Mediated Space

James Brown

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000699142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

As the social media revolution embeds itself in our daily lives, and as those who once consumed media become producers, established broadcast media producers are witnessing the dissolution of trust in their established authority. Mediated Space critiques contemporary intersections of Architecture and broadcast media that exploit spaces and places that are real, imagined or hybrids of the two in order to re-establish and strengthen the power of traditional capitalist mechanisms of production and consumption. Examining eight spatial constructions in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Mediated Space embarks on a global exploration of how architecture, spatial design and technology conspire in the service of global capitalism. In three thematic parts that focus on the automotive space of the city, the journalistic space of the news room and the mediated skyline of the city, Mediated Space makes an architectural critique of spaces that are rarely designed by architects but that are experienced every day by millions of people.

1
The Mediated Space of Broadcast News

One
W1A

“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.”

In 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 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.

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

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 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).

Interior of ITN Headquarters, London

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 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

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

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 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

Exterior of BBC Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London

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 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 long-divided 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 consider...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1 THE MEDIATED SPACE OF BROADCAST NEWS
• PART 2 THE MEDIATED SPACE OF ADVERTISING
• PART 3 THE MEDIATED SPACE OF ENTERTAINMENT
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• IMAGE CREDITS