Architectures of Global Communication
Subtitle: Psychoacoustics, Acoustic Space, and the Total Environment, 1941-1970
Contributors: Picon, Antoine; Hays, K. Michael; Galison, Peter; Mills, Mara
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Description: This dissertation examines architectural engagements with communication technologies, within the framework of mid-twentieth-century efforts to institute a global community and engineer media democracies. I interrogate the sound modernities that architects constructed in collaboration with engineers, officials, and acousticians, and I demonstrate the architectural strategies that informed them: the theater, the concert hall, the cinema. These interiors, I argue, reconfigured the international community as a networked audience, and the institutions of world organization as the main stages of international diplomacy.
Notes: Keywords: acoustics, architecture, communication, global village, multimedia, sound.

Thesis Ph.D. Harvard University 2014