look out over the city from on high.

1

Rutheiser, C. (1997) ‘Making Place in the Nonplace Urban Realm: Notes on the Revitalization of Downtown Atlanta’. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 26(1), pp. 9–42.

2

Mayer, B. (2001) ‘The Lost World of Sid and Marty Krofft’. Catalyst, 26 April, 16–17, p. 25.

3

Founded in 1972, the Atlanta Flames enjoyed only modest support from Atlantians, and in 1980 their franchise was sold to Canadian businessman Nelson Skalbania and moved to Calgary, Alberta, where they continue to this day as the Calgary Flames.

4

YouTube. Omni Coliseum Implosion. [Online]. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYLaoLr02iY

5

Volkmer, I. (1999) News in the Global Sphere: A Study of CNN and Its Impact on Global Communication. London: University of Luton Press.

6

Gitlin, T. (1998) ‘Public Sphere or Public Sphericules?’ in T. Liebes and J. Curran (eds), Media, Ritual, and Identity, pp. 168–74. London: Routledge; Powers, S. & el-Nawawy, M. (2009) ‘Al-Jazeera English and Global News Networks: Clash of Civilizations or Crosscultural Dialogue?’ Media, War & Conflict, 2(3), pp. 263–284.

7

Ibid., pp. 265–266.

8

Powers and el-Nawawy’s study also found, however, that compared to BBC World and CNN International, the longer viewers watched AJE, the less dogmatic they were in their thinking, and the more open they were to considering opinions alternative to their own.

9

Hafez, K. (2007) The Myth of Media Globalization. Cambridge: Polity, p. 54, author’s emphasis; cited in Powers & el-Nawawy, p. 265.

10 Stanley, A. (2012) ‘How MSNBC became Fox’s Liberal Evil Twin’. New York Times [Online], 31 August. www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/

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us/politics/msnbc-as-foxs-liberal-evil-twin. html?_r=0 11 Kron, J. (2012) ‘Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America’. The Atlantic [Online], 30 November. www. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/redstate-blue-city-how-the-urban-rural-divide-issplitting-america/265686/ 12 Al Jazeera additionally operates two smaller regional networks, Al Jazeera Türk and Al Jazeera Balkans, based in Istanbul and Sarajevo respectively. Al Jazeera Balkans broadcasts from studios on the top floors of the BBI Centar Shopping Centre in central Sarajevo. 13 Figenschou, T. U. (2010) ‘A Quantitative Content Analysis of Al-Jazeera English’s Flagship News’. Global Media and Communication 6(1), 85–107, p. 93. 14 Helal, I., cited in Powers & el-Nawawy. 15 Mashood, S. (2013) ‘Doha: Media City?’ The Edge (5)2, 58–74. 16 Doha Centre for Media Freedom. (2016) Home page. www.dc4mf.org/ 17 Reporters without Borders. (2016b). ‘News: Robert Ménard and Staff Leave Doha Centre for Media Freedom’. [Online]. https://rsf.org/ en/news/robert-menard-and-staff-leave-dohacentre-media-freedom 18 Reporters without Borders. (2016a) ‘2016 World Press Freedom Index’. [Online]. https:// rsf.org/en/ranking/2016 19 Dowdy, C. (2015) ‘Al Jazeera’s European HQ Adapts to Life in the Shard’. Metropolis [Online], April. www.metropolismag.com/ April-2015/Al-Jazeeras-European-HQ-Adaptsto-Life-in-the-Shard/ 20 Hatherley, O. (2013) ‘The Shard: Beacon of the Left’s Skyline’. The Guardian [Online], 12 February. www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2013/feb/12/london-shard-cityleftwing

21 Veech x Veech. (2014) ‘Veech Designs Al Jazeera’s New Broadcast Studio in the London Shard Tower’. Veech x Veech [Online], 10 December. http://veechxveech.com/ journal/#veech-designs-al-jazeeras-newbroadcast-studio-in-the-london-shard-tower; John McAslan & Partners. (n.d.) ‘Al Jazeera Media Network UK Headquarters’. John McAslan & Partners [Online]. www.mcaslan. co.uk/projects/al-jazeera-media-network-ukheadquarters 22 Dowdy, op. cit. 23 Al Jazeera. (2016) The Stream. Al Jazeera [Online]. http://stream.aljazeera.com/

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D E T A I D E F M G O N E I TH ACE RTIS SP VE D A

FOUR IMPORTED FROM DETROIT

“

There is some irony that Detroit, the birthplace of the idea of planned obsolescence, would become obsolescent itself.

”

O

n 6 February 2011, at the Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the 45th Super Bowl saw the Pittsburgh Steelers take on the Green Bay Packers for the culmination of the 2010 season of the National Football League (NFL). Half of the entire population of the United States – 163 million people – saw some or all of this game. 1 The Super Bowl is as much about consumerism and the big guns of global capitalism as it is about sport. A major league American football game lasts 60 minutes and the Super Bowl XLV was framed by 48 minutes of commercials. 2 Slots were sold for $100,000 per second. 3 Fifteen movie trailers aired either before or during the game, including Kung Fu Panda 2 and Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon. The Canadian pop star Justin Bieber appeared twice, once for his movie Never Say Never and again alongside the English rock star Ozzy Osbourne in an ad for the electronics retailer Best Buy. 4 Other brands promoted included Pepsi Max, Budweiser, Stella Artois and Coca-Cola. The implications of a successful or unsuccessful Super Bowl advertisement for big consumer brands are immense. In the words of one media commentator, ‘people watch for the commercials. It’s the biggest opportunity to build awareness but if you don’t deliver, you really bomb’. 5 Six car companies had bought airtime during the game, including Audi, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and General Motors. The longest commercial ever to be aired during a Super Bowl came during the third quarter from Chrysler, which premiered a two-minute ad introducing a new model and a new marketing campaign. Chrysler had to purchase two 60-second slots and then appeal to the NFL to rearrange other advertisers’ films to combine them. 6 Titled Imported from Detroit, the commercial had been filmed the month before by the music video and commercial director Samuel Bayer for Wieden+Kennedy, Chrysler’s advertising agency. Following the 2008 bankruptcies of Chrysler, Imported from Detroit attempted to convey two messages: one implicit and one explicit. The implicit message was that a new and revitalised Chrysler was back, and their products had the capacity to be a serious competitor for your next car. The explicit message was that, in fact, nothing had really changed, and the emergence of Chrysler from bankruptcy could be likened to the resilience and perseverance of American blue-collar labour. With its carnival of big-budget commercials and a stadium audience of 100,000 led in a rendition of the national anthem by Christina Aguilera, this season finale of a uniquely American sport also complemented the weighty patriotism of the advert. The slogan ‘Imported from Detroit’ plays on a common American distinction between domestic and imported cars: domestic vehicles (Ford, Chrysler and General Motors) are perceived to be more affordable, and imports are perceived to be more expensive and therefore luxurious. Playing to popular mythologies about independence of spirit and self-determination, Imported from Detroit suggested that the so-called ‘Motor City’ of Detroit – and by association Chrysler – were both un-American and yet at the same time typically American.

‘THE PHOTOGRAPHERS ARE THE WORST’ In an allusion to the prejudiced readings of Detroit’s history by ‘journalists who have probably never even been here’, Imported from Detroit’s narrator acknowledges that this ‘is probably not the [story] you’ve been reading in the papers’. 7 In a 2009 interview for Vice magazine, the Detroit photographer James D. Griffioen coined

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the term ‘ruin-porn’, one that – for better or worse – was to become indelibly associated with Detroit.

For a while James was getting four to five calls a week from outside journalists looking for someone to sherpa them to the city’s best shitholes, but they’ve finally begun leaving him alone since he started telling them to fuck off. ‘At first, you’re really flattered by it, like, “Whoa, these professional guys are interested in what I have to say and show them.” But you get worn down trying to show them all the different sides of the city, then watching them go back and write the same story as everyone else. The photographers are the worst. Basically the only thing they’re interested in shooting is ruin porn.’8 Having gained popular traction in blogs and magazines, academic credibility was afforded to the serious theoretical study of ruin porn in November 2012 by a symposium at Columbia University. The event featured a conversation between ruin pornographers Camilo José Vergara, Andrew Herscher and photographer Andrew Moore. 9 Publicity for the symposium described Detroit as ‘one of the most photogenic US cities today … Vibrant or vacant, symbolizing crisis or hope’. 10 The degree to which hope or crisis might be interpreted from Detroit’s ruin appeared to relate in no small part to the distance of the beholder from the city of Detroit itself. Writing in Art News, the critic Richard B. Woodward framed the contemporary photographic fetishisation of Detroit’s ruins as part of a rich tradition in Western art, from the pre-Renaissance fascination in the remnants of the Roman empire, to Piranesi’s etchings, Wordsworth’s poetry and Caspar David Friedrich landscapes. 11 The difficulty with photography, from Woodward’s perspective, is that while it ‘is superbly equipped to describe the results of events … [it] is inarticulate or misleading when it comes to explaining their causes … Avarice and folly, not to mention the global flow of capital, are invisible to the eye of the documentary camera’. Griffioen and Woodward share the complaint that many photographers, film-makers and journalists frequently fail to place their photographs of Detroit’s ruins in any kind of historical context. In fact, they frequently fail to frame photographs of Detroit’s architectural landmarks in any context. For his 2009 interview, Griffioen escorted journalist Thomas Morton to an urban prairie in east Detroit, saying:

If you angle the camera the correct way it looks like you’re in the middle of nowhere – but then you turn a little to the right and there’s a well maintained, fully functioning factory, and to the left there’s a busy office park. Still, people love to take this shot, crop it so it’s just prairie, and be like, ‘Look, this is a mile from downtown, it’s turned into woods.’12 Chief among the architectural ruins reported as misunderstood and misrepresented by Detroiters is the Packard Plant. Emblematic of Detroit’s collapse, the building’s closure predates both the city’s economic and racial crises and is now a popular filming location for period dramas set in 1970s New York City or post-apocalyptic stories set 20 years in the future. Designed by Albert Kahn and measuring 1,000,000m 2 over 16 hectares, the building was the first car factory in North America to be built using reinforced concrete. It was shuttered in 1956 as the luxury Packard range of automobiles was wound up and merged with the mid-market Studebaker brand. As a landmark of ruin pornography, the origins of its

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descent into dereliction are often misunderstood. The factory’s closure came not at the bleakest moment of Detroit’s economic decline, but in fact just a few years after the city was at its peak population, and 11 years before the race riots that projected Detroit into international repute.

‘THE MONEY WAS CARRIED OUT IN THE POCKETS OF THE WHITE PEOPLE WHO FLED’ Much like the city of Atlanta, Georgia, discussed in Chapter 3, Detroit’s racial segregation was ‘cemented’ in the 1950s. 13 In 1951, Wayne State University surveyed Detroit citizens for the Detroit Board of Commerce. A total of 593 men and women were interviewed for an hour each (by an interviewer of the same race) on their perceptions of the city. Of those, 46 per cent listed unfavourable elements, and top among the white interviewees’ unfavourable elements were race relations. This included complaints by white citizens that with the progress of the Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans were being afforded too many rights, and that they were increasingly moving into white neighbourhoods. These divisions fell not only along lines of race, but also class. In general, the survey found that better educated and higher income whites had a more favourable or ambivalent view of African-Americans, whereas less educated, poorer whites exhibited the highest levels of racism towards African-Americans. Public housing and schools were fully segregated and enforced desegregation of public housing in 1956 had little effect, because the city of Detroit simply wasn’t building enough public housing, and local neighbourhood associations could protest against the construction of public (and therefore predominantly African-American) housing developments. More importantly, the enforced desegregation of schools and housing simply led to voluntary segregation, with white families voluntarily selling up and moving to new properties in majority white suburbs where deeds could be written to forbid the sale of property to African-Americans. Meanwhile, the explosive growth of the suburbs’ white populations was fuelled by the cheap mortgages available to returning World War II veterans, whose dollar could buy newer and better-quality housing than in the city. Metropolitan (metro) Detroit’s suburban counties of Lapeer, Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, St Clair and Wayne all experienced significant growth during the second half of the twentieth century, largely at the expense of the city of Detroit. In 1950, approximately 16 per cent of the city of Detroit’s population was African-American. In the following decade, the city of Detroit lost 363,000 white residents and gained 182,000 African-Americans, while metro Detroit gained 926,000 residents. Of these, only 19,000 (2 per cent) were African-American. So, whereas in 1950, about half of Detroit’s white population lived in the city, ten years later, only 37 per cent lived in the city. The rapid suburbanisation of Detroit was facilitated by America’s strong post-war economic growth. Veterans of World War II had returned to civilian life and accessed GI (General – or government – Issue) grants for college education and mortgages. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 initiated the US Interstate Highway System, and the American automobile industry returned to maximum consumer production after turning over factories to the manufacture of armaments and military vehicles. As middle- and upper-class ridership of public transit diminished and populations dispersed to far-flung suburbs easily commutable by car, so the city gradually abandoned its streetcars.

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The ever-worsening conditions experienced by Detroit’s African-American population were a powder keg awaiting a spark. The 1967 riots were the turning point that changed Detroit irrecoverably. The riots lasted for five days straight after a police raid on an unlicensed speakeasy. Forty-three people died and 467 were injured, including 182 civilians, 167 Detroit police officers and 83 firefighters. These events exacerbated the trends in population movement. Former Detroit mayor Coleman Young wrote that:

The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could.14 While the 1967 riots were not the only cause of Detroit’s ‘white flight’ (as discussed in Atlanta in Chapter 3), they certainly accelerated it. The year before, in 1966, the city lost 22,000 residents; in 1967, 67,000; in 1968, 80,000; and in 1969, 46,000. After peaking at 1.85 million in 1950, the year-on-year decline of Detroit’s population continued unabated. By 2013 it had dropped to 701,000, a 61 per cent decline. Fundamental to the economic implications of this population decline on the city of Detroit is an understanding of the nature of municipal incorporation in the United States of America. Unlike in the UK, in the USA a town is created with the establishment of a municipal corporation, usually by a charter granted by state legislature or local legislation. This may require a successful referendum of the population affected by the incorporation. By the 1930s, in a situation familiar to many industrial American cities, Detroit was surrounded by independently incorporated and self-governing cities into which the city could not expand. 15 In 1950, the city of Detroit’s population was about 60 per cent of the greater metro area of Detroit, Macomb County and Oakland County. By 1960, while the population of metro Detroit had grown about 25 per cent to 3.8 million, the population of Detroit itself had fallen, and was proportionally about 44 per cent of metro Detroit. As the population of Detroit shifted from the city to the independently incorporated suburbs, so the tax revenues and disposable income of that population shifted. While the city of Detroit became poorer, Oakland County became one of the wealthiest counties in the USA because of the intense concentration of wealth derived from the auto industry. 16 And as Detroit became constrained by surrounding cities, between 1945 and 1957, Ford, Chrysler and General Motors built 25 new manufacturing plants, but not one of them in the city itself. 17 Whereas Detroit lost blue-collar manufacturing jobs, wealthier and more secure white-collar jobs moved to the suburbs. At the same time, as part of a conscious process of globalisation, the big three auto makers began to open manufacturing plants in other parts of the United States, away from their traditional Michigan heartland, as well as across the borders in Canada and Mexico. The duplication of production lines allowed the big three to manufacture vehicles closer to their major markets, and to insulate their production capacity against labour disruption. A period of consolidation saw Hudson go out of business and become absorbed by the American Motors Corporation. The most critical moment for the American auto industry came in 1973, with the Egyptian and Syrian invasion of Israel. A staunch ally of Israel, America supplied

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arms and weapons, and in protest the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) nations retaliated with an oil embargo that lasted well into 1974. For the first time in their history, America’s domestic automobile manufacturers were vulnerable to more fuel-efficient foreign imports. In the late 1960s, the typical American passenger car achieved less than ten miles to the US gallon, 18 and even a decade later it was still resolutely under fourteen. 19 As Japanese and European manufacturers saw sales of highly efficient compact cars soar across the USA, the distinction between domestic and imported cars took on even more meaning. To reduce the country’s dependence on imported oil, in 1975 the federal government introduced stringent fuel consumption standards, for which the domestic automobile manufacturers were hopelessly unprepared. American car production plunged from more than 12.5 million in 1973 to fewer than 9 million in 1975. Already buffeted by the decentralisation of manufacturing away from the Motor City, Detroit’s industry was dealt a body blow. The big three were hardwired into building the wrong cars at the wrong time.

