Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and the Market 9780226752471

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Non-Design

Non-Design Arch itectu r e , L i be r A L i s m, A n d t h e mA r k e t

Anthony Fontenot

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris. This publication is made possible in part by the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68606-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75247-1 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226752471.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fontenot, Anthony, author. Title: Non-design : architecture, liberalism and the market / Anthony Fontenot. Other titles: Architecture, liberalism and the market Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034650 | ISBN 9780226686066 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226752471 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture, Modern—20th century. | Architecture—United States— History—20th century. | City planning—History—20th century. | Design— Philosophy. | Liberalism. | Libertarianism. Classification: LCC NA680 .F62 2021 | DDC 720.973/0904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034650 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my mother, for her endless encouragement and for having shown me that with diligence and patience anything is possible

Contents

Introduction 1 1 : Planned Order versus Spontaneous Order 25 2 : New Brutalism and the Critique of Socialism: Non-Design and the New Visual Order 54 3 : The Borax Debates: From Modern Design to Non-Design 101 4 : Spontaneous City: Jane Jacobs and the Critique of Planned Order 136 5 : Chaos or Control: Non-Design and the American City 169 6 : The Indeterminate City 214 Conclusion 266 Acknowledgments 275

Notes 277

Index 363

Introduction

One of the most fundamental critiques of design in the twentieth century came from critics outside the discipline in a revolt against central design. The impact on political, economic, and design theory was devastating. At the heart of this effort to overthrow design as a form of control was the phenomenon of non-design, a term that denotes an attitude that is characterized by a suspicion and/or rejection of conscious design while embracing various phenomena that emerge without intention or deliberate human design.1 Fundamental to the philosophy of non-design is the rejection of any design of a social and economic order made according to a centralized authority. With the revival of liberalism, in the 1940s non-design was well articulated as a critique of collectivism, evident in the theories of the Austrian-school economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich August von Hayek, and espoused by many liberal critics, including the Austria-born philosopher Karl Popper. Hayek’s work on the undesigned nature of social institutions and his theory of spontaneous order, understood as the result of individual action but not of human design, challenged the dominant socialist views about planning and the necessity for a consciously designed social and economic order. These theories were developed into a doctrine that maintained a critical view of any form of rational control of society by a central authority. Parallel to political and economic debates, in the 1940s Hubert de Cronin Hastings, chief editor and proprietor of the British periodical the Architectural Review, put forth a radical theory of design known as townscape, also based on a revival of liberalism, articulated as a revolt against aesthetic and political tyranny.2 Exploring the philosophy of non-design in British and American design culture, I argue in this book that the attempt to purge central design from architecture and urban planning that emerged in the postwar period took place for many of the same reasons that Mises, Hayek, Popper, and other liberal thinkers gave with respect to their critique of collectivist economic planning. By the 1960s the architectural and urban theories of Jane Jacobs, Ernst Gombrich, Christopher Alexander, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott

Brown, and particularly Reyner Banham, shared many of the concerns of the liberal critique of central design, particularly related to control and order. Although it is rarely noted explicitly, non-design played a significant role in British and American design culture in the postwar period. A key goal of this book is to recover and assess that legacy. My aim is not to endorse the doctrine of non-design but rather to investigate its relationship with design theory. I have concerned myself less with whether the approaches espoused by liberal theorists are sound, which is to say, with whether they ultimately promote or hinder the formation of a democratic society, than with exploring parallel developments in economic and political theory and in design theory.3 To pursue this inquiry, I employ two basic concepts, non-design and non-plan, that are related yet distinct. Non-design describes both a phenomenon that emerges without intention or deliberate human design and a philosophy that is characterized by a rejection of conscious design. Design is the result of intended action, whereas non-design is the result of unintended action without a specific predetermined outcome that, according to Hayek, nevertheless generates order.4 The term non-plan, as conceived in the manifesto by Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price titled “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom” (1969), was a call for deregulation and the implementation of a method by which unrestrained market forces define the outcome of the urban order.5 These approaches were informed by a liberal attitude that advocates a free and spontaneous social and economic order and is opposed to centralized societies, like those guided by state socialism.6 The key philosophy behind non-design and non-plan is the liberal understanding of liberty as “a condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible.”7 Throughout this book we will be concerned with the emergence of this new paradigm and the various forces that ushered in the transition from design to non-design and from planning to non-planning in the postwar period. The task becomes one of exploring the extremes in economic and political discourse, on the one hand, and avantgarde theories of design, on the other. My main argument is that, parallel to well-known political and economic debates, architecture and urban planning also engaged in critiques of central design as a form of control over social and economic life.

t h e economic And P o Lit icA L cr it iq ue of c entrAL design The 1920s and 1930s were marked by the decline of liberalism and the rise of totalitarianism. In the midst of the economic and social crisis of the Great Depression, as many nations turned to strongmen to address their ills, the well-known American journalist Walter Lippmann published An Inquiry into the Principles of a Good Society (1937), in which he denounced fascism and communism. These two extremes were grouped together because both implied

2 | introduction

coercive direction by a single-party dictatorship and an endangered liberal economy. Reflecting on history, Lippmann contrasted the legacy of liberalism and Adam Smith with that of collectivism and Karl Marx and found the latter to be driven by a compulsive rational desire to control social processes. In contrast to collectivist efforts to design a new society, Lippmann maintained that democracy relies on the “formless power of the mass of the population,” best managed through “social control by law rather than by command.” To those invested in designs of the future, Lippmann arrived at a devastating conclusion: “The modern economy requires freedom from arbitrariness through equal laws. But it cannot be planned. No new social order can be designed. The agenda of liberal reforms is long, but there is no general plan of a new society. All plans of a new society are a rationalization of the absolute will. They are the subjective beginnings of fanaticism and tyranny.”8 The modern economy, he continued, “is world-wide, formless, vast, complicated, and, owing to technological progress, in constant change.”9 Referring to those who try to stabilize it, whether by “protective laws and monopolistic schemes” or “when the revolutionist makes blueprints of a world composed of planned national economies ‘coordinated’ by a world planning authority,” Lippmann asserted, “neither takes any more account of reality than if he were studying landscape architecture with a view to making a formal garden out of the Brazilian jungle.”10 The claim that this formless entity cannot be designed— and indeed, according to liberals, should never even be attempted to be designed— is a central concern of this book. Lippmann acknowledged that “the greater the society [is], the higher and more variable the standards of life, the more diversified the energies of its people for invention, enterprise, and adaptation, the more certain it is that the social order cannot be planned ex cathedra or governed by administrative command.”11 He argued, “The collectivist planners are not talking about the human race but about some other breed conceived in their dreams.” As if to address the visionary architects and urban planners of the period, Lippmann argued: “The Good Society has no architectural design. There are no blueprints.”12 To an entire generation of socialist avant-garde artists, architects, and intellectuals committed to progressive schemes of the future, specifically Le Corbusier, who held the benevolent despot Louis XIV in great esteem,13 Lippmann warned that “the supreme architect, who begins as a visionary, becomes a fanatic, and ends as a despot. For no one can be the supreme architect of society without employing a supreme despot to execute the design.”14 Restating his claim, Lippman wrote, “There is no plan of the future: there is, on the contrary, the conviction that the future must have the shape that human energies, purged in so far as possible of arbitrariness, will give it.”15 He warned, “There is no mold in which human life is to be shaped. Indeed, to expect the blueprint of such a mold is a mode of thinking against which the liberal temper is a constant protest.”16 The liberal principle that informs the resistance to any attempt to design society by central command drives

3 | introduction

the philosophy of non-design. The liberal attitude fiercely rejects any effort to mold and shape society according to the dictates of an authority. Whether employed in political, economic, or design discourse, this critique has shaped the history of twentieth-century architecture and urban planning theory to a significant degree. Lippmann acknowledged the work of the Austrian-school economists Mises and Hayek, “whose critique of planned economy has brought a new understanding of the whole problem of collectivism.”17 Since 1920, a “formidable literature,” Lippmann wrote, had developed in Europe, particularly Mises’s “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen” (1920).18 Chief among books in English was Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibility of Socialism (1935), a collection of essays edited by Hayek that featured Mises’s seminal essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” which presented a devastating critique of the entire ethos of socialist economic calculation in a planned economy, triggering the decades-long economic calculation debate.19 Inspired by a translation of Lippmann’s book, the French philosopher Louis Rougier organized the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, an international gathering in Paris on August 26– 30, 1938.20 The group studied The Good Society in detail and sought to construct a new liberalism as a rejection of collectivism, socialism, and the old laissez-faire liberalism.21 The main idea was to resist collectivist central planning because, as Mises and Hayek argued, it would lead only to economic chaos and the destruction of human liberty. The gathering included Lippmann along with many European intellectuals, such as Raymond Aron and Michael Polanyi, as well as Austrian-school advocates, including Hayek, Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow, and Alfred Schütz, and it resulted in the birth of an international organization, Centre International d’Études pour la Rénovation du Libéralisme, or International Center of Studies for the Renovation of Liberalism. While these efforts were largely stymied during the war, in 1947 they were revived by Hayek with the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, which put forth a new philosophy to challenge the views of collectivist state socialism associated with Marxist or Keynesian social and economic planning that was widespread throughout the developed nations.22 Its members included social theorists, economists (including Hayek, Mises, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Frank Knight), philosophers (including Karl Popper and the American libertarian economist and philosopher Murray Rothbard), and historians (including the Austria-born art historian Ernst Gombrich). The association was formed to facilitate an exchange of ideas between scholars from various disciplines and points of view and to establish a more liberal approach to society in the “hope of strengthening the principles and practice of a free society and to study the workings, virtues, and defects of market-oriented economic systems.” The mission of the organization was to promote economic and political liberalism, and key among its objectives was “the right of each individual to

4 | introduction

plan his own life.”23 This view reflected the position of Lippmann, who had insisted that “in a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.”24 These efforts helped to formulate new ideas and circulate the philosophy of liberalism and the critique of collectivist planning among multiple disciplines.

t he L i b erAL c ritiq ue o f th e We LfA r e s tAt e In 1942, the Labour Party of Great Britain released The Old World and the New Society, in which the party outlined its plan for social and economic reconstruction. Asserting Labour’s vision of a socialist planned order, the pamphlet boldly outlined its plans for “a planned democracy,” declaring that “a planned society must replace the old competitive system.” Given that “an unplanned society is unable to maintain a reasonable standard of life for a large number of its citizens,” the Labour Party argued that “there must be no return to the unplanned competitive world of the inter-War years. . . . The basis of our Democracy must be planned production for community use.” The effects of an unplanned economic order were responsible, they argued, for everything from poverty to fascism. Harold Laski, who would serve as chairman of the British Labour Party in 1945– 1946, promoting a resolution (later passed) in a speech delivered at the Party Conference on May 26, 1942, noted, “Nationalization of the essential instruments of production before the war ends, the maintenance of control over production and distribution after the war— this is the spearhead of this resolution.”25 Voices of opposition to this grand socialist vision were deemed “anti-planners” and “anti-controllers,” meant to be derogatory, describing those who resisted socialist polices of nationalization of major industries and utilities along with the required concentration of state power though central planning.26 As the growing enthusiasm for planning increased throughout the 1940s, the liberal philosophy grew more pronounced in its critique of centralized state planning. In 1944 Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, in which he accused the planned order of socialists as an unnecessary, and perilous, form of centralized control over social and economic life. He warned British intellectuals that, regardless of good intentions, they were on an extremely dangerous path that would only undermine efforts to achieve economic and political freedom. Hayek argued that “whoever controls all economic activity controls the means of all our ends.” He continued, “Democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who now wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects.”27 Referring to the alleged inevitability of planning, Hayek wrote, “The main question is where this movement will lead us.”28 He argued that socialism was responsible for having “persuaded liberal-minded people to submit once more to that regimentation of

5 | introduction

economic life that they had overthrown because, in the words of Adam Smith, it put governments in such a position that “‘to support themselves they are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.’”29 The solution was to reject collectivism and economic planning in favor of a free and competitive market. For Hayek, “one of the main arguments in favor of competition is that it dispenses with the need for ‘conscious social control’ and that it gives the individuals a chance to decide whether the prospects of a particular occupation are sufficient to compensate for the disadvantages and risks connected with it.”30 The British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century, particularly Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Hayek maintained, “have given us an interpretation of the growth of civilization that is still the indispensable foundation of the argument for liberty. They find the origin of institutions, not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful.”31 Building on this insight, Hayek understood society and the market to be undesigned phenomena that were created by everyone yet designed by no one. For Hayek, the invisible hand was the crucial mechanism that enabled “spontaneously grown institutions, such as language, law, morals, and conventions that anticipated modern scientific approaches and from which the liberals might have profited,” to function and develop, arguing that the market order has evolved by a process of cumulative growth, without specific direction or intention, that is the result of human action but not of human design.32 Liberalism, Hayek maintained, “built up a social theory which made the undesigned results of individual action its central object, and in particular provided a comprehensive theory of the spontaneous order of the market.”33 In contrast to what he perceived as an obsession with design and planning of social order, whether it was Hegel or Marx, “whether it was socialism in its more radical form or merely ‘organization’ or ‘planning’ of a less radical kind,” Hayek was concerned because he believed that at its core was an issue of control.34 In contrast to the oppressive legacy of coercion and the state, Hayek’s notion of liberty was based on the idea of order without commands. One of Hayek’s major contributions was to theorize spontaneous order, a formless entity allowed to evolve without the interference of an outside force, and to promote it as an ideal social and economic order.35 Indicating the extent to which these ideas represented the opposite of what socialist intellectuals believed at the time, Hayek wrote: “According to the views now dominant, the question is no longer how we can make the best use of the spontaneous forces found in a free society. We have in effect undertaken to dispense with these forces and to replace them by collective and ‘conscious’ direction.” He concluded that “the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man.”36 From the doctrines of Saint-Simon, the first of the modern planners, to that of Marx, the fundamental problem of the collectivist approach, Hayek believed, had persisted into the present.37 Consequently, Hayek denounced the passion for central planning associated with H. G. Wells, Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes,

6 | introduction

and Lewis Mumford, among others, as not only naïve but also counterproductive to the formation of a society based on social and economic liberty.38 This period witnessed a rise in critiques of the scientific objectivism of Marxism and Soviet-style planning of economic and social life, which were explosive cultural and political issues. Hayek’s critique of socialist planning called into question many cherished beliefs, such as the notion that “a planned society is a free society,” a view challenged by many liberal critics. Following the collapse of German liberalism, in Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944), Mises argued that dictatorship and violent oppression of dissenters were not peculiar features of Nazism but “the Soviet mode of government, and as such advocated all over the world by the numerous friends of present-day Russia.”39 Both Hayek and Mises argued that central design by a small elite group, whether implemented by the political left (communism) or the right (fascism), was inherently undemocratic, if not totalitarian. As an alternative, they believed that the market functioned as a neutral mechanism and provided an appropriate means by which a democratic society could be achieved through the decentralization of information and wealth. These fundamental ideas helped establish the Austrian-school critics as “the world’s most formidable opponents of Marxism and socialism and leading exponents of liberal ideology.”40 They urged that it was crucial to understand the vital role that spontaneity played in the evolution of a dynamic undesigned order that included the market, social institutions, and culture. For Mises, Hayek, Michael Polanyi, and other liberal thinkers, a democratic society was a spontaneous society. Polanyi wrote: “When order is achieved among human beings by allowing them to interact with each other on their own initiative— subject only to laws which uniformly apply to all of them— we have a system of spontaneous order in society. We may then say that the efforts of these individuals are co-ordinated by exercising their individual initiative and that this self co-ordination justifies their liberty on public grounds.”41 The example that best epitomized spontaneous order, the prototype of order established by an invisible hand, was the free market. While largely distinguishing liberals from socialists, these economic and political concerns had their counterpart in design debates. For modern design theorists such as Sigfried Giedion, the unrestrained forces of the market not only resulted in crass commercialism but also produced a state of affairs in which design was controlled by the “dictatorship of the market.” Given that many socialists believed that a good society was defined by a well-planned collective community based on social welfare, the very concept of democracy, and its relationship to design, was at stake. With the help of Hayek and Gombrich, Karl Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), in which he put forth a critique of totalitarianism in defense of freedom, individualism, democracy, and an “open society.” A common feature in the work of Mises, Hayek, and Popper was their attempt to analyze the roots of totalitarianism. Accusing Plato, Hegel, and Marx of relying

7 | introduction

on historicism to support their political concepts, Popper announced, “‘Scientific’ Marxism is dead.”42 He advocated a philosophy that was “diametrically opposed to all those modern Platonic dreams of brave new worlds in which the growth of reason would be controlled or ‘planned’ by some superior reason.”43 This liberal critique coalesced into a new philosophy that challenged the views of social and economic planning associated with state socialism and informed some of the most incisive critiques directed at socialist and Marxist views of culture, including modern urban planning and design. Though seldom discussed in relation to architectural discourse, the philosophy of nondesign manifested itself as a critique of central design in economic, political, and design theory from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Lib erALism And design: A rch it ect ur A L d e bAtes o f the 1940s The 1940s proved a period of great change in attitude toward design. The London periodical the Architectural Review developed a multifaceted campaign that came to be known as townscape, based on a revival of the eighteenth-century philosophy of the picturesque, that sought to challenge architects, planners, and politicians view of design. Townscape was spearheaded by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, who in 1944 published “Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscape,” in which he claimed the eighteenth-century radical English notion of liberty as the central thesis of the townscape doctrine.44 This polemic was informed not only by the opposing values behind English liberty and French tyranny but also by the relationship between design and coercion: “Can democratic opinion which is by its nature diffuse be brought round to the saving grace of a Bauhaus style without the application of force?” Hastings asked. To advance his case, Hastings contrasted the English “Empire of free men,” who devised the “free forms” of the picturesque, with the “totalitarian French with their insistence on slavish symmetry.”45 Equally informed by eighteenth-century radical political and aesthetic theory, the picturesque offensive, Hastings asserted, was “a revolt against that old bore Plato, a protest against merely ideal Beauty.”46 Explaining the “urgent meaning” of the picturesque, or townscape, for contemporary debates, Hastings wrote, “According to the present thesis the full implications of the modern movement with all its baffling ambiguities can only be brought out by reference to the eighteenth century in which, and not the nineteenth, were set up those basic contradictions which form the stuff of the modern dilemma.”47 Informed by radical Whig principles of the eighteenth century, Hastings appears to share certain affinities with the liberal thinkers of the day.48 In response to the two prevailing political models of the period, US capitalism and the managerial and authoritarian socialism of the Soviet Union, Hastings called for a pluralistic democracy that could safeguard the welfare of every individual. The radical philosophy of Uvedale Price, a key protagonist of the eighteenth-century picturesque debate who was fond of associating good 8 | introduction

government with good landscape, was revived to address the ills of the postwar world and to combat the obsession with control in modern design. Inspired by Price’s free plans that “suits all free governments” and exclude only despotism, Hastings explored the relationship between “freedom and free forms,” with the aim of achieving a type of design without coercion. In contrast to French garden design, his answer was the picturesque, a radical, anarchic, entropic “disorderly ideal” and “a tremendous event in the long apprenticeship of democracy.”49 In 1949 Hastings published “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy founded on the true rock of Sir Uvedale Price,” which outlined townscape’s liberalism in urban planning as a radical approach that called for the acceptance of everything, from Victorian and popular culture to modernism. Hastings implored architects and town planners to “love, or to try to love” all things, including those that were beyond their control, from “Spec. Builders’ Venetian” to the “neon sign of the flower shop.” Of the picturesque, Hastings wrote: “It is a democratic art. It can give satisfaction to all tastes.”50 When Hastings asserted that the townscape philosophy “exhorts the visual planner— particularly the English visual planner— to preoccupy himself with the vast field of anonymous design and unacknowledged path which still lies entirely outside the terms of reference of official town-planning routine,” he initiated an entirely new approach.51 By acknowledging both the planned and the unplanned parts of the city as the complete built environment, informed by a liberal attitude that accepted radical differences, Hastings set in motion a doctrine that would have a profound, if often misunderstood and seldom acknowledged, effect on the evolution of design theory of the second half of the twentieth century.52 During this period, the liberal view of spontaneous order stood in stark contrast to the dominant views of the socialist planned order. For the English art historian Herbert Read, a champion of modernism in Britain, the importance of design was that, particularly in the context of the upheaval and devastation of the war, it could help introduce order into a “chaotic civilization.”53 In 1944, in the context of wartime planning, the Council of Industrial Design was initiated as an effort to establish central state control over various aspects of design, a move that many modern architects and theorists supported. For example, the German émigré art historian and architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, like many other socialists, maintained unwavering support for social reform and centralized state planning, which was viewed as being in opposition to liberalism, spontaneous order, and free-market economics.

