Bridging Urban and Media Studies: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and theExplorationsGroup, 1951-1957

Abstract

This article examines the collaborations between Marshall McLuhan, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, and the modernist town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in the 1950s. Giedion's studies of everyday material culture and his concern with the human scale of cities became central to McLuhan's proposal for studying media. Through a historical analysis of Tyrwhitt's papers and correspondence, the paper documents her role in mediating a dialogue between McLuhan and Giedion and in co-founding, with McLuhan and others, the Explorations Group at the University of Toronto. Drawing upon Giedion's concern with the humanization of urban life, Tyrwhitt helped formulate a methodology that used the urban environment and architecture as the framework to analyze the effects of media. The paper argues that Tyrwhitt's own contributions to the Explorations journal took up both Giedion and McLuhan's focus on media and material culture and their commitment to interdisciplinarity in examining the mediated experience of urban life.

Bats in the Belfry: On the Relationship of Cybernetics and German Media Theory

“…4-5)-accessible to the academic public and compatible with other theoretical discourses since the early 1950s. As a member of the Explorations Group-a precursor to the Toronto School of Communication Theory (see Darroch, 2008)-McLuhan had learned about Wiener's cybernetics through multiple sources and had started a "conversation … with advocates of cybernetic theories," such as Wiener himself (Darroch & Marchessault 2016, pp. x-xi).…”