10 Membranes

The Architecture of News International

The above picture is of the new Sky studios in Osterley. This is a £233 million state-of-the-art media production facility housing the principal operations of, BBC excepted, the major media powerhouse of the UK. What a building it is; not so much a building as a factory, a stylistic echoed in the other great fortress of News International, Wapping, a vast complex somewhere between a Soviet steel works and an oil tanker, beached amidst warehouse conversions and tenements. The building is of course resonant as the place that broke Fleet Street and the print unions.

The architecture of News International is one that squarely situates the media business as one of industrial, as opposed to post-industrial, mass production. These are not glass and steel palaces, light, open and democratic, not distributed presences, but brute, oppressively functional (unlike say the functionalism of Rogers and co) monoliths, de-contextualised, not so much designed as sat down by unthinking alliances of accountants and engineers, statements of shock and awe in power terms. Great factories are monuments to economic prowess - think the Salts Mill in Bradford, or the Ford and GM factories in Detroit, in their pomp the greatest centres of industrial production in the world, or the armouries of Krupp in the Ruhr, Magnitogorsk rising from the Russian plains or today we might think of the sprawling factory state of Foxconn in Shenzen, one plant alone encompassing up to 450k workers. Factories are nodes of raw economic output; News International does not produce content; it manufacturers it. 

This building is one that fires the imagination. It is almost comically dystopian, futuristic, menacing; the sealed cube of an impenetrable global network of unparalleled influence and inscrutability. By design or not, News International has ended up with architecture that reveals how digitisation doesn’t change the industrial footprint of mass media to the extent we might expect, and also reveals the way in which the company, but probably not the employees, internalises its own mass, role and function, and also, and most wonderfully, plays into the hands of all who are suspicious of the Great Murdoch Empire.