t he d ec Line of so c iALism And t h e r i s e of A non- mArxist APProAch What emerged after World War II was nothing short of the “collapse of humanity.” National Socialism was revealed as barbaric, made grotesquely evident by the horrifying images of emaciated dead bodies in prison camps, followed 9 | introduction

by reports, in excruciating detail, of the mechanization of death executed by the cold, rational logic of a totalitarian European government. No one escaped; everyone was thrown into a world of chaos. Progress and doom are two sides of the same coin, said Hannah Arendt.54 Mises and Hayek argued that central control by the government over private property and the economic system is what distinguished any type of socialist state, Nazi or communist, from a liberal economy. They argued that the scientific utopianism of Soviet communism, with its promise of a world of equality, and the Neuordnung (new order) were both based on a one-party totalitarian dictatorship. For many, the moral disaster of the Nazi experiment only reinforced the eighteenth-century liberal notion of the “hazard of any experiment” that Edmund Burke had continually warned about. The revival of liberalism offered one of the most sustained critiques of centralized power and totalitarianism. The need to distance oneself from overt rationalism, which modern architecture had long been identified with, became increasingly pronounced.55 Following the momentous Labour Party victory in 1945, in which the socialists vowed to deliver the brave new world of the welfare state, in 1951 England witnessed the return of Winston Churchill as prime minister and the Festival of Britain, a hybrid scheme composed of modernist buildings and picturesque planning, conceived by the vanguard of British socialist architects of the period. Described by Churchill as little more than “three-dimensional Socialist propaganda,” the Festival of Britain was dismissed by the young as a debased and irrelevant approach to design. In the 1940s, London modern architects were largely socialist. This was the context in which the new humanism was conceived and conveyed on July 6, 1944, in the Architects’ Journal, as a reaction against the principles of functionalist and rationalist modern architecture.56 Inspired by the Swedish attempt to humanize design, the Architectural Review’s editors introduced of a new attitude toward architecture and planning in Britain that was referred to as the “the new empiricism.”57 While emphasizing certain aspects of socialist realism, the official style in Moscow, the new empiricists tried to accommodate popular taste in architecture, designed to soften the harshness of modern architecture with “people’s detailing” that used traditional materials, such as bricks and wood, as part of the political transformation of Britain toward Swedish-type socialism in the postwar years.58 As Toni del Renzio explained, for many in the Independent Group, “Marxism had little to offer anymore.”59 Throughout Europe, he continued, the “various Communist Parties which were closely associated with aesthetic notions hardly progressed from what was seen by us as discredited social realism.”60 This non-Marxist approach informed the revolt of the young. By the early 1950s, the reassessment of the principles of modern design gained momentum among a new generation of architects and critics associated with the movement of brutalism.61 The first target of the brutalists was the architecture of the Festival of Britain and the early new towns, chronicled in the manifesto “The New Brutalism” (1955) by Reyner Banham, whose attack was directed at both the international style and new empiricism.62 10 | i n t r o d u c t i o n

In his 1952 series of lectures “Freedom and Its Betrayal,” the Russia-born liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, author of Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939), focused on six formative anti-liberal thinkers, including Hegel and Saint-Simon.63 When Berlin’s eloquent elucidation of pluralism and liberalism, and their virtues, was broadcast on BBC Radio’s Third Programme, it created a wild sensation. This was followed by The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (1953), one of Berlin’s most popular publications, in which he established two types of intellectual and artistic personalities: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”64 While the hedgehog was associated with “those who relate everything to a single central vision” and “planning the life of society,” the fox referred to “those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way . . . related by no moral or aesthetic principle.”65 We learn that the world of the hedgehog, undoubtedly the villain in this tale, is centripetal, and that of the fox is centrifugal, “their thought is scattered or diffused.”66 As we shall see, these intellectual concerns were extended to inform design debates. Just as liberal critics challenged scientific Marxism and rationalist, purposive planning, arguing in support of a system that embraced free and spontaneous social processes, the postwar period witnessed a new non-rationalist attitude in art and culture. In the United States, Jackson Pollock’s action paintings demonstrated how spontaneity could be incorporated into the process of making art, while in Europe, the interest in unconscious forces found expression in art brut and art informel, explored by Michel Tapié in Un art autre (1952). These ideas informed the principles of new brutalism, which sought to challenge the ethics and aesthetics associated with socialist design.67 The relationship between design and rational order was reconsidered by a range of architects and thinkers, including the Independent Group members, particularly Alison and Peter Smithson, evident in their fascination with the “messy vitality” of street life documented in the photographs of Nigel Henderson.68 The non-design critique informed some of the edgier design discourse and practice of the period, such as the Smithsons’ interest in a “random or scattered aesthetic” and Banham’s fascination with the “chaos of the market.” As Anne Massey noted, the Independent Group’s new understanding of design “emphasized the history of science and technology and gloried in the disorder of human existence.”69 The Smithsons developed a new design philosophy based on a valuation of materials for their inherent qualities “as found,” unmolested by design. This approach informed their 1953 revolt at the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) meeting in Aix-en-Provence against philosophies of high modernism. The disorder of daily life became the subject of new debates and experiments in art and architecture. The Independent Group’s attempt to theorize disorder found expression in a chaotic “new visual order” of common daily life explored in exhibitions such as Parallel of Life and Art (1953) and the “Patio and Pavilion” section of This Is Tomorrow (1956). Many designers and critics interested in non-design were often preoccupied with the 11 | i n t r o d u c t i o n

“removal of limits” and the resultant “unrestrained,” “unformed,” and “diffuse aesthetic.”70 The Independent Group’s interest in the relationship between design, the market, advertisement, and consumer products as a more openended design method is revealing. If the philosophy of CIAM dominated urban debates from the congress’s founding in 1928 to World War II, by the mid-1950s signs of its collapse were beginning to emerge. In 1957, just as Popper announced “the end of utopian engineering” and the Smithsons and other members of Team 10 proclaimed “the end of CIAM,” Alvar Aalto affirmed that the architectural revolution was still alive and warned that, like all revolutions, “it starts with enthusiasm and it stops with some sort of dictatorship.”71 Terms such as dictatorship increasingly gained currency within the design disciplines as a critique of rationalist control.72 These issues were explored as they related to everything from the design of objects and building to new attitudes toward the city and modern urban planning. During this period, the question of central control permeated deep into many aspects of art and culture. For example, in 1954 during the seminar “Urban Form,” the American composer-artist John Cage asserted, “I think it would be better to give up the idea of control and merely enjoy the absence of control,” to which the urban planner Kevin Lynch responded, “You believe, then, that the person should be trained to enjoy what is there, rather than attempt to control the environment.” Cage responded, “What would be the intention of an imposed order?”73 In 1958 Cage developed a diagram to illustrate a specific strategy that he was exploring in his work, which was accompanied by two phrases: “consciously controlled” and “unconsciously allowed to be.”74 Similarly, in 1958 the British art critic Lawrence Alloway, a member of the Independent Group, visited several cities in the United States, and while he acknowledged the “architect-controlled places,” such as Rockefeller Center, it was the vast and complex decentralized cities such as Los Angeles that, he believed, constituted the “real city” of the time. Such an environment, Alloway concluded, “seems to be unplannable in popular terms.”75 While recognizing that “the mass arts contribute to the real environment of cities in an important way,” Alloway also wrote, “It is absurd to print a photograph of Piccadilly Circus and caption it ‘Architectural Squalor’ as Ernő Goldfinger and E. J. Carter did.”76 Alloway believed that such “dense displays of small bright packages,” along with radio, music, and cinema, offered vital connections with the “real” environment. Reflecting on the growing appreciation of “pop architecture,” Alloway argued that “popular art in the city is a function of the whole city and not only of its architects.”77 These spontaneous popular environments gained significance as symbols of a non-imposed order as designers grappled with issues related to design and control. In 1959 Banham came out in support of the radical forms of decentralized cities emerging in the United States, arguing that they constituted vital centers of “popular aggregation” resulting from the “diffuse, well-mechanised culture

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of motorized conurbation.”78 These unplanned environments were hailed as a new model of decentralization. Questioning whether a single designer could be responsible for an entire city or even “arbitrate over the whole design process,” in 1960 Peter Smithson concluded that “centralized design control does not work.”79 Referring to Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Plan (1960), Smithson insisted, “it is above all, centralized, absolutist, authoritarian.”80 As plans by architects were contrasted with popular spontaneous urban formations, which were routinely denigrated by urban planners, in 1961 Banham emphasized that there were multiple solutions for dealing with the complexities of the contemporary city, “but the one we have so far is the relatively desperate solution of handing over responsibility to the will of a dictator— Le Corbusier at Chandigarh, Lucio Costa at Brasilia— and we are entitled to ask whether this is an adequate solution for our most pressing problem in design.”81 The characterization of planners as dictators and authoritarian would only become more common. If in the early 1960s Banham still believed that it was conceivable to renounce the “autocratic dominance” of Bauhaus theory without “losing control of the over-all design,” then by the late 1960s his criticism increasingly distanced itself from the “need for control.” From the authority of modern design to regulations imposed by the welfare state, Banham consistently challenged the power of exclusive institutions.

t he n eu trALity o f the mAr ke t For Mises, Hayek, Polanyi, and other liberals, the free market epitomized a spontaneous order insofar as it was not consciously designed by anyone for any specific purpose; rather, they believed, it resulted from a process of trial and error that freely evolved over generations. Following the publication of Planned Chaos (1947), Mises released his imposing magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949), which enlightened a generation on the connection between “value-free economics” and liberal politics.82 Just as liberal theorists assumed that the market functioned as a neutral or value-free mechanism, without the need for central control and allowing individuals to pursue their own interest free of coercion by government and other forms of authority, designers began to investigate the relationship between design and the “chaos of the market,” an important topic for the Independent Group, especially Banham. Parallel to the development of liberal economic theories of the period, Banham’s embrace of the American commercial logic of free-market economics had a profound effect on his criticism and played a crucial role in shifting debates on modern design. By the mid-1950s, Banham argued that the history of automotive design demonstrated an “extraordinary continuum of emotional- engineering-by-public- consent.”83 Consequently, Banham embraced the American commercial logic of product design and its fine-tuned engagement with the market, a phenomenon referred to as “borax,” which he believed offered a more “democratic give and take.”84

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The neutrality of the market was said to allow consumers to make choices that were incorporated into the design process. In design, the idea of spectators as consumers developed in the work of Lawrence Alloway. Referring to the interactive design work of John McHale, in 1955 Alloway explained that the artist keeps “control from a distance on the construction because he did the initial work, but, after that, all the effective decisions are made by the spectator.”85 Along with the idea that the spectator, or consumer, was as an active agent in the design process came the idea that design work needed to embody a certain neutrality to allow for (cybernetic) feedback, adjustment, and engagement.86 Similar ideas informed designers in their search for a value-free approach to design. The call for more anonymous or neutral methods of design, which sought to challenge design as a form of control, became increasingly pronounced in the 1960s. As the European model of design became associated with central control, Banham looked to more anonymous methods of design, which he found in the typical American model of commercial industrial design, responsible for everything from automobiles to appliances, and created by teams of anonymous designers in close contact with the “desires of the public.” In an effort to define a more democratic design process, Banham encouraged designers to experiment with the development of a “permissive architecture,” claiming that there was no need for “elaborate controls, nor for hidden persuaders.”87 Banham repeatedly articulated his interest in “almost value-free buildings,” an interest he shared with Cedric Price and others.88 Price believed that what the world needed for maximum freedom was “a wellserviced anonymity.”89 Informed by a “philosophy of enabling,” Price’s Fun Palace (1961– 1965) was an extraordinary example of indeterminacy in architectural form, allowing its components to be reconfigured according to the desires of its occupants, thus empowering ordinary citizens to become active participants in the design process.

P oP or mArket Aesthetics : t h e fus io n o f A rt And co mmerc e The liberal economists and Banham shared a theoretical interest in the way a free-market economy functioned and its role in advancing a democratic society. While reflecting on the history of design and questioning “whether flashy and vulgar are quite the terms of abuse they used to be,” in 1963 Banham articulated his philosophy of the market and its relationship to design: “Flashy a lot of this stuff has to be because its economic life depends on its impact on the public eye at a very competitive point of sale; vulgar it has to be because it is designed for the vulgus, the common crowd (including you and me) who are the final arbiters of everything in the pure theory of democracy.” Banham concluded that “if you want Pop design to be tasteful and beautiful instead of flashy and vulgar, you must envisage a drastic and illiberal reconstruction of society.”90 This liberal vision of society evolved in a social and political context

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in which liberty and democracy were characterized as “a state free of coercion and constraint.” In such as state, who decides what should be made and how it should be designed? “Some agency must determine what should be produced,” said Mises, who argued that “if it is not the consumers by means of demand and supply on the market, it must be the government by compulsion.”91 In contrast to modern design authorities, Banham believed that the commercial model of design, with its anonymous teams of designers, consultants, and market analysts, and informed by consumer feedback, resulted in a more open-ended aesthetic and consequently could be a universal model of design. Few design critics have devoted themselves more fully to investigating the relationship between design and the market than Banham. In the Independent Group discussions of the early 1950s he explored the idea of consumer products in a free market as a form of “popular art.” Through extensive analysis of commercial design products, packaging, and advertisement, Banham developed a concept of pop, initially borrowed from Leslie Fiedler, that was synonymous with American popular consumer products.92 For him, commercial industrial products and advertising were not the inspiration for design but served as its ideal.93 Banham believed that the design methodology responsible for producing cigarette packages, automobiles, comics, and other mass-produced items functioned perfectly well as found. For Banham pop art was “distinguished from earlier vernacular arts by the professionalism and expertise of its practitioners (i.e. rock-’n’-roll singers, TV stars, etc.).”94 The American commercial model was pop, and he made that emphatically clear in “Toward a Pop Architecture” (1962), in which he challenged a history of art and social reform. Banham rejected “the cordon-sanitaire between architecture and Pop Art,” arguing that it “represents a very deep-seated desire, as old as the reformist sentiments of the Pioneers of Modern Architecture, that the profession should not be contaminated by commercialism, that architecture should remain a humane ‘consultant’ service to humanity, not styling in the interest of sales promotion.”95 This criticism was undoubtedly aimed at the foundational theories of design established in the late nineteenth century. In “Art and Socialism” (1884), William Morris— influenced by Karl Marx— maintained that the “supremacy of Commerce” over art “is an evil, and a very serious one.” He questioned whether “competition in the market” was the only form that commerce could take and sought to cure “the evils that exist in the relations between Art and Commerce.” Challenging this view, Banham acknowledged the work of Albert Kahn, Henry Ford’s architect, and other “commercial” architects who had been excluded from the history of modern design. By observing the world of commerce, he learned that “architecture can become involved in Pop Art at its own level and according to the same set of Madison Avenue rules.” He believed that architecture “can serve as a selling point for some desirable standardized product that is too complex or too expensive to be dispensed from slot machines.” Thus, “architecture can be a part of the pop world” by becoming a

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“desirable standardized product”— though it would have to “take over current advertising and marketing techniques, instead of methods that still smacked of the transfer of fiefs from one vassal to another.” Because “buildings are still too heavy to be sent to supermarkets, the consumer instead must be mobile and locally numerous, and these more modern merchandizing techniques can only be employed in heavily motorized conurbations.”96 For those who argued against “architecture as package and commodity,” Banham insisted that “commerce is normal.” These ideas established an important foundation for new ways of thinking about art, commerce, and the city in the 1960s. Banham’s ideas provided the basis for thinking about a pop or market urbanism, which celebrated decentralization and the free market, sought a new alliance between art and commerce, and distinguished Banham from other critics of the left. Whether as a result of Banham’s radical move toward pop as a pure expression of the market or not, tensions emerged in the British scene, and in 1964, Banham wrote that “the Smithsons and Eduardo Paolozzi and people like that, have been calling rather necrophilic revivalist meetings of the Independent Group to try and clear their names of being responsible for the present Pop Art movement in England.”97 Banham continued to champion market-based democratic design. From objects of mass production to cities, the non-design philosophy of the market was central to Banham’s most controversial theories of design.

t h e no n- Arc hitec t- de s ig ne d e nv iro nm e nt Denise Scott Brown noted that many of the principal ideas of the Independent Group informed new movements in America. An important connection between new brutalism, Team 10, and the American scene of the 1960s was that they all “promoted an aesthetic that could respond to the vitality of the nonarchitect-designed environment.”98 During this period, the interest in nondesign developed into a more coherent body of theory, although it was associated with a wide range of phenomena, including vernacular environments, such as those featured in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (1957), “spontaneous towns,” favelas, and other types of self-organized built environments that fascinated Team 10 members, documented in Aldo van Eyck’s “Architecture of Dogon” (1961),99 as well as Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects (1964). Architects who accept the wisdom of “primitive vernacular architecture,” wrote Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, “do not easily acknowledge the validity of the commercial vernacular,”100 which they endorsed. Architects were fascinated by environments created without architects because they appeared to elude central control while containing some vital element that was missing from the architect-controlled environment. These two areas of interest, vernacular environments, on the one hand, and commerce and the free market, on the other, both of which embodied spontaneous order, distinguished many of the avant-garde architects of the 1960s from their modern predecessors and gave rise to new concepts of the built environment. 16 | i n t r o d u c t i o n

In 1960 Hayek pointed out the naïve understanding of economics behind most urban planning, arguing that the control of land use and other such measures was largely “motivated by the desire to dispense with the price mechanism and to replace it by central direction.”101 He also noted that, under the leadership of Frederick Law Olmsted, Patrick Geddes, and Lewis Mumford, the degree to which town planning had developed into an “anti-economics” approach would make an “interesting study.”102 This analysis was part of a growing discontent with the “will-to-utopia,” as Mumford put it, and the shortcoming of planning that was being acknowledged in multiple disciplines. The non- design approach informed some of the more radical reassessments of modern urban planning, evident in, for example, Jane Jacobs’s pioneering work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a devastating critique of central design that exposed the anti- economics of town planning while championing the informal social and economic networks of ordinary people of the city. Building on Warren Weaver’s theory of complexity, Jacobs asserted that cities are “problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences.”103 Not unlike the research pioneered by the Independent Group a decade earlier, through a careful observation of daily messy street life, including informal commerce, what was once perceived as arbitrary or chaotic began to be considered as a new type of “complex order,” aided by theories of complex systems in the sciences.104 Jacobs encouraged her generation to regard the spontaneous order of cities— far from being “solidified chaos”— as something “capable of being understood,” instead of “in some dark and foreboding way, irrational.”105 She argued that while the variables may be countless and complex, they are not haphazard; “they are ‘interrelated into an organic whole.’”106 By the early 1960s, complexity theory was at the center of Hayek’s work on spontaneous order.107 In “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” (1964), Hayek presented a case that was strikingly similar to Jacobs’s notion of organized complexity. Both recognized the primacy of local knowledge and the role it played in spontaneous order, and both understood the limitation of large-scale planning. In its place they argued for the right to pursue one’s own “individual plan.” Relying on biological analogies, both saw feedback (or cybernetics) systems as key to a dynamic evolving environment.108 Jacobs advocated an incremental approach to city change, similar to Karl Popper’s rejection of utopian planning in favor of what he called “piecemeal engineering.”109 While articulating misgivings that were widely felt, Jacobs put forth a new critical approach that documented the way things were, rather than the way planners thought they should be, as a means of demonstrating how the unplanned city was an inclusive and non-imposed order with rules and structure that allowed for common people to freely coordinate among themselves. These views helped establish the bottom-up versus top-down polemic that raged throughout the 1960s and beyond. Following Jacobs’s analysis of cities as organized complexity, but dismissing her rejection of suburbs and refuting her emphasis on the “need for 17 | i n t r o d u c t i o n

concentration,” in 1963 the American urban theorist Melvin Webber turned his attention to diffuse non-urban formations and made the case that telecommunications and personal mobility, enabled by the automobile, created “an important instrument of personal freedom,” empowering “community without propinquity.”110 In support of low-density developments, such as those in Los Angeles, that critics had long scornfully dubbed “urban sprawl” and “subtopia,” Webber argued, “We have mistaken for ‘urban chaos’ what is more likely to be a newly emerging order whose signal qualities are complexity and diversity.”111 Not long after, the American journalist Tom Wolfe advanced a similar argument about the unplanned world of neon signs and the commercial strip, hailing the “builders of places like Las Vegas and Los Angeles,” created by nonarchitects, as “America’s first unconscious avant-garde!”112 By 1965, the “architecture of bright lights and big signs,” as Denise Scott Brown described it, had become essential viewing for all students of architecture. In 1963, in a lecture at the Architectural Association in London, the Austriaborn art historian Ernst Gombrich put forth a theory of urbanism based on “unplanned growth,” meant as a challenge to “the boldest plans of our urbanists” that “often look mechanical, cold, and cheerless.”113 Greatly indebted to Karl Popper’s scientific method, Gombrich contrasted “slow and unplanned growth” with “deliberate planning.” Offered as an alternative to modern planning, the incremental process of trial and error, defined as an “organic” approach, was presented as the “secret of the old cities.” These ideas aligned with the research of Christopher Alexander, who, two years later, in his polemical essay “A City Is Not a Tree” (1965), contrasted “natural cities,” described as having “arisen more or less spontaneously,” with “artificial cities,” based on “deliberate action and design.”114 The non-design philosophy, espoused by Popper as a rejection of Marxism, utopian planning, and historicism, informed the work of Gombrich, Alexander, Stanford Anderson, and Colin Rowe, inspiring an interest in the revision of history, tradition, and premodern forms.115 The idea of a complex order radically altered the way in which design was understood, and consequently, the search for hidden order in what was perceived as chaos informed many of the theories related to non-design. In 1960 the influential Austria-born art critic Anton Ehrenzweig, noted for his views on “the diffuse state of vision” and his theory of order and chaos, gave a talk on BBC radio based on Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960); Paul Grimley Kuntz summarized these ideas in his statement that the “problem before the art world is the emergence of anti-art.”116 For Ehrenzweig, Kuntz noted, “bursts of apparent chaos are efforts to liberate the unconscious mind from oppressive style-consciousness.”117 In “The Hidden Order of Art” (1961), Ehrenzweig asserted that “the seemingly chaotic structure of handwriting conceals some hidden unconscious order, such order is destroyed as soon as it is imitated by a conscious effort.” Elsewhere, Ehrenzweig suggested that by evoking “a purposeless daydream-like state,” one can grasp “some hidden all-over structure” and thereby avoid the

