Be it in Moscow, Belgrade, Berlin or Cairo – there is hardly a city or nation wanting to present itself as progressive that has resisted the showy construction of a television tower. According to exhibition curators Friedrich von Borries, Matthias Böttger and Florian Heilmeyer (raumtaktik, Berlin), “the TV towers that have risen up over cities since 1950 are almost always symbols of social change or political and economic power. No other type of building in the second half of the 20th century was as politically charged as the television tower.”

A case in point is the Berlin Television Tower. It will celebrate the 40th anniversary of its inauguration on October 3, 2009. This building was not only supposed to dwarf every tower in West Germany, but at the same time to form the pinnacle of the redevelopment of East Berlin’s center.
Television towers are still being built today. Two projects are currently underway in Japan and China, both of which have 610 meter-high towers and thus aim to supersede the CN Tower in Toronto as the world’s tallest television tower.

The exhibition will showcase 25 realized or planned television towers in Ashgabat, Auckland, Barcelona, Baghdad, Belgrade, Berlin, Brasilia, Guangzhou, Jakarta, Yekaterinburg, Johannesburg, Cairo, Las Vegas, Liberec, Moscow, Prague, Riga, Shanghai, Stuttgart, Tashkent, Tehran, Tokyo (2), Toronto and Vilnius. There have never been so many TV towers in one exhibition before.

The global distribution of the towers, which began in 1956 with the inauguration of the Stuttgart Television Tower, traces the political history of the 20th century. The ideological competition between the East and West was followed by rivalry between global cities as to which could be most attractive to tourists and corporations. The first television towers were mainly built in Europe and are currently almost exclusively built in emerging countries in Asia and the Middle East.

Most television towers are characterized by the political circumstances prevailing at the time of their construction. They are both a risky venture in terms of engineering and a sign of social progress. Thus most of them have a fixed spot in the popular culture of the respective cities and countries. People love or hate them, sell them to tourists in the form of souvenirs or print them on postcards. More than with any other type of building, it is literally the signal effect of the TV towers’ architecture that is the center of interest.

Unlike in many architecture exhibitions, visitors to the DAM will not find any architectural models, renderings or engineering plans, but rather a collection of objects from everyday culture: stamps and postcards, cocktail mixers and cheese skewers, bedside lamps and schnapps bottles, pens, snow globes, puzzles and candles. The DAM will become a souvenir shop documenting the variety of individual ways (state) architecture is adopted.
Developments in different countries are compared within several different lines of thought dealing, for example, with the issues of propaganda, marketing and destruction.