‘WE’RE CERTAINLY NO ONE’S EMERALD CITY’ The film that premiered at the 2011 Super Bowl set out to distinguish and reimagine the image of a city that was more often than not the subject of highly negative press reporting. By drawing parallels between the Chrysler corporation and the city of Detroit, the film alluded to the charged emotions that surround a popular belief in the resilience and work ethic of the American people. Yet a closer reading of Imported from Detroit reveals many contradictions between the image of the city and its history. 20 To explore these, the chapter considers two elements of the film: the way that it frames the architecture of Detroit, and the way that it frames the people of Detroit. In Imported from Detroit, our journey is from the suburbs to the city. We begin our journey on a freeway, I-75 northbound towards Detroit, in the suburban city of Lincoln Park. I-75 is the second longest north–south freeway after the east

Imported from Detroit , I-75 north

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coast’s I-95, passing through six states from Florida all the way to Michigan and the Canadian border in Sault Ste Marie. Through Detroit the I-75 is a six-lane suburban freeway carrying local traffic to and from the suburbs north and south of the city. An overpass of concrete and blue steel flashes overhead. A mile post, street lamps, trees and oncoming traffic are glimpsed. A wider shot reveals an oil refinery with smoke stacks and in the foreground the signage for J. L. Lasser Crane Rental. As our journey into the city of Detroit continues, a gruff narrator speaks.

I got a question for you. What does this city know about luxury? What does a town that’s been to hell and back know about the finer things in life? The film enters the city of Detroit and begins to encounter various architectural and artistic landmarks. The three chimneys of the Detroit Edison steam generating plant (1916) on Willis Avenue. A skyscraper is viewed through the trussed openings of a partially demolished building. A chain-link fence, the vast American flag flying over the former Detroit Tigers stadium in Corktown. Steam emerging from manhole covers. Downtown, heading west on Cadillac Square, we approach Campus Martius Park, catching sight in the distance of Louis Kamper’s (1861–1953) neo-Renaissance Book Tower (1916–1926), framed by Rossetti Associates, postmodernist Compuware Headquarters (2000–2003). We approach John and Arthur Scott’s Baroque Wayne County Building (1897–1902), focusing in on its rooftop and the vivid green bronze statue of Progress (1898–1902) standing in a quadriga by J. Massey Rhind (1860–1936). 21 Framed by a wing mirror and the A-pillar of a car, we glimpse the concrete columns that carry the Detroit People Mover monorail above the city’s streets. Projected to have a daily ridership of more than 60,000, the 4.8km loop currently carries about 11,000 passengers a day around the downtown core.

Well I’ll tell you. More than most. You see, it’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel. Add hard work and conviction. And a know-how that runs generations deep in every last one of us. That’s who we are.

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We drive past Robert Graham’s Monument to Joe Lewis, a suspended forearm and clenched fist, 7m long. The camera leaves the viewpoint of the car. In the Rivera Courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts, we see details of Diego Rivera’s (1886–1957) Detroit Industry Murals (1932–1933). Muscular men heave and ho against factory implements. Caucasian and African-American men work together.

That’s our story. Now it’s probably not the one you’ve been reading in the papers. The one being written by folks who have never even been here. Don’t know what we’re capable of. Because when it comes to luxury, it’s as much about where it’s from as who it’s for. Now we’re from America – but this isn’t New York City, or the Windy City, or Sin City, and we’re certainly no one’s Emerald City. We crane our view upwards, towards the 47 storeys of Wirt C. Rowland’s (1878–1946) art deco Penobscot Building (1927–1928). We pass Marshall Frederick’s (1908–1998) Spirit of Detroit (1958) in front of Harley, Ellington & Day’s Coleman A. Young Municipal Center (1951–1954). An inscription in stone behind the bronze figure reads ‘Now the Lord is that spirit / and where the spirit of the / Lord is, there is liberty’. 22 We glimpse a white male hand holding the steering wheel of a car at the 12 o’clock position, and part of a face in a rear-view mirror. A church, two suburban houses: one neo-Georgian, one modern. The Fighting Aces football team jogs in the snow, and an ice skater spins on the ice rink at Campus Martius Park. A police officer directs traffic, a man notices us while crossing a street. As night falls, we see more of the car, a black Chrysler 200 sedan. The driver is the renowned hip-hop artist Marshall Bruce Mathers III, better known as Eminem, a native of Detroit and star of the movie Eight Mile (Curtis Hanson, 2002). Driving south on Woodward Avenue, indicated by an in-car satellite navigation system, we arrive at C. Howard Crane’s (1885–1952) Fox Theater (1928). Entering the opulent auditorium, a choir awaits, framed by red curtains. Mounting the stage, turning to the camera, Eminem says:

This is the Motor City, and this is what we do. Taken together, the architectural landmarks and public artworks are presumed to be recognisable to a national American audience. This is recognisably Detroit. Yet against the contemporary interest in Detroit ruin porn, there are no ruins. With the exception of the postmodernist One Campus Martius Park (Rossetti Associates, 2003), all of the architectural landmarks featured in the film date from either the late nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth century – that is to say Detroit’s boom times. The film invokes nostalgia for a period before the city was ravaged by the car industry.

‘THAT’S WHO WE ARE’ In addition to the architectural landmarks viewed in our journey from suburban to urban Detroit in Imported from Detroit, various Detroiters are glimpsed during the film. A liveried doorman nods ceremonially as the camera passes. Members of the Fighting Aces football squad jog in the snow. An ice skater pirouettes on the Campus Martius Park ice rink. A police officer directs traffic on a downtown street. A smartly dressed man in a camelhair duffel coat looks at the camera while

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crossing the street. And finally, on the stage of the Fox Theater, Eminem addresses the camera in front of a choir. In publicity materials supporting the Imported from Detroit campaign, including various short YouTube videos published by Chrysler, these Detroiters are introduced. The ice skater seen spinning on the outdoor ice rink is the US national champion figure skater Alissa Czisny. A supplementary video sees her practising at the Detroit Skating Club in Bloomfield Hills and describing her perception of Detroit in a locker-room interview. The police officer directing traffic is Officer Rowland Bell of the City of Warren Police Department in Macomb County, Michigan. 23 Lastly, and most notably, Pastor Larry Callahan introduces and describes the history of the Selected of God Choir, which found fame through this commercial and other television engagements. These moments of personal testimony contribute to the authenticity of the film and its campaign. Yet the attention paid by the film to the urbanity of Detroit – and the journey into the city – is contradicted by the suburbanity of the characters it associated with the city. Czisny is a resident of Bloomfield Hills, Oakland County, which is also home to her skating club. Officer Bell is not employed by the City of Detroit Police Department and would not normally undertake traffic duties in downtown Detroit. Other details captured in Imported from Detroit subvert an impression of authenticity. There is no J. L. Lasser Crane Rental in the city. The sign framed in front of the Marathon Oil Refinery is a digital alteration of a sign advertising the J. J. Curran Crane Rental company. Nor is there any record online of a Fighting Aces football team in Detroit. The Fighting Aces’ white and blue sweatshirts and sweatpants might have been recognisable to the Super Bowl audience, being not so different from the colours of the Detroit Lions, an NFL team who play at Ford Field. Ford Field is an indoor football stadium opened in 2002, 20-year naming rights for which were purchased for a reported $40 million by the Ford Motor Company. Chrysler’s cinema verité representation of Detroit did not extend to including and promoting the identities of these enterprises. Two fundamental contradictions emerge on a closer examination of Eminem’s car. First, Chrysler Group LLC (FCA US LLC since 2014) is not based in the city

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of Detroit. From its foundation in 1925, Chrysler was headquartered in Highland Park, an independently incorporated city enclave of 20,000 people within metro Detroit. In 1986, however, construction started on a new complex for the company in Auburn Hills, Oakland County, 80km to the north. In 1992, Chrysler announced that it would move its corporate base out of metro Detroit to Auburn Hills, leaving just 10 per cent of its original workforce in Highland Park. 24 And while the Chrysler marketing campaign implied that the 200 sedan was ‘imported from Detroit’, like its corporate headquarters, the car is in fact manufactured outside the city limits in Sterling Heights, Macomb County, some 32km from downtown Detroit. Chrysler is implicated in the sustained evacuation of employment, income and tax dollars from the city of Detroit that contributed to the death spiral. 25

‘THE STORY HAS BEEN TOLD’ In the hours after the Super Bowl, Edmunds, an American automotive analyst, reported that the commercial increased web traffic for Chrysler by 267 per cent, and increased traffic for the Chrysler 200 by 1,619 per cent, the highest percentages of any vehicle advertised during the game. 26 The Wall Street Journal reported that more than 800 consumers had contacted Chrysler dealers by midnight after the game to request quotes on new Chrysler 200s. 27 The Imported from Detroit campaign was developed in two subsequent films. In one, Ndamukong Suh, a football player for the Detroit Lions, is filmed driving a Michigan-registered Chrysler 300 through the streets of his hometown of Portland, Oregon. Filmed under similarly grey skies to the commercial filmed in Detroit, the narrator speaks about humble beginnings. The film ends with the powerful figure of the footballer melting into his proud mother’s embrace. In the second film, the Detroit-born fashion designer John Varvatos is filmed flicking through vinyl in a second-hand record store in New York City, before driving back to his apartment to sketch out a new collection. On 7 June 2014, the Chrysler slogan ‘Imported from Detroit’ was replaced with ‘America’s Import’. Quoted in the Detroit Free Press, Fiat Chrysler chief marketing officer Olivier François explained that ‘it’s a brand that competes with imports, it’s a brand that proves you don’t have to go overseas to get a quality car … The “Imported from Detroit” story has been told. It put the brand back on the map and it did its job’. 28 If Imported from Detroit sought to put Chrysler ‘back on the map’, it did so by attempting to reshape some of the popular mythologies surrounding the city of Detroit. One of these mythologies is the association of Detroit with the ruin porn made famous in the last decade by photographers, journalists and bloggers. A fascination with the ruins of Detroit is hardly new, but it should be noted that photographic ruin porn largely struggles to articulate the complex historical, social and economic contexts that generate the raw material of these images. Detroit’s history is all about its context. Like the ruin porn, Imported from Detroit is highly selective with its context and its content. Another of these mythologies is the relationship between the auto industry and Detroit. This is a relationship that goes to the heart of the American model of free market capitalism. Charles Erwin Wilson, President (1941–1953) and CEO (1946–1953) of General Motors (and later the US Secretary of Defence, 1953–1957), famously said (but is often misquoted) that ‘for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa’. More than any other

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American city, Detroit has been shaped both for and by the social and economic implications of global capitalism. It was under Alfred Sloan, President of General Motors from 1923 to 1956, that General Motors recognised that with the saturation of the American auto market, annual model changes and artificially shortened lifespans would contribute to a faster turnover of consumption. There is some irony that Detroit, the birthplace of the idea of planned obsolescence, would become obsolescent itself. As a mechanism of global capitalism, Imported from Detroit can be seen to manipulate the image of a post-industrial Detroit in order to sell cars made by a manufacturer that is to some extent implicated in the downfall of the city. The film portrays a stress-free journey from a distant suburb to the city’s downtown. It alludes to the architectural landmarks of Detroit’s golden era but pays no attention to the remnants of the auto industry that, like many of the middle and senior managers, fled the city to the suburbs. It was the automobile that brought Detroit’s success, and it was the automobile, with its freeways, its easy 30-minute commutes and its more economic offshore manufacture, that killed Detroit’s success. It also left behind a city whose vast and low-density planning isolated those who fell below the poverty line. Losing a job can mean losing a car, so whereas a car can be read as a symbol of success, the absence of a car in suburban America can be seen as a symbol of failure. Through a defiant reinterpretation of the cultural associations with the architectural ruin porn of Detroit, Chrysler celebrates the tough resilience of a city even though it was Chrysler that – in part – contributed to the downfall that preceded its revival.

1

Sweney, M. (2011) ‘Super Bowl 2011 Draws Highest Ever Audience for US TV Show’. The Guardian [Online], 8 February. www. theguardian.com/media/2011/feb/08/superbowl-highest-ever-audience

2

Daddi, B. (2014) ‘Press Release: Kantar Media Reports the Super Bowl Scores with Over $2 billion in Ad Spending over the Past Ten Years’. [Online]. http://us.kantar.com/ media/619339/2014_super_bowl_pre-game_ release.pdf

3

Rushe, D. (2011) ‘Super Bowl Advertisers Likely to Pay $100,000 a Second’. The Guardian [Online], 6 February. www. theguardian.com/media/2011/feb/06/ advertisers-us-super-bowl

4

Coming Soon. (2011) ‘Which Movies Will Have Super Bowl Spots?’ ComingSoon.net [Online], 20 January. www.comingsoon.net/news/ movienews.php?id=73396

5

Rushe, op. cit.

6

Boudette, N. (2011) ‘Eminem Super Bowl Ad Sparks Lasting Buzz for Chrysler’. The Wall Street Journal [Online], 8 February. http:// blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2011/02/08/ eminem-super-bowl-ad-sparks-lasting-buzzfor-chrysler-video/

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Allen, A. (2011) Imported From Detroit. YouTube. [Online] https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SKL254Y_jtc

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8

Morton, T. (2009) ‘Something, Something, Something, Detroit’. Vice [Online], 1 August. https://www.vice.com/read/somethingsomething-something-detroit-994-v16n8

9

Vergara, C. J. (1999) American Ruins. New York: Monacelli Press; Herscher, A. (2012) The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press; Moore, A. & Levine, P. (2010) Detroit Disassembled. Bologna: Damiani.