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pitfalls of conscious design, what Ehrenzweig referred to as “preconceived design and cliché.”118 The interest in non-design was fundamental to the development of new theories that informed the critical methodology of the “inclusivist architects,” led by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and Charles Moore, which helped challenge the orthodoxies of modern architecture. Reflecting on emerging urban conditions in California, in “You Have to Pay for the Public Life” (1965), Charles Moore called into question the view of planners who routinely bemoaned the fact that the “sprawling metropolis is formless.”119 Citing José Ortega y Gasset, who, in La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses) of 1929, described the origin of the polis as the creation of a contained traditional urban square, Moore developed the idea of monumentality as “a function of society’s taking possession” of a place. Ortega y Gasset also described the invasive and menacing power of the state as that which “breaks up, is dispersed, atomized,” as a force of “pure dynamism” aimed at the “absorption of all spontaneous social effort.”120 Encouraging a more dynamic engagement with the complexities of the dispersed metropolis, Moore called for an “immediate involvement with the site, with the user and his movements, indeed with everything all at once, with the vitality and the vulgarity of real commerce,” which presages “more clearly than any tidy sparse geometry, an architecture for the electric present.”121 The theory of townscape, with its critique of central design and its radical call to simultaneously embrace the planned and the unplanned, found expression in honoring the full spectrum of non-designed artifacts, from vernacular architecture to pop and from freeways to Disneyland. In 1966 Robert Venturi published his renowned book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Subverting the planner’s disdain for unplanned environments, many of which were featured, and despised, by the American critic Peter Blake in God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (1964), Venturi argued that what was missing from modern design was the “complex and illusive order” found in the unplanned city. Venturi asserted that the “seemingly chaotic” relationships between various “honky-tonk elements” achieved an intriguing kind of “vitality and validity” and an “unexpected approach to unity as well.”122 He concluded that the pattern of the “everyday landscape, vulgar and disdained” as it may be, offered a compelling “complex and contradictory order” that was “valid and vital” for reinvigorating architecture and for conceiving an “urbanistic whole.”123 The search for hidden order in the spontaneous urban landscape was at the heart of these new theories. Non-design advocates believed that a non-designed order was a complex order whose constituent parts, which have some quality, identifiable in advance, were arranged in a way that is highly unlikely to have been acquired by random chance alone. For Hayek, the ability to discern “some recurring pattern or order in the events” distinguished chaos from order. He wrote, “It is to this trait of our minds that we owe whatever understanding and mastery of our environment we have achieved.”124 Informed by the theories of Henri Bergson,

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who called “disorder an order we cannot see,” Venturi, Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, in a section titled “inclusion and the difficult order” in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), wrote: “The emerging order of the Strip is a complex order. It is not the easy, rigid order of the urban renewal project or the fashionable ‘total design’ of the megastructure,” both of which had been condemned as products of central design. In contrast, the strip was an order of inclusion, they argued, that just barely maintained “control over the clashing elements” of the scene. “Chaos is very near,” they wrote, and the looseness of control gives it its force.125 While planners and critics had routinely dismissed Los Angeles as urban chaos, in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Banham embraced the totality of the unplanned city, arguing that it had “a comprehensible, even consistent, quality to its built form.” Employing the biological analogy of ecology to explain everything from “pop ephemeridae” and the “chaos on Echo Park” to the “commercial non-plan on Sepulveda Boulevard,” Banham suggested that context was the organic element that “binds the polymorphous architectures into a comprehensible unity.” For Banham, each ecology of the city (Surfurbia, Foothills, the Plains of Id, Autopia) appears to grow naturally from its context, suggesting that organisms best adapted to their environment are more likely to thrive, thus advancing the idea of growth rather than design. As with Moore and Venturi and Scott Brown, the theory of townscape, with its scenographic approach and integration with topography, was noticeable in its refusal to separate “art from life and art works from quotidian objects.”126 In the design-versus-non- design debates over the American city, some called for order and control through urban planning, and others sought to allow the city to develop on its own via disorder and sprawl. Modern urban planners and critics such as Sigfried Giedion, Lewis Mumford, Peter Blake, and Christopher Tunnard believed that design should be employed as a means of controlling the “exploding metropolis,”127 whereas Venturi, Scott Brown, Moore, Webber, Banham, and others argued for non-design strategies in support of the spontaneity and vitality of unplanned cities. These disputes largely divided an older generation of designers and theorists who maintained a belief in modern design and planning from a younger generation who did not. For modern urban planners, decentralized unplanned developments epitomized the failure of planning, evident in Blake’s condemnation of roadscape and carscape. Similarly, the American architectural historian Vincent Scully claimed that the automobile, the “love of the road,” and “the illusion of total individual freedom . . . played a major part in destroying the American city today.”128 Challenging these views, the new generation of architects and critics argued for a conception of design that embraced the full context of the built environment, including the unruly car-based urbanism, and the unplanned conditions that were often disregarded by modern architects. The affirmation of these common environments, along with the rise of a liberal, non-judgmental

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attitude toward unplanned cities, the sprawl of suburbs, commercial strips, and roadside environments, characterized a new sensibility. Non-design became a tool to critique modern design and planning strategies for ordering the city. Consequently, in the foundational writings of the period by Banham, Moore, and Venturi and Scott Brown, conspicuously missing is their support for any form of design by professional designers.129 What they did support were common environments ruled by spontaneous order and the qualities of non-design— that is, conditions that were the result of laissez-faire economic and urban developments. Moore was enamored of environments created by non-architects, such as the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo. Banham celebrated the Watts Towers, dingbats, and the non-planned commercial developments of Los Angeles— a highly developed technological order driven by unrestrained market forces. Venturi, Brown, and Izenour, declaring their support for the Las Vegas strip and suburbia, claimed that “learning from the existing landscape” was a “revolutionary” act for an architect.130 Consistent in all these approaches was a belief that, unlike plans by “authoritarian architects,” these common environments of non-imposed order were infused with vital commerce, rife with radical differences, and defined by an ever-changing untamed aesthetic.131 Like other anti-establishment architects and critics of the period, Banham believed that in Los Angeles “planning could even do harm.”

f rom no n- design to no n- PL A nning The absence of control informed the philosophy of non-design.132 This was made explicit in the manifesto by Banham, Barker, Hall, and Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom” (1969), which argues that the history of planning is marked by coerciveness; its whole ethos is doctrinaire. Consequently, the authors seek an alternative to planning as a form of control and call for deregulation. Envious of the “vitality and spontaneity” of unplanned cities in the American West, such as Las Vegas, they argued, the reason such popular environments were absent from the British landscape was because the “planners have suppressed [them].”133 The principle behind their approach shares many of the same concerns outlined in Hayek’s own manifesto of 1945, “The Liberal Way of Planning.”134 The liberal plan and the non-plan should be considered synonymous. Both describe a process of deregulation by which the removal of limits allows the supposedly unfettered forces of the market to function according to its own internal logic while serving as a neutral agent of social and technological change. For Hayek, there was no dispute about whether planning should occur; rather, “It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning— direction of the whole economic

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system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons.”135 Were government authorities or specialized groups to make decisions for an entire society, or were individuals to be allowed to decide their affairs for themselves? Hayek denounced centralized planning because he believed that it was an unnecessary form of control that limited the “liberties of the individual.” The idea that a society could be organized by other means than control and planning was a major preoccupation among liberals. The fact that Las Vegas and Los Angeles became the center of international architectural debates may help explain the role that non-design played in these arguments. The two environments were routinely hailed as forms of spontaneous order, like the market, that worked perfectly well on their own without the need for imposing an external order through planning. Non-plan can be viewed as the logical conclusion to a decade that began with the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and ended with a growing contempt for planning as a form of oppression and control. In After the Planners (1971), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Robert Goodman captured the antiestablishment mood of the era. He attacked the prevailing model of large-scale government-sponsored planning—epitomized by wholesale demolition of existing neighborhoods and the construction of new high-rise public housing—which he labeled the “urban-industrial complex.” He deplored what he saw as the increasingly technocratic approach to so-called urban renewal, and, echoing Hayek, he challenged socially conscious planners to reassess their methods: “We don’t think of ourselves as agents of the oppressors, yet we are not really far from being the Albert Speers of our time.”136

t h e recognitio n of no n- de s ig n After years of lurking below the surface, aspects of this polemic were identified by Diana Agrest in her essay “Design versus Non-Design” (1976), in which we learn that design is a “closed system,” whereas non-design, “that no man’s land of the symbolic” with its predisposition to openness, where “there is no unique producer,” exists beyond a “defined institutional framework.”137 In the introduction, Kenneth Frampton explained that, for Agrest, architecture appeared as the “repressive projection of certain specific values,” so that “conscious design fuses at this juncture with ideology.” In this formulation, nondesign is said to represent the “spontaneous projection of life onto the built world,” establishing a dichotomy between the “repressive ‘forms’ of design” and the “liberating ‘processes’ of non- design.” On Agrest’s use of the term non-design, Frampton reflected: “For the pure manifestation of non or rather unconscious design . . . must surely imply the suspension of all conscious design, while conscious design in its turn must imply ideological repression.”138 Consequently, “conscious design” was perceived as a manifestation of ideology, whereas non-design was thought to be free of ideology. But this normative 22 | i n t r o d u c t i o n

understanding is insufficient. As we will see, non-design, like design, was deeply invested with ideological meaning. For those who question how fluidly ideas move between various disciplines, such as politics, philosophy, and design, consider how The Hedgehog and the Fox, more than twenty years following its publication, continued to inform new approaches in architecture and urbanism. Just as Berlin divided writers and thinkers into two categories, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter extended Berlin’s interpretation in Collage City (1978)— perhaps the most articulate, if partial, account of liberalism and design of the period—to consider works of art, in which they claim “Picasso, a fox, Mondrian, a hedgehog.”139 This analysis was also used to examine architecture: “Palladio is a hedgehog, Giulio Romano a fox,” and Le Corbusier “a case of a fox assuming hedgehog disguise for the purpose of public appearance.” In this discussion, what was at stake was “the single central vision” in architecture. Two competing models were offered that approximate the schema of the planned, what they called “the rationally ordered and ‘scientific’ society,” and the unplanned, in this case, “the manifold disjunctions of Hadrian’s villa” that represent a shattering of a central vision, evident by its “structural discontinuities and the multiplicity of syncopated excitements,” along with “the sustained inference that it was built by several people at different times.”140 Distrustful of overt positive assertion, the liberal continuously warns “against attaching too much importance to conscious intention.”141 The unwritten manifesto of the Independent Group members titled NonArt Not Now recalls the list of theories in the postwar period defined by a negative prefix: non-plan, un-planned, anti-art, anti-architecture, anti-design, and non-design, along with other terms such as non-Left and non-Marxist.142 It is noteworthy that the negative prefix describes more precisely what is being negated rather than what is being affirmed, yet we lack a sufficient body of theory to fully appreciate the significance of the negative for the history of modern architecture. In addition, one might consider Isaiah Berlin’s notions of negative liberty and negative rights— positive liberty is often associated with collectivism, and negative liberty is typically attributed to individualism— along with Hayek’s notion of a non-purposive spontaneous order, conceived of as a challenge to positive assertion.143 This phenomenon points to one of the more subtle challenges of this study: how to conceptualize the negative. I heeded the warning issued by Henri Bergson on “how hard it is to determine the content of a negative idea, and what illusions one is liable to, what hopeless difficulties philosophy falls into, for not having undertaken this task.”144 Diffuse, dynamic, and often lacking clear definition and positive assertion, the great advantage of a negative idea is its ability to elude criticism.

concLu sio n From Adam Smith to the Austrian-school economists, the theory of the invisible hand aided the search for the hidden order of the market. Parallel to these efforts, design theorists sought to reveal the hidden order of the unplanned 23 | i n t r o d u c t i o n

city. What binds these various approaches is an interest in non-design, as a critique of central design, and the affirmation of spontaneous order. The repetition and persistence of non-design in various fields of study requires a theoretical explanation. However, the history of non-design is simply too diffuse a body of theories and techniques to attempt a comprehensive account. This book presents an overview of the ways in which non-design and non-planning operated in design discourse by describing their origin, formulation, and history. The goal has been to explain the various concepts, in all their subtlety and complexities, to help reveal the motivations and fascination by designers and critics with that which has not been designed. We return to that formless thing described by Lippman as a dynamic and ever- evolving order that cannot be designed, and indeed, according to the liberal, should never even be attempted to be designed. Such conclusions raise fundamental questions about the nature of design. This book was motivated by an unsettling suspicion that many of the theories of the postwar period stand on precarious foundations. It is my hope that the book provides a useful point of departure for future research on this vast, elusive, and complex subject.

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1 : Planned Order versus Spontaneous Order

If social phenomena showed no order except insofar as they were consciously designed, there would indeed be no room for the theoretical sciences of society and there would be, as is often argued, only problems of psychology. It is only insofar as some sort of order arises as a result of individual action but without being designed by any individual that a problem is raised which demands a theoretical explanation. fr iedr ic h hAy ek

hAyek ’s revoLt Along with other Austrian-school economic theorists, Friedrich August von Hayek was one of pioneers in the critique of central design in the twentieth century.1 In his The Road to Serfdom (1944), he accused design, and specifically socialist planning, of belonging to a zeitgeist characterized by a “passion for a conscious control of everything.”2 Hayek attacked the pervasive assumption among socialists of the necessity of a designed order, made by conscious decision and effort, in a democratic society. In opposition, Hayek conceived of spontaneous order, in which people pursued their own individual plan and self-interest.3 The idea of spontaneous order— a result of human action but not of human design— formed the theoretical foundation for Hayek’s most decisive critiques of socialism and, by extension, the nineteenth- century ethos of rationalism and modern design.4 Hayek derived this conception of spontaneous order from Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand of the market and from the Scottish natural law philosophers who observed that spontaneous forces are beyond the direct control of man and without direction toward preconceived ends. Hayek contrasted the planned order of collectivism, which he associated with social control and totalitarianism, with the spontaneous order of freemarket economics— conceived of as the unplanned coordination of individual activities engaging in free trade with minimal coercion— which he associated with economic freedom and democracy.5 Hayek argued that all forms of centralized state collectivism, whether from the left (socialism) or the right (national

socialism), inevitably lead to totalitarianism.6 He argued that any form of centralized economic planning would not be possible without imposing an unbearable loss of individual liberties. Highly suspicious of the enthusiasm for socialist planning in Western democracies, Hayek wrote that “the universal demand for ‘conscious’ control or direction of social processes is one of the most characteristic features of our generation.”7 He located the origin of this obsession in the doctrines of Henri de Saint-Simon and other French proto-socialists, arguing that, far from a tradition of liberation, in fact, “socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian.”8 During the early 1940s, when many intellectuals and the Western political establishment were sympathetic to, and supportive of, socialism, Hayek’s work was vehemently dismissed as reactionary.9 This chapter concerns the history of ideas associated with non-design that emerged following World War II as a critique of the rational planned order of socialism. We examine Hayek’s philosophy of non-design, particularly his concept of spontaneous order as an open-ended process of social evolution, and its relationship to free-market economics as well as architectural debates of the period and the reassessment of modern design principles. We conclude by contrasting Hayek’s view of non-design and the free market with modern architects’ and critics’ support for modern planning and the state. As adamant as Hayek was about exposing the history of socialist planning as a form of social engineering, he was equally determined to articulate a clear alternative to “deliberate human design.” Following Adam Smith, Hayek believed that financial self-interest and competition could promote economic and political freedom. Smith himself famously wrote: “[The businessman is] led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”10 This idea underlay Hayek’s concept of the mechanism of the market. Hayek took the market to be a neutral framework within which individuals act with minimal coercion. From a socialist point of view, “this liberal plan . . . is no plan.” This non-plan, or the non-design aspect of this approach, stood in direct opposition to any form of planned order. In contrast, Hayek wrote, “what our planners demand is a central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan, laying down how the resources of society should be ‘consciously directed’ to serve particular ends in a definite way.”11 One of the main points of dispute between Hayek and the socialists was “whether a rational utilization of our resources requires central direction and organization of all our activities according to some consciously constructed ‘blueprint.’”12 For Hayek, the “liberal way of planning” must not rely on central-command decisions but should emerge from independent decisions made by individuals. An idealized free market modeled how this form of a spontaneous and collectively organized society could emerge.

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i n t erWAr viennA The period after World War I was a time of great social and political change in Austria, marked by the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the failure of Austrian liberalism, the rise of socialism and “Red Vienna” (1918– 1934), and domination by fascism. The 1920s witnessed extraordinary intellectual development in Vienna, particularly in the realm of art, science, and philosophy. This period in the city saw the construction of the modernist buildings of Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, as well as the emergence of psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Hayek and his contemporaries, such as Karl Popper, were exposed to the lively debates of the period, including those centered on the Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle), itself based on the school of logical positivism.13 The Vienna Circle was founded in 1922 by Moritz Schlick, and its principle members included Rudolph Carnap and Otto Neurath. Another important group of economists, sociologists, and philosophers had their center in the famous Privatseminar of the Austrian economist and sociologist Ludwig von Mises, who would become Hayek’s mentor. Hayek attended the University of Vienna, where he was introduced to the liberal free-market economic tradition of the Austrian school of economics.14 After studying philosophy, psychology, and economics, he earned doctorates in law and political science in 1921 and 1923, respectively. Hayek was greatly influenced by the works of Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school of economics, particularly Menger’s 1871 work Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Principles of Economics) and his engagement with classical liberalism.15 Like many of his generation, Hayek was initially sympathetic to socialism, but after reading Ludwig von Mises’s 1922 book Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus (Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis), his views were profoundly changed.16 As Hayek recounted, the book “shocked our generation, and only slowly and painfully did we become persuaded of its central thesis.” It was Mises, Hayek said, who helped him understand and appreciate “something which we have not designed.”17 Ludwig von Mises initiated the socialist calculation debate with the publication of his seminal 1920 essay “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen” (“Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth”).18 The question Mises posed was this: How would it be possible for an economic system, based on a socialist model of a centrally planned economy, to exist without any prices? Provoked by a book published in 1919 by Otto Neurath, who was convinced of the feasibility of economic planning, Mises challenged the basic tenets of socialism by reasoning that market prices formed through the voluntary exchange of private property were necessary for a rational economy.19 Along with other prominent economists trained at the University of Vienna, Hayek participated from 1924 to 1931 in the private seminars held by Mises. In 1927 Mises founded the Österreichisches Institut für Konjunkturforschung (Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research) and named Hayek its

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first director. Then, following an invitation to lecture at the London School of Economics, Hayek was appointed in 1931 to the Tooke Chair in Economics Science, where he remained until 1949.

P LAnning in b ritAin And t h e We LfA r e s tAt e Many people believed that the stock market crash of 1929 in America was a result of unchecked capitalism and that the free market had proved too unstable. Thus, in the 1930s many called upon the state to realize certain socialist promises of economic and social justice by means of economic reform. Major economic restructuring through centralized state planning occurred in several industrialized nations: Germany, under the Nazis; the Soviet Union; and the United States, during the New Deal, which implemented major state organized projects and social programs. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in England between 1940 and 1943, the early planning phase of the British welfare state, and in it he sought to address a “small circle of people actively struggling with the difficult questions which arise in the field where economics and politics meet, and . . . to persuade a few leaders in the current movement of opinion that they were on an extremely dangerous path.”20 In 1942 the Labour Party issued a pamphlet titled The Old World and the New Society, which promised the war-ravaged nation that “a planned society can be a far more free society than the competitive laisser-faire order it has come to replace.”21 It also declared, “There must be no return to the unplanned competitive world of the inter-War years, in which a privileged few were maintained at the expense of the common good.” And it avowed, “The basis for our democracy must be planned production for community use.” The section titled “A Planned Democracy” affirmed that “a planned society must replace the old competitive system.” In addition, the pamphlet promised a list of progressive reforms and outlined the measures required to accomplish them.22 At the request of the Labour Party, William Beveridge produced a report in 1942 that outlined the welfare state, including programs such as the National Health Service and workers’ compensation. However well intended these programs were, Hayek saw the social and economic planning necessary to implement them as dangerous and unnecessary. Warning the socialist intelligentsia that well-intended actions often produce unwanted results, he wrote: “Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?”23 Hayek was a close observer of German politics and the rise of the Nazis. Contrary to common belief in the 1940s that fascism was a product of capitalism— and that only by adopting socialism could Western democracies avoid a similar fate— Hayek argued that Nazism was both nationalist and socialist. Furthermore, he argued that both political systems shared many

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fundamental characteristics, mainly the need for centralized state planning. Hayek thus believed that central planning could engender totalitarianism. Hayek wrote, “Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”24 By associating socialism with national socialism, and planning with central planning and social engineering, he rendered planning a deeply suspect form of conscious design, which he associated with social control. Hayek set himself the task of undoing an intellectual history responsible for seducing and monopolizing the imagination of so many of his contemporaries. “The only people who were intellectually active in speculating about society,” Hayek wrote, “were the people who were dissatisfied and were designing new and different forms of society.” He continued: “In the past one or two generations, the greater intellectual activity, the greater influence, has come from the people who were looking for an alternative so that in consequence intellectual trends are against a philosophy in which I believe, and that to reverse them will be largely a task of education of study and intense intellectual effort to provide something which has at least the same intellectual strength and plausibility as that philosophy which now captivates so many young people of good will.”25 These cautionary words were offered to a generation who felt empowered by the victory of the Labour Party, which, in outlining the relation of the welfare state to the achievement of socialism, had made planning a focus of its government. Consequently, it played a key role in advancing the growing enthusiasm and support for planning. In 1940s Britain, the word planning was very popular and used indiscriminately by economists and town planners alike. Swayed by professionals, the public came to view planning as the answer to many social problems. Planning was employed as a response to the crisis and opportunity of wartime upheaval. During this period, numerous proposals were put forth for the restructuring and rebuilding of cities, including the Plan for London (c. 1942), a bold utopian and socialist vision of the city, issued by the Modern Architectural Research Group (or MARS Group), the English wing of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM).26 Like other ambitious initiatives of the period, as the historian Andrew Higgott noted, the County of London Plan of 1943— like the Greater London Regional Plan of 1944 and the Town and Country Planning Acts— “reflected the assumptions of the emerging welfare state, not least that of strong centralised government, and embodied assumptions of social control, seen largely uncritically in the years of wartime and immediately after.”27 As planning was becoming more prevalent, it was also being subjected to increased scrutiny; increasingly, serious doubts began to overshadow the socialist, and by association, modernist, imperative to design a new society.

