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Carlotta Daro
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Carlotta Daro
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Matthew Wells
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm Matthew Wells, one of your hosts and today I'm delighted to be speaking with Carloto Daro about her book the Architecture of the Infrastructures of Telecommunication published by the MIT Press in 2025. Architecture of the Wire charts the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on modernity from telephone poles and wires and cables to the micro architectures such as the telephone booth, and offers a new history that explores the intersection of technology with architecture and art across Europe and North America. Carlotta, thank you so much for joining us.
Carlotta Daro
Hi Matthew, thank you to you. Thank you for this invitation. Brilliant.
Matthew Wells
Could you start off by just telling us how you came to write the book?
Carlotta Daro
Sure. So actually this project dates back to some time ago. I was well, my education was mainly made in between Rome and Paris, but then I ended up making a postdoc program in Montreal at McGill University and I joined the community of scholars in Sound studies, which was already my interest, my focus. But joining this group I really that was affiliated mainly to the figure of Jonathan Stern, to which I would say this book. It's a kind of homage that I would like to pay to him. So this group was very much interested in the cultural aspect related to technology and going through trying to bring together my background in architectural history, this interest in sound the topic came and being in North America, this topic like pumped up as A natural issue. And I had this incredible fellowship from the Mellon foundation, so I could really spend time in visiting a lot of archives, mainly firm archives, firm of the epoch that really developed this infrastructure and system of telecommunication in a country that was pioneering at the epoch. So I spent time in the AT&T archives, Bell Labs. It was a great moment, as for many, this postdoctoral moment where you have only this duty of pushing your research. And what I found was a huge material, a huge material that was going from photos, Advertisement administrative documentations and so a lot of heterogeneity in terms of what I couldn't found and a lot of incredibly astonishing iconographic materials. So I really started as since I'm an art historian, my first reflect was really to gather these powerful images without really knowing where I was going. And then to try to find an order. I really tried to make chapters through thematic questions that were raising up during my studies. And then I was back to Europe in Paris, where I had my first position as teaching, well, assistant professor. And in there I could develop more an aspect in the European context. So those are mainly these geographical areas that I bring together in the studies. So it's clearly not exhaustive in terms of geography, but also of course in terms of what you can address through this topic. So my intentions were was really to try to make sections, if we want to speak in a visual way, section through this huge story of the installation of telecommunications systems in the Western world.
Matthew Wells
And thanks. And how then, with all this mass, this enormous topic and these huge amount of visual materials and company archives, how did you decide to structure the book?
Carlotta Daro
Yeah, this was difficult and I have to say that in this case the help of other scholars or of editors. So I would like to mention also Tom Weaver that was really there at the beginning of this project that really helped me in maybe assuming also this attitude of not willing to cover too much, but to be more focused in what was important to me. So I really tried to simplify the book, I think really aims to a kind of simplification also of the topic as much as is possible. And so choosing one word, one keyword that would really accompany this idea of going through making a kind of crossing section of different realities that I wanted to bring together through these words and these words. I mean we can just mention them. And I start with matter making really kind of accurate description of the initial anatomy of this infrastructure system. Then addressing the topic of aesthetics that is quite central to the whole book, I would say then addressing the question of techniques, of course I'm not going into a really technical reading, but it's more about how I try to compare how this network developed. And how the technique itself shaped a way to develop the urban settlement. So all theories that when went together with the real development of the technologies themselves. The question of the imaginary that was provoked by this infrastructure, but also the other way around, how the imaginary produced by utopian vision of the late 19th century and early 20th century produced also a reality. So I'm really trying to demonstrate this reciprocal movement. Then the question of the wireless, taking this specific technology that is called wireless, but as we know, is not really wireless technology. And how also this developed both an imaginary but also a