All Eyes on Space - by Sam Dodd (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In All Eyes on Space, Sam Dodd looks at television and sees architecture: a dynamic system of spatial design, environmental planning, and bodily control operating behind and beyond the small screen. By transmitting images and sounds across vast distances, television brings faraway places into immediate view and, in the process, reshapes how space is imagined and inhabited. Yet, this seemingly effortless presentation of "distant sight" is only possible because of deliberate architectural investments made throughout the second half of the twentieth century. From the 1940s onward, American architects and planners designed stations, studios, towers, cables, and screens while also experimenting with television as a medium for public communication and engagement. Drawing on archival records, original broadcasts, and works of art and design, Dodd plots a history of television architecture in the United States to show how the medium produced a distinctly American spatial logic that tethered expansionist ambitions to the management of visibility and access. Ultimately, this book reveals how a ubiquitous medium commonly understood as immaterial--if not ephemeral--became one of the century's most consequential built environments.

Review Quotes

Superb research and masterful storytelling. Sam Dodd shifts our conventional view of American television to help us understand it as a designed system, a mode of place-making, and ultimately, a form of modern architecture. A must-read for anyone interested in the Television Age and the origins, evolution, and future of screen-based (material) culture.--Monica Penick, University of Texas at Austin

All Eyes on Space exposes television as an amalgam of modern design and electronic signals that collapsed distance to bring much of the world within an American sphere of influence. From futuristic studios and postwar transmission towers to later programming and media property development, Sam Dodd shows how distant vision reshaped our perception of reality. Part architectural history and part media critique, this book reckons with material infrastructures and spatial conceptions that underpin our digital, placeless lives today.--Sandy Isenstadt, University of Delaware

About the Author

Sam Dodd is an assistant professor of art history and criticism in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University.