10 Columbia GSAPP. (2012b) ‘Gaze: Photographing Detroit’. Internet Archive [Online] http://web.archive.org/ web/20121116074126/http://events.gsapp.org/ event/gaze-photographing-detroit; Columbia GSAPP. (2012a) Gaze: Photographing Detroit (with Danielle Aubert, Andrew Moore and Camilo José Vergara). YouTube [Online]. www. youtube.com/watch?v=gqvkIqOpVyI 11 Woodward, R. B. (2013) ‘Disaster Photography: When Is Documentary Exploitation?’ Art News [Online], 2 June. www.artnews. com/2013/02/06/the-debate-over-ruin-porn/ 12 Morton, op. cit. 13 Sugrue, T. (2004) ‘From Motor City to Motor Metropolis: How the Automobile Industry Reshaped Urban America’. Automobile in American Life and Society [Online]. www. autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Overview/R_ Overview4.htm

14 Young, C. (1994) Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young. New York: Viking, p. 179. 15 Sugrue, op. cit. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Approximately 0.83 of an imperial gallon. 19 Young, A. (2013) ‘Forty Years Ago the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo Battered the Global Economy, But It Also Helped Expedite Better Fuel Economy’. International Business Times [Online], 18 October. www.ibtimes.com/fortyyears-ago-1973-arab-oil-embargo-batteredglobal-economy-it-also-helped-expeditebetter-fuel

26 Hirsch, J. (2011) ‘Chrysler and VW Score with Super Bowl Ads’. Los Angeles Times [Online], 7 February. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ money_co/2011/02/chrysler-and-vw-scorewith-super-bowl-ads-.html 27 Boudette, op. cit. 28 Snavely, B. (2014) ‘Chrysler Shifts Gears from ‘Imported from Detroit’; 200 Is “America’s Import”’. Detroit Free Press, p. A8.

20 Allen, A. (2011) Imported From Detroit. YouTube. [Online] https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SKL254Y_jtc 21 Nawrocki, D. A. (2008) Art in Detroit Public Places. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, p. 26. 22 II Corinthians, 3:17. 23 Chrysler. (2011b) Chrysler Imported from Detroit/Police Officer – ‘Dedication’. YouTube [Online]. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BbAdyzVsHg8 24 Anon. (1992) ‘Chrysler to Move Its Headquarters’. The New York Times [Online], 9 September. www.nytimes.com/1992/09/09/ business/company-news-chrysler-to-move-itsheadquarters.html 25 Some commentators noted that the Chrysler 200 wasn’t the most obvious choice for a successful image-conscious rapper such as Eminem to drive. Much of Chrysler’s resurgent sales during the same period had been driven by the recently refreshed 300 sedan, a larger vehicle widely praised for its muscular looks and creative reinterpretation of classical American automotive styling cues. The Chrysler 200, in comparison, was marketed as a more affordable compact sedan, and one which was to rack up a sizeable number of heavily discounted fleet sales, making it a reliable if unexciting staple of rental car lots across North America. Priced at almost $50,000, the larger and more critically acclaimed Chrysler 300 might have been a more suitable vehicle for a Detroit rapper’s homecoming. Exploiting a long-standing financial advantage, however, Chrysler manufactured the 300 across the border in Brampton, Ontario, in Canada, where federal and provincial incentives have long ensured the economic advantage of importing ‘American’ cars to America. See Kiley, D. (2011) ‘The Inside Story: Chrysler’s Risky Eminem Super Bowl Commercial’. Autoblog [Online], 8 February. www.autoblog. com/2011/02/08/chrysler-eminem-super-bowlad/

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FIVE INJECT SOME POSITIVE EMOTION

“

Unpicking and critiquing these relationships reveals much about the economic systems and power structures hiding in plain sight.

”

A

grey Volvo drifts from the centre of a bright suburban road and glances against the side of an older parked car. 1 The door crumples and the driver’s side window shatters. A tin of boiled sweets slides across the top of the dashboard, and a card air freshener swings from the rear-view mirror. Glimpsed for just a few seconds in a television commercial, this red car and its 1994 British registration plate are anachronistic. In the context of a television commercial, this car snags our attention, and becomes what Roland Barthes describes as a photographic punctum that pierces the smooth mediated space of globalised automotive consumption. 2 Much has been written about the multiple cultural interpretations of the car (notably in architectural discourse) as an object of consumerist desire. 3 Chapter 4 showed how the car occupies an ambiguous position, capable of signifying both freedom and entrapment. In tandem with these capitalist mechanisms of consumption, auto production is an equally significant concern of political and economic self-determination. 4 More than 50 years after US President Lyndon Johnson imposed a retaliatory 25 per cent import duty on a range of foreign consumer goods, including potato starch, brandy and light trucks (but not passenger cars), the Ford Motor Company continues to import passenger vans from its Turkish factory to the USA, where brand-new seats and windows are ripped out for recycling or disposal, so that the vans can be sold as cargo vans (that would accrue tax if imported without the passenger seats). 5 As the commercial Imported from Detroit demonstrates (see Chapter 4), even in the strongest global economies the dichotomy that opposes a ‘domestic’ car versus an imported one remains a keynote of automotive and economic politics. In emerging nations, the social and economic importance of the automotive industry is irrefutable. In Malaysia in 1979, Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad proposed a national car as a means of mobilising an increasingly wealthy population and spurring industrial development. This led to a joint venture with the Japanese car company Mitsubishi and the

Liverpool Victoria commercial

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launch of the Proton Saga in 1985. In South Korea, meanwhile, the Hyundai car company has grown from a licensed assembler of European Ford models to the fourth largest car manufacturer in the world in less than 50 years. The mediated space of automotive consumerism is not limited to individual societies, but also has geopolitical implications. Unpicking and critiquing these relationships reveals much about the economic systems and power structures hiding in plain sight.

FROM LIVERPOOL The Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society was founded in England in 1843. A mutual burial society, the Liverpool Victoria collected penny premiums from its members to cover funeral costs, thereby avoiding the societal shame associated with burial in a paupers’ graveyard. While cultural attitudes to death changed, burial societies remained a popular means of saving for end-of-life financial commitments. At their peak in the mid-1930s, there were some 200 such friendly societies in England. By campaigning for the establishment of the British welfare state after World War II, mutual societies effectively found themselves out of a job. 6 Therefore, as post-war levels of home ownership and personal wealth began to grow, the Liverpool Victoria evolved to become a provider of a broader range of financial services, including life insurance. In the same manner as its burial society origins, it was a mutual that depended entirely on a large network of home service agents for the personal collection of cash premiums from members’ homes. By the beginning of the 1990s, many mutual societies had realised that a viable financial services business could not survive solely on the arrival of ‘the man from the Pru’ (or one of his competitors) on the doorstep. While highly personal, doorstep collections brought little or no brand awareness to new customers. Self-evident as it may seem, a provider of life insurance has to attract new customers to counterbalance an ageing and oversold customer base. Until 1993, the Liverpool Victoria had no marketing department nor a single person employed in advertising. A dramatic change was needed, and television advertising would be a central part of it. Within 20 years, Liverpool Victoria became the third largest provider of car insurance in the UK. The most symbolic step in this revolution from doorstep mutual societies to commercial financial services provider came in 2007, when Liverpool Victoria truncated its name to LV, and coined the slogan ‘Look After What You Love’. For the first time in the history of the company, television advertisements were commissioned. The company’s creative agency described how ‘in a cold, negative, dry, price-driven market, we saw the opportunity to inject some positive emotion into the communications’. 7 With these changes came a new brand, one that sought to broaden the company’s appeal and improve customer perceptions. It did so, in part, by removing the last remaining reference to the geographical origin of the organisation. 8 The campaign sought not to capitalise on members’ fear of death and disaster, but on a consumerist affection for material possessions. Just as ‘Imported from Detroit’ sought to reset the popular consumer’s impression of both a city and a car company, ‘Look After What You Love’ sought to reset an emotional response to an automotive financial service. The two campaigns reveal two very different attitudes to the urban settings in which they were produced.

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‘THEY ARE MODERN THINGS, BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN THEY ARE DESIRABLE’9 The title of the long-running Canadian sketch show This Hour Has 22 Minutes mocks the subservience of television programming to commercials, even on a public network such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). On commercial television, commercials can make up as much as a quarter of the airtime, and on shopping channels the interludes between discrete programmes are, in fact, a pause from the explicit selling of products. In Part 1, and throughout this book, there are considerations of how the intertwined movements of globalisation and advances in digital technology have revolutionised the mechanisms of television production. Yet these developments have been just as impactful for the multi-billion-pound globalised advertising industry. As explored in the previous chapter, advertising is pervasive. It’s not just big-ticket sporting events like the Super Bowl that can appear to be swamped with advertising. Whereas Detroit has been scarred by the processes of global automotive capitalism, on the other side of the world another city is flourishing as a result of the same mechanisms. Set against the urban landscape of Cape Town, this chapter explores the marketing transformation undertaken by a financial services company from an existential fear of death to one of consumerist love. At stake are the functions of advertising, digital media and automotive culture in the realm of the postcolonial city. Since the mid-1990s, South Africa’s film and television industry has grown from employing some 4,000 to 25,000 people. The demand for commercial production in South Africa is primarily international, and for 25 years the UK has been the largest international market for television commercials made in South Africa. 10 In 2013, the film and television industry was contributing 3.5 billion rand (more than 200 million euros) to the country’s economy. 11 In the year to April 2015, more than 800 television commercials were produced in South Africa at a cost of almost 1.5 billion rand (80 million euros). 12 The growth of South Africa’s film and television industry is all the more amazing given that the country was one of the last to introduce

Liverpool Victoria commercial

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domestic television broadcasts, with the first regularly scheduled broadcasts not coming on air until 1976. While the UK remains one of South Africa’s top clients, the reach of these products is global. In 2015, 81 commercials were produced in South Africa for clients in the UK, 77 for Germany, 56 for Nigeria, 46 for the USA, 44 for France and 38 for Scandinavian countries. 13 These statistics do not take into consideration the many adverts produced for multinational clients which, with dubbing of voices, take the fullest advantage of South Africa’s generic architecture and urbanism, to be broadcast in multiple territories. Why has South Africa’s film and television industry benefited from this growth in overseas advertising production? The first advantage is economic. As a result of depressed currency exchange rates, gross domestic product and average earnings, it can be significantly cheaper to film a commercial for European audiences in South Africa than in Europe. The second advantage is geographic. For the purposes of an industry that depends on the reflection of light into camera lenses, South Africa has a highly agreeable climate. Cape Town enjoys twice as many hours of sunshine per annum as, for example, Liverpool in England. Residing in the same or an adjacent time zone to most European markets gives South African producers same-day contact with their clients. Digital cameras and high-speed data networks allow those clients to review daily rushes almost immediately. Significantly, for advertisers in the UK and Ireland, as a former colony and dominion of the British Empire, South Africa is one of only a handful of developed nations to have adopted and persisted with left-hand driving. British commercials for automobiles and automotive services filmed in South Africa are facilitated by the ease with which recognisable European vehicles can be sourced and driven on the left-hand side of the road. 14 While LV’s commercials are filmed in South Africa, every effort is taken to disguise the site of production and create the impression that the films represent everyday scenes in the UK. As objects of globalised capitalism, right-hand drive cars in South Africa are virtually indistinguishable from their British counterparts. Subtle alterations can be made to streets and buildings: an ice cream van by the side of a road, a blue and red London Transport roundel on a bus stop, or a good old fish and chip shop. However, there are snags. The anonymous red car that punctures the illusion in LV’s television advert was never sold in the UK. It was actually designed and marketed to circumvent legislation that sought to protect the nascent South African car industry from British imports.

VEHICLES OF SPATIAL PRACTICE Setting aside the explicit reading of LV’s commercials in terms of the automobile as a consumerist object, traces of South Africa’s automotive and political history can be discovered. The relationship between Great Britain and South Africa’s respective auto industries is one of colonial centre and margin. A variety of American and European cars were imported to South Africa in volume after World War II, either as finished products or as complete knock-down (CKD) kits for local assembly. The British Motor Company (and later British Leyland) took full advantage of receptive export markets such as South Africa, exporting cars and CKD kits to India, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. This relationship between the centre and margins of Britain’s colonial auto industry continued up until the 1990s, with the struggling Rover Group’s disastrous attempt to export tooling and components to build the Austin Maestro in Bulgaria. 15

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Austin Apache press photograph (British Leyland)

The degree to which the development of an independent auto industry was valued by certain governments can be understood by the legislation passed to encourage local production. The South African government’s Local Contents Programme, introduced in the 1960s, demanded that cars produced in South Africa consisted of at least 85 per cent locally produced materials by weight. 16 In response, Leyland launched a dedicated car for the South African market. 17 The car selected for this project was a stillborn prototype designed by BMC in England and based on the popular ADO16. A striking name was sought for the new car, and following market research in South Africa, the name Apache was selected, bearing a badge featuring a feathered arrow in stylised reference to the Native American tribe. 18

THE LEFEBVRIAN LENS In the abstract spaces of LV’s television commercials, a fish and chip shop or a fake British registration plate can be used in the creation of a sunnier simulation of a British city. How can we make sense – in architectural and spatial terms – of these mediated spaces? This book has been written in light of Henri Lefebvre’s critique of the production of space, which has relevance to the spaces and to the images of spaces. To make sense of the mediated spaces of architecture and urbanism with which this book is concerned, we can turn to Lefebvre’s critique of space and of images of space. According to Lefebvre, ‘images fragment; they are themselves fragments of a space. Cutting things up and rearranging them, découpage and montage – these are the alpha and omega of image-making’. 19 There is, therefore, no imagery without cutting, pasting and editing. As demonstrated by Imported from Detroit, the image of a city is defined by this editorial process. Framing a

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photograph around architectural dereliction, while omitting a vibrant community next door, is just one example of this. To elucidate the Lefebvrian terminology first touched upon in Part 1, consider Lefebvre’s spatial triad of representations of space, spaces of representation and spatial practices. Representations of space are not simply images. They are conceptual and technocratic spaces that both represent and reveal the power structures in which they are created. 20 They are technocratic abstractions and remain the dominant space of any society. Any dynamism of that space is, therefore, muted by the attempts made to codify it or transform it into a sign. 21 Representations of space differ from spaces of representation, which are directly lived by the people who inhabit them and made living by the interaction of their inhabitants. Finally, spatial practices are the dialectical practices that generate a society’s space. A Lefebvrian view of the abstract space of a television commercial reveals that it itself ‘is not homogeneous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal, its orientation, its “lens” … it renders homogeneous’. 22 In Imported from Detroit, this homogeneity manifested itself as a nostalgic concentration on pre-war, pre-automotive-crash, art deco skyscrapers. In LV’s television commercials, the homogeneity is more pronounced: full advantage is taken of the aesthetic and architectural similarities between the northern and southern hemisphere. The automotive space of the left-hand-driving freeway, suburban road or urban street are cleansed of any trace that is uniquely South African (such as registration plates, posters or advertising) and masked as a hybrid that is conceivably somewhere else. Socially constructed space contains not only objects, but also networks between those objects. In the architectural traces deliberately deployed for narrative effect in Imported from Detroit, or those that are cropped or airbrushed out of LV’s commercials, there is evidence of the networks that co-create social space. These networks of information are the living traces of the social relationships which construct that space. 23 In spite of the efforts to manipulate, disguise or eliminate these traces, the street scenes of Detroit and Cape Town are (in Lefebvrian terms) representations of an idealised automotive space built on top of a socially constructed space that ‘implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships’. 24 Lefebvre recognised that the fetishisation of objects made them more real than reality itself; more real than the social and productive reality which produced them. Nowhere is this more evident than in the marketplace of global capitalism, where products give profound pleasure (real or imagined), while concealing the nature of their production. 25 In these terms – and supported a good deal by Alfred Sloan’s concept of planned obsolescence – the car remains the ultimate consumer durable of global capitalism. 26 Commercials for auto makers and automotive services contribute to an idealised car culture, showing an abstract automotive space that is more real than reality itself. In the familiar vocabulary of an advert for automobiles and automotive services, the sun is sunnier, the road is emptier and the landscape is more dramatic. So far, so Marx. But Lefebvre builds on the Marxist principle of unmasking objects in order to reveal the social relationships that created them, 27 and in so doing he extended the principle to consider space as a social product, one ‘to be used, to be consumed, it is also a means of production; networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it’. 28 In short, space is also a social product, one that cannot be separated from the social structures that co-created it.

