the modernist x BDP London present - The BDP Talk Series. 1.5 - Elizabeth Darling : Modernist Architects at BBC Broadcasting House 23/7/26

Thursday 23rd July

6.15PM FOR A 6.30PM START 

BDP London 

16 Brewhouse Yard
Clerkenwell
London EC1V 4LJ

Making the Immaterial Material: Modernist Architects at BBC Broadcasting House by Elizabeth Darling 

In May 1932 the BBC’s new headquarters building, Broadcasting House, was completed. Its exterior, designed by in a severe modern classical style by Val Myer and F.J.Watson Hart, signalled the necessary gravitas of a modern corporation charged with broadcasting to nation and empire. Its interior, in contrast, housed 19 studios designed by the emerging leaders of Britain’s modernist movement: Serge Chermayeff, Wells Coates and Raymond McGrath. In this talk, Elizabeth Darling will take us on a tour of their studios, showing how, by using the most up-to-date materials, they created an ‘inventive modernism’ that expressed the modernity of the new technology of broadcasting. This architecture of the ether, described as ‘alive, brave and new’, was the first public commission for modernist architects in Britain.

Elizabeth Darling is a leading architectural historian, and specialises in histories of modernist cultures in Britain, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Among her extensive range of publications are articles on the modernist salon Finella, the housing activist Elizabeth Denby and the Pioneer Health centre, and the books Re-forming Britain (Routledge, 2007) and Wells Coates (RIBA, 2012). June 2026 sees the publication of her new book, Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC (Lund Humphries).

Copies of Elizabeth's new book Palace of the Ether will be available to buy on the night.

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Thank you to BDP for supporting this event.