[Commlist] CFP: Media Building: Architecture, Communications and the Built Environment from Fleet Street to Facebook

Media Building: Architecture, Communications and the Built Environment
from Fleet Street to Facebook*

*Deadline for 400-word abstracts: 16 December 2019*

https://mediabuilding.weebly.com

In 1702 Elizabeth Mallett founded the *Daily Courant* at her modest
bookshop on Fleet Street in London. Two centuries later, the street had
become the spatial nerve center for a range of local, national and
international networks of communication that were replicated on “newspaper
rows” across the globe. As media influence grew, so too did the size and
scale of its buildings, with American publisher Joseph Pulitzer contending
that ‘a newspaper plant…should be something to be gaped at.’ Structures
such as Pulitzer’s own *New York World *building, the striking neo-gothic
spires of the *Chicago Tribune *tower, and the sleek art-deco exteriors of
the *Daily Express *buildings in London and Manchester offered their own
expressions of media power, modernity, and the aesthetics of mass
communication, providing what Aurora Wallace describes as a “definable
shape…a hook on which to hang some news about the media itself.”

This conference, located at the heart of MediaCityUK, invites contributions
which explore the intersections between media culture, architecture, and
the built environment. We are interested in the relationship between media
content and media space, and the ways in which this relationship has
changed over time. What would press barons such as Pulitzer, who saw their
buildings as “the central and highest point(s) of New World Civilization”,
have made of Facebook’s Menlo Park Campus; an arguably more impressive yet
radically different vision of media power, sophistication, and influence?
How might publishers such as Lord Beaverbrook, the ‘first baron of Fleet
Street’, have reacted to its decline and dispersal during the latter
decades of the twentieth century? More broadly, how have media buildings –
both real and imagined - informed and given form to a range of
sociopolitical, cultural and ideological constructs, becoming a “delivery
mechanism” for ideas about objectivity, authority and identity? And what
can the past and future of media architecture tell us about the changing
nature of media production, distribution and consumption in the
twenty-first century?

Potential topics and case studies could include:

The history and impact of the “newspaper row” (Fleet Street; Park Row; 
Picayune Place; etc)

Media power, message and the modern skyscraper (China Media Group HQ, 
Beijing; the *New York Times *building, ‎Manhattan; *Der Spiegel 
*building, Hamburg; etc)

Media cities and mediated cities (Facebook Menlo Park Campus, Silicon 
Valley; MediaCity, Salford Quays; Media City Park, Dubai; etc)

Media spaces in popular culture (Superman and the *Daily Planet*; 
Spiderman and the *Daily Bugle*; representations of the newsroom and 
media buildings in films such as *Spotlight, *etc)

Liminal spaces, private architectures, media publics (blogging and the 
coffee shop; radical media and the built environment; media cultures in 
the ‘post-newsroom’ age; etc)

Reuse, relocation, and the afterlife of media architecture (the *Daily 
Express *building, Manchester; the *Tribune *building, Chicago; 
BBC/Channel 4 move from London to the North, etc)

The relationship between media building design and professional 
ideologies of journalism/newswork (soft power and media architecture; 
the ‘newsroom’ as a social and cultural construct; etc)

Race, Ethnicity and Media Buildings (the *Defender *building*, *Chicago; 
the *Daily Forward *building, New York; etc)

Media architecture and the end of empire (*Times of India *building*,* 
Mumbai; National Media Group, Nairobi; Broadcasting House,
London; etc)


Abstracts of *no more than 400 words* should be sent to conference 
organizers Carole O’Reilly [*(c.oreilly /at/ salford.ac.uk) 
<(c.oreilly /at/ salford.ac.uk)>*] and E. James West 
[*(james.west /at/ northumbria.ac.uk) <(james.west /at/ northumbria.ac.uk)>*] no later 
than *16 December 2019*

A limited number of travel awards are available to subsidize conference 
attendance by PGRs, ECRs and temporary faculty. To be considered please 
submit an estimate of travel expenses with your abstract.


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