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POSTCOLONIAL SPACES OF REPRESENTATION LV’s commercial imagery is worthy of scrutiny precisely because, in Lefebvre’s terms, ‘the language of things is as useful for lying as it is for telling the truth. Things lie, and when, having become commodities, they lie in order to conceal their origin, namely social labour, they tend to set themselves up as absolutes’. 29 In his application of Lefebvrian theory to matters of architectural concern, Nathaniel Coleman frames Lefebvre’s analysis as seeking ‘nothing less than to develop an understanding of how capitalism and state controls are “spatialized,” but also to reveal how the “abstract space” of capitalist production can be resisted by the remnants of “absolute space” that survive in the habits of “everyday life”’. 30 Like hundreds of other campaigns for European clients, LV and its advertising agencies produce television commercials in South Africa to take advantage of marked differences in climates, economies and cultures. Advertisers routinely manipulate the postcolonial African cityscape to create an idealised and eternally sunny representation of places in the northern hemisphere. LV sought to create a dependably sunny environment in which to sell a service which its customers hope never to use. In hiding behind an acronym, LV might also be accused of having distanced itself from its city of origin’s once prodigious reputation for car crime. 31 If Imported from Detroit demonstrates how the post-industrial city can be used in the construction of an alternative narrative of automotive capitalism, these LV advertisements are similarly singular examples of the way in which the postcolonial city can be used in the service of global capitalism. The success of the postcolonial city’s film and television industry has been built, in no small part, on the ability of the city to satisfy the demands of the former colonial centre. If, as Lefebvre encourages them, architects are to concern themselves with the means of production of space, then they should also be concerned with the physical and digital manipulation of the postcolonial cityscape that creates an abstract space of consumerism. Although consumers have repeatedly been found to express resistance to the offshoring of customer service, 32 there is apparently less concern about taking the Liverpool out of LV. By seizing the opportunity ‘to inject some positive emotion into the communications’, LV and its creative partners sought to imply that insuring a car is not a financial obligation, but an act of love, thereby rethreading the economic and cultural relationships that entwine car ownership with Western society. However, occasional glimpses of Table Mountain or an improbably aquamarine sea remind us of the absolute space of South Africa. Anonymous mid-century office buildings and suburban houses construct a hybrid city that is both northern and southern and – in the Lefebvrian terms touched upon in Part 1 – both abstract and absolute.

1

Designate. (n.d.) ‘IPA Effectiveness Awardwinning Work – How We Moved LV= from the Ninth Biggest Car Insurer to Third’. [Online]. www.designate.com/work/project/lv-brandstrategy/

2

Barthes, R. (2000 [1980]) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage.

3

Kerr, J. & Wollen, P. (2002) Autopia: Cars and Culture. London: Reaktion; Borden, I. (2012) Drive: Journeys Through Film, Cities and Landscapes. London: Reaktion.

4

Ibid., pp. 10–20.

5

Dolan, M. (2009) ‘To Outfox the Chicken Tax, Ford Strips Its Own Vans’. Wall Street Journal [Online], 23 September. www.wsj.com/articles/ SB125357990638429655

6

Hill, J. (1996) ‘Keeping Customers Loyal at Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society’. Managing Service Quality, 6(4), pp. 27–32.

7

Designate (n.d.) ‘IPA Effectiveness AwardWinning Work – How We Moved LV= from the Ninth Biggest Car Insurer to Third’. [Online].

8

Not unlike Norwich Union’s rebirth as Aviva five years previously.

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9

South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (1958–1966) comparing television to atom bombs and poison gas in Time magazine, 20 November 1964.

10 Amm, B. (Executive Officer, Commercial Producers Association of South Africa) (2016) Personal communication. 11 SAinfo. (2013) ‘Key Sectors: South Africa’s Film Industry’. [Online]. www.southafrica.info/ business/economy/sectors/film.htm 12 Commercial Producers Association South Africa (CPASA) & Equispectives. (2015) Commercial Producers Industry Survey. Cape Town: Equispectives. 13 Ibid. 14 Agencies supplying vehicles to film sets in South Africa make a point of offering a large inventory of left-hand drive vehicles, including American models. For example: www. picturecars.co.za/database/nd/index_lhd.htm 15 Unsurprisingly, the Bulgarian market largely ignored the Austin Maestro in 1995, 12 years after its British launch. The angular British hatchback was quickly eclipsed by the Škoda Felicia, a new product built by the Volkswagen Group in the Czech Republic. Regarded not just as a colonial satellite of the German parent company, but given autonomy and investment to grow as an emerging centre of low-cost auto design development and production, Škoda has since passed the milestone of producing 1 million cars globally per annum. See Adams, K. (2011a) ‘Around the World: Bulgaria’. AROnline [Online]. www.aronline. co.uk/blogs/cars/austin/maestromontego/ around-the-world-bulgaria/ 16 Similar legislation existed in Spain, where the car was built from 1965 to 1976 as the Authi Victoria. See Adams, K. (2015) ‘International Variations: Authi Victoria’. AROnline [Online]. www.aronline.co.uk/blogs/cars/ bmc-cars/11001300/11001300-internationalvariations/austin-victoria/ 17 Adams, K. (2013) ‘Around the World: South Africa’. AROnline [Online]. www.aronline.co.uk/ blogs/around-the-world/around-the-worldsouth-africa/ 18 Díaz Martinez, D. (n.d.a) ‘The History’. Austin Apache: South Africa’s Unique ADO16 [Online]. www.mginfo.co.uk/leyland/?q=node/27 19 Lefebvre, H., (1991 [1974]) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 96–97. 20 Merrifield, A. (2006) Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 109. 21 Coleman, N. (2015) Lefebvre for Architects. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 82. 22 Lefebvre, p. 287. 23 Ibid., p. 77. 24 Ibid., pp. 82–83. 25 Ibid., p. 81.

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26 Although the rise of the internet-enabled smartphone threatens to dethrone the car, especially as millennials in countries such as the USA show a decreasing interest in car ownership. 27 Lefebvre, p. 81. 28 Ibid., p. 85. 29 Ibid., pp. 80–81. 30 Coleman, pp. 54–55. 31 Dresser, G. (2004) ‘Liverpool Not the Capital for Car Theft’’ Evening Standard [Online], 1 June. www.standard.co.uk/news/liverpool-notthe-capital-for-car-theft-6958277.html 32 Sharma, P., Mathur, R. & Dhawan, A. (2009) ‘Exploring Customer Reactions to Offshore Call Centers: Toward a Comprehensive Conceptual Framework’. Journal of Services Marketing, 23(5), pp. 289–300. DOI: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1108/08876040910973404

SIX THE OPEN ROAD

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What if it were possible to create the idealised mediated space of consumerist desire, one voided of the messiness of humanity and society that might impede the untrammelled consumerist eye?

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t six twelve precisely, Zac Hobson died, and the Earth fell silent’. 1 As the sun pulsates overhead, he awakes with a sore head to discover, over the course of the following days, that he might be the only man left alive on Earth. The first act of Geoff Murphy’s 1985 film The Quiet Earth, in which Bruno Lawrence plays a scientist who emerges from a failed suicide attempt, is a bleak vision of the mental breakdown that follows a lone survivor’s initial euphoria at being liberated from the expectations of social behaviour and economic gain. Cars are an integral part of Hobson’s sudden liberty. Abandoning his sensible Mitsubishi sedan, Hobson borrows a variety of cars and trucks abandoned by their vanished owners in the streets of Auckland. Freed from the monotony of rush-hour traffic, Hobson explores a desolate New Zealand in search of survivors. As he resigns himself to a life of luxurious solitude, he drives a pick-up truck into a shopping mall to carry all his consumerist desires to the biggest house in the city. The preceding chapters of Part 2 saw how the idealised mediated automotive space of the city is one unconstrained by the car-based movements of anyone else. It is a familiar trope of the last-man-on-Earth genre for the protagonists to experience bewilderment, perhaps even brief ecstasy, at the realisation that the limitations of the car no longer apply to them. In this chapter, images of mediated cityscapes and landscapes, devoid of people and vehicles, are explored as indicators of an emerging trend in automotive marketing, one that liberates the consumer from the negative or costly aspects of car ownership.

NOT TO BE TRUSTED On 19 February 1990, Adobe Systems launched Photoshop, the first massmarket raster graphics editor. Over the next quarter-century, sophisticated image editing has been democratised, to the extent that even the most rudimentary modern smartphone can capture its own photographs using an inbuilt camera and allow the user to retouch and edit them. Writing less than two years after the commercial launch of Photoshop (for the Macintosh desktop computer) and PaintShop Pro (for Microsoft Windows), William Mitchell wrote of how digital imaging was beginning to subvert irrevocably the chemically constructed certainties of a supposedly truthful photographic image. The advent of this post-photographic era forces us ‘to adopt a far more wary and more vigilant interpretive stance – much as recent philosophy and literary theory have shaken our faith in the ultimate grounding of written texts on external reference, alerted us to the endless self-referentiality of symbolic constructions, and confronted us with the inherent instabilities and indeterminacies of verbal meaning’. 2 Marshall McLuhan, who viewed all media as extensions of our own human faculties, similarly predicted that we would confront this new paradigm with ‘an enormous backlog’ of outmoded psychological responses. 3 Just as the producers of advertising imagery have taken advantage of these software packages to digitally touch up and clean images of their products and the people using them, architectural imagery is also criticised for its omissions and deceptions. Consumers of architectural imagery are increasingly wary of the symbolic constructions that appear with remarkable regularity (whether it be the child with a balloon, the motion-blurred pedestrian or the lens flare of a sunny day). As a result, we as a society are increasingly cautious and distrustful of imagery of the built environment. 4

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A billboard for the Huiparam (‘Swallow’) car in North Korea, June 2004

As the preceding chapters have illustrated, advertising is both the lifeblood and the fantasy of capitalism: ‘without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream’. 5 Whereas the Western visitor to Cuba or North Korea might once have commented on the absence of advertising as an urban manifestation of a communist political system, today even totalitarian states are employing the imagery and language of capitalism to project an image of economic progress. The preceding two chapters explored how the varied architectural and urban landscapes of Detroit and Cape Town have been used in the service of capitalist reproduction. On a loose spectrum from heterogeneous to homogeneous urban space, these two cities demonstrate how urban environments can be framed, edited and doctored to support two different consumerist narratives. In Detroit, the heterogeneous architectural landmarks and urban landscape of a city are used to align a narrative of patriotic resilience with a consumer product. In Detroit, the heterogeneous architectural landmarks and urban landscape of a city are used to align a narrative of patriotic resilience with a consumer product. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in Cape Town, the postcolonial homogeneity of a city on the other side of the world is used with lower production costs to recreate a generic ‘anywhereness’. If Cape Town is more like anywhere else than Detroit, what then is the next logical step for the construction of a consumerist mediated space? Given the potential of digital technologies to liberate the media producer from the requirements of physical presence at the very site of image production, what if it were possible to create the idealised mediated space of consumerist desire, one voided of the messiness of humanity and society that might impede the untrammelled consumerist eye?

WAYS OF SEEING ADVERTISEMENTS Since the publication of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas in 1972, the supremacy of architectural form over image has been cast into doubt. Just as Venturi et al.’s critique and appreciation of the intense imagery of the Las Vegas strip helped to deconstruct the distinction between high and low architecture, John Berger paved the way for cultural historians to explore advertising as the expression of the systems of reproduction of capitalist societies. Advertising is quotidian, but it also belongs in the moment and

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is part of a continually renewing cycle of imagery. 6 Advertisements may refer to the past, but advertising imagery speaks neither of the past nor the present moment: it is always speaking of a continuously deferred future, one in which we aspire to achieve personal satisfaction through the acquisition of products. This future inspires envy in us; envy not so much of others who possess these products, but envy of a future version of ourselves that has taken the opportunity to consume. And while we are static, advertising imagery is dynamic and ever-changing: print advertisements are thrown away, posters are pasted over and television commercials are quickly curtailed by the resumption of programming. Advertising is the most relevant expression of these systems because it can be found everywhere and everywhen. As seen in Chapters 4 and 5, for more than a century the automobile has presented itself as the quintessential consumer product. 7 In Ways of Seeing, Berger uses print advertisements for Alitalia and Pakistan International Airlines to illustrate the emerging globalisation of our consumerist desires. 8 Capitalism expands our horizon, offering us the world for our own personal consumption and enjoyment: ‘the entire world becomes a setting for the fulfilment of publicity’s promise of the good life. The world smiles at us. It offers itself to us. And because everywhere is imagined as offering itself to us, everywhere is more or less the same.’ 9 Four decades after the publication of Berger’s book, the low-cost airline easyJet launched a multinational advertising campaign titled Generation easyJet which sought to celebrate the diversity of its European customer base by highlighting the many commonalities between our respective desires to fly away to somewhere else. 10 Yet with this jet-setting, the ease with which we can flit between the many landscapes of Europe makes them homogeneous. We fly with easyJet, rent a Europcar, stay in a Generator Hostel, and drink an Affligem Blonde, Sagres or Beamish. 11

IMPOSSIBLE PLACES If the mediated space of consumption is more or less the same everywhere you go, then so too is the mediated space of image production. Maground is a photographic agency unlike any other. Its website (www.maground.com) centres on a search box, cursor blinking, inviting the visitor to find perfect backgrounds for your product. Typing the words ‘modern architecture’ returns more than 30,000 images. Using a dynamic database that tags images with keywords rather than filing them in discrete categories, images can be found under popular tags including ‘urban’ (142,000 images), ‘classic architecture’ (12,800 images), ‘futuristic’ (7,000 images) and ‘skyline’ (6,000 images). Whereas architectural photography typically regards buildings as objects in a landscape, upon which the frame is to be centred and to which all other elements are subservient, Maground’s images are instead framed and focused on the space in front of and around buildings: a cobbled street beneath a sweeping concrete cantilever in a northern European city; a freshly laid asphalt pavement between an avenue of young trees; a wide expanse of grass in front of a modern villa. In each, the pictures present not a subject, but the absence of a subject, and the built environment becomes but a setting for something else, something as yet invisible. Jonathan Bell likens these empty streets to the carefully choreographed urban sets of post-disaster movies 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007). 12 In each, the protagonists discover the familiar architectural landmarks of their cities devoid of human

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occupation and activity. Throughout this cinematic genre, the recurring dichotomy between the fear of being truly alone and the dizzying possibility of living without any constraint is encountered. Whereas those films used budgets and manpower found only in big-budget cinematic production, new technologies are providing cost-effective alternatives for advertisers who want the same ethereal emptiness. Maground describes itself as the world’s leading photographic agency for landscape, urban and road photography, with the largest selection of high-resolution images of streets and roads from around the world designed for advertisers who want the best possible environment for their product. From the smooth pavement beneath a skyscraper to the dusty gravel track climbing a mountain pass, if you want a particular landscape in which to place your product, Maground can supply it. Unless you want images of urban locations tagged and painted with bright graffiti (of which Maground has more than 1,200), the vast majority of urban scenes are cleansed of unwanted traces of human activity. Every visual distraction that might interfere with or hinder the construction of a mediated space of automotive consumption and freedom has been delicately removed. There are no pedestrians, no animals and – crucially – no cars. These ‘impossible places … where every sign of habitation has been digitally scrubbed away’, 13 are impossible for the consumer to experience, but they appeal to innate desires of automotive consumption. In the visual language of the car advertisement, dreaming of a new vehicle is only half the fantasy; naturally we dream also of an empty road, free of traffic, roadworks and red traffic lights on which to enjoy it. What is the appeal of a powerful sports car unless we can imagine ourselves liberated from the banality of traffic congestion? What is the logic of owning a car in a dense European city centre unless we are freed from the daily struggle of parking it and the nagging fear of finding it damaged or stolen?