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non- design: hAy ek’s ALt e r nAt iv e t o co ns cio us d e sign And PLAnning In opposition to various plans for reorganizing society, Hayek argued that “they all differ from liberalism and individualism in wanting to organize the whole of society and all its resources . . . and in refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of the individuals are supreme.”28 Reinterpreting the basic principles of eighteenth- century liberalism, Hayek argued that “the fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion is capable of an infinite variety of applications.”29 Driven by individual decisions and actions, these spontaneous forces, Hayek argued, constituted the crucial foundation of a free society. From the theories of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte onward, Hayek argued, the ordering of society amounted to an abandonment of the liberal and individualist tradition, which he believed were the forces responsible for creating a democratic Western civilization. In contrast, Hayek believed that the free market offered a value-free or neutral framework that, if exploited properly, was capable of producing a truly free economic and social order. Furthermore— and perhaps most crucially— he emphasized that this order did not have to be invented, unlike the utopian plans of the socialist. Hayek’s proposition relied not on designing a new society but on cultivating an existing aspect of contemporary life. For Hayek, a revision of history played an important role in exposing the intellectual biases of the socialists. He argued that, throughout modern European history, “the general direction of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which had bound him to the customary or prescribed ways in the pursuit of his ordinary activities. The conscious realization that the spontaneous and uncontrolled efforts of individuals were capable of producing a complex order of economic activities could come only after this development had made some progress. The subsequent elaboration of a consistent argument in favor of economic freedom was the outcome of a free growth of economic activity which had been the undesigned and unforeseen by-product of political freedom.”30 This thesis stood diametrically opposed to any notion of a consciously planned economy or society. “According to the views now dominant,” Hayek wrote, “we have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results and to replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and ‘conscious’ direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals.”31 Hayek found the “conscious” and calculated aspect of central economic planning to be repressive and undemocratic, unlike the vital mechanism of the market that functions without direction or coercion. For him, the spontaneous order of individual decisions was the only order that could provide a value-free framework for a free society. The peculiar undesigned or non-design characteristic of any form of a free 30 | c h A P t e r o n e

society played an essential role in Hayek’s arguments about the fundamental nature of freedom. For Hayek, this argument was so self-evident that at times he seemed deeply perplexed that socialist intellectuals who argued for a free society could not see the contradiction. He noted that part of this confusion was because “socialism was embraced by the greater part of the intelligentsia as the apparent heir of the liberal tradition: therefore it is not surprising that to them the idea of socialism’s leading to the opposite of liberty should appear inconceivable.”32 Indeed, “it seems almost as if we did not want to understand the development which has produced totalitarianism because such an understanding might destroy some of the dearest illusions to which we are determined to cling.”33

T he Roa d T o S eRfd om: no n- d e s ig n in t h e m e diA A n d P oPuLAr Press During the Great Depression, the British economist John Maynard Keynes argued that in order to ensure social and economic stability, capitalism had to be regulated and controlled by a central authority of the state.34 In the United States, many of these ideas were implemented to acclaim in the New Deal. In the United States and Western Europe, the intellectual climate of the 1940s embraced planning and was largely supportive of many socialist ideas, which may be why The Road to Serfdom— with its unpopular ideas about liberalism, individualism, competition and free market economics— was turned down by three major American publishing houses before finally being accepted by the University of Chicago Press.35 One of the press’s readers of the manuscript in 1943, Jacob Marschak, wrote: “Those who love planning because they love the inevitable will, perhaps, after reading Hayek revise either their faith or their tastes. Perhaps they will start to think in terms of ends and means instead of prophecies.”36 The editors suggested a few changes to the original British edition, including changing its title to Socialism: The Road to Serfdom. Hayek objected, arguing that socialism was only one manifestation of the collectivist ideology of planned societies. In fact, Hayek dedicated the book “To the socialists of all parties” to highlight his conviction that any central planning was inherently undemocratic and limiting to the liberties of all citizens. The book gained an extraordinary amount of attention in the press and created an uproar. On the book’s jacket, the Saturday Review of Literature described it as “cogent, gracious, it deserves the widest reading. Its thesis will come as a shock to many . . . because it seems to run counter to many widely accepted and cherished slogans of the day.” Also on the jacket, the Miami Herald stated: “Here is a book so penetrating, so startling, so great, and, undoubtedly, so epoch-making, that I hope it will be read by every person in the United States able to read and think about the future of this country.” In one promotional blurb, a reviewer went so far as to state: “It is, in my opinion, the most important book published in 1944. Its effect may be as far reaching as Das Kapital or Mein Kampf.” Certainly intended as a penetrating critique of 31 | P L A n n e d o r d e r v e r s u s s P o n t A n e o u s o r d e r

the philosophies of both Marx and Hitler, the book’s main goal was to fuse capitalism with democracy. Most conspicuously, the book was promoted as “an incisive warning that the collectivism towards which we are veering is incompatible with democracy.” One reviewer noted that in England “it became the center of a violent controversy, [and] its effect on America promises to be even greater!”37 Indeed, its impact on thinking about democracy, freedom, planning, and decentralization would have long-lasting political, social, and urban consequences. In October 1944 a copy of the book was sent to Max Eastman, an editor at the Reader’s Digest and a friend of Leon Trotsky, who was known at the time for Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1940), in which he renounced socialism and communism. Eastman decided to promote The Road to Serfdom. Hayek arrived in the United States in April 1945 for a five-week lecture tour, starting before a crowd of more than three thousand people at the Town Hall Club in New York; it was broadcast over the radio. For an academic, the enthusiastic response from popular audiences was overwhelming. Coinciding with Hayek’s arrival was the release of the April 1945 issue of Reader’s Digest, featuring a twenty-page abridged version of The Road to Serfdom (fig. 1.1).38 The 8.75 million copies of Reader’s Digest that circulated each month, plus the million reprints that followed, provided unimaginable mass distribution of Hayek’s ideas.39 In addition, the Book-of-the-Month Club made available bulk orders of a thousand copies for a mere $18. Although Hayek was concerned that his ideas were too abridged, the Reader’s Digest version became the first popular manifesto for a new movement of economic liberalism that offered a serious intellectual rebuttal to the socialist ideas that had taken hold of so many young artists and intellectuals. In the first section, Hayek wrote that, “in order to achieve their ends, the planners must create power.” Therefore, “to decentralize power is to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man.”40 This polemic was to find its greatest reception in a country already being increasingly drawn to decentralization. Hayek emphasized that “socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of ‘planned economy’ in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.”41 These warnings were undoubtedly heeded in business circles. The most popular, albeit questionable, rendition of The Road to Serfdom came in the February 6, 1945, issue of Look magazine, which featured two pages of highly simplistic, reductive, and emotionally charged cartoons by Fred Ludekens, a prolific illustrator in popular magazines (fig. 1.2).42 Across the top of the pages was a succession of images of the Statue of Liberty, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Adolf Hitler. The headline read: “America is following the same road that Russia followed . . . Italy followed . . . Germany followed.” At the base of the images was a drawing of a spontaneously arranged crowd of people that progressively became more organized into a rigid line. The illustration brought 32 | c h A P t e r o n e

f igu re 1. 1 “The Road to Serfdom,” Reader’s Digest, April 1945. © 1945 by Trusted Media Brands, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

to life Hayek’s contrast between a democratic spontaneous order and a totalitarian planned order. Alongside this were eighteen cartoons ostensibly illustrating the themes of Hayek’s book, with captions that read as follows: War forces “national planning” Many want “planning” to stay “Planners” promise Utopias 33 | P L A n n e d o r d e r v e r s u s s P o n t A n e o u s o r d e r

f igu re 1 .2 “The Road to Serfdom,” Look, February 6, 1945.

But can’t agree on one Utopia And citizens can’t agree either “Planners” hate to force agreement They try to “sell” the plan to all The gullible do find agreement Confidence in “planners” fades The “strong man” is given power The party takes over the country A negative aim welds party unity No one opposes the leader’s plan Your profession is “planned” Your wages are “planned” Your thinking is “planned” Your recreation is “planned” Your disciplining is “planned”43

Hayek’s nuanced intellectual and historical arguments were replaced by severely reductive images and slogans resembling propaganda. By associating all forms of planning with fascism, the cartoon sealed a simple but powerful message: a planned order, while organized and clear, leads to totalitarianism, whereas a spontaneous order, while chaotic and unplanned, leads to freedom and democracy. The cartoon version was undoubtedly meant to stir emotions rather than reason; General Motors later printed the cartoons as a pamphlet in its Thought Starter series, distributing thousands of copies to workers and the general public across the country (figs. 1.3 and 1.4). The Thought Starter series was edited by Henry Grady Weaver, the libertarian director of General Motors’ Customer Research Staff. Some have credited 34 | c h A P t e r o n e

f igu re 1. 3 “The Road to Serfdom,” Look, February 6, 1945.

f igu re 1. 4 “The Road to Serfdom,” Look, February 6, 1945.

Weaver with starting an “intellectual revolution,” given his ability to craft a story of technological innovation, freedom, and the contributions of capitalism to civilization. In his book The Mainspring of Human Progress (1953), he wrote: “Everywhere you look in American history, you find examples of things seeming to happen by accident— without intention. Americans had no overall plan. . . . They had something more important. They had personal freedom to plan their own affairs; and the avalanche of human energy resulting from that freedom swept from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande.”44 Weaver identified “unplanned planning” as the underlying element of American economic success. His book, a “no-plan” manifesto indebted to Mises and Hayek, highlighted a fundamental principle of libertarianism, a philosophy that would become increasingly influential in the following decades.45

non- design And the com m o n knoWLe dg e o f t ime And PLAc e Following the release of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek published the essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in 1945 in the American Economic Review. Elaborating on his critique of central planning as a form of centralized power, Hayek argued that the most useful knowledge available in forming a democratic society is a particular kind of informal knowledge that is beyond the central control of the authorities and experts. Hayek pointed out that one of the greatest oversights of the socialist planner is discounting a full range of unimaginable resources because “one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind.” In refuting the privilege bestowed upon formal knowledge, Hayek wrote: “Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.”46 “Common” knowledge was crucial to Hayek’s conception of a spontaneously organized society because he believed that every individual “possesses unique information” that can be put to great use, but “only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation.”47 This inherent belief in the individual as a knowledgeable consumer and active participant in the formation of a decentralized economy stood in stark contrast to the Marxist critiques of Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School, who rendered the consumer as a passive subject of capitalist exploitation. In contrast, Ludwig von Mises argued, “In his capacity as consumer the common man is the sovereign whose buying or abstention from buying

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decides the fate of entrepreneurial activities.”48 Mises and Hayek shared the view that the common knowledge of the consumer and the consumer’s active participation in the market were crucial to the construction of spontaneous order. For this reason, Mises argued emphatically that “planning and capitalism are utterly incompatible.”49 Insisting that the socialist planned order was hopelessly misguided, he offered that a “free market economy best serves the common man,” while proclaiming categorically that the only two options are “laissez-faire or dictatorship.” By laissez-faire Mises meant: “Let the individual citizen, the much talked-about common man, choose and act and do not force him to yield to a dictator.”50 Referring to the price system as a kind of “machinery for registering change,” Hayek suggested that society observe the free market “like an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.”51 Hayek was so enamored of this idea because it promised the key to allowing a society to organize itself without any intentional design or central control: I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction” . . . should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and, therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.52

For Hayek, the new social ideal was the manifestation of an order based on the least amount of coercion possible. Fully aware of the social implications of a spontaneous order, Hayek explained that it “arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and most of our cultural inheritance.”53 In 1948 the Hungary-born British chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi published “The Span of Central Direction,” in which he deemed central planning to be impossible, arguing that “the operations of a system of spontaneous order in society, such as the competitive order of a market, cannot be replaced by the establishment of a deliberate ordering agency.”54 In an effort to “clarify the position of liberty in response to a number of questions raised by our troubled period of history,” Polanyi affirmed that social orders that are most important to human welfare are spontaneous orders.55 One of the most

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powerful ideas articulated during this period was the theory of spontaneous order, understood as a condition occurring without influence, force, or constraint. Following the rise of totalitarianism, this generation sought an alternative to all forms of forced order. In the work of Walter Lippmann, Mises, Hayek, Polanyi, and other liberals, a key concern was how to conceive of a free society in which social control could be governed by laws rather than by commands. Elaborating on this idea, Polanyi described that a spontaneous order in society can come about when individuals are “subject only to laws which uniformly apply to all of them,” as they exercise their own initiative: “The actions of such individuals are said to be free, for they are not determined by any specific command, whether of a superior or of a public authority; the compulsion to which they are subject is impersonal and general.”56 Polanyi then explained: “The most massive example of spontaneous order in society— the prototype of order established by an ‘invisible hand’— is that of economic life based on an aggregate of competing individuals.”57 Polanyi and Hayek shared many concerns, and crucial to their view of liberty and a free society based on spontaneous actions of individuals was the concept of common knowledge. Polanyi originated the notion of tacit knowledge, which closely aligned with Hayek’s ideas about localized, dispersed knowledge.58 They both agreed that informal associations and common knowledge were vital to a thriving network of freely interacting individuals, each pursuing his or her own initiative. To illustrate how this operated in society, Polanyi provided mathematical explanations, along with corresponding diagrams, of two contrasting models. One was a centrally directed (planned) model of a corporate authority, based on a hierarchy of superiors and subordinates, and the other was a spontaneous (unplanned) self-adjusting system.59 The diagrams visualized the crucial aspects of the mathematical models and helped to expose the “fallacy of central planning” while putting forth a compelling model of complex order. What was at stake was the ability to articulate a model of a free society for the postwar period distinct from the requisites of collectivism. Referring to the “superplanner,” guided by “an outlook uninformed by humility,” Polanyi warned that, “when such men are eventually granted power to control the ultimate destines of their fellow men, they reduce them to mere fodder for their unbridled enterprises. And presently illusions of grandeur turn into illusions of persecution, and convert the planning of history into a reign of terror.”60 While central planning was associated with order, repression, and control, spontaneity was upheld as vital to the achievement of multiple forms of liberty. Further criticizing the uncritical and growing confidence in central planning, in “Individualism: True and False” (1945), Hayek wrote: “If it is true that the progressive tendency toward central control of all social processes is the inevitable result of an approach which insists that everything must be tidily planned and made to show a recognizable order, it is also true that this tendency tends to create conditions in which nothing but an all-powerful central

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government can preserve order and stability.”61 By the 1950s, many of Hayek’s main conclusions had become widely accepted. In the foreword to the 1956 American edition of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek acknowledged, “If twelve years ago it seemed to many almost sacrilege to suggest that fascism and communism are merely variants of the same totalitarianism which central control of all economic activity tends to produce, this has become almost a commonplace.”62 Given such fierce denouncement of design and planning, were similar critiques articulated in the discipline of architecture and urban planning? At the time, Josep Lluís Sert’s Can Our Cities Survive: An ABC of Urban Problems, Their Analysis, Their Solutions (1942)— which presented the first attempt by CIAM to promote its agenda in the United States— and Eliel Saarinen’s The City: Its Growth, Its Decay, Its Future (1943) were important publications that highlighted the possibilities of modern planning to combat “urban blight,” the major social “disease” that was “stultifying our technological advances,” as one critic put it.63 In 1950, at the height of socialist planning of public housing and urban renewal projects across the United States, Hayek became professor of social and moral sciences at the University of Chicago, where he stayed until 1962. Along with Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and others, Hayek formed the Mont Pelerin Society, which provided an opportunity for like-minded liberals to gather and offer intellectual and moral support to members of what appeared to be a rather improbable movement.64 Yet many of the members’ basic ideas found their way into various disciplines, including architecture and urban planning.

t he “ engineering ty Pe of m ind” A n d mo dern design “Without a plan there is disorder, arbitrariness,” wrote the Switzerland-born French architect and planner Le Corbusier in 1923, and indeed the notion of order informed the very foundation of his principles of modern architecture and urban planning.65 From the 1920s, Le Corbusier’s influence on urban theory was profound.66 The Athens Charter (1933) of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, the single most influential document that formalized the modern architecture movement’s town-planning principles, faithfully reflected his dogma. In 1933 Le Corbusier published La Ville Radieuse: Eléments d’une doctrine d’urbanisme pour l’équipement de la civilisation machiniste (The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization), which offered the most complete account of his philosophy. The book opened, “This work is dedicated to Authority,” and then proceeded to outline its principles. The first on the list was “Le Plan: Dictateur” (“The plan: Dictator”).67 In the depth of economic and political crisis, as nations struggled for solutions to the Depression and as Europe shifted toward totalitarianism, Le Corbusier roused his readers by asserting: “I shall tell you who the despot is you are waiting for. The despot is the Plan. The correct,

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realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. . . . And this plan is your despot: a tyrant, a tribune of the people. Without other help, it will plead its course, reply to objections, overcome the opposition of private interest, thrust aside outworn customs, rescind outmoded regulations, and create its own authority.”68 Such powerful and provocative words suggested that a plan, like a despot, could bring about a new order only through a concentration of power, which was required to carry out the vision. Le Corbusier’s esteem for authority, a strong state, and the enlightened despot Louis XIV would have been of great concern for the liberal critics of central planning.69 “Everything depends upon the wisdom of the plans,” wrote Le Corbusier, then clarifying, “I am talking here of an ideal society that has already provided itself with a planned economy and swept away all the parasites present in the society we know today.”70 Cleansed of the unwanted, the coupling of economics and urbanism was key to his total planning approach, meant to replace the chaos of the traditional city with soleil, espace, and verdure, to bring the world under rational control for the common good. Despite poetic references, Le Corbusier’s radical vision of the future city was strict, even dictatorial, in its order, symmetry, and standardization. The discrepancy between his architecture and his urbanism, summarized as “complex house— simple city,”71 becomes all the more significant when considering that he routinely worked on his own to design cities for up to three million inhabitants. As Amit Tungare observed, “It would be difficult to exaggerate the emphasis that Le Corbusier placed on making an entire city bend to one single, rational plan. He repeatedly contrasted traditional cities (products of dispersed power and evolution across history), with the city of the future, which would be consciously formulated from start to finish by one designer.”72 Deeply suspicious of enterprises conceived by a “single mastermind,” Hayek observed that “most of the schemes for a complete remodeling of society, from the earlier utopias to modern socialism,” bear the mark of the “engineering type of mind.”73 Removed from the “social process in which others may take independent decisions,” Hayek asserted, the “single mind” of the planner gains “complete control” of the particular “little world” he creates.74 Whether employed in economics or in town planning, the central design approach has provoked boundless criticism as a form of authoritarian control.75 The affinity for rational thinking and the “aesthetic of the engineer” dominated Le Corbusier’s philosophy, as he proclaimed: “Relying on calculations, engineers use geometric forms, satisfying our eyes through geometry and our minds through mathematics; their works are on the way to great art.”76 Twenty years after Le Corbusier declared his unwavering faith in the scientific principles of the engineer, in an essay titled “The Religion of the Engineers: Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians,” Hayek quoted from Léon Halévy, a disciple and collaborator of Saint-Simon, who saw “the time approaching when the ‘art of moving the masses’ will be so perfectly developed that the painter,

