This paper explores how the European Parliament became a mass-media platform by mobilizing buildings and television networks to broadcast messages to the European public. Since the 1950s, the European Parliament has utilized various buildings in Strasbourg, Luxembourg, and Brussels not only as assembly spaces for parliamentary politics but also as channels to address the European public through the medium of television. As democracy and television became intertwined in the latter half of the twentieth century, television emerged as a vital tool for the European Parliament to engage with the emerging European electorate, particularly during the first European elections in 1979. The European Parliament adopted pan-European television programs like Eurovision, Eurikon, and Europa TV, leveraging them as instruments for European integration. To facilitate this communication, the institution established satellite transmission standards and television studios to broadcast the plenary sessions of the parliament. Concurrently, architects and designers were enlisted to reshape the physical space of the parliament, effectively transforming it into a mass-media setting. Unlike other governmental institutions, the European Parliament held the unique ability to influence media politics on a European scale, enabling it to simultaneously shape the television infrastructure and redefine its own image.

The contribution critically examines the dynamic relationship between the European Parliament and media networks, highlighting how this connection necessitated constant adaptation and obsolescence of the plenary hall architecture. Moreover, it explores how these media networks influenced the perception of the Parliament in the European public. By delving into the intertwining of architecture, mass media, and European politics, this research sheds light on the complex interplay between media history and architecture, showcasing how the European Parliament strategically harnessed the power of television to engage and connect with the European public.

International organisations and global governance studies typically refer to “architecture” as the structures of decision-making, power distribution, or financial flows. This position paper challenges this conventional understanding by delving into its primary meaning—the built environment. It charts ways in which architectural design, historiography, and criticism become relevant for the study of international organisations and, inversely, how multilateral diplomacy (e.g. “informal” networks such as the G20) questions existing architectural typologies and narratives. The study focuses on the meanings and expectations embedded in the spaces utilised by global governance actors. By evaluating the architectural discipline’s ability to conceptualise these spaces beyond their symbolic dimension, we emphasise the material characteristics and cultural connotations that shape negotiations, agreements, and treaties. Understanding their agency highlights the influential but often overlooked spatial dimension within international diplomacy and unveils how the built environment contributes to the imagination and materialisation of international governing.

Aluminum panels became a common construction component of curtain wall facades in the post-war era. But that these panels stem from a history of colonial trade networks and extractivist exploitation, is entirely obscured in the lightness and use of aluminum. Unfolding the cross-historical geopolitical map of aluminum panels gives insights in how planetary logistic efforts of ores and capital during the post-war era rendered architecture into a geological factor, and served western postcolonial control. When Hugo Junkers first patented a compound panel of aluminum sheets and honeycomb structure, Germany did not have access to major bauxite deposits, in order to render this aircraft technology into a mass product. Consequently, the aircraft and arms industry during the Third Reich depended largely on coal and steel. Aluminum, instead, was ruled by the patent-based monopolies in France and the US, controlling its inflationary use in the WWII aircraft industry, and the bauxite supply chains from West Africa and Jamaica. Only after the war, prefabricated aluminum panels enabled the conversion in production capacity from the aircraft industry into the construction sector, by bringing major companies such as Alcoa, Reynolds and Kaiser Aluminum on the European market. Based on archival findings of Marshall Plan funded US-study trips by architects such as Egon Eiermann, Walter Henn, Jean Tschumi, and Konrad Wachsmann, this paper aims to unfold geopolitical relations through a material history of aluminum panels. Ultimately, this period marks a starting point of a planetary feedback loop: Marshall plan credits were payed off by strategic ores, extracted by major US companies in former colonial territories, and reinvested again into aluminum based post-war reconstruction in Europe. It inscribed obscure colonial trade patterns into material logistic chains that imply the problematic inability until the present day to deal with postcolonial legacies in European post-war architecture and beyond.

In this volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, Dennis Pohl locates the origin of Europe's dependency on carbon and nuclear power in the postwar architectural designs and energy policies of the European Community. Since the 1950s, architects have proposed territorial, regional, and urban development plans that served the European political project. They collaborated with the European Coal and Steel Community in an effort to render the steel building industry as efficient as the car industry; they incorporated the ideas of infinite nuclear energy, as promoted by the European Atomic Energy Community, into their designs. This book demonstrates how architecture served the political economy of postwar Europe as a means of turning coal, steel, and radioactivity into tools of European governance. Architectural design enabled EU institutions to support social policies and worker housing within the coal and steel industry as well as to promote a new pan-European lifestyle based on nuclear energy. In other words, architecture powered Europe's larger infrastructural, economic, and cultural network. Pohl's work not only sheds light on how architecture has contributed to the carbonization of Europe, it also highlights the environmental issue, which challenges both architectural criticism and historiography in the era of the Anthropocene. Featuring artwork by Armin Linke.

Europe and Brussels had a mutual dependency from the founding of the European Communities. This article explores the historic relation between local urban and the transnational development of post-war Europe. It ultimately raises the question to what extent there exists a dialogue between various actors involved to actively design and build the image of Europe in Brussels.

Dennis Pohl architecture historian and researcher, discusses how architectural space both reflects and shapes institutions. Pohl is a postdoctoral researcher at Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture at TU Delft, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He is guest-editor of the ARCH+ issue "Europe: Infrastructures of Externalization," and the ATR issue "The Architecture of Global Governance."

Beatriz Colomina and Nikolaus Hirsch in conversation with Dennis Pohl about architecture, health, and biopolitics in the framework of the CIVA exhibition Sick Architecture in Brussels.

The digital era has supposedly had a drastic impact on contemporary forms of political debate. Live-tweets, podcasts, and posts have become the main channels for politics, polemics, and populism alike. But these tendencies are not only an acceleration of the politics of media brought about by the logics behind television, cybernetics, and computation in the post-war era. They gained strength when populist politics appropriated information access via mass media, which once promised the emancipation of ordinary citizens by architectural means through pop-culture.

In this essay I seek to elaborate how Cedric Price’s 1965 design of the Pop-Up Parliament dealt with a media-technical condition of politics, while proposing that architecture was an integral part of the media network of governing. Price’s project is paradigmatic of the 1960s, a period when the media operations of information compression, prediction, and audience targeting became more decisive for politics than the content of debate. This analysis allows us, on the one hand, to problematise conventional definitions of populism towards a media-based concept, and on the other, to further our understanding of architecture as a political medium operating directly with media such as documents, television, and computers. This essay argues that the advent of digital media calls for a different architectural history of populism, one which engages with the operativity of media and cultural techniques, rather than relying upon the symbolic representation of ideology in architecture.

This research focuses on the staged contrast between atomic modernity and colonial backwardness at Expo 58 in Brussels, as a strategic promise of the peaceful nuclear, powered by Congolese uranium. I analyze the management of nuclear power – ranging from household technologies to European (post)colonial infrastructures of uranium resources and nuclear power plants – to reveal architecture as a geopolitical technology. The article argues that the ‘domestication of the atom’ goes hand in hand with the domestication of power, exercised through architecture on various levels, affecting the politics of visibility, knowledge, and imagination. The article examines Expo 58 as a case study, where global uranium agents such as the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), the US Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC), the Belgian Centre d’Études pour les applications de l’Energie Nucléaire (SKC-CEN), and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) met in a setting that constructed both a Western scientific gaze and colonial backwardness.