[Commlist] CFP: Media Building Conference

https://mediabuilding.weebly.com
 Abstract Deadline: 16 December 2019

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)

In the spirit of debate and inclusivity, we welcome proposals for either 
individual presentations (c. 20 minutes), or panels (c. 60-90 minutes) 
in a variety of formats: traditional conference papers, roundtables, 
scholar-practitioner interviews, multimedia presentations, etc.

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.

Send 400-word abstracts to Carole O’Reilly [(c.oreilly /at/ salford.ac.uk)] and 
E. James West [(james.west /at/ northumbria.ac.uk)] by 16 December 2019.

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