Experts of the Media

The changing nature of the role of experts in politics and society, as well as their ideas, caught the media’s attention, which coincided with the experts’ vision of their own importance.

Debating the place of experts vis-à-vis society and politics occupied the CIAM during their important convention in 1933. During the conference, renowned photographer and filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy produced the film Architects’ Congress. The film testifies to the experts’ idea of history in the making, and captures the socializing and ‘living-of-modernity’ that characterized many of the male and female architects on board the boat to Athens.

The film highlighted stars like architect Le Corbusier, who was famous for his radical urban planning designs, and who, during the conference, argued for a decisive role for experts in politics and society. The film attests to the significance of experts and their technological solutions.

In Moholy-Nagy’s eyes, the experts of the built environment deserved his attention and that of the public. The “actors” starring in this film, he believed, could truly build a new kind of city that would allow for a better world than had been left behind by the Great War.

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