THREE-DIMENSIONAL CARTESIAN SPACE Many of Maground’s images offer clean perspectival regression: long urban boulevards or avenues that disappear to a single vanishing point, or tight urban intersections from which streets disappear to the left and the right. The former, voided of slow-moving traffic or unpredictable pedestrians, suggest speed and direct movement from point to point. The latter invite the imagining of a taut sports car, leaning into the corner as it changes direction at speed. These mediated urban spaces are founded on a near universal understanding and appreciation of Cartesian space, by which any given point can be represented numerically in its relationship to two perpendicular lines measured in equal units. In his recasting of the evolution from Renaissance painting to contemporary conceptions of space, McLuhan views the Cartesian conception of space and perspectival projection of space as the ‘absolute condition of order’ of Western art. 14 A digital conception of space gives us the opportunity to return to a primitive but unified conception of time and space as a continuous acoustic and olfactory (rather than exclusively visual) space. Whereas the Cartesian representation of space is based upon a rigid mathematical projection of what can be seen, today we are returning to a pseudo-primitive X-ray-like vision of everything we can possibly know, one that is not constrained by perspective or lines of sight: ‘a brand-new world of allatonceness’. 15 Maground does not merely provide two-dimensional representations of these idealised spaces. In addition to traditional ‘backplates’ (images of real, virtual or hybrid places onto which objects

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can be digitally superimposed), Maground can also supply three-dimensional ‘domes’ and ‘spheres’ of these streetscapes and landscapes. Directly referencing the architectural form, a dome is a digital file spliced together from multiple two-dimensional images, embedding spatial coordinates with multiple seamless viewpoints. Much like the dome of a chapel, the dome is designed around a central viewpoint. A still photographic backplate can be used in the production of a hybrid static image of a product, but a dome can be used to composite a digitally rendered three-dimensional model of the product to produce either a video or interactive image that the user can manipulate and explore. In automotive advertising, this is most commonly found on the graphically rich websites of car companies, allowing the user to click, grab and rotate a car in a given setting. As the image moves, our eye appears to be moving around the vehicle, and the background changes accordingly. For a compact city car, the setting might be an urban street, whereas for an all-wheel-drive pick-up truck, it might be a rocky outcrop overlooking a lake. We leap into the impossible space of the empty urban street or smooth wilderness, and in grabbing and moving the image we can simulate the perception of moving ourselves around this space, all the while centred on the object of our consumerist attention. We cannot move or look away. Our gaze is locked on the central object of our desire. This interactivity with a three-dimensional representation of an urban environment has had consumer currency since the 2007 launch of Google Street View. Having established the Google Search tool as the pre-eminent index of the virtual world of the internet, Google Maps was developed to offer a similarly comprehensive digital map of the physical world. The step from indexing and, importantly, ranking pages on the internet to mapping the built environment was an inevitable evolution of Google’s mission to organise and make universally accessible all the world’s information, both digital and physical. 16 Street View developed from a collaborative research project at Stanford University, which set out to understand how multi-perspectival images of extended planar landscapes could be captured. 17 Initial imagery was collected by mounting a side-facing camera in the back of an open car, driven at a constant speed along a street. The development of the technology used to compile and splice these images together, initially into extended elevations of one face of a city block captured by a single camera, would evolve to include multiple images captured from ‘rosettes’ of 15 cameras that could be composited into a three-dimensional view. In addition to capturing these multiple individual images and storing them on a hard drive in the vehicle, the rosette is connected to laser measurement and global positioning system (GPS) devices that locate the position of the cameras relative to buildings in the immediate vicinity and the wider world. In this way, the 15 eyes of the rosette are always precisely located in the physical world, and the visual signifiers that they create for consumers to explore are always tied to their referent. Google Street View has not only changed the ways in which we navigate from point A to point B or locate a particular business or building. It has also provided artists with a wealth of source material for new imagery that can be captured digitally without recourse to visiting the site of image capture. Examples of such serial works include John Rafman’s 9 Eyes (2012–2013), Mishka Henner’s No Man’s Land (2011) and Eric Tabuchi’s Border Line (2011). In Rafman and Henner’s works, the imagery is dislocated from the geographical coordinates that are integral to the Street View software. In Tabuchi’s study of the post-Schengen

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Google Street View car

Agreement borders of the European continent, the locations of the landscapes captured are ostensibly very precise, albeit removed of the exact coordinates that permit the audience to ‘visit’ them themselves. These European Union borders used to be defined and demarcated with formal structures in the absolute space of the landscape, but today they are intangible, and found elusively in the abstract space of the imagery. The web-based game GeoGuessr presents the player with a familiar virtual representation of a randomly selected place, but again the location and identifying cartographic data has been digitally scrubbed from the image. This gamification of Street View rewards users for their ability to research and identify a place based solely on the partial visual information collected by the Google Street View cameras. There remains a fundamental difference between the three-dimensional imagery offered by photographic agencies and that in Google Street View. The domes used in automotive advertising are framed and composed in such a way as to always be inward looking. The absent subject in these images is the vehicle or product which is to be inserted into a landscape, one that is detached from the Cartesian coordinates recorded by laser measurement and GPS devices. While the underlying photographic technology in a Street View rosette of cameras may be the same, these cameras look outwards and to a world which is precisely measured and located. Although artists and computer game programmers have used Google Street View as the basis for new works, in so doing they intentionally break the relationship between imagery and geographical coordinates for artistic or competitive effect.

COMPOSITES Photographic agencies commercialise their imagery through the sale of licences to use and reproduce their images. As the product of a complex series of digital treatments, the unit of an image is no longer discrete. By way of a specific compositing licence, Maground enables and encourages its clients to take full

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advantage of the range of imagery by selling the rights to use multiple images to compose another. In an example used by Maground to promote the composite licence, elements from four separate images are shown being combined. 18 A smooth tarmac road through grassland forms the lower third of the frame. A suspension bridge across a river or fjord is lifted from beneath the dark clouds and placed over the grassy roads, and a digitally inserted river is placed in front of a brighter and less cloudy blue sky. Reflected horizontally, the bridge now springs from a distant river bank, where a skyline of urban skyscrapers has been inserted. Picking and choosing elements of landscape, architecture and climate, a new composite image and an entirely new automotive landscape has been created. Our coach is pictured

TCO at a glance: Find out more about the cost factors involved when operating a bus or coach http://overall-economy.bus.mercedes-benz.com

Because everyday life never stands still. The Mercedes-Benz Intouro. Town. Country. Performance. Reliable and fuelefficient – just another day in the life of the Intouro. Designed to be the workhorse for dynamic overland transport and non-scheduled services, you can always rely on this highly efficient, multi-talented vehicle. For more information go to www.mercedes-benz.com/buses

Supplier: EvoBus GmbH, Mercedesstraße 127/6, 70327 Stuttgart

Composite image for Mercedes-Benz advertisement 210x297_EVO_Intouro_EN_1_1.indd 1

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11.04.16 14:25

travelling along an imagined and perfected road. We are in a rural idyll, yet close to a city, but still untroubled by traffic.

CONDEMNED TO LIVE Towards the end of the first act of The Quiet Earth, 19 several days after Zac Hobson finds himself utterly alone in the world, the unmaintained electricity grid around Auckland finally collapses, plunging him into darkness. This comes at the depths of Hobson’s own descent into madness, having arranged a diorama of cardboard dictators and world leaders to listen to his emperor’s address from the balcony of the colonial-style mansion he has occupied. As the taped applause and floodlights he has arranged fade, he realises that with his lone survival in an empty planet, ‘I’ve been condemned to live’. Just as the mediated spaces of contemporary automotive advertising reflect our desires, so too they reveal our fears. They use images of buildings and physical surroundings to create environments that invoke conditions of free movement, but also cultural sophistication and authority. This chapter has shown how technological developments have once again led to the production of a new hybridised space in the service of automotive consumerism. Maground’s images and three-dimensional domes are captured on every continent and in every season, voided of signs of human life and prepared for the superimposition of automotive objects of desire. Although automobiles have long been marketed as a consumerist fantasy of desire, new methods of spatial representation mean that the object of fictive desire is often presented behind an additional layer of fiction. Whether it is the city without a rush hour or the mountain pass without black ice, these idealised environments and the economic motives that inspire them reflect the continuing role of the automobile as consumable object of desire. 1

Trailer for The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, 1985).

2

Mitchell, W. J. (1992) The Reconfigured Eye. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 225.

3

McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium Is the Massage. London: Penguin, p. 63.

4

Although the immediacy of photography in social media has been suggested to offer an escape from the heavily mediated production of architectural photography. See Wilkinson, T. (2015) ‘The Polemical Snapshot: Architectural Photography in the Age of Social Media’. Architectural Review [Online], 15 January. www.architectural-review.com/ archive/viewpoints/the-polemical-snapshotarchitectural-photography-in-the-age-ofsocial-media/8674662.article

5

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, p. 148.

6

Ibid.

7

Although the internet-enabled smartphone may come to challenge its throne, especially in Western societies such as the USA where millennials appear not to be subscribing as readily to the dream of car ownership.

8

Berger, p. 144.

9

Ibid.

10 VCCP. (n.d.) ‘Generation easyJet’. [Online]. www.vccp.com/campaign/generation-easyjet/ 11 All brands of beer of the multinational Heineken International Group. 12 Bell. J. (2012) ‘The Empty City Revisited’. Things Magazine [Online], 9 February. www. thingsmagazine.net/the-empty-city-revisited/ 13 Ibid. 14 McLuhan & Fiore, p. 56. 15 Ibid., p. 63. 16 Anguelov, D., Dulong, C. Filip, D., Frueh, C., Lafon, S., Lyon, R., Ogale, A., Vincent, L. & Weaver, J. (2010) ‘Google Street View: Capturing the World at Street Level’. Computer, 43, pp. 32–38. 17 Román, A., Garg, G. & Levoy, M. (n.d.) ‘Interactive Design of Multi-Perspective Images for Visualizing Urban Landscapes’. [Online]. http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/ multi-cross-slits/interactive-multi-X-slits.pdf 18 Maground. (2016) ‘Mercedes-Benz Bus – Create Your Own World’. Maground Blog [Online], 3 August. http://blog.maground. com/?p=2538 19 Geoff Murphy, 1985.

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D E T A I T D N E E F M M O E N TH ACE TAI SP TER N E

SEVEN I’LL SEE YOU IN THE BOARDROOM

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Just as its editors cut and splice scenes for maximum dramatic effect, The Apprentice cuts and folds the cityscape of London to present an image of the city that ensures narrative continuity.

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ver an orchestral rendition of Sergei Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights, we begin with an aerial shot of the Docklands of East London. Flying towards the setting sun, our aerial view crosses the Greenwich Peninsula. With Canary Wharf’s cluster of skyscrapers visible in the middle distance, the high-rise offices of the City of London are discernible beyond, piercing the horizon into a warm pink sky. A jump cut brings us closer to Canary Wharf’s trio of skyscrapers: Citigroup Centre (Pelli Clarke Pelli, 2001), One Canada Square (César Pelli and others, 1991), and 8 Canada Square (Foster and Partners, 2002). We are about to fly over the distinctive pyramid roof of One Canada Square as the camera cuts to an interior. We are looking through the fourth wall of a modern boardroom, glazed on two sides with frosted glass, and smooth concrete on the third. One of the country’s most recognisable businessmen, Alan Sugar, is introducing the first challenge of The Apprentice. This chapter explores how The Apprentice cuts and folds London to create a new mediated space of television entertainment, one that draws upon and seeks to reinforce the city’s reputation as a global economic powerhouse.

YOU’RE HIRED Loughton Town Council bestowed its 2013 Building Design Award on a two-storey office building. 1 Clad in a dull shade of brick, Amshold House had been built on a brownfield site overlooking a mini-roundabout in this suburban Essex town. Easily accessible from Central London via the M11, and bordering the ancient woodland and parkland of Epping Forest, Loughton is a comparatively wealthy suburb, with the average house price nearing half a million pounds. 2 Less than 24km from the

Amshold House, Loughton, Essex

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cluster of skyscrapers that announces the start of The Apprentice, it’s actually here in this leafy suburb that Sugar’s business empire is headquartered. The list of companies based in Amshold House (and their turnover) dwarfs this small commercial building. In addition to Amsair (aviation) and Amscreen (advertising), a string of property investment companies, including Amsprop London, Amsprop Mayfair, Amsprop Oxford, Amsprop Piccadilly and Amsprop USA Holdings, is housed beneath the office’s brown roof tiles. Is it a surprise to discover that Sugar doesn’t run his business empire from the glossy high-rise buildings that are used to decorate The Apprentice? Much is made of Sugar’s entrepreneurial roots in the boiling of raw beetroot in a Clapton greengrocer’s. 3 The businessman, Labour peer and now television personality rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s with his Amstrad-branded range of audio and computer equipment. Amstrad gained a significant share of the growing British personal computer market until the early 1990s, when the globally successful Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac computer platforms began to dominate. Amstrad was sold for £125 million in 2007 to BSkyB, and now produces pay television decoders for Sky TV subscribers. 4 Sugar’s technology businesses always profited from the smart exploitation of profit margins in their constituent components – an approach to business that is mirrored in his property empire.