reality. And how this corresponded also to some political projects. How the use of wireless technology, as opposed to wired technology, bring also an ideology, meaning the question of law. So this opposition between the public and the private spheres, that it's very delicate, very crucial in terms of this big system, this big infrastructure. I mean, I'm speaking mainly of communication system, but this could be applied to many other. The question of the planning. So the scale now is starting to be reduced to the scale of the apartment, to the interior domestic space. So I tried to really go through some entrepreneurial documents that really were promoting a new science of planning, if we could say so. So to really encourage architects to think about this system, these networks before the construction, or to add this to the planning of housing. Because being aware that this would have been soon a reality for everyone. It was really a way to promote a commercial way. But also how these promotion integrated tools of architectural vocabulary. So I'm really trying to analyze the way these plants were, in a way popularized advertising using any kind of plants or axonometries. I go farther in this use of axonometry and so on the question of the public. So in this case, the question of the public is intended as really the audience. So with this curious invention that was the theatrophone. This is really a Parisian story. Even though in other countries there were similar attempts. It's a short story, but however, it's still 50 years and today maybe it's a little bit forgotten. And it's this first attempt of applying the technology of the telephone for leisure in a bourgeois society that still wanted to open the accessibility to these places like theater, opera house. And using the modern technology really, to me, a transition. I wouldn't say an invention, because in a way they were using the infrastructure of the telephone at the scale of the city. But how to apply this to a kind of new entertainment activity for the population and how to promote this. Also what was. And I found a lot of literature also about these. This new activity. Then the scale is more and more reduced to the. To the booth. So this is. It's a little bit a story about the telephone booth. Something that today it's almost an obsolete object. That still tells a lot, I think, about the early development of telecommunication and. And then finishing with the question of the ubiquity concluding. Actually, I opened the book and conclude the book with more an opening to the artistic production. So it's more how. Through some artistic works, I like to go to analyze them, to describe them in order to bring more theoretical topic and topics that really allowed me to have different perspectives at the beginning and at the end of the book.
Matthew Wells
Great, thank you. That's a wonderful summary of the kind of range of the book and all the different themes. With that last idea you just brought up around the artwork by Christian Marcloe that you discuss at the beginning of the book from 1935. Yeah. I was struck by the range also of. Of artists that you explore in this. Everything from kind of frontier landscape art from the American west to more contemporary. How did you come across some of this and how did you weave this into the story?
Carlotta Daro
Yeah, this was also maybe one of the difficulties because today I think we tend as scholars to be very specialized and to. We are afraid maybe to cross different documents of such different nature. So it was a little bit risky, I think, even though as an art historian, for me, art, it's all bringing arts in my work. It's always a way to. Well, I like it. But it is also a way to be able to express something about the reception of these modern tools. Because around this object there were a lot of different and contrasting rhetorics. And these are. You always would find an expression through artistic work. And so picking some work of art, as you say, of very different nature contexts and allowing me to jump a little bit from. And so maybe gave me also the freedom to do not stick to one only context, a geographical, cultural, historical. So my position in the book, I don't know. I mean, there is a big tradition of scholars that work like this. I'm not a pioneer, but I wanted really to enter this tradition where the works of art, in a way are almost treated at the same level of a propaganda document from a film of telecommunication. I mean, they don't mean the same thing, of course, but I didn't want to create an hierarchy just separating them, because there are always to understand how in the very epoch it Happened people were receiving this from the high level of high culture, let's say Heart Eduardo or whatever, to the most popular fictional stories or an advertisement from the. The film. Who developed these networks.
Matthew Wells
Right. No, no, absolutely. And. And it's. I think that comes across very clearly in the book also in the. Again, some of the amazing AT&T archival material as well as the. As these, These landscapes being constructed in America. I wondered, we talked a bit about the architects. Are there other actors in the book, other institutions, other professions that you kind of really wanted to foreground and discuss?
