The English house in the age of its wireless dispersion

摘要

In the 1930s, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcast hundreds of wireless programmes on domestic design, good housekeeping and home maintenance. Packaged in twenty-minute transmissions, they were sometimes designed for schoolchildren, at others, for their mothers and yet others for formal listening groups. As quotidian and humble in scale as their topic, broadcast home's ambition was titanic: to reform this oldest building typology into a training ground for the exercise of individual common sense, a modern cradle of and for a nation of competing, self-interested but inter-subjectively connected individuals, that would immunise British liberal democracy against the seductions of spectacle and grandiose monumentality of authoritarian ideologies. If the logic of typography had induced the professional journal to preserve the notion of house, even one that was mass-produced, as a monument, wireless, which Marshall McLuhan insightfully calls the reverberating 'tribal drum', supported an inclusive, pluralistic and implosive ideal. The hypnotic spell of the wirelessly disseminated voice identified the contemporary 'house', even one that was tailor made, with large-scale production: a mass-produced, mass-consumed, all-encompassing, everyday and authorless commodity. This projected a middle-of-the-road, consumer-oriented-modernism envisioned by G.M. Boumphrey, Wells Coates, Frank Pick, Anthony Bertram, and John Gloag, encompassing new rituals of national initiation not by over-coding but enhancing the private scenes of Oedipal formation at work in identification with home and family.