We interrupt this broadcast
Annotations by Charlotte Lydia Riley, Owen Hatherley, and Jonathan Bignell
Between 1975 and 1982, The Open University broadcast a series of televised courses on the genealogy of the modern movement: A305, History of Architecture and Design 1890–1939. We have asked Charlotte Lydia Riley, Owen Hatherley, and Jonathan Bignell to watch the course television programmes with us. They interrupted them to add context for a contemporary audience, from the perspective of history, architecture, and media studies. Their live annotations invite a reflection on the timeliness of authoring new histories and what it means to disseminate these histories in an always-particular moment in time.
You can watch all twenty-four televisions broadcasts of the course A305 on our YouTube channel.
We examined the course A305 in the context of our exhibition The University Is Now on Air: Broadcasting Modern Architecture and its accompanying publication, to offer a close reading of how The Open University mobilized new media environments for mass education in the 1970s.