Carlotta Daro
Yeah, so the same. I claim in the book that it's more an anonymous story. So you see clearly in which tradition I try to. To enter. However. Yeah. So my aim is really to consider not only heroic figures like the inventors that we all know, Alexander Graham Bell or Marconi or whatever, whoever, but I try to really tell also a more hidden story. I'm thinking about David Edgerton as his book about the shock of the old. So to describe also that these developments were not possible just because one person invented an object. They were possible because there was already a technology and a network that already existed. And telecommunication is about completing, developing one on top of the other. It's never separated. You don't have. You don't use only one network to develop your new invention. And also the transportation network was always connected also to the telecommunication network. So I tried to describe a more complex picture around these developments. And so this brings automatically to be interested also to less known figures like engineering, also entrepreneurial figures that really wanted to develop some invention in order to pursue a kind of economical, but also sometime ideological aim goal. And the users also. I try to also tell the story from the side of the users. What was the, as I was saying, the reception that we can read through different kind of testimonies. And so trying to really redistribute the story to multiplicity of actors, which I think it's a more realistic account. Of course, we cannot tell all the story, but the idea was really to try to open up. However, still I use also the words of important architects, important artists, because in a way they also were important in terms of promoting in their own view, these technologies in real operations, in real ideology, in real theory. So there are in particular three figures, I would say, that are often cons. They often come out through this story. And these are Louis Manfort, Frank Lloyd Wright. And there is also, I mean, a development around the figures of Le Corbusier, in a way, I'm sure we could find Other voices. To me, it was also a way to. I tried to find figures that explicitly speak about these systems and they explicitly develop a vision of the city through and of the territory through the use and the application of these systems. However, they're not only fanatics about this new invention, they are not only excited about this progress, sign of progress of the modern time, they also express their own critical view in an interesting manner. So to me was a way to follow a voice that could show the multiple approaches, the multiple feelings, so the multiple application that could be drawn through the acceptance of these new technologies in the architectural and your brand planning.
Matthew Wells
Brilliant. Absolutely. And as well as this, the kind of seriousness at which these figures dealt with the questions of telecommunication, I wonder, as well as these human actors in your book and these institutions, there are also these non human actors in the form of the technology itself. And you said in the introduction, you know, your introduction to the book that you know that they, you know, that you, you. It's not a kind of handbook or a manual for how to set up a telephone network, but it's obviously something you took very seriously when you were writing it. Like you can sense that the author of this book has really got a little bit obsessed with early telephones and other telephone technology, especially, you know, telegraph poles. How did you marry this kind of, this rich literature on technology with some of the cultural and architectural aspects you wanted to be explore.
Carlotta Daro
You are referring to the manual of, at the beginning of the, exactly.
Matthew Wells
The, the, the, the Hopkins manual about telephone lines. And then, you know, it's just incredibly seriously unpacked. Every aspect of this how exactly how we construct, you know, a cable, these posts, how they're laid out in the landscape, the kind of like the conductive nature of them, how you lay them out in relation to different apartment buildings. I wonder, you know, as an example, I just wondered how, how did you, you know, without. How did you want to engage with this technology with these like non human actors? How did you, how did you want, what did you want the, the reader of the book to kind of come away from the, the, the with this technology that say, the discussion of Mumford or Le Core them.
Carlotta Daro
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Matthew Wells
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Carlotta Daro
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Carlotta Daro
Sometimes the discourse fly very high because it's really a vision, I mean, in terms of Manford Wright and Le Corbusier. It's really about the society. It goes, yeah, it has a lot of ideological and political implication, also economic implication in their vision for the future of the cities or of the society. And then I like actually to jump from one scale to another as a physical scale, but also in terms of the object itself. Since these kind of infrastructure are present in the interior of an apartment, but we know that they are extended to the old territory. There is really this contrast all the time in working in this object to the little scales of the little object through the physical and the physical application at the larger scale. And in the same way, I wanted to go from the big theories to the concrete real object. And so that's why at the very beginning, I like it to really be very descriptive. So to really stick to this manual, to one of this first manual that was really developed and published many times. So it really shows how this was needed. And also to insist on the fact that these networks, especially North America, still rely on a kind of super simplified structure. So there is something that almost didn't move since the beginning. Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit, but this infrastructure is very old and it really relates us every day to something, to another epoch, the epoch of the Industrial Revolution, of this development, especially in North America. So I try to also demonstrate how this was related also to the idea of unifying the nation during the late 19th century. So this means of the conquest of the west that went along with the development of these infrastructures. And so this for me was really, yeah, was a way to bridge the idealization of these networks to something that stays very concrete and very real. And do not forget this, because in media theory, media studies, very often there is a tendency also to speak about communication as something that is immaterial, that is flaws that there are a lot of analogies that insist on this idea of connecting faraway places, hiding the distances. So all metaphors that in a way, insist on the kind of material reading of the object themselves. And I wanted to bring this back, as other scholars are doing the same job, to remind us. I mean, we are aware, but to be back to the materiality of these objects.