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the musician, and the poet ‘will possess the power to please and to move with the same certainty as the mathematician solves a geometrical problem or the chemist analyzes some substance.’”77 Repelled by such an idea, Hayek wrote, “In Russia even the artists appear to pride themselves on the name of ‘the engineers of the soul,’ bestowed upon them by Stalin.”78 Likewise, he claimed that the “ideals of the engineer” not only have dominated historically but also continue to have an enormous “influence on current views about problems of social organization,” and he emphasized that the “technological approach, or the engineering point of view, is much greater than is generally realized.”79 Although architectural historians have routinely acknowledged the technical innovations achieved by engineers as an important precedent in the development of modern architecture, few have considered the implications of their methods for approaching questions of social organization. In 1928, the Bohemia-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture Sigfried Giedion wrote that the task of the contemporary historian was “to extract from the vast complexity of the past those elements that will be the point of departure for the future.” Following this logic, he wrote, “The ‘new’ architecture had its origins at the moment of industrial formation around 1830, at the moment of the transformation from hand work to industrial production.” The force of the “new” architecture therefore “belongs to a great stream of development” and industrialization in which “construction in the nineteenth century plays the role of the subconscious” insofar as it is the “pure” expression of calculations and materials, regardless of the “historicizing masks” of its various products and buildings. Giedion credited Saint-Simon with the insight that industry was the “central concept of the century” and “destined to turn life inside out.” Therefore, Giedion claimed, “industry anticipates society’s inner upheaval just as construction anticipates the future expression of building.”80 A belief in rationalism and progress may have dominated among architects, designers, and economists of the nineteenth century, but it was certainly not embraced by everyone. The novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the poems and criticism of Charles Baudelaire, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche all espoused a profound aversion to rationalism. While fears of the dystopian world that could result from an obsession with rationalism were seldom expressed, by the end of World War II a deep discontent with modern design began to dominate architectural criticism. Between 1941 and 1945, Giedion worked on Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948), a book that abandoned faith in science, rationalism, progress and the engineers. Amid the extraordinary devastation of World War II, as Sokratis Georgiadis noted, Giedion “questioned the omnipotence of a rationalism that was an end in itself and registered his skepticism of the naïve faith in progress.”81 In fact, he came to the conclusion that “mechanization is an agent, like water, fire, light. It is blind and without direction of its own. It must be canalized. Like the powers of nature, mechanization depends on man’s capacity to make use of it and to protect himself against its inherent perils. Because mechanization sprang from

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the mind of man, it is the more dangerous to him. Being less easily controlled than natural forces, mechanization reacts on the sense and on the mind of its creator.”82 In one of the most disturbing eulogies to modernity and the death of the machine in the history of architectural criticism, Giedion wrote: “It may well be that there are no people left, however remote, who have not lost their faith in progress. Men have become frightened by progress, changed from a hope to a menace. Faith in progress lies on the scrap heap, along with many other devalued symbols. . . . And it began so marvelously.”83 A desperation and urgency, even disgust, accompanied Giedion’s lament “On the Illusion of Progress”: “We are confronted with a great heap of words and misused symbols and next to it an immense storehouse bursting with new discoveries, inventions, and potentialities, all promising a new life. . . . But the promises of a better life have not been kept. All we have to show so far is a rather disquieting inability to organize the world, or even to organize ourselves.”84 Hayek’s “Abuse of Reason” project, undertaken in the same period as Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, also studied the relationship between scientific methods and social problems in an effort to provide an intellectual history that could reveal the fundamental problems of the past century.85 Hayek attempted to outline not only a history of the forces that resulted in totalitarianism but also a genealogy of its most essential methods and designs. At the height of European totalitarianism, Hayek sought an alternative history to challenge the present. Hayek and Giedion both concluded that the origin of the totalitarian crisis was to be found in the doctrine of Saint-Simon, specifically in his unwavering faith in progress. Giedion came to the realization that “in the nineteenth century, revolutionaries and capitalists alike based their motives of action on the creed of progress.” In the depths of disillusionment with progress and the promise of utopia, he wrote: “Proudhon pathetically proclaims . . . ‘that which dominates all my efforts, their principle and their end, their base and their crown . . . that which I affirm, resolutely and irrevocably, in all ways and all places [is] progress.’ By which he understands it to be ‘la marche de la société dans l’histoire.’ The same belief stands invisibly behind Karl Marx’s scientific solution of the social problem: the infinite perfectibility of man.” Throughout the 1940s, as Mises, Hayek, Polanyi, Popper, and others made significant contributions to an anti-rationalist approach, a new philosophy began to coalesce.86 Like other liberal critics, Popper, in his The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), attacked totalitarianism at its root. When Hayek and Popper met in England before World War II, Hayek knew of Popper’s Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) of 1934, and following the war, their work shared many themes.87 Many liberal advocates shared an aversion to Hegel and Marx, and to all forms of central planning and social control. With differences notwithstanding, they were united in their goal to undermine totalitarianism. Their view of democracy stood in stark contrast to that of revolutionary societies commanded by powerful leaders. Highlighting this point, in Planned Chaos (1947), Mises wrote: “The term democracy, as I use it, 42 | c h A P t e r o n e

means a system of government under which those ruled are in a position to determine, directly by plebiscite or indirectly by election, the mode in which the legislative and executive power is to be exercised and the selection of the supreme executives. Democracy is the very opposite of the Bolshevist, Fascist and Nazi principle according to which a group of self-appointed vanguardists has the right and the duty to seize the reins of government by violent action and to impose its own will upon the majority.”88 Since the 1920s, the Austrianschool economists had consistently argued against collectivism, citing it as a form of anti-democratic society. Following World War II, when an entire generation of modern architects was forced to retreat from their convictions of science and the “aesthetic of the engineer,” Mises, Hayek, Polanyi, Popper, and other liberal philosophers propelled forward, offering a counternarrative that traced the unsettling history of rationalism and progress from Saint-Simon to Marx, while critiquing the engineers and planners modes of social engineering.89 By the end of the 1940s, many of these critiques were increasingly becoming accepted. Hayek had also formulated an alternative to the scientistic methods of conscious direction and control of social life. He continuously elaborated on the idea that “an order arises as a result of individual action but without being designed by any individual,” offering quotidian examples, such as language.90 By the late 1940s, many viewed the conception of modern design as a means of overt control over social processes with deep suspicion. Reflecting sentiments shared by many other advocates of modern design, Giedion asked, “How was it possible for the foundation and very core of nineteenth-century thought and action to collapse so hopelessly?” His answer: “Mechanization was misused to exploit both earth and man with complete irresponsibility.”91 While many modern architects and designers maintained their belief in modern design, following World War II, a generation struggled to develop a more humane modernism. In 1943, Giedion, Josep Lluís Sert and Fernand Léger had offered “Nine Points on Monumentality” as a way to move forward. Similarly, in England the “disquieting inability to organize the world” produced the new humanism movement. In 1947, at the seventh Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, as signs of the demise of modern design were increasingly evident, Aldo van Eyck asked a decisive question: “Does CIAM intend to guide a rational and mechanistic conception of human progress toward an ‘improvement’ of human environment, or does CIAM, criticizing this attitude, intend to help transform the background against which it projects its activity?”92 These concerns underscored a significant and sustained critique of modern design that was becoming ever more pronounced.

t he r evivAL of Lib erALism in de s ig n de bAt e s Before the theories of Charles Darwin were established, it would have been almost unthinkable to propose that human institutions come into existence through trial and error and not deliberate human design. The solution to the 43 | P L A n n e d o r d e r v e r s u s s P o n t A n e o u s o r d e r

problem of attempting to establish new institutions, Hayek argued, could be found in the eighteenth-century philosophers and their “interpretation of the growth of civilization that is still the indispensable foundation of the argument for liberty.”93 For Hayek, the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment offered an understanding of the evolution of civilization. Hayek quoted Adam Ferguson, appreciating the way he understood “‘how nations stumble upon establishments which are indeed the result of human action but not the execution of human design.’”94 Not unlike species that evolve over time from common ancestors, for Hayek, human institutions were the product of social evolution, and the British philosophers found “the origin of institutions not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful.”95 What was at stake was an alternative genealogy of the evolution of European society. Theories of social evolution, which distinguished the British tradition from the Continental philosophy of social revolution, became even more pronounced following World War II. Parallel to efforts by political and economic liberals to revive the doctrine of liberalism, the editors of the Architectural Review, one of the most respected journals in England, turned to the eighteenth-century British theorists of the picturesque aesthetic as a way to rethink modern design in the 1940s. Not unlike the currents in political theory, architecture debates centered on the meaning of democracy while struggling with how to avoid authoritarian tendencies in design. In 1944, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, proprietor and chief editor of the Architectural Review, published “Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscape” with the goal of resurrecting the “true theory of the Picturesque” and applying it to the urban scene, rather than the more typical rural areas. This effort to rethink town planning was directed primarily at modern designers. Hastings protested: “The Bauhausians have boldness and architectural imagination. But their new world does not appear to incorporate any of the old ones, and to many quiet people it seems that, like other revolutionaries, they may destroy more than they can possibly create. They have no tolerance of accident.” At the heart of the matter was an issue related to a rationally conceived order. Hastings explained: “To one unacquainted with the Picturesque movement the analogy with democracy might seem highly nineteenforty-ish and out of order, but in point of fact it was one the Whig landowners were fond of making. Landscape principles were Whig principles; from Horace Walpole to Uvedale Price the prophets of the movement were fond of drawing parallels between their free landscape and, in Walpole’s words, this ‘Empire of free men,’ the opposite of course being the totalitarian French with their insistence on slavish symmetry.”96 In contrast to the sternness associated with modern design and the rigidly conceived rational town planning that dominated the period, Hastings offered the “democratic art” of the picturesque, claiming that it could “give satisfaction to all tastes.” But to accomplish this, Hastings urged, one must maintain a commitment “to plan irregularly, to disdain formality, to contrive beauties that shall be great, and strike the eye, but

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without any order or disposition of parts as shall be commonly or easily observed, to improve a scene according to the manner suggested by itself and without regard to systematical arrangement.”97 With the launch of the townscape campaign, Hastings set the stage for a robust polemic concerning rationalism versus anti-rationalism in design.98 While Hayek admired Edmund Burke for his anti-rationalist philosophy and criticism of the French Revolution, the editors of Architectural Review would have taken note of his views on the picturesque.99 In many essays on the subject, Nikolaus Pevsner expounded on the virtues of eighteenth-century English philosophy and design aesthetics.100 The concern of the Architectural Review editors over the restrictive aspects of town planning— not unlike Hayek’s critique of planning as a form of control— resulted in an endorsement of the freedom of the “soft gentle curves” and surprise of the picturesque. While the reaction to this “debased return to history” is well documented, few scholars have commented on how this shift in reference, from French rationalism to British anti-rationalism, had a counterrevolutionary impact on both economics and modern design in the postwar period.101 From Hayek’s point of view, the differences between the British and French traditions were paramount. The British were not Continental socialists, and many favored industrial and social reform over revolution. Hayek distinguished two types of individualism, one marked by the traditions of the Scottish philosophers, Burke, and the English Whigs, and the other characterized mainly by French and Continental writers, dominated by Cartesian rationalism, including the Encyclopedists, Rousseau, and the physiocrats, which he denounced, since “this rationalistic individualism always tends to develop into the opposite of individualism, namely, socialism or collectivism.”102 Intent on exposing the intellectual biases of the socialists, Hayek argued that in European history from about 1750 onward, ideas of liberalism and democracy, capitalism and individualism, free trade and internationalism, came to be disregarded and dismissed while Western Europeans “continued to import German ideas of ‘organization’ and were even induced to believe that their own former convictions had merely been rationalizations of selfish interests, that free trade was a doctrine invented to further British interests, and that the political ideals of England and America were hopelessly outmoded and a thing to be ashamed of.”103 In sketching an alternative history that acknowledged an evolutionary understanding of social processes, Hayek claimed that “the general direction of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which had bound him to the customary or prescribed ways in the pursuit of his ordinary activities. The conscious realization that the spontaneous and uncontrolled efforts of individuals were capable of producing a complex order of economic activities could come only after this development had made some progress. The subsequent elaboration of a consistent argument in favor of economic freedom was the outcome of a free growth of economic activity which had been the undesigned and unforeseen by-product of political freedom.”104

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While highlighting the main difference between socialism and liberalism, Hayek argued that the former was primarily characterized by an insistence on social design, whereas the latter evolved out of an undesigned process. He reminded his readers, “That socialism has displaced liberalism as the doctrine held by the great majority of progressives does not simply mean that people had forgotten the warnings of the great liberal thinkers of the past about the consequences of collectivism. It has happened because they were persuaded of the very opposite of what these men had predicted.”105 The lessons of the past were issued as warnings for postwar Europe alongside an emphasis on the need to define a new approach.

mo dern design And th e s tAt e v e r s us non- design And the fre e m A r k e t The long history of social reform in England, which gained momentum in the late nineteenth century, was confronted by new challenges in the twentieth century. Immediately after the war, England saw a conflict between the values of social reform associated with modern design and an emergent sensibility. One of the most prolific and outspoken advocates of modern design was the German émigré art and architecture historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who advocated that the state provide the means by which to organize and advance social reform. As a Germany-born socialist, his long record of support for modern design and centralized state planning in England stands in stark contrast to Hayek’s ideas of a non-designed order. Hayek and Pevsner were from the generation that had immigrated to England in the 1930s, and both were Anglophiles able to mine British history to support their intellectual projects.106 Deeply fascinated by William Morris’s artistic and political activities, Pevsner shared his passionate views on equality, claiming, “I don’t want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.” Pevsner also noted that Morris wanted an art “by the people and for the people,” which aligned with the basic objectives of Pevsner’s socialism and was made evident in his criticism of the deplorable conditions of workers in England in the nineteenth century. These conditions were possible, he claimed, because “economists and philosophers were blind enough to provide an ideological foundation for the criminal attitude of the employer. Philosophy taught that unthwarted development of everybody’s energy was the only natural and healthy way of progress.” In this worldview, for Pevsner, “liberalism ruled unchecked in philosophy as in industry, and implied complete freedom for the manufacturer to produce anything shoddy and hideous, if he could get away with it.”107 In contrast, Hayek looked to the history of classical liberalism in England and drew on a body of economic and social theory that honored the virtues of individual liberties, minimal government, and free trade. While both Pevsner and Hayek were critically engaged in the major intellectual debates of the period, they held radically different views about the nature of design and the role of the state.

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In Academies of Art, Past and Present (1940), originally written in Germany before 1933, Pevsner presented a history of official, state-controlled, and statesupported schools of art from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. His goal was to examine “why the artist has become so painfully severed from his public.”108 In Pevsner’s diagnosis of the problem, he concluded that it was liberalism and individualism that led the artist of the nineteenth century to renounce social duty and to revel in art for art’s sake. He argued that the situation persisted “as long as States did not start abandoning the principles of nineteenth-century liberalism.” In the 1880s, a new conception of art did come into existence, alongside “the change in the attitude to the State we are experiencing just now, above all in the new totalitarian States.” As enthusiasm for socialist central planning spread through Western democracies, Pevsner recognized that a “growing tendency towards governmental enterprise has become evident in England too.”109 Pevsner noted approvingly that “control over schools is spreading.” In 1944, England established central state control over many aspects of design under the Council of Industrial Design. That same year, of course, Hayek released The Road to Serfdom, in which he argued that all forms of centralized state collectivism lead not to a community of social harmony but to an unbearable loss of individual liberties. In contrast to Hayek’s view, Pevsner believed that liberalism was antithetical to modernism, arguing: “If a return to Liberalism is desired, no art education in one consciously accepted and promoted style is possible, just as no planning of towns, no planning of streets is possible. Art will be the privilege of genius, and the art which surrounds us all will be a medley of individual activities. If however planned towns, streets, and houses are desired, only State interference can help, and only at the expense of civic liberties.”110 Pevsner had long supported socialism and state planning; as late as 1934 he wrote articles condemning “attitudes that are alien or hostile to the state,” which some have interpreted as defending Joseph Goebbels and the principles of the state’s right to determine cultural policy.111 Contra Hayek, Pevsner believed that it was only through state planning that actual social reform could be brought about. His overzealous support of this idea may have limited his ability to be critical of the state and the potentially adverse effects of an all-powerful central government.112 Throughout his prolific career, Pevsner remained dedicated to the principles of socialism and social reform, and he consistently supported efforts of the state to reform design. Pevsner was part of a generation that sought to promote modern design as a means of controlling an unplanned and chaotic world. In 1946 he wrote Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things: An Attempt to Establish Criteria by Which the Aesthetic Qualities of Design Can Be Judged— part of series of pamphlets published by the Council of Visual Education— a design manifesto for the “common man” (fig. 1.5).113 In the foreword, Herbert Read, vice chairman of the council, acknowledged an increasing realization in Great Britain of the importance of design to help introduce “some sort of order” into “our chaotic

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f igu re 1 .5 Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things (London: Council of Visual Education, 1946), cover. © British Library Board. All rights reserved / Bridgeman Images.

civilization.” He then concluded that “there is not much point in planning an order of ugliness.”114 As with many theorists and architects of the period, he intuited an overwhelming sense that a deliberate order, defined by modern aesthetic principles, must prevail over aesthetic mayhem. To advance this cause, Pevsner outlined some of the key criteria by which good design might be recognized— although “aesthetics is not a science, any more than ethics.”115 In Pevsner’s view, both aesthetics and ethics needed to be channeled, directed, and controlled though education if they were to have an impact on the larger population, especially on the “common man.” This idea was reinforced by other publications in the series, including Hervey Adams’s Art and Everyman: A Brief Analysis of the Part Played by Art in Our Daily Lives (1944), which claimed that “taste is a quality that can be educated.” Adams highlighted the “dangers of ignorance and of indifference” of the public at large that has “allowed the ugliness of industrial defacement, the muddle of suburbia, and all the trumpery[,] badly designed junk that is sold in so many of our shops.” Similarly, in the foreword to Art and Everyman, Clough Williams-Ellis, an architect who served on several government committees concerned with design and conservation of the rural landscape, wrote, “Seeing what we have lately made of our world, one cannot help wondering whether some such change of management might not be worth a trial.”116 Following the warnings of Williams-Ellis, Adams argued that one of the most important problems facing England after the war was uncontrolled development: “The pawky and spasmodic efforts that have been made in the recent past to cope with the festering sores left on the fair face of Britain by uncontrolled industrial development need to be replaced by a new well-planned industrial and agriculture endeavor, to be effectively carried out by national planning.”117 In the same vein, Charles Reilly’s pamphlet Architecture as Communal Art (1946) questioned whether Britain could “look forward once more to a real communal art,” stressing “the great building years ahead of us, years in which we must necessarily express the new co-operative era when competing commerce, with its concomitant and competing individualism, will take a second place . . . to the big co-operative enterprises of whole towns and to the great undertakings of the state, such as the power stations for the electricity grid.”118 In The Future Citizen and His Surroundings: Evidence to Sir Cyril Norwood’s Committee on Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools (1946), W. F. Morris made his case that “no education is complete which does not include the appreciation of design in all its aspects– architecture, town and country planning and the fine and industrial arts” (fig. 1.6).119 Morris believed that schools should play a part in teaching the virtues of design and went on to claim that “if there was an increased consciousness within the educational system of the importance of good design,” a child could develop “proper aesthetic valuations” for welldesigned houses, buildings, towns, and villages as well as articles of everyday use. Morris’s unyielding confidence and belief in the virtues of a planned order,

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f igu re 1 .6 W. F. Morris, The Future Citizen and His Surroundings (London: Council for Visual Education, 1946), cover. © British Library Board. All rights reserved / Bridgeman Images.

conceived and administered by design officials and the state, highlighted a generation’s hopes for a better world through planning. The Council of Visual Education’s series of pamphlets offers great insight into the concerns of architects, planners, and intellectuals in Britain in the 1940s and presents an opportunity to examine contrasting views and to question one of Hayek’s basic assumptions: that well-intended premises notwithstanding, socialist intellectuals were on a dangerous path that would require ever-increasing government control over individual liberties.

hAyek ’s c ritiq ue o f toWn P LA nning Considered by many to be a model of progressive reform, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 established the foundation for modern planning in Britain by erecting a “new structure of planning machinery to ensure that planning will be centrally co-ordinated and also effectively executed.”120 Greatly admired by many architects, urban planners, and sociologists, particularly in the United States, the act gave local governments control over the approval of planning proposals as well as the use of eminent domain.121 These and other measures were outlined in the publication Handbook: Facts and Figures for Socialists, 1951. Reflecting the attitudes of many modern town planners, J. M. Richards, British critic and Architectural Review editor, reported that “Britain’s town-planning laws are as enlightened as any in the world.” He noted that their “general effect is to enable the siting of all buildings, and the use to which all land is put, to be controlled and planned in advance in the public interest.” He was confident that the act would succeed in preventing “repetition of mistakes,” such as the “ribbonbuilding along main roads and the scattering of unplanned housing estates over precious agricultural country.” He concluded that “the control exercised by local authorities and their architects had brought about a most welcome change from the scene dominated by speculative builders before the war.”122 The Town and Country Planning Act was part of a larger effort in Britain to use design as a means of reform, extending from an aesthetically pleasing industrial design of consumer goods to the built environment, as we have seen, and the editors of the Architectural Review played a key role in promoting those goals. In 1951, the Architectural Review published “COID: Progress Report: Industrial Design 1951,” in which Pevsner’s Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (1937) was held up as the means by which to judge the “absolute and relative merits and demerits” of the progress of design in Britain (fig. 1.7).123 While celebrated by many modern designers and their advocates, the far-reaching implications of these various reforms were of great concern to critics of a single centralized authority. Hayek’s liberal philosophy was extended to consider many aspects of social organization, including town planning. In a review of Charles Haar’s Land Planning Law in a Free Society: A Study of the British Town and Country Planning Act (1951), Hayek asserted that “it is as devoid of any appreciation of the wider

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f i g u r e 1 . 7 “COID: Progress Report: Industrial Design 1951,” Architectural Review (December 1951). By permission.

economic issues involved as were the group of architects and administrators who, in the peculiar circumstances of Britain between 1940 and 1947, were almost exclusively responsible for this piece of legislation.”124 A key concern for Hayek was that the act in effect changed the “whole character of the British economic system.” Accusing architects and administrators of having little more than a naïve understanding of economics, Hayek pointed out that “while entirely suspending the operation of the price mechanism with regard to land (outside agricultural uses) [the act] has put nothing in its place except arbitrary

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decision without even a general principle to guide it.”125 He continued, “The main lesson the British experience has to teach [is]: the acute danger that a small group of technical specialists may, in suitable circumstances, succeed in leading a democracy into legislation which few of those affected by it would have approved if they had understood what it meant.”126 His principal concern with the legislation was that, “if it were to be consistently carried out, land planning would in the end mean central direction of all commercial and industrial activity. No private person or corporation would have any interest in putting a piece of land to better use or in starting anything new on British soil, because the gain . . . would have to go to the government.”127 In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), in a chapter titled “Housing and Town Planning,” Hayek further reflected on the act, affirming that the “desire to dispense with the price mechanism and to replace it by central direction” was characteristic of much of the town planning carried out “particularly by architects and engineers who have never understood the role that prices play in co-ordinating individual activities.”128 He reprimanded the leaders of the town planning movement, men such as Frederick Law Olmstead, Patrick Geddes, and Lewis Mumford, for their “anti-economics” interpretation of the way cities work.129 In contrast to efforts by town planners, Hayek asserted that “the market has, on the whole, guided the evolution of cities more successfully, thought imperfectly, than is commonly realized and that most of the proposals to improve upon this, not by making it work better, but by superimposing a system of central direction, show little awareness of what such a system would have to accomplish, even to equal the market in effectiveness.”130 Hayek concluded that “many of the policies intended to combat particular evils have actually made them worse,” and he warned that some of the developments “created greater potentialities for a direct control by authority of the private life of the individual.”131 He reminded his readers: “By ‘coercion’ we mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another.”132 As the polemic of planned order versus spontaneous order advanced, ideas based on anti-control and freedom of the market were explored by a new generation of artists, architects, and critics as an alternative to socialist planning, whose ideals had largely defined modernism.