A SPATIAL INVENTORY OF THE APPRENTICE The nature of television production has created a long-standing disjunction between the interior and exterior, and between that exterior and its supposed location. The set of BBC One’s EastEnders isn’t in East London at all, but at the BBC Elstree studio complex in Hertfordshire. The interiors of the houses that line Albert Square, including the Queen Victoria pub, aren’t behind those empty façades, but located in sound stages a few hundred metres away. Likewise, in 2014, with the redevelopment of the Granada Studios complex in Manchester, Coronation Street moved to nearby Salford, where it was replicated brick by brick on a larger studio lot. The Apprentice is no different but, drawing on the urban folklore and autobiographical highlights of its leading man, it elevates this manipulation to a metropolitan scale. At the start of each series of The Apprentice, the viewer is introduced to the series’ new tranche of apprentices, striding through the city, appearing to have arrived by train or plane at one of the city’s stations or airports. They move individually and with purpose, intercut with interview footage in which candidates offer enthusiastic reasons for their likelihood of success in the competition, before joining together for a trademark group shot walking towards the camera, perhaps across one of London’s landmark bridges. They have all come on a mission to succeed in the world of business, for which the city is celebrated. By the implication of approaching Canary Wharf in an aerial shot at the start of the programme, The Apprentice suggests that these climactic scenes take place in one of the landmark skyscrapers built on the former shipyards repurposed by Margaret Thatcher’s urban enterprise zone. Photographic representations of the buildings and infrastructure of Canary Wharf appear again, this time in the interior of the television set, in framed pictures that hang in the boardroom’s ante-room, a spatial bookend to the drama experienced in the boardroom, as nervous apprentices either await a decision on their fate or celebrate the success of their completed task here. We are

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Viglen Headquarters, Colney Street, St Albans

introduced to London as the general setting and these landmarks of Thatcherite free market corporate entrepreneurialism as the more precise location. As might be expected, the climactic boardroom scenes are filmed not in Canary Wharf, nor at Amshold House, but in a West London television studio. For all but two apprentices (the winner, and the finalist who is neither hired nor fired), there is the final spatial gesture in the post-dismissal walk of shame. Having been fired in the boardroom, and perhaps having muttered a few words of gruff appreciation, the unsuccessful apprentice collects their suitcase and leaves. They pass through two softly closing frosted glass doors and emerge into the chill wind of the night to an awaiting taxi. After striding into the city with purpose and determination, this dismissal is presented as the complete opposite. Day has become night, optimism has become pessimism and, without any acknowledgement, the City of London has become St Albans. The exterior sequence of this exit is filmed out of sequence (at the start of the filming schedule) 32km away at the headquarters of the Viglen Computer company in Hertfordshire. 5 Having been shown to arrive in the moneyed skyscrapers of East London at the start of the programme, and having filmed their boardroom contretemps in the West, the dismissed apprentices leave from the more mundane commercial architecture of London’s northern fringes. Constructed in close proximity to the M25, the headquarters of Viglen Computer is just one of the familiar and largely anonymous big-box industrial units that pepper the fringes of Britain’s towns and cities. Between their arrival and departure, Sugar’s apprentices are set a number of tasks to demonstrate their skills. These take place around London, the UK and occasionally overseas. The tasks often reflect trends in British consumerism, challenging the apprentices to produce a particular food or beauty product which

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has proven popular on the high street in the year leading up to production. Between these weekly excursions, spatial continuity is provided by a selection of spaces used in every episode. The apprentices are provided with accommodation for the duration of their engagement in the competition. These change with each series of the programme, and have included upscale properties in neighbourhoods including Chiswick, Hampstead Heath, Notting Hill, Battersea, Ladbroke Grove, Bedford Square, East Sheen, Bayswater and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The apparent luxury of these large rented properties is diminished only by the single beds and shared bedrooms that the unfamiliar contestants occupy on their arrival. In an interlude between boardroom scenes, the losing team in each episode is sent to discuss the reasons for their failure before facing the final judgement. To counterbalance the modernity and opulence of the boardroom, these scenes are filmed in one of two greasy spoon cafés in Acton or Park Royal, West London. The rudimentary co-sleeping arrangements of the luxury houses and the blue-collar ‘caffs’ of the pre-dismissal scene establish a tension between the exclusivity of the boardroom and what lies beyond it.

FOLLOW THE MONEY These observations about the spatial discontinuities of The Apprentice are, in themselves, worthy of little more than a mention in online databases of television trivia. To fully understand the implications of the cutting and folding of London in this high-profile television programme, a deeper appreciation of the relationship between Sugar’s cultural and economic capital and the built environment of London is needed. Although it was Amstrad’s activities in the field of personal computing that made Alan Sugar a household name and 101st in the 2015 Sunday Times Rich List, the majority of his personal wealth is derived not from consumer electronics, but from the property portfolios of the Amsprop family of holding companies. 6 Whereas The Apprentice sets out to celebrate an entrepreneurial spirit, in reality much of Sugar’s financial success can be attributed to smart property development and investment. Mark Wright, winning contestant of the tenth series of The Apprentice, told a journalist that his new mentor instructed him to ‘make money from property and do business for fun’. 7 The Amsprop companies own ‘ultra-prime’ 8 commercial buildings, principally in Central London. A notable example, completed in 2015, was the 40,000 square foot Sugar Building on Cheapside near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, which after substantial redevelopment was leased at a near record-breaking rate of more than £80 per square foot. 9 From time to time, The Apprentice acknowledges Sugar’s expertise in property: in the 11th series of The Apprentice, for example, Sugar set his candidates the task of selling up-market high-rise apartments overlooking the River Thames for London property developers. However, Sugar’s property wealth is built on much more than the glamour of ‘ultra-prime’ corporate offices. Amstrad’s former headquarters, a non-descript office block in Brentwood, Essex, was vacated with the sale of the company to BSkyB. In 2009, Amsprop agreed a 25-year lease of the building to a budget hotel chain for an undisclosed amount. The two market leaders in the budget hotel segment, Premier Inn and Travelodge, operate around two-thirds of all hotel rooms in the UK. 10 Originally associated with new-build properties on motorway service stations and

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Premier Inn hotel, Brentwood, Essex, converted from the former offices of Amstrad

alongside trunk routes, these chains have grown their portfolios to include more and more urban properties. Some new-build hotels use prefabricated rooms constructed offsite (some from as far away as China) to reduce construction costs. 11 Yet a new architectural sub-genre of budget hotel is emerging. Faced with a collapse in demand for commercial office space following the 2008 crash, property developers have been attracted to the favourable financial returns that repurposed office buildings can generate as low-cost hotels. Obsolete or commercially unattractive office buildings, such as the former Amstrad headquarters, with naturally ventilated floor spans of around 15m, are highly suited to reconfiguration with rows of singleaspect bedrooms either side of a corridor spine. With the sale of Amstrad to BSkyB, Sugar realised the economic value in his business’s intellectual property, and with the lease of the former Amstrad offices to Premier Inn, he leveraged significant value from a drab and otherwise obsolete office building on the suburban fringe of London. Such leases are typically agreed on per-room-per-annum terms, drawing parallels with the spatial valuation of such a building to the operating models of the hotels themselves, which seek to maximise a room’s annual rate of occupancy.

THE ART OF THE DEAL The British version of The Apprentice is one of two dozen licensed versions of a successful television formula. Apprentices have prostrated themselves at boardroom tables from Malaysia to Nigeria. Conceived by a British television producer, Mark Burnett, the original show was sold to the American NBC network in 2004, with New York real-estate developer Donald Trump as protagonist. 12 Loughton is a long way from Manhattan, and Amshold House is a world apart from the building that housed The Apprentice’s original taskmaster. Der Scutt’s 58-floor Trump Tower

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(1983) has featured in every episode of the American programme, and has since become more widely known as the controversial (and expensively protected) New York City residence of the 45th President of the United States of America. 13 Clad with a brown-smoked curtain wall, with a jagged step back from the corner of 5th Avenue and 56th Street, with trees planted on the successive balconies, the tower was co-developed by its eponymous resident as a mixed-use residential and commercial block. Trump’s claims of personal wealth have come under repeated examination, first with the assertions made during The Apprentice, and second with his campaign for the 2016 US presidential election. Trump may not be ‘the largest real estate developer in New York’, 14 but he is clearly an expert in the arts of self-promotion and of monetising a brand. Property developments bearing the Trump name rarely carry any financial investment from Trump himself, instead justifying a steep licensing fee from the developers. During Trump’s presidential campaign, journalists were welcomed to the Trump Tower building where the campaign team was working in ‘bare bones’ offices, with folding tables and unfinished walls decorated with homemade campaign materials sent by supporters. The very same offices used by the campaign team had previously been used by television producers during the 14 seasons of The Apprentice. The boardroom set of the television programme was constructed in vacant office space in Trump Tower, generating lucrative rental income for the Trump Organization from the television show’s producers. In 2016, just as personal donations to Trump’s presidential campaign began to flow in, Trump quadrupled the rent charged to his campaign for using their bare bones office space in the Trump Tower. 15 If there are disconnections between the opulent architectural expressions of Trump and Sugar’s respective property portfolios, they are perhaps mirrored in the difference between the image of London’s economic capital and its more pervasive reality. These differences can be found in the suburban architecture of Amshold’s many companies, whether it is the corrugated steel shed of Viglen Computer or the ordinary brick of Amshold House. While the gold and marble foyer of Trump Tower gave way to a deep mahogany palette in Trump’s ‘boardroom’, the British version of The Apprentice crafts a more contemporary architectural aesthetic with Sugar’s faux-concrete and glass boardroom studio set. Just as its editors cut and splice scenes for maximum dramatic effect, The Apprentice cuts and folds the cityscape of London to present an image of the city that ensures narrative continuity. It plays on a popular familiarity with the architecture of global capitalism, including the Thatcherite free space of London Docklands or the more recent high-rise landmarks such as the Shard or 30 St Mary’s Axe. The nature of television production presents challenges, especially for a complex reality game show largely filmed on location. The cutting and folding of the architecture and urban spaces of the City of London is driven not by a desire to compose a coherent representation of the city, but to portray its actors in a way that heightens their emotional investment in a contest of capitalist ambition. However, the mediated space constructed in The Apprentice differs from that projected by its ebullient protagonist. Sugar’s businesses are privately held, and we can only speculate as to which parts of his property portfolio return the greatest dividends. Yet his accumulated wealth comes not from the entrepreneurial activity of buying and selling consumer goods or developing electronic equipment, but from the savvy investment and development of property. From consumer electronics to budget hotels, Sugar’s business empire is built on an appreciation of the difference

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between what the component parts of something cost and what the market will pay for them. So-called ‘ultra-prime’ commercial properties in prominent Central London locations are only one aspect of this line of business. In redeveloping the former Amstrad headquarters in Brentwood for lease as a budget hotel, Sugar has capitalised on the increasing disparity in use value and economic value of London’s architecture. There isn’t much demand for a medium-sized office block in this part of London’s commuter belt, but there is buoyant year-round demand for cheap hotel rooms. Television producers may create a mediated space of glossy steel, glass and concrete in the presentation of The Apprentice, but the reality of its UK protagonist’s wealth is grounded in the economic value of far more mundane buildings.

1

Hardy, C. (2013) ‘Alan Sugar’s Company Amshold and Housing Firm Redrow Homes Eastern Awarded for Architecture by Loughton Town Council’. Waltham Forest Guardian [Online], 21 March. www.guardian-series. co.uk/news/10305691.display/

2

Rightmove (2016) ‘House Prices in Loughton, Essex’. Rightmove [Online] www.rightmove. co.uk/house-prices/Loughton.html

3

Sugar, A. (2010) What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography. Macmillan: London, p. 20.

4

BBC News. (2007) ‘BSkyB Agrees £125m Amstrad Deal’, BBC News [Online], 31 July. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6923517. stm

5

Acquired by Amstrad in 1994, Alan Sugar owned the Viglen Computer company until 2009, when he handed it to his business associate and Apprentice co-star Claude Littner. Sugar remains a major shareholder. Prior to the fourth series of the programme, and the sale of Amstrad to BSkyB, this departure sequence was filmed outside the offices of Amstrad in Brentwood, Essex. See: Lane, M. (2009) ‘You’re Tired’. Property Week [Online], 16 January. https://www. propertyweek.com/news/youre-tired/3131391. article

6

Martin, W. (2015) ‘Most of Alan Sugar’s Immense Wealth Doesn’t Come from his Technology Ventures’. Business Insider [Online], 15 October. http://uk.businessinsider. com/alan-sugars-property-empire-is-why-hesso-wealthy-2015-10

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Anderson, E. (2015) ‘Lord Sugar Tells His Apprentice to Invest in Property if He Wants to be Wealthy in Business’. The Telegraph [Online], 14 October. www.telegraph.co.uk/ finance/enterprise/11929491/Lord-Sugar-tellshis-Apprentice-to-invest-in-property-if-hewants-to-be-wealthy-in-business.html

8

Amsprop. (2015) Amsprop homepage [Online]. http://www.amsprop.com/

9

Bourke, J. (2015) ‘Lord Sugar Scores Record City Rent at Sugar Building’. Evening Standard [Online], 3 August. www.standard.co.uk/ business/business-news/lord-sugar-scores-

record-city-rent-at-sugar-building-10435428. html 10 Ruetz, D. & Marvel, M. (2011) ‘Budget Hotels: Low Cost Concepts in the U.S., Europe and Asia: What Lies Ahead for the Industry?’ in R. Conrady & M. Buck (eds), Trends and Issues in Global Tourism 2011. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 99–124. 11 Smith, R. E. (2011) Prefab Architecture: A Guide to Modular Design and Construction. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons; Smith, R. E. (2009) ‘History of Prefabrication: A Cultural Survey’. Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Construction History, Cottbus. [Online], May. www.bma.arch.unige.it/PDF/ CONSTRUCTION_HISTORY_2009/VOL3/ SMITH-Ryan_VW_Paper_layouted.pdf 12 Grynbaum, M. M. & Parker, A. (2016) ‘Donald Trump the Political Showman, Born on “The Apprentice”’. New York Times [Online], 16 July. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/business/ media/donald-trump-apprentice.html 13 The top floor of the tower is number 68, to give the impression of an additional ten storeys in listings. 14 Bagli, C. V. (2004) ‘Due Diligence on the Donald’. New York Times [Online], 25 January. www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/arts/televisiondue-diligence-on-the-donald.html 15 Halperin, M. and Heilemann, J. (2016) ‘Tour Donald Trump’s Bare-Bones Campaign Headquarters’. Bloomberg Politics [Online], 26 August. www.bloomberg.com/politics/ videos/2015-08-26/tour-donald-trump-sbare-bones-campaign-headquarters; Date, S. V. (2016) ‘Donald Trump Jacked Up His Campaign’s Trump Tower Rent Once Somebody Else Was Paying It’. Huffington Post [Online], 22 August. www.huffingtonpost.com/ entry/trump-campaign-rent_us_57bba424e 4b03d51368a82b9?o9ix30du10s5rk9

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EIGHT OLYMPIC LEGACIES

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Beneath the image of architectural sophistication – literally beneath it – was a chaotic and unresolved maelstrom binding politics, economics, society and architecture.