Matthew Wells
Yeah. I think also you bring not just the immateriality, but also the labor of these. Of these networks, you know, both. Both the telegraph poles in the field, but also then within the house and how they're organized, the way they enable different types of labor in itself to happen in that. And I wondered, the book. The. Where would you talk a little bit about where the book ends? In the final. In the final chapter, where it thinks about kind of two. Two artworks from one from the start of the 20th century and then one from the second half of the 20th century.
Carlotta Daro
Yep. So the. The first work is a work that always. I always. Since this work accompanied me for many years, and this was a really work of art that always. You know, there are some things that obsess you a little bit. So Lazolo Molinaji, in the late tens, started to make a series of painting called Telephone Painting. No, telephone pictures that were in email.
Matthew Wells
Yeah. Enamel. Yeah.
Carlotta Daro
Enamel.
Matthew Wells
Yeah.
Carlotta Daro
Yeah. No, they're my English. Sorry. And his challenge was to dictate the drawing that he wanted to. To get in this material through telephone lines. So dictating to this. Having a millimeter paper, so dictating the way the drawing has to be done through the manufacturer. So there is a lot of topics in there. There is the fact of delegating the work of art to someone else. There is the line, just the transmission of your own message through these lines. And on the other side, this kind of standardization of the work of art through someone that is a manufacturer. There is also the nice story of the wife that is contradicting him and telling that actually he didn't do this through the telephone, but who cares? This was the idea that was behind the work itself. So to me was a way to. Since I started with more the aesthetics. Works of art that we're speaking about, more the aesthetics of this object. And now I was focusing and concluding the book with the use of the telephone to produce art. And then. So the second work was. I mean, this idea then was declined through different exhibition in the 60s, late 60s, and later on with the idea of telephone art. So a series of exhibitions that were really playing with this same idea of an artist giving instruction to a curator to create a work. And of course, entering very much in this conceptual attitude of the epoch and.
Matthew Wells
Then.
Carlotta Daro
I going through this idea of using the telephone as a media that that creates the artistic piece itself. I mentioned also this important event that was made by experiments in art and Technology the late 60s at the Armory Show. I mean and where a lot of performers were using different technologies. But in particular there is this piece by John Cage that uses really the technology of and was collaborating with laboratories, engineers and trying to make the tournament. Do you say detournement to misuse of the technology system through also and connecting it through objects to other places to bring this idea of ubiquity. So the telephone is very much say it's an instrument that allows someone to be at the same time in different place because I can be here and telephone on the other side of the world. And telecommunication propaganda insisted a lot on this power of multiplying the individual in different location and spaces and at certain times. So this work of art again allowed to reflect on some aspect of these communication systems.
Matthew Wells
Fantastic. Thank you. And does this feed into your current work? It's perhaps a bit cruel at the end. You know, a book is such a major project to ask what the next thing is. But I wondered if this fed into your kind of future work over the next few years.