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2 : New Brutalism and the Critique of Socialism no n - d e si g n An d th e n e W v i s uA L o r d e r

t h e formAtive y eArs o f ne W brutA Lis m New Brutalism was a label to throw at the left. Left-Marxist theory has crumbled.

ALiso n sm ithso n

r e y ner bAnhAm

The terms international style (1920s), new empiricism (1940s), and new brutalism (1950s) describe a sequence of contested conceptions of modern design that unfolded over the first half of the twentieth century.1 Within this trajectory, new brutalism— a “non-Marxist” design movement in England in the 1950s— was an aesthetic and ethical challenge to the larger socialist cultural and aesthetic doctrines that dominated the former movements.2 As a body of theory, new brutalism sought to purge the history of modern design of its socialist biases and redefine it according to an emerging liberal paradigm. The shift from a Marxist perspective, which supported central planning, to a non-Marxist view, which embraced non-design and the unplanned forces of the market, is a central moment in the postwar history of modern design.3 Spearheading this critical turn, Reyner Banham aligned his criticism of modern design with an emerging critique of Marxism espoused by liberal critics, particularly with Austrian exiles in England, including Hayek; Karl Popper, who promoted the idea of indeterminacy and an open society; and Ernst Gombrich, who advanced a non-elitist approach to art history. Along with other prominent social theorists, these three figures— all affiliated with the University of London— developed an extensive critique of Marxism in their respective fields. Their work was well articulated as “intellectual weapons” in their “war of ideas against ‘totalitarian philosophies.’”4 During this period, Banham was a student pursuing his PhD under Nikolaus Pevsner (from 1952 to 1958) at the Courtauld Institute of Art and a key member of the Independent Group, an assembly of artists, architects, and historians connected with London’s Institute of Contemporary Art from 1952 to 1955. This was a period marked by great change; a fundamental shift occurred not merely in architectural sensibilities but also away from Marxism, socialism, and the welfare state toward non-Marxism, non-socialism, and the market.5

f i g u r e 2 . 1 Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review (December 1955). By permission.

In December 1955, directly on the heels of Nikolaus Pevsner’s last talk in the Reith Lectures, “The Englishness of English Art,” Banham published “The New Brutalism,” a manifesto for new art and architecture (fig. 2.1).6 Highly conscious of the significant historical changes occurring in English architectural culture, Banham wrote: “As Britain’s first native art movement since the systematic study of art history reached these islands, the New Brutalism needs to be seen in a double historical context— that of post-war architectural thought, and that of post-war historical writing on architecture.”7 The postwar period in England was, of course, undergoing major social and political changes in the understanding of the role and power of the state. When the openly socialist Labour government came into power in 1945, it set the groundwork for realizing a bold vision of a welfare state. This vision had been articulated in a 1942 report by the economist William Beveridge that called for the centralization of all major government departments in order to nationalize the economy and offer social insurance that would cover every citizen regardless of income.8 The war years had accustomed the population to almost total state control, opening the door to the idea that the state was best suited to offer centralized education, health coverage, and unemployment and sickness allowances. The Labour Party called this a “planned order” guided by a “humane” concern for the common good, while maintaining that unbridled capitalism would lead to chaos. These political issues had their counterparts in design and architecture debates, and in many cases, they caused a schism between older and younger

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architects and theorists, as well as those who believed in socialism from those who did not. If Banham and the Independent Group could agree with Sigfried Giedion that the artist of the twentieth century “resorts to elements such as machines, mechanisms, and ready-made articles as some of the few true products of the period, to liberate themselves from the rotten art of the ruling taste,”9 they would have most certainly disagreed with Giedion’s indictment of the ethics of the American industrial designer for whom “only one consideration counts: the merchandizer, dictator of taste in the United States.” Like many theorists of the period, Giedion’s condemnation of the “dictatorship of the market” shaped his views of contemporary design.10 Many Marxists maintained that the forces of the market needed to be controlled in order to manifest a “humane society,” and many believed that design could play a crucial role in creating a new orderly world. In 1945 Herbert Read acknowledged, “In Great Britain there is a growing awareness of the importance of design: it is perhaps a reflection of the more general realization that some sort of order must be introduced into our chaotic civilization.”11 While design and planning were promoted by the Marxist left and the welfare state, their detractors supported a radically different vision of a new society. After reading Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Winston Churchill warned in 1945 that a socialist system would inevitably “have to fall back on some form of Gestapo.”12 The debate turned on the values of freedom and control and the means by which a free society should be organized. The 1945 Labour Party Election Manifesto announced that the anti-controllers and anti-planners desire to sweep away public controls, simply in order to give the profiteering interests and the privileged rich an entirely free hand to plunder the rest of the nation as shamelessly as they did in the nineteen-twenties. The Labour Party stands for order as against the chaos which would follow the end of all public control. We stand for order, for positive constructive progress as against the chaos of economic do-as-they-please anarchy.13

The Labour Party won the general elections in 1945 with a campaign that promised the establishment of a “Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain”— a “free democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organized in the service of the British people.” To fulfill its promise, Labour put forth extensive nationalization programs. Consequently, England underwent major social and political changes. After only two years under socialist leadership, Herbert Read worried that England had “become completely finished because now based on assumptions which deprive social life of incentive . . . I begin to think that the Americans are right to keep to a capitalist economy until a better alternative than state socialism becomes evident.”14 These concerns penetrated all spheres of culture. After years of explosive debates, in 1951 the Tory Party returned to power, with Winston Churchill becoming prime minister again. Ironically, in that 56 | c h A P t e r t W o

same year England celebrated the Festival of Britain, the design centerpiece of the socialist welfare state, which demonstrated “a socialist blueprint for a controlled, ordered, yet humane environment for the benefit of the wider population.”15 Hugh Casson, director of the festival, commented that “Churchill, like the rest of the Tory Party, was against the Festival which they (quite rightly) believed was the advanced guard of socialism.”16 Indeed, Churchill understood the political implications of the project, referring to it as “three-dimensional Socialist propaganda.”17 It was within this context that a new attitude toward design, which came to be known as “new brutalism,” began to emerge. Recounting the history of new brutalism, Banham emphasized its political nature, claiming, “The passion of such discussion has been greatly enhanced by the clarity of its polarization— Communist versus the Rest— and it was somewhere in this vigorous polemic that the term ‘The New Brutalism’ was first coined.”18 More precisely, the context of these debates was a peculiar historical period during which “Swedes, Communists, and the Town and Country Planning Association are bracketed together as different isotopes of the common ‘Adversary.’”19 The two rival factions were represented by the “communists,” which included the establishment architects and critics, especially those associated with the London County Council and the Architectural Review, and the younger generation, which was largely “non-Marxist.” These political and ideological differences are crucial to understanding new brutalism as an aesthetic and ethical challenge to the Marxist political and cultural doctrines that dominated postwar architectural culture. Referring the origin of new brutalism, Banham wrote: It was, in the beginning, a term of Communist abuse, and it was intended to signify the normal vocabulary of Modern Architecture— flat roofs, glass, exposed structure— considered as morally reprehensible deviations from “The New Humanism,” a phrase which means something different in Marxist hands to the meaning which might be expected. The New Humanism meant, in architecture at that time, brickwork, segmental arches, pitched roofs, small windows (or small panes at any rate)— picturesque detailing without picturesque planning. It was, in fact, the so-called “William Morris Revival,” now happily defunct, since Kruschev’s [sic] reversal of the Party’s architectural line. . . . But it will be observed that The New Humanism was again a quasi-historical concept, oriented, however spuriously, towards that midnineteenth century epoch which was Marxism’s Golden Age, when you could recognize a capitalist when you met him.20

In the context of the clash of architectural generations, Banham suggested that a certain aesthetic had become associated with a particular political position: The New Brutalists at whom Marxist spite was directed could be named and recognized— and so could their friends in other arts. The term had no sooner got into public circulation than its meaning began to narrow. Among 57 | n e W b r u t A L i s m A n d t h e c r i t i q u e o f s o c i A L i s m

the non-Marxist grouping there was no particular unity of programme or intention, but there was certain community of interests, a tendency to look towards Le Corbusier, and to be aware of something called le beton brut, . . . and, in the case of the more sophisticated and aesthetically literate, to know of the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet and his connection in Paris.21

Banham here defines the open sensibility of new brutalism as an aesthetic practice lacking a unified or central intent, which distinguished it from modernism in that it could not be reduced to a unified set of concerns or formal interests. Nor did it adhere to the moral imperatives of the modern movement, particularly the belief in social reform. Banham then outlined a history of the development of a non-rational aesthetic associated with art brut, while searching for potential affiliations between art and architecture. Of art brut, Jean Dubuffet wrote: “We understand by this term works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part (contrary to the activities of intellectuals). . . . We are witness here to a completely pure artistic operation, raw, brute, and entirely reinvented in all of its phases solely by means of the artists’ own impulses.”22 Of particular interest, art brut consisted of work by individuals from various non-professional backgrounds, including psychiatric patients and children, and consequently, the common characteristic of this outsider art was that it functioned beyond the conscious control of authority.23 In this sense, the non-rational aesthetic of art brut might be characterized as “spontaneous art,” which posed a challenge to official art history and academic modernism that had become routine in postwar design practices. The various participants in these debates employed complex strategies. For example, when Banham explained that new brutalism emerged out of polarized debates between communists and the rest, the intentional ambiguity allowed “the rest” to encompass not only the Conservative Party but also a radical young group that could not be properly identified as either left or right. This characteristic defined the postwar generation. As Banham explained: “Something very weird happened around 1946– 1947 when the lines were being drawn for the Cold War. Suddenly . . . it was very difficult to read Time or any American magazine at all, simply because of one’s political loyalties. In that period there arose a situation where one’s natural leanings in the world of entertainment, and so on, were to the States, but one’s political philosophy seemed to require one to turn one’s back to the States.”24 As a way of navigating such uncertain political terrain, said Banham, “We left ourselves with one foot on either side of the dividing line that had been drawn through the culture of the West.”25 His specific use of terms such as non-left and non-Marxist are particularly revealing in that they reference what was being resisted more than what was being affirmed.26 The critique of socialism and the liberal left also included a critique of planning, specifically the rationalism behind scientific planning. If the belief in the engineer’s aesthetic, hailed by modern theorists,

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had served as the guiding principle for modern design since the 1920s, by the 1940s the method was increasingly under political and aesthetic scrutiny.

t he critiqu e o f rAtio nALism With the social, political, and moral catastrophe of Nazi Germany and the widespread devastation of World War II, Hayek said, “After the experience of the last thirty years, there is perhaps not much need to emphasize that without principles we drift.”27 Since at least the 1930s he had grown increasingly suspicious of any state of affairs in which “order is created by direct commands.”28 He saw the influence of scientific planning and social engineering in the work of figures as disparate as H. G. Wells, Otto Neurath, and Lewis Mumford. In 1942, when the Labour Party outlined its principles for the reconstruction of England after the war, it argued against the return of the “unplanned competitive world” that followed World War I in which a privileged few made enormous gain at the expense of the common good. The “old competitive system,” it demanded, must be replaced with a “planned society.” It further stated, “As a necessary prerequisite to the reorganization of society, the main War-time controls in industry and agriculture should be maintained.” Hayek, having lived through the interwar years in Vienna, must have experienced an intense and disquieting sense of déjà vu upon reading such words.29 Hayek feared that the model of Russia proposed for emulation by men in power was intolerably misdirected, and he argued that state ownership and control of the means of production was incompatible with political freedom. As the planning agenda of the welfare state took shape, Hayek put forth a controversial body of theory that offered a clear set of principles for economic and social development that did not rely on central planning or, he believed, jeopardize individual liberties. Between 1941 and 1944 Hayek worked on a project he called the “Abuse of Reason,” which was published as a series of journal articles that included “Scientism and the Study of Society,” in which he attacked pervasive scientism and rationalism, and “The Counter-Revolution of Science.” This body of work formed the basis of The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (1952). In an essay from that book titled “Engineers and Planners,” he argued that “the ideal of conscious control of social phenomena has made its greatest influence felt in the economic field” and has resulted in the present popularity of “economic planning,” which can be traced to the prevalence of “scientist ideals.”30 For Hayek, the influence of engineers and planners was inappropriately rational and technological for understanding problems of social organization. From the earliest utopias to modern socialism, most schemes for a complete remodeling of society, Hayek insisted, bear the distinct mark of the “particular forms which they take in the hands of the applied scientist and especially the engineer.”31 This led him to suspect the premise behind all attempts at social engineering. To apply engineering techniques to the solution

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of social problems, Hayek argued, was precisely what gave rise to notions such as political engineering and social engineering, which had become “fashionable catchwords” epitomizing the 1940s generation and its predilection for conscious control. Long before Le Corbusier made his claims concerning “The Engineer’s Aesthetic and Architecture” in Vers une architecture (1923), the reverence for rational methodology was well pronounced. Addressing the International Congress of Architects in 1889, Anatole de Baudot announced: For a long time the influence of the architect has declined, and the engineer, l’homme modern par excellence, is beginning to replace him. Were the engineer able to replace the architect altogether, the latter could undoubtedly disappear without at the same time eradicating art. Forms will not compose the basis of the new architecture. In the general disposition of plans and in the design of constructional systems arising from these new situations is to be found the new expression as a whole; the details will then follow. But you will say what you propose is indeed the method of the engineer. I do not deny it, for it is correct.32

For Hayek, to approach the social sciences using methods similar to those of the physical sciences was ill conceived, because the former had relatively stable properties and the latter did not. The complexities of social phenomena, driven by individual desires and motives, could not be accounted for like physical properties. Consequently, Hayek believed that to transfer methods from engineering to social engineering constituted a grave error, which he saw as endemic to the Austro-Marxist social scientific methodology. He noted that “in Russia even the artists appear to pride themselves on the name of ‘engineers of the soul,’ bestowed upon them by Stalin.”33 Hayek pointed out that one of the best illustrations of this tendency was provided by Karl Mannheim, who wrote in 1940: Functionalism made its first appearance in the field of the natural sciences, and could be described as the technical point of view. It has only recently been transferred to the social sphere. . . . Once this technical approach was transferred from natural sciences to human affairs, it was bound to bring about a profound change in man himself. The functional approach no longer regards ideas and moral standards as absolute values, but as products of the social process which can, if necessary, be changed by scientific guidance combined with political practice. . . . A human being, regarded as part of the social machine, is to a certain extent stabilized in his reactions by training and education, and all his recently acquired activities are coordinated according to a definite principle of efficiency within an organized framework.34

Hayek used the term scientism to describe this functionalist approach, a critique that coincided with important changes in the design disciplines.35 60 | c h A P t e r t W o

mod ern design in engLAnd A ft e r Wo r Ld WA r ii In the 1940s in England the critique of modern design manifested in various ways. If architects and critics once enthusiastically advocated the “rational aesthetic” of functionalism and the international style, after the war they sought to establish a new direction. For example, in “Towards a Rational Aesthetic” (1935), the noted critic and Architectural Review editor J. M. Richards outlined the basic characteristics of modern design as standardization, simplicity, and impersonality, and he subsequently celebrated the planning efforts carried out by British state authorities.36 Richards revered both the “dignity of the State” and its central planning mechanisms, and he approved of the idea that control should be exercised by local authorities, claiming, “It is right that no building should be allowed to go ahead until the plans have been passed by someone in an official position.”37 Modern architecture, Richards wrote, has the capacity to offer “well-planned cities composed of buildings that are also wellplanned . . . that make full use of what modern science can provide.”38 Indeed, he wrote, “the one thing that is ruining the countryside [is], the unplanned small-house development on the outskirts of our cities . . . that ignores the principles behind modern architecture.”39 Yet following the war, Richards advocated a radically different approach in The Castles on the Ground (1946), an apotheosis of English suburbia.40 The shift from rational planning to urban processes dominated less by conscious control was evident: “The anarchy of the suburban jungle may appear contemptible to those with an urge towards scientific planning, but the town planner must deal tenderly with the slow unselfconscious process by which the suburban landscape grows.”41 As Anne Massey has noted, Richards and other architects posited Sweden as a new ideal, arguing that the “Swedes had rejected objectivity and rationalism in architectural aesthetics, applying these qualities to the methods of construction only.”42 The leaders of the emergent new humanism movement, which was organized and promulgated by the editors of the Architectural Review, thus looked to Swedish modernism as their primary inspiration in developing a less rational or functionalist and more “humane” type of design. Consequently, practitioners incorporated traditional materials, asymmetrical plans, pitched roofs, and one-story houses. Massey noted that “such humanistic architecture is indicative of the gentle Welfare State culture which permeated post-war Britain.”43 Nikolas Pevsner, author of Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) and a staunch supporter of socialism and the Bauhaus approach to modern design, explained that strength and coldness were the virtues of collectivism that suppressed individuality: “The architect, to represent his age, must be colder, cold to keep in command of mechanized production, cold to design for the satisfaction of anonymous clients.”44 Yet by the mid-1940s Pevsner had turned his attention to reviving eighteenth-century English picturesque theory.45 The shift from a conception of modern design as cold and anonymous to being concerned with free planning, informal qualities, and accidental effects of the 61 | n e W b r u t A L i s m A n d t h e c r i t i q u e o f s o c i A L i s m

nineteenth-century city, “accidents for which we have to be grateful,”46 marked a decisive turn in Pevsner’s approach to modern design. He explained, “As every artist knows, accident can be a very great stimulus.”47 Pevsner was fascinated by the work of the protagonist of the eighteenth-century picturesque, especially the theories of Uvedale Price and Joshua Reynolds, for whom “Variety, Intricacy, Irregularity, Contrast, Surprise, Irritation and Accident” served as basic categories. The main question that haunted Pevsner following the war was whether “the style created between 1900 and 1914 is still the style of today or whether 1950 has to be defined in completely different, largely opposite terms.”48 His research on picturesque planning, which began around 1942, was a search for an approach to design capable of responding to the increasingly common “charges of mechanization and inhumanity.” While Hayek and Pevsner shared an enthusiasm for the traditions of English culture, important differences were evident in their attempts to define new approaches to postwar culture. Like Hayek, who distinguished the traditions of British empiricism from those of French rationalism, Pevsner argued that the art of the picturesque garden was a “purely English creation, in stark contrast to the French grandiosity and formalism of Versailles, just like English liberalism is in contrast to French absolutism— this spontaneous, complex and romantic art is England’s greatest contribution to European art.”49 What separated their philosophies was that Hayek fundamentally opposed all forms of collectivism, whereas Pevsner held on to a belief in socialism as a reasonable means by which to organize society. In praise of the Festival of Britain, as if to specifically address Hayek’s critique of the central planner, Pevsner wrote “The exhibition was not planned by a single individual, even if there was a director of architecture,” and the “common language is perceptibly different from that of two decades earlier.” He continued: “Gone is the hardness, the inflexible angularity, the aloof dogmatism of the beginning of the modern movement; gone is the excessive insistence on the social and scientific aspects of architecture.” Pevsner celebrated this approach and declared that “the unexpected views in every direction are enchanting— here, as in the whole exhibition— a principle derived (no doubt unconsciously) from the English theory of the picturesque.”50 Pevsner’s apparent embrace of liberalism and spontaneity are distinct from Hayek’s views, as Hayek argued that “the anti-rationalist approach, which regards man not as a highly rational and intelligent but as a very irrational and fallible being, whose individual errors are corrected only in the course of a social process, and which aims at making the best of a very imperfect material, is probably the most characteristic feature of English individualism.”51 While Hayek believed that social processes should be the result of a spontaneous order, Pevsner continued to support socialism, the welfare state, and collectivism as well as the need for social reform. This distinction was to prove crucial in Reyner Banham’s approach to modern design. Referring specifically to Richards’s and Pevsner’s new directions, Banham wrote: “Those of my generation who interrupted their architectural training in 62 | c h A P t e r t W o

order to fight a war to make the world safe for the Modern Movement, tended to resume their studies after demobilization with sentiments of betrayal and abandonment. . . . Two of the leading oracles of Modern Architecture appeared to have thrown principle to the wind and espoused the most debased English habits of compromise and sentimentality.” Referring to Pevsner’s shocking claim that “the Modern revolution of the early twentieth century and the Picturesque revolution of a hundred years before had all their fundamentals in common,” Banham retorted, “Had Pevsner deliberately set out to infuriate the young, he could hardly have done better.”52 In the context of the “softening” of modern architecture, a violent architectural debate erupted. As Banham recalled, new brutalism was “an angry response to the ‘William Morris Revival’ of the British Communists and the new classicism made fashionable by Wittkower’s book.”53 Not unlike the new humanism, Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949), attempted to redefine “humanism” by encouraging ideals of a more stable social order in postwar Europe. While exploring the theories behind symmetry and classical proportions in the work of Leon Battista Alberti and Andrea Palladio, Wittkower argued that the Renaissance architect “believed in a hierarchy of values, a system of hierarchical order among various branches or categories of building,” and that “his design had to express, in the over-all planning as well as in every detail, symbols of eternal validity.”54 Banham recounted, “The effect of Architectural Principles has made it by far the most important contribution— for evil as well as good— by any historian of English architecture since Pioneers of the Modern Movement, and it precipitated a nice disputation on the proper uses of history.” Banham further explained, “The question became: Humanist principles to be followed? or Humanist principles as an example of the kind of principles to look for?”55 By the mid-1950s both architectural aesthetics, expressed as “formal alternative, and Routine-Palladians,” and its ethics of a “hierarchy of values,” like those of the new humanism, clashed with new brutalism’s radically different ideas about order and disorder.56 The new brutalism manifesto was put forth as a challenge to the picturesque, Wittkower, the new empiricism, and the socialist principles that had informed modern architecture since the 1920, and particularly its manifestation in postwar Britain.

