'There is no such thing as a boring place': architecture and the built environment as a televisual experience

The essay will look at a number of documentaries that relate to architecture with a view to analysing and defining their characteristic visual strategies, modes of address, and the ways in which they relate to key issues of heritage, innovation and timely controversies over social contexts and use. It will consider the documentary traditions that programmes draw on, and how the characteristics of television shape the mediation of buildings and environments. It will take a particular interest in the part played by expert and polemical commentators, both in terms of their ideological import and their function as expert narrators, advocates and avatars.

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Screen following peer review. The version of record Barry Curtis, Naomi House; ‘There is no such thing as a boring place’: architecture and the built environment as a televisual experience, Screen, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 March 2018, Pages 105–113, is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjy012
and https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/59/1/105/4937794