Carlotta Daro
Yeah, no. So through this idea, through my interest about sound and already this book, I was stepping back into history because I work earlier I was working more in the 20th century historical aspect. And now I'm very much interested because I'm affiliated now with the chair of Grammatic Learning Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich. And when I arrived I discovered that our common ground was an interest in architectural acoustics. They wanted to develop something in more applied research. And I wanted of course I'm an historian. But then when I arrived there, I realized that we're using a lot these today's call it the immersive technology. So a lot of virtual and augmented reality applied to architecture and using ELSO trying to develop something about acoustics in this virtual simulation of a building to be realized to come. And so we developed a new project that was submitted to the Swiss national funding and it was actually accepted last year. And so there is an applied research as this going on about this acoustic simulation in virtual and augmented reality. But I'm working on really on this notion of immersion and illusion in architecture going back again to the 19th century. Because I found I'm discovering more and more how this century was really characterized by a nice merge between the scientific exploration in through a Baconian tradition of empirical knowledge, but also merging with some more mystical approaches to knowledge, to experience. And so I discovered, especially in London, but not only also in Paris and other capitals of the epoch, there was really a big enthusiasm about making buildings that were allowing and the society to enjoy experiences that were always related to sciences and new inventions, but that were really often at the border of pure entertainment. And these places are. We know more about the dioramas, we know more about panoramas or all this kind of different declination of the of optical, sometimes acoustic experimentation. But maybe we know less about the scientific institution like the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, but other venues also that were really aiming to divulgate science to the the population through this idea of providing also a kind of entertainment venue. So I'm really trying to now to explore this project that were mainly aimed to recreate illusionistic and immersive atmosphere environment within the architectural building. So again, this is maybe wide. I will have to find also some ways to make topics, but this is the area of my interest today.
Matthew Wells
Super. It's very exciting. We'll be looking out for that and for the the next book in a few years time. And thank you so much Carlotta for joining us. Just to remind everyone that the Architecture of the Wire Infrastructure Telecommunication was published by the MIT Press and is available in all good bookshops and is lavishly illustrated an amazing array of images. So please do check out a physical copy at some point.
Carlotta Daro
Thank.
Matthew Wells
You, Sam.
Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Matthew Wells
Guest: Carlotta Daro
Date: October 5, 2025
This episode of the New Books Network features an in-depth interview with Carlotta Daro about her new book, The Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication (MIT Press, 2025). The conversation explores the material, social, artistic, and historical dimensions of telecommunication infrastructure—from the physical installation of wires and telephone poles to the broader cultural imaginaries these technologies have inspired. Daro and host Matthew Wells discuss the book’s thematic structure, its interdisciplinary approach, and the wider implications for understanding modernity, society, and art in both Europe and North America.
(02:05–05:45)
(05:45–12:47)
(12:47–15:36)
(15:36–20:37)
(20:37–27:01)
(27:01–31:57)
(31:57–36:14)
On archival discovery:
“A lot of heterogeneity in terms of what I couldn’t found and a lot of incredibly astonishing iconographic materials. So I really started as… gathering these powerful images without really knowing where I was going.” — Carlotta Daro (04:04)
On bridging theoretical and material scales:
“I like actually to jump from one scale to another as a physical scale, but also in terms of the object itself… these kind of infrastructure are present in the interior of an apartment, but we know that they are extended to the old territory.” — Carlotta Daro (23:28)
On the recurring tension in media studies:
“There is a tendency also to speak about communication as something that is immaterial… I wanted to bring this back… to be back to the materiality of these objects.” — Carlotta Daro (26:46)
On art’s role in technological critique:
“To me was a way to… focus and conclude the book with the use of the telephone to produce art.” — Carlotta Daro (28:17)
This episode showcases Carlotta Daro’s innovative approach to the telecommunication infrastructure––melding architecture, art history, media studies, and the study of material culture. The conversation highlights the book’s rich interdisciplinarity, its attention to both the grand narratives and overlooked stories of technological development, and its commitment to bridging theory, materiality, and art. For listeners, the episode offers both a compelling overview of The Architecture of the Wire and insight into the future directions of research in architecture, technology, and culture.