Experts of the Media

The changing nature of the role of experts in politics and society, as well as their ideas, caught the media’s attention, which coincided with the experts’ vision of their own importance.

Debating the place of experts vis-à-vis society and politics occupied the CIAM during their important convention in 1933During the conference, renowned photographer and filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy produced the film Architects’ Congress. The film testifies to the experts’ idea of history in the making, and captures the socializing and ‘living-of-modernity’ that characterized many of the male and female architects on board the boat to Athens.

The film highlighted stars like architect Le Corbusier, who was famous for his radical urban planning designs, and who, during the conference, argued for a decisive role for experts in politics and society. The film attests to the significance of experts and their technological solutions.

In Moholy-Nagy’s eyes, the experts of the built environment deserved his attention and that of the public. The “actors” starring in this film, he believed, could truly build a new kind of city that would allow for a better world than had been left behind by the Great War.

How to cite this page

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Martin Kohlrausch, 'Experts of the Media', Inventing Europe, http://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/experts-of-the-media

Sources

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Kees Somer, The Functional City. CIAM and the legacy of Van Eesteren, 1928-1960, Rotterdam: NAi Uitgevers, 2007.

http://moholy-nagy.org/

Evelien van Es, Gregor Harbusch, Bruno Maurer, Muriel Pérez, Kees Somer, Daniel Weiss (eds.), Atlas of the Functional City CIAM 4 and Comparative Urban Analysis, Bussum: Thot, 2014

 

 

About this tour

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Building a Better World

After the First World War, experts cooperated to build a better world. Within the international organization Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), architects aimed to improve society by creating efficient cities. While a common cause could dynamically unite a diverse array of experts, the organization’s goal of improving the world through technological progress for social ends would not withstand the test of reality.


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What's like this?

Le Corbusier, one of the founding fathers of CIAM



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