Transmitting Nation “Bordering” and the Architecture of the CBC in the 1930S1

e ssaY | essai TransmiTTing naTion “Bordering” and the architecture of the CBC in the 1930s1 Mi ChAeL WiNdOVer holds a doctorate in art > MiChael Windover history from the University of British Columbia. his dissertation was awarded the Phyllis-Lambert Prize and a revised version is forthcoming in a series on urban heritage with the Presses de l’Université du Québec as Art deco: A Mode of ational boundaries are as much con- Mobility. Windover is currently in the School of Nceptual as they are material. They Architecture at McGill University working on his delineate a space of belonging and mark a liminal region of identity production, Social Sciences and humanities research Council and yet are premised on a real, physical of Canada postdoctoral project: “Architectures of location with economic and social impli- radio: Sound design in Canada, 1925-1952.” cations. With this in mind, I introduce This article represents initial output from this the idea of “bordering” as a potentially project. useful critical term in architectural and design history. Indeed the term may open up new avenues of research by taking into account both material and conceptual infrastructures related to the production of “nations.” Nations are not as fixed as their borders might suggest; they are lived entities, continually remade culturally and socially, as cultural theorist Homi Bhabha asserts with his notion of nation as narration, as built on a dialect- ical tension between the material objects of nation—including architecture—and accompanying narratives.2 Nation is thus conceived as an imaginative yet material process. But what is an architecture of bordering (or borders)? Initially we might think of the architecture at international boundaries, including customs buildings and the infrastructures of mobility (highways, bridges, tunnels, etc.) or immobility (walls, spaces for detainment of suspected criminals or terrorists, etc.). Military installations (forts, air and naval bases, the coast guard, etc.) might also come to mind. These are all rather direct manifestations of the establishment, pro- tection, and maintenance of national borders. In this article, I would like to extend this concept even further to consider how bordering (the process of continually re- creating borders culturally) is essential to the production of “nations” and that this is as much a conceptual as materially FIG. 1. CBL transmitter BuiLding at HornBy, ontario, 1937. | Canadian BroadCasting Corporation Fonds, LiBrary and arCHives Canada, rg 41, voL. 542 FiLe part 1, e010934709. JSSAC | JSÉAC 36 > No 2 > 2011 > 5-12 5 MiChael Windover > essaY | essai grounded process. And to do so, I will had made similar claims about the role Indeed, while Anderson’s work high- look at the example of radio—a seem- of communications to the engendering lighted the role of print-capitalism in the ingly borderless and immaterial medium. of the nation, including Canadians Harold production of imagined communities, Radio waves, which can carry socio-polit- Innis and Marshall McLuhan.4 It is perhaps the radio was a potentially even more ical content and thus are a potent force not surprising that early on Canadian powerful medium for spurring national in nationalism, are affected by material scholars highlighted the importance of imaginings. This early electronic medium constraints, including geographical fea- communications to the projection of the had the time-space compressing effect of tures and atmospheric effects, and are nation since the role of the state in the instantaneity, making it even more of a based on social and economic infra- affairs of culture—mass or otherwise— centralizing and nationalizing instrument structures. The properties of radio are has been (and continues to be) a regular than newspapers. It would have a signifi- thus somewhat analogous to national feature in public discourse. As media his- cant impact on national movements, for boundaries. By drawing attention first torian Mary Vipond noted in her presi- example in post-World War II decoloniza- to the importance of media like radio to dential address to the Canadian Historical tion movements.6 Emphasizing the power the engendering of nations, especially in Association, of radio to make the “imagined” catas- the geographically immense and cultur- trophically material, McLuhan argued ally complicated terrain of Canada, then Since harold innis’s seminal work on the that, “It was Hitler who gave radio the underlining the significance of architec- fur trade, we have learned to think of this Orson Welles treatment for real.”7 In ture to the policy governing the Canadian country along east-west lines of communica- Canada, the place of radio as a compon- system of radio broadcasting, I hope to tions, waterways, railways, telegraph lines, ent of national culture was a topic of great indicate one way in which we might envis- and radio and television networks provid- concern beginning in the mid-1920s. Sir age “bordering” in architectural studies. ing the technological