Anthony Fontenot
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226686066
- eISBN:
- 9780226752471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226752471.003.0006
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural History
This chapter explores urban debates on the American city following World War II. In response to the extraordinary transformations of the built environment, some called for order and control through ...
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This chapter explores urban debates on the American city following World War II. In response to the extraordinary transformations of the built environment, some called for order and control through modern urban planning while others advocated that the unplanned city should be allowed to develop “on its own” as a form of self-organization. We examine the critique of “Man Made America” (1950), by the Architectural Review editors, along with criticism by Lewis Mumford, William H. Whyte, Christopher Tunnard, and Peter Blake. In contrast, it considers Louis Kahn’s theory of the American city as fluid space and Jean Gottmann’s notion of megalopolis, while reflecting on the evolution of a new sensibility in the 1960s generation of Anglo-American designers and critics that embraced a non-design philosophy. Unlike modern urban planners who believed that design should be employed as a means of controlling the “exploding metropolis,” Charles Moore, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Reyner Banham, and others argued for non-design strategies in support of the complexity and spontaneity of the unplanned American city as a means of challenging modernist notions of architecture and urban planning. We conclude by examining Ada Louise Huxtable’s critique of chaos and the “new aesthetic.”Less
This chapter explores urban debates on the American city following World War II. In response to the extraordinary transformations of the built environment, some called for order and control through modern urban planning while others advocated that the unplanned city should be allowed to develop “on its own” as a form of self-organization. We examine the critique of “Man Made America” (1950), by the Architectural Review editors, along with criticism by Lewis Mumford, William H. Whyte, Christopher Tunnard, and Peter Blake. In contrast, it considers Louis Kahn’s theory of the American city as fluid space and Jean Gottmann’s notion of megalopolis, while reflecting on the evolution of a new sensibility in the 1960s generation of Anglo-American designers and critics that embraced a non-design philosophy. Unlike modern urban planners who believed that design should be employed as a means of controlling the “exploding metropolis,” Charles Moore, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Reyner Banham, and others argued for non-design strategies in support of the complexity and spontaneity of the unplanned American city as a means of challenging modernist notions of architecture and urban planning. We conclude by examining Ada Louise Huxtable’s critique of chaos and the “new aesthetic.”
George Cotkin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190218478
- eISBN:
- 9780190218508
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190218478.003.0022
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, Cultural History
The New Sensibility seemed to have its apotheosis in Las Vegas, a city predicated upon excess and liberation from traditional bounds. Not only did Tom Wolfe write about the city in these terms, but ...
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The New Sensibility seemed to have its apotheosis in Las Vegas, a city predicated upon excess and liberation from traditional bounds. Not only did Tom Wolfe write about the city in these terms, but architects Venturi and Scott Brown looked at the landscape and found it fascinating. In Learning from Las Vegas, a book that some designate as opening the era of the postmodern, they analyzed the surfaces and signs of Vegas, exulting in its eclecticism. Hunter S. Thompson, in his bestselling book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had a less pleasurable encounter with the city, inhabiting its excess and interpreting the city as exemplary of the death of the American dream. But in his fevered prose, excessive in its drug-induced paranoia, he created a work that fits firmly within the New Sensibility.Less
The New Sensibility seemed to have its apotheosis in Las Vegas, a city predicated upon excess and liberation from traditional bounds. Not only did Tom Wolfe write about the city in these terms, but architects Venturi and Scott Brown looked at the landscape and found it fascinating. In Learning from Las Vegas, a book that some designate as opening the era of the postmodern, they analyzed the surfaces and signs of Vegas, exulting in its eclecticism. Hunter S. Thompson, in his bestselling book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had a less pleasurable encounter with the city, inhabiting its excess and interpreting the city as exemplary of the death of the American dream. But in his fevered prose, excessive in its drug-induced paranoia, he created a work that fits firmly within the New Sensibility.
