The New Newsroom

"This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice… Printing will kill architecture”

So wrote Victor Hugo in his famous reaction to the emergence of the printing press. Until that moment, it was architecture that held the prime responsibility of conveying human thought, an edifice that could be read. The invention of the Gutenberg Press, according to Hugo, transferred this responsibility onto something less solid but somehow more durable- “the book of paper” as opposed to the “book of stone”, immortalised through its multiplicity (a transferal now extended even further into the realms of the ephemeral with “the book in the cloud” made still more permanent despite its immateriality).

A large number of printing presses were set up in Europe during the early nineteenth century. They functioned both as the space in which the news was published and the place where it was processed and prepared for publication. These large buildings were prepared for the purpose of conveying human thought and strategically located next to one another (as along Fleet Street in London) and became integrally connected within the urban network of the city. The process of gathering, processing, publishing and digesting of news accordingly revealed itself through the familiar interiors of public halls, pubs, newsstands along the street. On a regional scale, in 1819, in the Northern French city of Lille, the local paper, L’Echo du Nord was established alongside its printing presses in the city’s Grand Place, situated next to stock exchange, the chamber of commerce, the opera and the theater, intrinsic to the public life of the city.

In parallel to the rising power of the press, the early years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of grand newsrooms. The Chicago Tribune even famously held a prestigious competition to design “the most beautiful building in the world” resulting in the baroque-styled tower with a public “hall of inscriptions”- embedded artifacts from all 50 of the US States – as testament of the outreach of the organisation it represented. Similarly, in London the Daily Express moved into its new “Black Lubyanka”, an art deco building featuring chromium strips and black vitrolite, as well as plaster reliefs and silvered decorations representative of the wider British Empire . In the same period a new building was commissioned for the Echo du Nord, renamed “The Voice of the North”, designed by Albert Laprade in 1936. The building, now the tallest on Grand Place, had 28 windows on its facade, representing the 28 cities to which the newspaper circulated, topped by a statue of the three graces, symbolising the region’s northern provinces, Artois, Flanders and Hainaut.

With a need to keep up with advancing communication systems and technology, the building soon grew in size quickly occupying an entire urban block. However, by the 1990’s the industry, threatened by the internet and by the social media boom, began to rapidly shrink, resulting in the newspaper renting out its entire ground-floor to retail, retaining only the logo on the symbolic facade as its last public connection as the “Voice of the North”. In newsrooms everywhere during this period, the shrinking spaces of news production were then moved to the outkirts of cities, to business parks and industrial sites, completely separating themselves from their formerly public, highly visible inner city-states. In the process, an abundance of new news organisations, now operating out of warehouses, residences, and business parks, began springing up the world over. With these multiple news sources, an overwhelming number of opinions, sometimes of an oppositional or contradictory nature, an increasing number of fake news stories, and an overproduction of news in general, news today is received and digested through a bubble of distrust.

“Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally agitated being that – in the space between the building fronts- lives, experiences, understands and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls[…] Among these, the arcade was the drawing-room. More than anywhere else, the street revealed itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses.”

-Benjamin, Walter, and Howard Eiland. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Pr. of Harvard Univ. Pr., 2003., 879.

As famously described by Walter Benjamin, the nineteenth century arcade was born out of industrial overproduction and new goods that flooded the market, consolidating and putting in public view the new products of industrial luxury. While the arcades themselves were in effect extensions of streets, with their own symmetrical facades, sky-lit interiors, and gas lights adorning walls and ceilings, they remained protected from the weather, and hence behaved as interior public space, a place to witness the daily life much like a street but in a shared interior whose character and adornments borrowed much from domestic architecture.

An illustrated guide to Paris says : “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in miniature:’

– Benjamin, Walter, and Howard Eiland. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Pr. of Harvard Univ. Pr., 2003., 3.

Despite serving primarily as a pedestrian thoroughfare, the arcade is commonly bordered or covered by a building that serves its own variable function. And so in Paris the passage Vero Dodat held pork butchers, the passage du Caire’s main business was lithograph printing, and the passage de l’opera housed the Opera, a small theater and a “little stock exchange”- a varying program of activities, but one accessed via the arcade itself, through its doorways, stairways and other passages.

In this scenario, the constantly shrinking spaces of the “Voice of the North”, which even in its demise still circulates to a quarter of a million people every day, are located on Grand Place, bordering a public arcade that runs through the block. In contrast to today, where the public ground-floor is rented out and the rest of the building is occupied by the newspaper, the project envisages the reversal of this relationship, with housing units now sitting on top of a public set of newsrooms.

The ever-changing and evolving newsroom forms a constant backdrop to the city, whose very public presence within today’s more characteristically distrustful news era provides a new sense of credibility and tangibility to the production and reception of news. At the same time, a territory and power once represented through the vertical monumentality of a stepped facade is now translated into a more egalitarian horizontality. What used to be a single facade and public hall is now a continuous civic surface and interior street of the arcade.

Thesis Project, Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design

Thesis Advisors- Tom Weaver, Ido Avissar, Salomon Frausto