means by which the Henry Thornton devised the first network I will focus on the transmission site in country has been constructed economically, of stations for the Canadian National Hornby, Ontario, about thirty miles north- politically and symbolically.5 Railway (CNR) as a means of fostering west of Toronto, arguing that the archi- nationalism and promoting tourism.8 As tecture and ornament of the transmitter Vipond’s comment reminds us that the Vipond points out, network broadcasting building reinforce the interest of the new “imagined community” of Canada—that also allowed the publicly-owned corpora- Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) cultural construction yet socio-political tion to “provide better programs more to represent itself as a national institution site—is inextricably based on material cheaply,” make more efficient and cost- in part by aestheticizing the activity of infrastructure. So as much as we under- effective use of CNR’s telegraph lines radio transmission (fig. 1). stand Canada as the culmination of cul- (which had been upgraded in 1926 to tural representations and practices ( seen the carrier-current type), and accompany t he space of radio on maps and money, in photographs and its nationwide train service and disparate films, read in novels and newspapers, staff.9 The CNR network in cooperation Mass media play an essential part in heard in broadcasts, discussed in con- with private and some American stations the process of “bordering” or the nar- versations, etc.), it is predicated on the produced a “coast to coast” network for rativization of nations. In his influ- sometimes overlooked architectures of the celebration of Canada’s Diamond ential book Imagined Communities: bordering, the architectures that facilitate Jubilee on July 1st, 1927, and although Reflections on the Origin and Spread of the mobility of people, capital, and ideas. only established for the duration of the Nationalism, Benedict Anderson argues Railway stations and hotels, art galleries, event, the network drew attention to the that the advent of the modern nation and legislative buildings, for instance, nationalizing potential of the medium in state resulted from the development of all play significant parts in the history of the country.10 The radio infrastructure of “print-capitalism,” particularly on the per- bordering Canada (that is, they produce the CNR would later become the foun- ipheries of European empires (especially or reassert the space of the nation in one dation of Canada’s public broadcasting the Americas).3 Newspapers and other way or another and thus serve as nation- system.11 print media allowed people who might building institutions). Less visible in day- otherwise not meet each other to share to-day life but also essential to bordering, Following a controversy sparked by in a common sense of belonging, spurring I contend, are broadcasting studios and broadcasts made by religious groups a national consciousness. Other scholars transmitting stations. (including notably the International Bible 6 JSSAC | JSÉAC 36 > No 2 > 2011 MiChael Windover > essaY | essai Students Association—an organization from commercial stations (in the coun- of Jehovah’s Witnesses) and the govern- try), or the Australian system, which ran ment’s decision to shut down particular a public network alongside commercial stations in 1928, a royal commission was stations with a governmental department formed to study broadcasting in Canada.12 acting as regulator, the CBC was uniquely The 1929 Aird Commission (named after charged with providing a national net- the chair, Sir John Aird) recommended work and public programming as well public ownership, and while all of its as regulating private stations and short- recommendations were not followed, it term networks. Essential to the agenda would become the foundation of the 1932 were the limitation of power of private Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission stations and the construction of high and subsequently the Canadian power stations owned and operated by Broadcasting Corporation (1936).13 In the the CBC. To public radio lobbyist and later words of Graham Spry, co-founder of member of the first Board of Governors the Canadian Radio League, a key lobby of the CBC, Alan Plaunt, the chain of sta- group for public radio: tions “would be a national property as important to the continued existence of For a nation, so widespread in its range and Canada as a nation as trans continental so varied in its racial origin, radio broad- [sic] railways to its inception.”15 The idea casting, intelligently directed, may give us of constructing a chain of high power what provincial school systems, local news- stations had been recommended by papers, and the political system have yet advocates of the public system from the to give us, a single, glowing spirit of nation- Aird Report on, but it was only with the FIG. 2. arCHiteCturaL review, voL. 72, no. 8, 1932, ality making its contribution to the world passage of the Canadian Broadcasting p. 46.

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