t he P oLemic b efo re khru s h ch e v: ne W brutA Lis m A n d t he rejec tion o f A mAr xis t A e s t h e t ic Following the death of Joseph Stalin, in March 1953 Nikita Khrushchev became the leader of the Soviet Union. On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev shocked delegates to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party by listing and then denouncing Stalin’s crimes, initiating a campaign of de-Stalinization. In response to a spontaneous national uprising in Hungary, on November 4, 1956, Soviet tanks and troops moved in and crushed the revolution, which “sent a shock wave through the political world.”57 Half the members of communist 63 | n e W b r u t A L i s m A n d t h e c r i t i q u e o f s o c i A L i s m

parties around the world quit. This shift left many British communist architects without ideological support while inadvertently situating “the rest”— that is, the non-communists— in a position of advantage. During this period an entirely new world, it seems, appeared as nations, including Britain, clambered to establish new ideological footings. After graduating, Colin St. John Wilson joined the newly formed Housing Division of the London County Council (LCC) and worked there from 1950 to 1955 under the directorship of Leslie Martin, along with James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson, Alan Colquhoun, Peter Carter, William Howell, and others. It was one of the few places following the war where young architects could find work. The views of the older architects, many of whom were communists, mixed with the bright, young, and sometimes assertive opinions of newly graduated architects to create a dynamic environment. Wilson recalled, “All of a sudden, one was with a young very, very lively— very, very pushy bunch!”58 With the cultural changes occurring in the early 1950s, two worlds collided. During this period, projects at the LCC were predominantly modern, but important differences began to emerge between older and younger architects of the Housing Division, and they became polarized into (what became known as) the “soft” and “hard” camps. For British socialist architects who were committed to the Labour government’s welfare state, it was common to be interested in Swedish socialism and its welfare state, which since the 1930s had been centered on the concept of folkhemmet (the people’s home). Swedish modernism had shifted toward the informal and vernacular as inspiration for its progressive model of welfare-state architecture. Some of the more politically devoted architects in England looked to Soviet communism for inspiration. In fact, many in top positions at the LCC were “closely allied to Communists (some were ‘card-carrying’ Communists), and promulgated a hard-line Socialist-Realist architectural policy.”59 Wilson and his group rejected both the Swedish and the Soviet models and their bland aesthetics, including the much-revered restrained work of the Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund, employing brickwork, wood, and low-pitched roofs. The hards, rejecting all of this, denounced the style as “Commissar’s Tudorbethan,” and they countered it with the clear thinking, brutal power, and the rawness of béton brut displayed by Le Corbusier in the Unité d’Habitation project in Marseille, France.60 As Stephen Kite and Sarah Menin argued, this move “evidenced a sharp politicoethical fault-line, the contested ground whereon the ethic of ‘the New Brutalism’ would be forged.”61 On one side of the debate, then, was the older generation, mostly communists, whose interest in Swedish empiricism was combined with the English picturesque. The advocates of this approach— including Oliver Cox, A. W. Cleeve Barr, and Philip Powell— were labeled “soft,” but their politics were hard left. They favored a gentle, accommodating, new humanism or welfarestate architecture style. The younger generation described this group as “architectural conservatives (who were confusingly furthest to the left politically)”

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and “liked using brick, pitched roofs and what was derisively called ‘People’s Detailing.’”62 The representative soft architecture was the Alton East Estate (1953– 1956) in Roehampton, South West London, a scheme of terraced, twostory apartments carefully situated to accommodate existing trees and other landscape features. Like other schemes by Cox, Roehampton was organized according to the principles of picturesque planning, always following Alexander Pope and showing respect for the genius loci. This group was convinced that their soft style could offer Britain a new model for modernism that was more sensitive to context and related to the traditional vernacular— and would hopefully become a popular style to engage the “common man.” This approach emphasized certain aspects of socialist realism, the official style of the Soviet Union. Efforts were part of a self-conscious movement that included the revival of two significant moments in British history, the eighteenth-century picturesque and the nineteenth-century socialism of William Morris. The approach was hailed under the banner of “new empiricism” or “new humanism” (the two were often conflated), which had been promoted, if not invented, by editors of the Architectural Review.63 Ultimately, this new style was meant to signify a “progressive humanization of the Modern Movement” and was offered as the model of postwar British architecture.64 On the other side of the debate were the angry young Corbusians, fond of béton brut and the boldness of Le Corbusier. This group— which included Peter Carter, Alan Colquhoun, Bill Howell, and Colin St. John Wilson— affirmed the daring and aggressive logic of the modernist approach and consequently was known as “hard”: “‘Formalist’ was yet another counter to ‘empiricist’ in the insults traded between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ camps.”65 This younger generation resented many of their elders and felt deceived. Banham recalled, “Those of my generation who interrupted their architectural training in order to fight a war to make the world safe for the Modern Movement, tended to resume their studies after demobilization with sentiments of betrayal and abandonment. Two of the leading oracles of Modern Architecture appeared to have thrown principle to the wind and espoused the most debased English habits of compromise and sentimentality.”66 The hards were eager to reinvigorate architecture with a power, passion, and technique akin to the “heroic period of modern architecture,” an approach that the older generation increasingly viewed as no longer valid.67 The building that epitomized the hard approach was Bentham Road Estate (1952– 1959), in Hackney, which looked to the Unité d’Habitation— “Le Corbusier at his most Cartesian”— as inspiration.68 The design team for the building—Wilson and Carter, joined by Alan Colquhoun (under the leadership of C. G. Weald)— experimented with “a radical narrow frontage maisonette form that echoed the template of the Unité d’Habitation.”69 It was one of the first housing projects built out of reinforced concrete, and it quickly became known as one of the béton brut estates. The history of this quarrel was chronicled, in part, by Banham, who described it as “a violent and sustained polemic on style, such as England had

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not seen since the nineteenth century.”70 The tensions that simmered amid the creative fractiousness of the LCC architecture department during this period, with Cox and the left-wing “Swedophiles” continuously directing animosity at Wilson and the Corbusian “anarcho-aesthetes,” finally erupted.71 In 1951 Wilson and Hugh Casson, senior architect at the LCC, editor of Architectural Review, and director of architecture of the Festival of Britain, engaged in an explosive and open quarrel.72 In February 1952 Cleeve Barr and Oliver Cox challenged Wilson and the hards, resulting in a confrontation that drew some one hundred architects from various LCC divisions to gather in a pub nearby. During the argument, one of the softs indignantly accused Wilson of “throwing mud at Stalin for his attack on Commissars’ Tudorbethan.”73 Further confrontations ensued when Whitfield Lewis confronted the young hards over the formalism of Albert Drive in Wimbledon, West London, a project consisting of housing blocks five stories high and forty meters long that “consciously reject the cottage allusions of the low-rise element of the empiricist of the Alton East Estate.”74 The struggle of these young aspiring architects sent a clear signal that they were not prepared to compromise on their ideals of modern architecture. These debates gained little public attention at the time. It was Wilson who initiated them and gave the movement its intellectual courage to persist and to grow into what is now referred to as new brutalism. In 1951 Wilson began publishing a series of controversial articles concerning these various projects in the Observer.75 It was not until after Banham joined the editorial staff of the Architectural Review and began writing regular articles that reflected and publicized the interests of the hards that new brutalism gained currency in the architectural press. It was also Wilson who introduced Banham and his wife, Mary, after they relocated from Norwich to London, to a circle of ambitious young architects and artists, many of whom were vital to new brutalism: Alan Colquhoun, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Robert Maxwell, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, James Sterling, and William Turnbull, among others.76 This new generation grew increasingly impatient with an older generation that seemed unwilling or unable to move beyond what was once perceived as radical socialist or communist politics. For many of the young designers, Marxism had lost its appeal. Banham summed up this attitude as “a total rejection of the style of all forms of Welfare architecture that is of consequence.”77 This turn away from the socialist aesthetic and ethic that dominated England following the rise of the welfare state fueled a counterrevolution that helped transform British design culture. The “one dominant factor,” Banham explained, that kept these debates “open and alive” was that the “social conscience of the older architects” in the LCC had, in many cases, “hardened into an acceptance of Communist doctrine,” even among architects who were not communists per se.78 In England there were a number of notable LCC architects affiliated with

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f igu re 2 . 2 William Morris Society letter to the editor, The Times, September 13, 1955. The Times / News Licensing. Image: The William Morris Society.

the Communist Party, including David Gregory Jones, Oliver Cox, and the architect and town planner Graeme Shankland, who joined the LCC in 1949 and was elected a branch secretary of the party.79 In 1955, he became the first secretary of the William Morris Society, a body devoted to “remembering the work of the great visual and decorative designer, writer and early Marxist.”80 In a public letter published on September 13, 1955, the society’s founders (J. Bandon-Jones, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Stanley Morison) described a commemorative gathering at Red House, Morris’s home designed by Philip Webb, to establish a forum to help extend knowledge of the man as craftsman, writer and socialist and to promote discussions about Morris’s “contribution to art, crafts, literature, and social and political thought” (fig. 2.2).81 Although the political battle lines between communists and noncommunists in British architecture might seem clear, as Banham later

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explained, “the adoption by English Marxists architects of William Morris as a patron-figure” muddled the picture. While Morris’s work seemed irrelevant to the postwar period, Banham pointed out that it did have “a certain Marxist logic to it.”82 In fact, to the older generation of politically engaged architects, it served as vital inspiration. Referring to the impact of William Morris and the arts-and-crafts movement, Oliver Cox recalled, “We wanted to build Heaven on Earth.”83 As a means of advancing their interest in the “welfare-state architecture of Sweden” the editors of the Architectural Review used Morris to exemplify its new empiricism.84 Writing under a pseudonym in 1940, J. M. Richards had put forth concerns about modern architecture’s lack of appeal to the common “man in the street,” claiming that it did not offer him “any suitable alternative to the Olde World styles that for many years have at least offered him the solace of suggestiveness.”85 As Eric Mumford observed, this move attempted to link “the issue of modern architecture’s appeal to that of political representation, citing the turn in the Soviet Union to neoclassicism, where the ‘impressionable peasants’ find palatial stone buildings decked with sturdy columns[,] . . . more convincing evidence of the progress of the Five Year Plan than modern buildings of whatever quality.”86 In 1944 Richards called for a “truly twentieth century vernacular, a vernacular which recognizes humanity and which humanity can itself recognize because it is national, because it is familiar.”87 Richards concluded: “A coherent, popular and human architecture can finally evolve within a society which, while fully accepting the advantages and implications of mechanization applied to things, abhors the mechanization of human beings— a society that is itself coherent, popular and human. Then only through the rebirth among all men of that moribund desire for good design— the outward and visible sign . . . stimulated by right education and the development of sound, contemporary, vernacular standards, can a new architecture of humanism arise.”88 The welfare state architect’s commitment to the “communist cause” and concern for the common man manifested as the promotion of “humanizing forms.”89 Consequently, the William Morris revival was promoted as a logical extension of new empiricism, with its socialist realism aesthetic of “people’s detailing,” which took the form of pitched roofs and “nineteenthcentury brick-building techniques, complete with small shoulder-arched windows.”90 The William Morris revival was thus an attempt to develop a “gentle modernism” similar to that adopted by Sweden’s progressive housing programs. Richards believed that this approach allowed modern design to be “humanized” without becoming irrational.91 As Eric Mumford noted, “Most leftleaning architects and local councils favored the Swedish route as a suitable middle way between Stalinist socialist realism and the ‘tougher’ kinds of modernism.”92 In light of the history of the English arts-and-crafts movement, Banham suggested that the hearkening back might have been expected, given that “social conscience in architecture is an English tradition that goes back to

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William Morris” and that the earliest works of the LCC Architect’s Department, founded in 1889, had been “mostly in such ‘social’ fields as housing.”93 This shift away from the heroic period of modern architecture signaled an attempt to redefine a commitment to a socialist aesthetic, which, as Nikolaus Pevsner had shown, could be traced from William Morris to Walter Gropius. With the subsequent development of a vision of architecture in which rationalism was downplayed, the older generation felt the need to radically rethink the principles of modern design. This shift was perceived by the younger generation not only as a softening of its formerly hard position but, as expressed by Banham, also as throwing principle to the wind.94 Furthermore, after years under the influence of the Labour Party, for some, the socialist planned order of the welfare state had come to represent little more than “administrative despotism.”95 As chief of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department in the Soviet Union, Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov endorsed socialist realism in art and denounced any deviations from it. His control over cultural production extended not only throughout the Soviet Union but also, via the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), established in 1947, through various countries that supported communism. Banham recounted that within the LCC “attempts to enforce an Anglo-Zhdanov line were conducted with a grotesque mixture of Stalinist conspiratorial techniques (as was also the opposition to them) and the traditional methods of British snobbery.” In terms of design, Banham explained that “the hardening of the architectural line by the Communists occupying the middle ranks of the LCC architectural hierarchy stemmed partly from a genuine conviction that something related to English nineteenthcentury brick-building was the correct approach (for which they produced William Morris’s ‘Red House’ by Philip Webb as justification) and partly from a defensive response to their own worsening situation.”96 By the early 1950s, new towns and housing proposals of the LCC provided the evidence for the younger generation that the attitude toward modern design held by the establishment was indeed questionable. Throughout the 1950s, Soviet communism came increasing under attack by both the left and the right, even as the battle lines in the design world became blurry and porous. Banham pointed out that solidarity existed among the editors of the Architectural Review, instructors at the Architectural Association, and the young architects’ superiors at “largely socialist-dominated local government bodies like the London County Council.”97 Yet even though the younger generation resented the architectural establishment and the views it promulgated, they found it difficult to maintain consistent hostility because the Architectural Review frequently allowed oppositional voices to be published, including Banham’s own new brutalism manifesto.98 New brutalism was decidedly anti-Marxist, anti-socialist, and above all anti-communist. Yet, Banham emphasized, it was not merely an aesthetic but an ethic that “describes a programme or an attitude to architecture.”99 This

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radical ethical stance against the ossified socialist ethical and aesthetic principles of the welfare state stressed not only that those principles were useless for addressing the realities of the postwar world but also that Marxist theory was in fact fundamentally reprehensible. As we saw in chapter 1, this argument had been advanced by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944) and was the main thesis of Karl Popper’s hugely influential book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).100 Hayek’s theory of a spontaneous order and Popper’s concept of an open society distinguished themselves from systems based on central control, such as that of the state, religion, or other institutional authorities, and sought to provide the means by which a decentralized, open-ended heterogeneous order could emerge. Hayek and Popper issued warnings to the socialist intelligentsia of England that their well-intended desire for a rationally constructed society had grave consequences. In 1956 Hayek suggested that the century of socialism probably came to an end around 1948, and he argued that, “though hot socialism is probably a thing of the past, some of its conceptions have penetrated far too deeply into the whole structure of current thought to justify complacency.”101 Throughout the 1950s, as the liberal critique gained recognition, it began to take on great significance for larger culture debates.

t h e neW c ritiqu e With many major cultural institutions dominated by socialist intellectuals, a growing opposition to collectivism manifested itself in various disciplines. By the mid-1950s the liberal critique of Marxism and communism was well established in England, particularly in the work of Hayek, Popper, and Ernst Gombrich, all of whom were teaching at University College, London— where Banham pursued his doctoral degree— between 1945 and 1950. These three figures played important roles in establishing a critique of economics, social science, philosophy, and art history that had a profound impact on cultural debates in Britain. Along with A. J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, and other liberal critics, they shared a deep aversion to “historicism,” which caused them to turn away from Hegel and Marx, whose methods of analysis were not only deeply flawed but also, they believed, responsible for the rise of totalitarian states. This field of forces shaped the context into which Banham inserted his “New Brutalism” manifesto, which was intended not only as a provocation to the dominant views on art and aesthetics but as a challenge to the cultural and political doctrines of the socialist welfare state.102 Britain’s dramatic new course fostered an intense national debate not merely over the “details of specific pieces of legislation but also over the values, behaviour, and expectations of each and every British subject,” as Kirk Willis has noted.103 The establishment of Soviet-style regimes in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s informed a related, passionate discussion of the nature of totalitarian states, the dangers of increased state control, and the nature of freedom. In England these discussions dominated public life via publications and lectures by Isaiah Berlin,

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Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper, George Orwell, and others. The renowned British philosopher, mathematician, and political activist Bertrand Russell delivered the inaugural Reith Lectures, under the main title Authority and the Individual (1948– 1949), with lectures titled “Social Cohesion and Government,” “The Role of Individuality,” and “Control and Initiative: Their Respective Spheres,” while considering the effects of increasing state control, as in Soviet Russia. Challenging the doctrine of collectivism upheld by many intellectuals and politicians, liberal critics in England defended the virtues of the individual while displaying a healthy skepticism toward authority. This critical attitude helped usher in a shift away from Marxism and had enormous implications for the study of economics, politics, and science, as well as art and architecture.104 In contrast to the view of the revered collective upheld by the socialists, liberal thinkers in England defended the virtues of the individual while displaying a healthy skepticism toward authority. This critical attitude had enormous implications for not only the study of economics, politics, and science, but art and architecture as well. Popper and Hayek first met in London in 1936; Hayek was a great admirer of Popper’s book Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) of 1934 and invited him to lecture at his seminar at the London School of Economics that spring.105 That same year Gombrich arrived in England to take up a post as research assistant at the Warburg Institute, also affiliated with the University of London.106 During Popper’s stay in England from September 1935 to June 1936, he and Gombrich became close friends, and they would go on to continue a lifelong correspondence.107 Gombrich attended Hayek’s seminar at which Popper presented the arguments for what would eventually be published as The Poverty of Historicism (1957). By historicism, Popper meant “a methodology of the social science that emphasizes their historical character and aims at historical prediction.” This argument occupied a central role in his work because he was “convinced that this historicist methodology is, at bottom, responsible for the backwardness of the social sciences.”108 In 1937, as the political situation in Austria deteriorated, Popper immigrated to New Zealand. While he was there he wrote his most influential book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), which became known for its attack on theories of teleological historicism in which history unfolds inevitably according to universal laws, and accuses as totalitarian Plato, Hegel, and Marx for relying on historicism (Historismus) to support their political philosophies. He developed a critique of historicism and a defense of liberal democracy, what he called “open society.”109 Many people helped to get it published, including Hayek and Gombrich.110 After a considerable number of publishers had turned down the book, Herbert Read, a director at Routledge, assisted in securing its release. The book galvanized British intellectuals and offered a harsh rebuttal of Marx and socialism. Together with Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, The Open Society and Its Enemies served to establish a philosophy that was able to challenge the Marxist and socialist views of the intellectual left. In an effort to establish a position for Popper at the London School of

