The architecture of microwave towers, 1949-1984: Cold War relays. Comparative study of french and english contexts

Microwave towers, familiar yet often overlooked silhouettes, have stood out in our landscapes since the post-war period. Objects of curiosity or indifference, they remain largely absent from the field of architectural history, relegated to their technical function. This thesis considers the subject through the prism of the Cold War and explores the hypothesis that these towers, far from being mere technical objects, reflect aesthetic and ideological values linked to their context. The work thus lies at the intersection of architectural history, the history of technology, cultural studies and heritage, contributing to a redefinition of architectural canons by integrating these marginalised objects. The methodology adopted is primarily comparative, focusing on the French and British contexts through the constitution of a study corpus covering the years 1949 to 1984. The thesis explores successively the French post-war experiments and the development of the first models, the British development of the dual civil and military 'Backbone' network, and the French modernisation of the 1970s, before addressing the obsolescence of the technology through the mechanisms of heritage preservation and protection of the towers. It demonstrates that these technical architectures are material manifestations of the political, economic and aesthetic evolution of Cold War Europe.