The Rise of the ‘Technocelebrity’. The Politics of Social Expertise in the Public Careers of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius

The project combines expertise from modern history, history of architecture and media history to explore the relationship between experts and celebrity in the 20th century through the cases of two exemplary architects, Le Corbusier and Gropius. The project assumes as TCs they turned into social and political key figures through bundling strands of discourse that had previously not been connected and that the media and the public played an active role in shaping these TCs in a phase of accelerated technological and social change between the 1920s and 1960s. The project will question how democratic the phenomenon of TC was, how to position the phenomenon in the ‘age of extremes’ and the Cold War specifically and how it was gendered. It will do so by data mining different (mass) media but also through intense archival research on both architects and their networks.