Bridging Urban and Media Studies: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the Explorations Group, 1951-1957

Abstract

This article examines the collaborations between Marshall McLuhan, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, and the modernist town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in the 1950s. Giedion’s studies of everyday material culture and his concern with the human scale of cities became central to McLuhan’s proposal for studying media. Through a historical analysis of Tyrwhitt’s papers and correspondence, the paper documents her role in mediating a dialogue between McLuhan and Giedion and in co-founding, with McLuhan and others, the Explorations Group at the University of Toronto. Drawing upon Giedion’s concern with the humanization of urban life, Tyrwhitt helped formulate a methodology that used the urban environment and architecture as the framework to analyze the effects of media. The paper argues that Tyrwhitt’s own contributions to the Explorations journal took up both Giedion and McLuhan’s focus on media and material culture and their commitment to interdisciplinarity in examining the mediated experience of urban life.