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uly 2012. As the recognisable theme music of the BBC television news reaches its crescendo and fades, the viewers are introduced to journalist and newsreader Sophie Raworth. The view over her shoulder is not of the interior of BBC Broadcasting House, but a panorama of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, including its stadia and some of its sporting venues. For the duration of the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, the BBC broadcast from temporary television studios that looked down from on high onto the site of the 2012 Summer Olympics. Audiences around the world were afforded views of the Olympic Park that not even ticket holders could enjoy. Out of sight of these lofty television cameras – and quite literally beneath them – were the traces of a dramatic shift in the provision of London’s housing, commerce and entertainment. To capture this breathtaking view for newscasts, interviews and introductions to sporting events, the BBC and Al Jazeera each built their own suites of television studios on top of two tower blocks in the Carpenters Estate in Stratford, E15. Lund Point and Dennison Point are two of a trio of 21-storey tower blocks anchoring the Carpenters Estate, a 1960s-era social housing development made up of more than 700 apartments and maisonettes. The studios were controversial, earning Newham Borough Council £315,000 from the BBC for space at the top of Lund Point, and £144,000 from Al Jazeera for space at the top of Dennison Point. The previous chapter examined the mediated space of London in The Apprentice and uncovered some of the disparities between the ways in which the city is presented as a global financial capital and the ways in which a property magnate has built his wealth. This chapter considers the disparity between the economic value and use value of some of the buildings around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and how television producers worked to present the spectacle of the London Olympics to a global audience. Looking down on E20 as part of a package for broadcast on television and online, Lucy Hockings, a BBC World newsreader and journalist, gave viewers

Interior of BBC Olympics studio, London

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a tour of the BBC’s temporary studios during the Olympics. Reminiscent of the urban housing projects of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, the top floor of the two towers had once been accessible to residents. Adjacent to an open-air deck was a nursery for children, housed under a distinctive butterfly roof. Hockings began in the temporary production facilities that had been installed in the old nursery. In one room, racks of servers whirred away, cooled by fans and laced together by cables and wires. In another, the single-glazed windows had been blacked out to create lightproof production galleries in which editors and producers spliced broadcasts together. Stepping out from the rooftop pavilion, Hockings guided a camera crew up a flight of stairs constructed from scaffolding, up onto a temporary structure. On the open part of the roof adjacent to the former nursery, a specialist company had built a temporary structure that was elevated above the concrete parapet of the rooftop. Here, above the height of the tower block’s own elevators, the studios were connected directly to ground level by a hoist lift attached to one side of the tower. Athletes and para-athletes of all abilities could bypass the social housing below and have level (if vertiginous) access to the studios. Hockings led her camera crew out over the edge of the building gates of the hoist lift to demonstrate the view over East London, first towards the North Greenwich Arena and then towards the distant skyscrapers of the City of London. 1 Overlooking the Olympic Park to the north-west, two separate studios had been built to allow for simultaneous broadcasts on domestic and international BBC channels. Elevated several metres above the original roof level, and above the balustrade of the building, floor-to-ceiling glazing presented an unobstructed view of the skyline of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The BBC and Al Jazeera were able to demonstrate a spatial supremacy over other broadcasters, some of which had to make do with the bedrooms and living rooms in former council flats on lower floors. Others occupied the media village within the Olympic Park itself,

Temporary TV studios on top of Dennison Point (rear right) and Lund Point (front right), London

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and some of these constructed similar temporary studios on a multi-storey car park. With this most prominent of outlooks, set against the Olympic skyline, the BBC was able to offer impressive wide shots of the entire panorama and also the interior of the studio itself. Just as New Broadcasting House was shown as the site of production in television newscasts, so this privileged rooftop panorama was shown as the site of journalistic production during the Olympics. With only an intangible hairline between window panes, BBC television viewers were treated to a wide panorama of the Olympic Stadium, the Orbit and the Aquatics Centre. Through the television coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympics, including the Opening Ceremony which intercut close shots of performers with wide-angle views of the stadium and East London, these broadcasts supported the international recognition of these sporting venues far beyond the Olympic Park. They also confirmed the televisual supremacy of the two broadcasters who had been able to secure these viewpoints.

THE ICON BEHIND The most prominent architectural landmark in the background of the BBC’s Olympic newscasts was the Orbit, a 114m viewing tower designed by the sculptor Anish Kapoor, engineer Cecil Balmond and architects Ushida Findlay. Its design was the outright winner of a competition to build a specifically ‘iconic’ structure at the heart of the Olympic Park. The very existence of the Orbit was determined out of political necessity. Commissioned by Olympic Minister Tessa Jowell and then Mayor of London Boris Johnson, the competition was held because of a concern among senior politicians that the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park emerging from the reclaimed industrial land of East London would not be sufficiently iconic for a Summer Olympics. At the centre of the park was Populous’s Olympic Stadium, widely praised for not only its low cost, but also its future adaptability. 2 The Olympic Velodrome (by Hopkins Architects), meanwhile, was recognised for its structural efficiency. Neither building, however, could match the architectural showmanship of the venues constructed for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. Confronted with an altogether more modest Olympic Park, Jowell and Johnson soon recognised that the venues were in danger of lacking aesthetic and architectural punch. Oliver Wainwright describes the Orbit as ‘a bizarre kind of contorted knot of steel entrails, which serves no function whatsoever. You can go up it, not even have a very good view from the top of it because there’s so much steelwork blocking the panorama’. 3 In a way, the Orbit became an appropriate architectural symbol of London’s approach to the Olympics, existing only because of the implicit fear that without it there would be nothing sufficiently iconic about the Olympic Park. Following a chance encounter in the cloakroom (or, as some have attributed it, the gentlemen’s lavatory) between Boris Johnson and Lakshmi Mittal – Chairman of ArcelorMittal, one of the largest steelmaking companies in the world – at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the competition was framed in terms of a creative and conspicuous use of steel. 4 Expected to turn a profit of £1.2 million, the ArcelorMittal Orbit lost as much as £10,000 a week in the years after the Olympics. 5 In response, a variety of money-making attractions have been added to the tower, including an enclosed helter-skelter slide designed by the artist Carsten Höller (£15 fee, including general admission) and the opportunity to abseil 80m from the viewing platform (£85 fee). 6

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GIANT EVILS In the first hour of the 2012 Olympics’ Opening Ceremony, a segment celebrated the contribution to British society of the National Health Service (NHS). A total of 600 NHS staff and 1,200 volunteers performed in a dance routine that featured more than 300 hospital beds, some of which disguised trampolines. The innovation and social contribution of Britain’s post-war welfare state was presented to some controversy in the right-wing British press. Seventy years prior to the lighting of London’s Olympic flame, the Beveridge Report of 1942 created the framework of what would become known as the UK’s modern welfare state, addressing the five ‘Giant Evils’ of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. The introduction of a flat-rate national insurance scheme was used to fund public healthcare, unemployment benefits and retirement benefits. As part of the great reconstruction of the UK after the war, hundreds of thousands of council homes were built up and down the country. By the end of the 1970s, and during the first Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, the tide was beginning to turn against the principles of council housing. In London, these policies had dramatic effect: whereas fewer than 24 per cent of Londoners live in social housing today, almost 43 per cent did in 1981. In some areas it was even higher: 65 per cent in Southwark, 82 per cent in Tower Hamlets. The Thatcherite aspiration of enabling everyone to own their own home has come, however, at the expense of the country’s social housing stock. A doctrine of liberalisation and deregulation encouraged citizens to become speculators of property, just as they were being encouraged to become speculators of newly privatised national industries and utilities. First, with the Right to Buy, and more recently with Help to Buy, social housing tenants are offered generous subsidies to buy their own homes, thereby removing more housing from an already oversubscribed stock. From the outset of London’s bid to host the Olympics, housing had been stipulated as part of the Olympic Legacy. In addition to the stadia, a large Athletes’ Village was built to house the international teams competing in the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics. That housing kick-started other large developments in the years following the Olympics. Some 10,000 homes were envisaged as part of the event’s legacy, 3,000 of which would come from the Athletes’ Village. Built at a cost to the taxpayer of around £1 billion, the village was sold in 2011 before it was completed to the investment vehicle of the Royal Family of Qatar for £557 million. Defending the sale, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt argued that the reduced selling price reflected not, as critics suggested, a massive loss to the public purse, but the reality of the public contribution to the new roads and infrastructure required to build the apartment complexes. In spite of representing a loss of £275 million to the taxpayer, Hunt insisted the sale nonetheless represented ‘a great return and shows how we are securing a legacy from London’s Games’. 7 The definition of ‘legacy’ had proven slippery since its first mention, and with this sale the impossibility of measuring legacy was again highlighted, especially within the short tenure of any one government minister. By the time the Olympic Flame had travelled to Rio de Janeiro four years later, it was clear that the Olympic Legacy’s contribution to London’s housing would not meet the high expectations placed on it. The East Village is a large development of apartment blocks built as the Athletes’ Village, and subsequently converted into private homes after the Olympics and Paralympics. Built to a high standard, and continuing to receive modest architectural recognition, just under half of the housing

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units in this mixed-tenure development are defined as ‘affordable’ housing according to local incomes. The other half of the development is a mix of shared-ownership homes and apartments rented at rates closer to the London market average. In 2010, the Olympic Development Authority promised at least 35 per cent of the housing built in the Olympic Park would be made available as affordable housing. This figure was revised down to a minimum of 20 per cent before the Olympics, on the justification of rising land values and growing debt. 8 At the heart of these changing attitudes towards the provision of affordable housing has been the definition of what is affordable, from a dynamic calculation of what an average local income could afford to a fixed percentile of market rates. Various promises of experimental forms of tenure, co-housing, self-build, and land given over to community groups have all been abandoned, in no small part because the Olympic Legacy Company carries a debt of some £12 billion to the Treasury. In the stark light of the sale of the Olympic Village to overseas interests, the need for affordable housing in London has never been greater. In a report published in March 2016, the London Housing Commission estimated that the capital needed to build 50,000 new homes a year before the end of the decade to satisfy demand, and even more if rising house prices were ever to be quelled. 9 Waiting lists for social housing in London are longer than ever. And yet, all across London, houses and apartments in private and social developments are standing empty. Despite lengthy waiting lists, councils such as Newham are actively removing residents from their own estates. By the start of the 2012 Summer Olympics, most of the 700 homes on the Carpenters Estate had been decanted of their residents. To this day, the estate is mostly empty, increasingly isolated among a sea of private residential developments. Over several years preceding the Olympics, various plans to redevelop the Carpenters Estate were proposed by Newham Borough Council and vetoed by residents. In 2013, University College London (UCL) withdrew from lengthy negotiations to acquire and redevelop the Estate to form a new East London campus. In research carried out by students at UCL’s own Development Planning Unit, years of technocratic and expert-driven regeneration projects had repeatedly failed to undertake meaningful engagement with residents. 10 In November 2015, Newham Council’s cabinet reasserted its intention to find a partner with which to redevelop the estate, promising ‘thousands of new homes and jobs’. 11 As council homes on the Carpenters Estate were being boarded up, a group of single mothers living in the Focus E15 Foyer discovered that due to unrelated funding cuts from central government, they too would soon be made homeless. The foyer, which was the largest of its kind in Europe, provided a home for single parents, and also a venue for training, education and support. As a result of cuts in funding from central government, the foyer closed in 2012. Every Saturday afternoon since 2013, the Focus E15 campaign group have been out on the streets of London. Most weekends, they can be found operating a stall on Stratford Broadway, facing a large branch of the discount department store Wilko. The campaigners have been asked to move on, and on at least one occasion their stall has been confiscated (or, according to the urban folklore, arrested) by the Metropolitan Police. Paul Watt, who has studied the Focus E15 campaign extensively, interviewed some of the women who were made homeless, and found them traumatised. 12 Their eviction came at the same time that Newham Borough Council adjusted the mechanism by which it prioritised those waiting for social housing. From October 2012, Newham began to prioritise those in paid employment or members of the

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armed forces. Being neither in employment or in the military, the young women and their children were dramatically deprioritised, just as the stock of social housing was being reduced, private rents were rising and the Focus E15 Foyer was closing. They faced a perfect storm. With both opportunities and eligibility for housing in the borough so limited, many of the Focus E15 mothers were offered accommodation not just outside the borough, but outside the City of London, in cities as far afield as Hastings, Birmingham and Manchester. Watt describes what the woman did next in terms of their sociological imagination, a concept conceived by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills. 13 Mills wrote of how individuals could become practical sociologists by taking their personal troubles and converting them into public issues. A person unemployed in a city of 20 per cent unemployment is engaging with personal problems, but also with public problems. Watt argues that the mothers reframed their personal problems – eviction, homelessness and their subsequent deprivation – as public issues. In so doing, they became practical sociologists. By challenging the framing of their problems as personalised, they collectivised and demonstrated how the issues reflected a wide range of problems which much of London is now facing. 14

ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS In the lifetime of the Carpenters Estate, London (and by extension the rest of the nation) has struggled to address its unfolding housing crisis. Now, more than ever, London needs more homes. From the rooftop of the Carpenters Estate’s three tower blocks, dozens of new housing schemes can be seen, springing up on brownfield sites across East London. In most of them, planning regulations have mandated a certain number of units of affordable housing. However, whereas once it was the responsibility of local authorities to provide the bulk of affordable housing, now it is the responsibility of the market to provide it. In shifting that responsibility, the definition of affordable housing has shifted from what people can reasonably afford to what the market will bear. At the same time, commercial property developers have been using canny interpretations of planning permissions to minimise their obligations to provide even these limited numbers of affordable housing units. 15 Initiatives elsewhere in London, such as the St Clement’s Community Land Trust in Mile End, offer some alternatives to the private conception of affordable housing in terms relative to market rates. 16 Community Land Trusts (CLTs) define the rental value of affordable housing according to the average local income, so that the housing there remains affordable in perpetuity. The London Legacy Development Corporation (formerly the Olympic Park Legacy Company) has passed the responsibility of defining affordable housing to the commercial developers, who have been able to use their own viability assessments to demonstrate that – even in the superheated London property market and surrounded by some of the poorest boroughs in the capital – it isn’t economically viable for them to build a housing development with more than the minimum number of affordable units. Throughout the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, host and visiting broadcasters showed London to the world. From their rooftop vantage points, the cameras of various television networks showed off such architectural landmarks as the Olympic Stadium and the late Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre. The image of the Olympics was framed from cameras on top of one of London’s partially decanted

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council estates. Beneath the image of architectural sophistication – literally beneath it – was a chaotic and unresolved maelstrom binding politics, economics, society and architecture. The location of the Olympic Games served to accelerate the rampant inflation of property values throughout neighbouring communities, including the Carpenters Estate. By planting themselves atop the forcibly emptied Lund Point and Dennison Point, the BBC and Al Jazeera found themselves complicit in the processes of economic gentrification and social cleansing. This reality of a shifting political and social attitude towards council housing, during one of the greatest housing crises ever seen in the UK, is more pervasive than the architectural image of the Olympic Games.

