In the nineteenth century, the piano became an important social, no less than musical, instrument of middle-class domesticity, and its presence in North American homes only increased in the first few decades of the twentieth century. The piano was a large-scale consumer item that in some ways prefigured later technologies, such as the phonograph, radio receiver, television and hi-fi stereo. While musicologists and organologists have addressed social practices associated with the piano, their studies have not considered the role of interior design in the instrument’s appearance and placement or the sensorial experience of the piano in domestic interiors. Drawing from a broad range of materials – from interior decoration advice literature to prefabricated house catalogues, middle-brow fiction to parlour piano music – this chapter argues that the piano played a potent role in the socio-spatial structure of middle-class homes. It provided both a focal and acoustic point in the multisensory design of the middle-class living room. The visceral tactility of keyboard performance on the one hand and the spatial penetration of its tones on the other combined to create a polysensory experience for residents and guests alike. By examining a variety of cultural representations and products associated with the piano in the first quarter of the twentieth century, this chapter encourages a reconsideration of the sounds and sights of middle-class domesticity.
John Leroux and Thaddeus Holownia, A Vision in Wood & Stone: The Architecture of Mount Allison University, Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press Ltd, 2016, 234 pp. $ 65.95 (hardcover) ISBN 9781554471409. An article from journal RACAR : Revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review (Volume 44, Number 1, 2019, pp. 4-122), on Érudit.
This article examines architecture designed and built by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada (CBC) from 1940–1953. Following the Second World War, the construction of buildings across the country confirmed and solidified the Crown Corporation’s position as a national service, reinforcing social democratic values held by cultural elites. These buildings became important material components of radio publics as they amplified the public broadcaster’s presence. Focussing on transmission stations and studios, the article shows how the building of radio infrastructure strategically promoted a sense of national community on the one hand yet tapped into regionalism on the other. The article illuminates the overlooked material presence of radio and adds to recent scholarly interest in studying media houses by arguing that the architecture of radio was instrumental in the composition of modern, mediated publics in the mid-twentieth century.
Architecture and photography are entangled mass media. Since the advent of photography in the nineteenth century, this new medium has played a critical role in the dissemination of architectural id...
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) site near Sackville, New Brunswick, exemplifies the material and spatial foundations of radio. Designed by the CBC's own architecture department and constructed in 1939, the station operated as a regional transmitter, broadcasting to the Maritimes of Canada and the northeastern United States, and visually and materially represented the CBC in this area. During World War II the Canadian government decided to establish a powerful shortwave station at the Sackville site, resulting in the erection of a much larger facility on the location of the earlier building and an innovative system of antennae on the surrounding marshlands in 1944–45. The recent dismantling of these towers, which marked the skyline for seven decades, has radically altered the built environment around Sackville and raises questions about the role of architecture and space in the history of radio.
Cet article examine une station de transmission de la Société Radio-Canada qui a ouvert ses portes à Watrous, en Saskatchewan, en 1939. Le bâtiment est vite devenu un phare de modernité, correspondant ainsi à la présence visuelle des postes de radio dans les maisons ou publicités. Notre étude met en lumière les différents registres matériels et spatiaux du système de radiocommunication — de l’espace intime de la maison à l’architecture institutionnelle. Notre analyse de la conception du bâtiment révèle ses liens avec le paysage (réel et représenté) ainsi qu’avec les notions complexes de lieu (matériel et immatériel). Nous soutenons que les études de design offrent une façon unique et significative d’aborder l’histoire des médias, dans laquelle ces derniers sont conceptualisés en termes de matérialité et comme éléments constituants de la société.
This book argues that mobility is the central theme of the interwar mode of design known today as Art Deco. It is present on the very surfaces of Art Deco objects and architecture – in iconography and general formal qualities (whether the zigzag rectilinear forms popular in the 1920s or curvilinear streamlining of the 1930s). By focussing on mobility as a means of tying the seemingly disparate qualities of Art Deco together, Michael Windover shows how the surface-level expressions correspond as well with underpinning systems of mobility, including those associated with migration, transportation, commodity exchange, capital, and communication. Journeying across the globe – from a skyscraper in Vancouver, B.C., to a department store in Los Angeles, and from super-cinemas in Bombay (Mumbai) to radio cabinets in Canadian living rooms – this richly illustrated book examines the reach of Art Deco as it affected public cultures. Windover’s innovative perspective exposes some of the socio-political consequences of this “mode of mobility” and offers some reasons as to how and why Art Deco was incorporated into everyday lifestyles around the world.
Bombay of the interwar years was a city in transition. TheUrbs Prima in Indus, and second city of the British Empire, became increasingly both a site of nationalist sentiment and a conduit of cosmopolitan cultural and economic currents. Its urban fabric witnessed the shift from colonial, Victorian city tomodernemetropolis. Captured in A. R. Haseler’s dramatic aerial photograph from the mid-1930S (Fig. 1), the Regal Cinema stands out against the Indo-Saracenic monuments of late imperial Bombay — notably George Wittet’s Gateway of India (1924) seen at the top of the photograph, his Prince of Wales Museum (1923) — its gardens on the bottom left — and, on the right, his Royal Institute of Science (1920). Although not a government-commissioned building, to the right of the Gateway, on the waterside, is the Taj Mahal Hotel (1903), a luxurious structure intended by the Parsi industrialist, Jamsetji N. Tata, to be a location for inter-cultural relations. Extending this type of space to some degree, the Regal was built by another Parsi, Framji Sidhwa, in 1933. The cinema marked the beginning of a decade-long building boom that corresponded with a significant population increase, as more and more migrants joined the city’s growing industrial workforce.The Art Deco styling of the new financial, residential, and commercial buildings, like the Regal, celebrated and framed a modern public culture which responded to the unique socio-political realities of interwar Bombay. ‘Public culture’, a term developed by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, is conceptualized here as a dynamic process of indigenization, one that takes into account the global flow of ideologies through human migration and especially by mass media, one that destabilizes the ‘high-low’ binary and avoids the homogenizing terminology of ‘westernization’ or ‘Americanization’. The Art Deco cinema might be considered a crossroads where the often interpenetrating and sometimes competing narratives of commerce, nation, empire and formations of modern subjectivities intermingled: a nexus of cultural, economic, technological and political flow. The use of Art Deco is important in the context of Bombay as the style signified modernity and a particular sense of cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and yet resonated with or extended pre-existing cultural traditions in a distinctly local manner on the other.