1

The North Greenwich Arena was the temporary name for London’s O2, formerly the Millennium Dome. Excluded from the approved list of Olympic sponsors, the telecoms company that had secured naming rights to the Dome had to temporarily surrender its privileged title.

2

After two protracted bidding processes, the stadium’s anchor tenant is West Ham United Football Club. A variety of other sports, including cricket, rugby and athletics, have been accommodated in the years after the Olympics.

3

Wainwright, O. (2016) Personal communication.

4

Brown, M. (2010) ‘Climb This: Anish Kapoor’s Massive Artwork that Will Tower Over London’. The Guardian [Online], 31 March. www. theguardian.com/uk/2010/mar/31/anishkapoor-artwork-tower-london

10 Frediani, A. A., Butcher, S. & Watt, P. (2013) ‘Regeneration and Well-being in East London: Stories from Carpenters Estate’. MSc Social Development Practice Student Report. 11 Newham Council. (2015) ‘Newham Council Reaffirms Commitment to Redevelop Carpenters Estate’. Newham Council News [Online], 20 November. www.newham.gov. uk/Pages/News/Newham-Council-reaffirmscommitment-to-redevelop-Carpenters-Estate. aspx 12 Watt, P. (2016) ‘A Nomadic War Machine in the Metropolis: En/countering London’s 21stcentury Housing Crisis with Focus E15’. City, 20(2), pp. 297–320. 13 Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 14 Watt, op cit.

5

Crerar, P. (2015) ‘ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower “Losing £10,000 Each Week”’. Evening Standard [Online], 20 October. www.standard. co.uk/news/london/orbit-tower-losing-10000each-week-a3094971.html

15 Bernstock, P. & Poynter, G. (2012) ‘London 2012: Affordable Housing Sidelined in Olympic Regeneration’. The Guardian [Online], 27 July. www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2012/ jul/27/affordable-housing-sidelined-olympicregeneration

6

This book has been written in great anticipation of Douglas Murphy’s (2017) Nincompoopolis: The Follies of Boris Johnson (London: Repeater Books), which promises to go into more detail about the genesis of the Orbit and other follies commissioned using public money by the former Mayor.

16 Howard, E. (2014) ‘Could Community Land Trusts Offer a Solution to the UK’s Housing Crisis?’ The Guardian [Online], 25 June. www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/25/ community-land-trusts-uk-housing-crisis-eastlondon-mile-end

7

Kollewe, J. (2011). ‘Olympic Village Snapped up by Qatari Ruling Family for £557m’. The Guardian [Online], 12 August. www. theguardian.com/sport/2011/aug/12/olympicvillage-qatari-ruling-family

8

Bernstock, P. (2016) ‘London Olympics Has Brought Regeneration, but at a Price Locals Can’t Afford’. The Guardian [Online], 30 August. www.theguardian.com/society/2016/ aug/30/london-olympic-regeneration-butprice-locals-cant-pay

9

London Housing Commission. (2016) Building a New Deal for London: Final Report of the London Housing Commission. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. www. ippr.org/publications/building-a-new-deal-forlondon

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CONCLUSION When Ravi Baichwal screamed at the sound of a car crashing into the street-side television studio of Chicago’s ABC7 News in 2007, the normally resilient seal around the mediated space of television production was broken, and the news began (enthusiastically) to report on itself. This book is inspired not by the silver Mazda that drove through the floor-to-ceiling glass window of the studio, but rather by what happened next: the human inquisitiveness that brought a crowd together outside in sub-zero temperatures to gawp and look behind the curtain at how these spaces are made. The public realm of the street was no longer a soundproofed backdrop demonstrating currency and proximity, and the studio was no longer a hermetically sealed tourist attraction. It is an inherent characteristic of any power structure to mask the mechanism by which it is reproduced. In The Architecture of Neoliberalism, Douglas Spencer defends the necessity of theory ‘with all its unproductive negativity and its hateful criticality’ to resist the over-powering ideology of neoliberalism, one that presents itself as both self-evident and natural. 1 This book has attempted to look at how mediated space reveals important truths about the mechanisms of its production. Any critical discussion of the production of space inevitably calls for reference to the production of competing value systems. Karl Marx distinguishes between concrete labour – that which directly generates a use value – and abstract labour – that which indirectly produces an exchange value. Henri Lefebvre applied Marx’s conception of labour to the production of space, writing that when ‘labour fell prey to abstraction, whence abstract social labour – and abstract space’. 2 Foreseeing the spatial implications of the postmodern era, Lefebvre argued that ‘we are thus confronted by an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next: geographical, economic, demographic, sociological, ecological, political, commercial, national, continental, global’. 3 These abstractions – including mediated space – are always one or more steps removed from the concrete space in which they are created. Understanding how and why this happens is critical. This book has considered the characteristics of this mediated space in three distinct fields: journalism, advertising and prime-time entertainment. In these three genres of screen-based media, the allusion to established spatial codes is always part of a mechanism that demonstrates and reproduces the authority of the producer. We enter and exit the television newsroom in a way that flatters the human and economic resource of a television station. We are shown the car not only as a vehicle of liberty and independence, but also as a vehicle of the patriotic values associated with a national image. We experience the city not as a site of democratic and social agency, but as the venue for capitalist competition and the accumulation of wealth. The codes of mediated space are well established, largely because they depend on recognition by the widest possible audience. Yet the way people consume broadcast media is changing. As internet-connected devices become more portable, we are less and less likely to consume media in traditional ways. Video journalism is no longer the preserve of the television networks, with newspapers publishing embedded video reports, and entirely new producers, such as Vice, publishing full-length documentaries online and on television. A new mediated

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space of broadcasting is being created, and new audiences are engaging with it in different ways. Television newsrooms have to be designed for an hour of consumption on high-definition widescreen televisions, but also for 90-second clips viewed on pocket-sized devices. In 2011, Chrysler’s marketing team reached half the population of the USA with a television advertisement in the third quarter of the Super Bowl, but they also took advantage of word of mouth and online video to help the Imported from Detroit campaign reach even more potential consumers in the days afterwards. Broadcasters are adapting as well. BBC iPlayer is one of many platforms developed by established producers to enable users to consume media in different ways, at different times and on different devices. New producers, like Netflix and Amazon, have leapfrogged the traditional linear broadcast media of cinema and television and their revenue models to bring content directly to paying subscribers, whether they’re watching on an internet-connected television at home or a smartphone on the bus. Likewise, the expanded television audience of reality game shows such as The Apprentice is no longer limited to those who sit down to watch the entirety of a television broadcast at a time determined by the network, with highlight clips rapidly shared on social media. Although the television show is constructed around familiar patterns and repeated sequences, viewers can choose to leap directly to a dénouement, stepping into the millionaire’s boardroom without needing to follow the apprentices’ weekly journey to the same point. As traditional broadcasters adapt to the changing landscapes of media production and consumption, they continue to refer back to established architectural and spatial codes, ones which are widely recognised by consumers. This book has shown how broadcasters are no longer limited by their concrete spatial resources in the creation of a commonly understood mediated space of journalistic authority. Chroma-key studios that can be constructed within the limited headroom of a typical office can create spaces with depth and breadth that far exceed the concrete dimensions of the studio. How does mediated space represent or manipulate the role of architecture and cities as inheritors of cultural meaning? Buildings such as New Broadcasting House and interiors such as those designed for Al Jazeera’s London studios are designed to demonstrate journalistic integrity and authority. Advertising campaigns – for example, those produced for Chrysler and LV – play on commonly held personal emotions and societal beliefs. Architecture is not the only language for critiques of such attempts: Shana Redmond has analysed Chrysler’s Imported from Detroit campaign with a concern for the cultural and musical history of Detroit, accusing the auto maker of over-writing the African-American history of the city with an alternative fictional narrative. 4 The complete erasure or redaction of any identifying features in the mediated space of Cape Town in advertisements for the northern hemisphere, meanwhile, represents a new form of postcolonial urban relations. Back in London, the cultural inheritance of Britain’s social housing stock is being ever diminished by political and economic initiatives, including the ‘Olympic Legacy’, which serves to incentivise the accumulation of wealth through property. Michel Foucault wrote that ‘we are in the age of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered. A period in which, in my view, the world is putting itself to the test, not so much as a great way of life destined to grow in time but as a net that links points together and creates its own muddle’. 5 This book is less concerned with proposing speculative solutions to Foucault’s digital muddle, and more with unpacking the ways in which broadcasters

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and consumers co-produce a new kind of space through media such as network television. Through an appreciation and critique of these responses, we can begin to build our collective ability to understand and unpick these mechanisms. We have seen how mediated space is created alongside and over that which we perceive in concrete terms. New technologies can conspire with architectural design in the creation of a hybrid of Lefebvrian abstract and absolute space, one that maintains an illusion of human activity and physical presence even after technology has rendered it superfluous. The values of mediated space are not exclusively architectural, but the expanded discipline of architecture has a moral and ethical duty to engage proactively with these issues, especially where they can be shown to have a direct relationship to issues of societal welfare, such as employment or housing. This book is not a territorial gesture, defending the architectural profession against the erosion of its authority, nor is it an opportunity to stake territory by claiming new terminology. It is, instead, a response to the acts of spatial mediation and co-production that implicitly determine how an environment can imply journalistic integrity, how the social, racial and economic histories of a city can be manipulated in order to sell a product, and how the status quo of global capitalism can be reinforced by prime-time television entertainment. As discussed in the opening pages of this book, space is already always abstracted in some sense or another. As some of the examples in this book have demonstrated, there are some instances where that abstraction is becoming more significant. As a widely understood referent for cultural and economic capital, the mediated space of screen-based media is being widely used to assert and reinforce the authority and cultural capital of diverse producers. The discipline of architecture has largely been excluded from the production of this mediated space, one which has been more effectively served by other specialist fields, but it remains the best placed discipline from which to name and critique the spatial codes and mechanisms of reproduction that these mediated spaces employ. This mediated space is all around us. We see it every day and it employs cultural codes that are familiar to all of us. It is deserving of an accessible critique, not one that mirrors the obfuscation of its origins or uses needlessly opaque academic language: one that encourages all of us to become critically engaged with our mediated space.

1

Spencer, D. (2016) The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture became an Instrument of Control and Compliance. London: Bloomsbury, p. 163.

2

Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 49.

3

Ibid., p. 8.

4

Redmond, S. L. (2013) ‘Detroit’s Idle: The Domestic Sounds of Labour’s Foreign Landscape’. Race & Class, 55, pp. 60–77.

5

Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ in N. Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, p. 350.

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INDEX Note: page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abstract space 13, 18 advertising 75–6 (see also automobile advertising; television commercials) Al Jazeera 43–8 Olympics studio 93, 94 The Apprentice 85, 86–91 architectural codes in advertising 58–9, 75 in The Apprentice 90 ruin-porn 53–4 in television news 13–14, 18, 32–3, 46–7 Atlanta, Georgia 40–1, 42 Olympics, 1996 40 authenticity 60–1, 68, 71, 77, 86 automobile advertising 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 Barthes, Roland 3, 65 BBC Broadcasting House 17–18 BBC New Broadcasting House 13, 15, 18–25, 32, 33, 37, 40 BBC News 13, 15, 33 BBC Olympics studio 93–5 Berger, John 75, 76 broadcast and narrowcast codes 5 Broadcasting House 17–18 Cable News Network (CNN) 32, 40, 41–3, 47–8 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) 67 Cape Town 67–71, 75 capitalist economy 13, 62, 70, 71, 75 car culture 65, 70 Channel 5 News 34 chroma-key studios 14–15, 28, 29, 35–6 Chrysler 53, 57–62

colour branding 18, 34 composite images 79–80 co-production of meaning 2, 3

Olympics, London, 2012 92–6 The One Show 21–3 The Orbit (sculpture) 95

Detroit 53–62, 75 digital alteration 60, 74, 77 digital imaging 74, 75, 76–80

photographic agencies 76–8, 79

financial services 66 Foucault, Michel 5, 101

remote production 31 representations of space 70

global capitalism 62, 70, 71 global local 27–38 Global Television Network 28–37, 45 Good Morning Britain 16–17 Google Street View 78–9

satellite television news 43–5 Saussure, Ferdinand de 3 signification 3–4 social housing 96–9 social media 46–7 socially constructed space 70 South Africa 67–71, 75 spaces of representation 70 spatial codes 32–5, 42–5 (see also architectural codes) spatial practices 70 suburbanisation 40, 55–6 Sugar, Alan 85, 86, 88, 90 Super Bowl 53, 57

housing crisis 96–9 housing segregation 55–6 image databases 76–80 Imported from Detroit 53, 57–62, 101 ITN Headquarters 13–15 ITV News 14–15, 16 Lefebvre, Henri 13, 70–1, 100 Liverpool Victoria 66, 67, 70, 71 London housing crisis 96–9 London Olympics, 2012 92–6 Maground 76–8, 79–80 McLuhan, Marshall 4, 74, 77 motor industry 55, 56–7, 60–2, 65–6, 68–9, 70 New Broadcasting House 13, 15, 18–25, 32, 33, 37, 40 Olympic Legacy 96 Olympics, Atlanta, 1996 40

The Quiet Earth 74, 81

television commercials 67 Chrysler 53, 57–62 Liverpool Victoria 65, 67, 70, 71 South African production 67–8 television news 11–26, 28–37 Trump, Donald 89–90 video technology 2 virtual environments 14–15, 16–17, 29, 30, 33 W1A 18, 20, 24 Ways of Seeing 76 ‘white flight’ 40, 56

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IMAGE CREDITS Page 1 Amanda Monfrooe Page 14 James Benedict Brown Page 15 Dominic Harris / Alamy Stock Photo Page 16 Picture courtesy of ITV Page 17 James Benedict Brown Page 19 (top & bottom) MJP Architects Page 22 (top & bottom) James Benedict Brown Page 28 James Benedict Brown Page 29 James Benedict Brown Page 34 Roger Hutchings / Alamy Stock Photo Page 36 James Benedict Brown Page 41 Andriy Kravchenko / Alamy Stock Photo Page 42 Editorial / Alamy Stock Photo Page 45 VIEW Pictures Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo Page 46 Scenic design by Jack Morton Worldwide, in collaboration with AJMN Creative Page 57 Courtesy Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, photo: Wieden+Kennedy

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Page 58 Courtesy Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, photo: Wieden+Kennedy Page 60 Courtesy Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, photo: Wieden+Kennedy Page 65 Courtesy LV.com Page 67 Courtesy LV.com Page 69 Magic Car Pics Page 75 Adrian Bradshaw/EPA/REX/Shutterstock Page 79 Andrew Lloyd / Alamy Stock Photo Page 80 courtesy Mercedes-Benz Omnibus Page 85 James Benedict Brown Page 87 James Benedict Brown Page 89 James Benedict Brown Page 93 Nick Garrod Page 94 Jeff Gilbert / Alamy Stock Photo