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Economics, Hayek encouraged him to publish his research on historicism. Conceived of as a political pamphlet, it was first published in 1944 and 1945 in three parts in Economica, the journal of the London School of Economics and Political Science. It was later published as The Poverty of Historicism (1957) and dedicated to the victims of the “fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Human Destiny.”111 With the help of Hayek and others, Popper moved in 1946 to England to teach at the London School of Economics, and in 1949 he became professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London.112 Following the end of World War II, after years working as a translator for the BBC, Gombrich returned to the Warburg Institute. The period between 1946 and 1950, when Hayek, Popper, and Gombrich were all affiliated with the University of London, coincided with the formative years in the development of a new critique of economics, social science, philosophy, and art history in England. (In 1950 Hayek left London for the University of Chicago, where he would stay until 1962.) These three individuals each formulated a specific critique of historicism, linked by a critique of Hegel, Marx, and the philosophy of collectivism. Hayek developed the theory of spontaneous order, a social and economic order beyond the control of any individual or authority; Popper promoted the philosophy of an open society; and Gombrich pursued a nonelitist and all-inclusive approach to art history.113 As a body of theory, this new critical approach to economics, philosophy, and cultural criticism offered a clear alternative to Marxism and had a significant impact on public debate. On May 12, 1953, at the London School of Economics, Isaiah Berlin delivered the lecture “Historical Inevitability,” which was reported as a “brilliant, irresistibly eloquent tirade” against all philosophers, historians, political theorists, and writers who, in one form or another, “accept the notion of ‘historical inevitability.’”114 In response, Isaac Deutscher published an article that asked, “What is one to make, for instance, of the following typical statements?” He continued: “To understand all is to see that nothing could be otherwise than as it is; that all blame, indignation, protest is merely complaint about what seems discordant. . . . This is the sermon preached to us by thinkers of very different outlooks, by Spinoza and Godwin, by Tolstoy and Comte, by mystics and rationalists, theologians and scientific materialists, metaphysicians and dogmatic empiricists, American sociologists, Russian Marxists, and German historians alike.”115 Deutscher concluded that “only two philosophers, I fear, survive the great execution: Mr. Karl Popper and Mr. Isaiah Berlin.”116 One critical respondent argued that “Plato was no more a totalitarian communist than he was (as has been variously suggested) a fascist, a theosophist, a William Morris Utopian, or a herald of Christianity.”117 Heated debates ensued in the press, offering insight into the larger cultural and political context of the period that saw the advance of this distinct critique of socialism, meetings of members of the

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Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and Banham’s formulation of his “The New Brutalism.”

f rom the neW c ritiqu e to t h e ne W brutA Lis m With Banham as main provocateur, new brutalism attempted not only to challenge a body of modern design theory established in the 1920s but also to undermine the central control of cultural production by institutions associated with the welfare state. Making implicit references to quantum field theory as a way of understanding complex changes in what was once perceived as the unshakable theories of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Banham wrote: “Introduce an observer into any field of forces, influences or communication and that field becomes distorted. It is common opinion that Das Kapital has played old harry with capitalism, so that Marxist can hardly recognize it when they see it, and the widespread diffusion of Freud’s ideas has wrought such havoc with clinical psychology that any intelligent patient can make a nervous wreck of his analyst.”118 This assessment of Marxism and psychoanalysis, flaunted in the opening sentence of the manifesto, appears to be informed by the new body of theory that had taken root in England.119 Popper’s work critiqued a certain methodology of historiography that led him to condemn Plato, Hegel, and Marx for historicism. Analogously, Banham asked, “What has been the influence of contemporary architectural historians on the history of contemporary architecture?” To which he replied, “They have created the idea of the modern movement— this was known even before Basil Taylor took up arms against false historicism.”120 In the first two paragraphs of the manifesto, two crucial concepts emerge: determinism and historicism, both of which were associated with the critique put forth by Popper. Banham reasoned that a false historicism was at work in the historiography of modern architecture, which, like the other social sciences, suffered from the “historicist fallacy.” Referring to various debates of the early 1950s, in “Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945– 1965” (1968), Banham explained that much had happened to “destroy the congruities of geometrical beauty and science” and that “members of the anti-Picturesque connexion” who were interested in non-deterministic topics were “already making free with concepts such as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, were growing suspicious of ‘one-to-one’ relationship and the concept of ‘uniqueness,’ were beginning to talk of topology rather than geometry, and if they did not yet dispose of the concept ‘open-ended,’ were certainly reading Professor Karl Popper’s The Open Society as implying the downfall of all closed and determined systems such as Plato’s politics— or classical architecture based on elementary geometry.”121 Banham’s reference to Popper offers important insight into the architectural debate. Popper’s work attacked the nineteenth-century notion of historicism along with the determinism and holism that he argued were “responsible

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for a range of methodological and political catastrophes.”122 His critique of historicism argued against “the view that the story of mankind has a plot, and if we can succeed in unraveling this plot, we shall hold the key to the future.”123 The historicist doctrine, Popper explained, assumed “that there are specific historical laws which can be discovered, and upon which predictions regarding the future of mankind can be based.”124 He maintained that historicists are typically holists and collectivistic, determinists who view historiography as a science capable of generating predictions about the future. In “What Is Dialectic?” and “The Poverty of Historicism,” Popper argues (in the words of his biographer, Malachi Haim Hacohen) that “the problem with the dialectic was that Hegel and the Marxists extended its use from the history of ideas to history in general, and even to nature . . . Marxists assumed that the dialectic set the laws of history and nature.”125 Hacohen summarized Popper’s most important contributions of the 1930s and 1940s thus: “‘What Is Dialectic?’ . . . was probably provoked by the confusion of logic and dialectic, theory and history, causal and explanation and biological metaphors among Viennese socialists, and Marxist social theorists and scientists (especially evolutionary biologists). Popper used here, for the first time, the rubric of ‘trial and error’ to describe his own philosophy, and posed it as an alternative to the dialectic. He targeted Hegelian dialectic as ‘the worst of all absurd and incredible philosophic theories,’ foreshadowing Open Society, and focused on its detrimental effects for Marx’s sociological analysis, foreshadowing ‘The Poverty of Historicism.’”126 Popper explained that his interest in the problems of the methods of science and philosophy were “greatly stimulated by the rise of totalitarianism, and by the failure of the various social sciences and social philosophies to make sense of it.”127 Likewise, Hayek’s work from this period attempted to address similar problems, such as historicism.128 In “The Historicism of the Scientistic Approach” (1952), Hayek argued that, far from a true method of historical study, historicism was a “result of the same prejudices as the other typical scientistic misconceptions of social phenomena.”129 By the 1950s the idea that prejudices, not scientific knowledge, governed the writing of historical narratives had become a great concern of many historians, including Banham.130 When Banham accused historians of the modern movement of being guilty of false historicism in “The New Brutalism,” he was following a line of argument similar to Popper’s critique. Unlike false prophets of optimism and rationalism, Popper argued that “the true historicist will see in this analysis only a useful warning against the romantic and Utopian character of both optimism and pessimism, in their usual forms, and of rationalism too. He will insist that truly scientific historicism shall be independent of such elements; we simply have to submit to the existing laws of development, as we have to the law of gravity.”131 Popper explained that “ideas of this kind have actually been held by some historicists, and have even been developed into a fairly connected and rather popular historicist moral theory: the morally good is the morally progressive, i.e.,

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what is ahead of its time in conforming to such standards of conduct as will be adopted in the period to come.” Popper continued, “This historicist moral theory, which could be described as ‘moral modernism’ or ‘moral futurism’ (it has its counterpart in an aesthetic modernism or futurism), accords well with the anti-conservative attitude of historicism.”132 Referring to Popper’s critique, Gombrich recounted: “This deadly analysis of all forms of social determinism derived its urgency from the menace of totalitarian philosophies. . . . But it also had a bearing on my own field, the history of art and civilization.”133 Informed by this new critique, Gombrich’s views on art and art history distinguished him from many of his contemporaries in London who adhered to Marxist analysis.

t he n eW Art histo ry While introducing the context of this new critique in design culture, Banham warned that “one cannot begin to study the New Brutalism without realizing how deeply the New Art-History has bitten into progressive English architectural thought, into teaching methods, into the common language of communication between architects and between architectural critics.”134 Banham moreover referred to new brutalism as “our first native art-movement since the New Art-History arrived here.”135 This “new” art history in England had been largely developed by German and Austrian art historians— including Fritz Saxl, Rudolf Wittkower, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Ernst Gombrich— who had fled the upheaval of World War II.136 Their appearance in London coincided with the founding of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932 and the arrival from Hamburg of the sixty-thousand-volume art library of Aby Warburg. These institutions would soon be assimilated into the University of London and would help Britain emerge following the 1950s as one of the leading centers for the study of art.137 The influence of fellow émigré Karl Popper on British art history in the postwar period is not well known. In the preface to Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Gombrich professed his deep admiration and indebtedness to the work of Popper, claiming, “Any acquaintance I may have with problems of scientific method and philosophy I owe to his constant friendship. I should be proud if Professor Popper’s influence were to be felt everywhere in this book.”138 Popper’s philosophical attitude toward the history of science and the problems of determinism had a substantial impact on Gombrich’s influential work in the postwar years. Gombrich recalled, “Before Hitler’s occupation of Vienna . . . I was fortunate enough to meet Karl R. Popper, who had just . . . established the priority of the scientific hypothesis over the recording of sense data.” Gombrich continued: “I had shared this concern, but I had become increasingly skeptical of the solutions offered by Neo-Hegelian Geistesgeschichte and Neo-Marxist Sociologism. This skepticism was not very popular with some continental colleagues, proud of being in the possession of a key that revealed the ‘essence’ of past ages. On the other

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hand, it may have seemed exaggerated to my new English friends, who found the whole issue remote.”139 These new methods of inquiry soon distinguished Gombrich from many of his colleagues in London. By the mid-1950s, the term historicism had acquired several distinct meanings in various fields of study.140 For Nikolaus Pevsner, “historicism is the outcome of such a dominating faith in history that it chokes original action and the action which replaces it is inspired by the past. In architecture the nineteenth century was the period of universal historicism.”141 Pevsner had explored these ideas in An Outline of European Architecture (1943), in which he claimed that “no healthy style in architecture is possible as imitation of a past style.”142 While Pevsner’s historicism shared little with Popper’s critique as a defense of liberal democracy, Popper’s method found a coherent expression in Gombrich’s approach to art history. His essays explored topics as diverse as psychoanalytic approaches to art, iconographic studies, cartoons, and Hegel’s aesthetics. Already in Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser (A Little History of the World) of 1936, a children’s history book, Gombrich demonstrated an allinclusive and highly accessible approach to history.143 His appreciation of various informal qualities in primitive art, children’s drawing, toys, and cartoons distinguished his method in that it did not privilege modern art and viewed the production of images as part of a larger and more diverse cultural spectrum. Gombrich’s approach to art history has been described as a “rallying cry against snobbery and elitism.” For him works of art are not the results of some mysterious activity, but objects made by human beings for human beings.144 Discussing the conventions of realism, Gombrich observed: Everyone who has ever seen a Disney film or a comic strip . . . knows that it is sometimes right to draw things otherwise than they look, to change and distort them in one way or another. Mickey Mouse does not look very much like a real mouse, yet people do not write indignant letters to the papers about the length of his tail. Those who enter Disney’s enchanted world are not worried about Art with a capital A. They do not go to his shows armed with the same prejudices they like to take with them when going to an exhibition of modern painting.145

As with Hayek and Popper, Gombrich’s hostility to Hegelian and Marxist thought was grounded in his experience of interwar Austrian politics.146 Unlike many historians of the modern movement, Gombrich rejected the notion that artists and their work were infected by some ineffable “spirit of the age.” This rejection of the grand theme of zeitgeist, which could be detected in Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936) as well as Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941), distinguished Gombrich’s methods. Consider Giedion, who, in an effort to describe the forces of the modern era, wrote, “It is the route that present realities force us to take.”147 His

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approach suggested that an inevitable outcome was waiting to happen. Giedion’s scheme for the integration of science and culture was a direct result of his attitude toward history and the methods he employed in studying it. The Swiss historians Heinrich Wolfflin, Giedion’s teacher, and Jakob Burckhardt, Wolfflin’s teacher, had a major impact on Giedion’s conception of history. As Arthur Molella argued, from Wolfflin, Giedion “inherited the concept of the Zeitgeist as a unifying cultural principle.” Wolfflin taught Giedion how to “grasp the spirit of an epoch,” and Burckhardt “showed how a period should be treated in its entirety.” In addition to these powerful influences, “abetted by a lingering Hegelian tradition in German-speaking Europe, he [Giedion] saw history as a succession of Zeitgeists, each centered on a major constituent idea.”148 Giedion’s work held authority for the younger generation in England, and as Richards wrote, his books Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command were the “young architects’ bibles in the 1950s.”149 Yet by the late 1950s a different attitude had taken root. As Banham understood it, the problem with a centralized command of culture that supported an expression of the popular was that it inevitably manifested itself in work of patronizing sentimentality.150 In a review of Giedion’s Architecture, You and Me (1958), which shows a certain mawkishness endemic to the older generation of modernists, Banham deplored his methods and claimed that the book smacked of “works of condescending popularization handed down by the Council of Industrial Design.”151 The following year Banham proclaimed that the “position of commitment” has derailed the “left historians” of architecture, including “luminaries such as Sigfried Giedion.”152 Throughout the 1950s this methodological critique gained wider circulation and had a significant impact on various disciplines.

t he i mAge And co mmo n ob j ect s As the younger generation felt increasingly distant from the abstract art of the modern masters, Gombrich occupied a special place in the design debates of the early 1950s.153 On the occasion of the exhibition Growth and Form (1951), the Independent Group’s contribution to the Festival of Britain, Gombrich was invited to give a talk, for which he prepared “Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form.”154 Gombrich introduced his curious object of interest, “a very ordinary hobby horse,” and specified that “it is neither metaphorical nor purely imaginary.”155 Describing the image of a hobbyhorse, he seemed particularly impressed with the power of its modesty and explained that it was “usually content with its place in the corner of the nursery and has no aesthetic ambitions.” He asked, “Should we describe it as an ‘image of a horse?’” Noting that the received notion of image was bound up in Greek philosophical traditions, which have “dominated our aesthetic language for so long,” he proceeded to search for alternative ways to describe the “image” of a hobbyhorse as a substitute for a horse. Gombrich wrote, “Let us first ride

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our wooden steed into battle against a number of ghosts which still haunt the language of art criticism,”156 and then he turned his attention to the “age-old problem of universals as applied to art” born of the “classical formulation in the Platonizing theories of the Academicians.”157 Not unlike Popper’s revision of the history of philosophy in which he attempted to purge from its roots historicist thinking, Gombrich’s analysis proved a deep indictment of many of the historical methods of art history, and it helped yield an “innocent eye” capable of seeing the common built environment in new ways. Reflecting on this period, Lawrence Alloway recalled that image had become a term that could be used to “describe evocative visual material from any source, with or without the status of art.”158 Indeed, as Banham explained in “The New Brutalism,” the word image was “one of the most intractable and the most useful terms in contemporary aesthetics”; he claimed that ultimately “it means something which is visually valuable, but not necessarily by standards of classical aesthetics.”159 The philosophical notion of image had long preoccupied British debates on aesthetics, particularly via the work of Henri Bergson, and was developed as a central concept in the philosophy of new brutalism.160 Anthony Vidler noted that Banham adopted Gombrich’s thesis on image “to escape from classical aesthetics.”161 Yet the deeper meaning for the new brutalists was the importance of transforming common material into an extraordinary and memorable “image.” This in turn raised the question of style, which, according to Vidler, for Gombrich seemed to entail a dynamic process: “We must reckon with the possibility of a ‘style’ being a set of conventions born out of complex tensions.”162 His embrace of the informal qualities found in primitive art, children’s drawing, and toys speaks of a thoroughgoing “faith in humble things.” This approach to appreciating informal quality was crucial to the development of one of the key concepts of new brutalism, which helped establish new ways of exploring the ordinary yet complex systems that make up the common aspects of the built environment.

groWth versus design : t h e no n- teLeo Lo gic AL e t h ics The aforementioned exhibition Growth and Form (1951), organized by Richard Hamilton, Reyner Banham, John McHale, and Lawrence Alloway at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), during the summer of the Festival of Britain, was one of the first exhibitions associated with what would become known as the Independent Group (fig. 2.3).163 In the exhibition, the spectator was completely engulfed by blown-up micrographs and X-rays on screens, and films showing crystal growth and the maturation of sea urchins projected onto the walls. Nigel Henderson, a fellow student at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, had introduced Hamilton to the work of scholar-naturalist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose book On Growth and Form (1917) had inspired him to launch the exhibition. As a study of morphology in nature,

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f igu re 2 . 3 Growth and Form, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1951. © Nigel Henderson Estate. © R. Hamilton. All rights reserved, DACS and ARS 2020. Photo © Tate.

Thompson’s critique of evolution argued that the form of an organism could be understood as a “diagram of forces” resulting from a dynamic environmental process— not unrelated to Gombrich’s conception of style. Thompson’s work engaged issues that intrigued the younger generation in England: “In things both great and small, the naturalist is rightfully impressed and finally engrossed by the peculiar beauty which is manifested in apparent fitness or ‘adaption’— the flower for the bee, the berry for the bird. . . . [N]atural history deals with ephemeral and accidental, not eternal nor universal things; their causes and effects thrust themselves on our curiosity, and become the ultimate relations to which our contemplation extends.”164 Thompson also cautioned against a persistent fallacy in the long-pursued search for an explanation of evolutionary laws: “Time out of mind it has been by way of the ‘final cause,’ by the teleological concept of end, of purpose or of ‘design,’ . . . that men have been chiefly wont to explain the phenomena of the living world.”165 Two fundamental concepts that emerge in Thompson’s critique of teleology

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played an important role in a new understanding of design as an open-ended process driven not by determinate causes but by a wide range of dynamic and indeterminate forces. While Thompson pointed out that even though “we are told that teleology was ‘refounded, reformed and rehabilitated’ by Darwin’s concept of the origin of species,” this is not the case. Rather: By the theory of natural selection, “every variety of form and colour was urgently and absolutely called upon to produce its title to existence either as an active useful agent, or as a survival” of such active usefulness in the past. But in this last, and very important case, we have reached a teleology without a telos, . . . an “adaption” without “design,” a teleology in which the final cause become little more, if anything, than the mere expression or resultant of a sifting out of the good from the bad, or of the better from the worse, in short of a process of mechanism. . . . But the use of the teleological principle is but one way, not the whole or the only way, by which we may seek to learn how things came to be, and to take their places in the harmonious complexity of the world.166

Thompson then quoted the French philosopher Charles Dunan to the effect that natural laws are “blind and brutal,” and that nature builds by the dictates of “a severe architecture.”167 These passages would have undoubtedly stirred the imagination and found their way into a program that sought to challenge the polite and meek gestures of a Swedish-toned design, on the one hand, and academic pure geometry on the other. In contrast to Thompson’s thesis, in The Philosophy of Modern Art (1951), Herbert Read had insisted, “There is no phase in art, from the palaeolithic cave paintings to the latest developments in constructivism that does not seem to me to be an illustration of the biological and teleological significance of the aesthetic activity in man.”168 The younger generation, though, saw Read’s insistence on the universal and timeless qualities of beauty as largely outdated for a world marked by incessant change, complexity, and mechanization. If, as Anne Massey claimed, “the crucial link between Thompson’s thesis and the Independent Group was the rejection of teleological, universal explanation of the environment,”169 then it would follow that their efforts would lead toward non-teleological design methodologies to address such concerns. In art and design, what began to emerge was an interest in scattered, dynamic, ephemeral, complex aesthetics associated with common phenomenon such as informal street life.

n e W b rutAList Aesthet ics The search for a set of principles that could challenge the modern design paradigm relied upon the new sensibility emerging in art. Banham explained that, “non architecturally,” new brutalism “describes the art of Jean Dubuffet, some aspects of Jackson Pollock and of [Karel] Appel, and the burlap painting of 80 | c h A P t e r t W o

Alberto Burri.” Another important reference crucial to conceptualizing this work was the French art critic Michel Tapié’s theory of un art autre, which reflected the sensibility of various artists who embraced a certain anti-rationalist approach.170 Tapié’s interest in aformal or formless expressions was shared by other artists and critics, including Dubuffet. During this period, for example, Dubuffet was deeply impressed with the work of Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist and art historian, whose influential book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken was a primary inspiration for what he called art brut, or outsider art (fig. 2.4).171 In 1948 Dubuffet formed the Compagnie de l’Art Brut to challenge the rational approach to cultural production and the traditional standards of beauty in favor of a more humanistic approach to image making. Produced by nonprofessionals working outside aesthetic norms, including psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children, this deeply individualist art eluded institutional control and was capable of spontaneously expressing a range of emotions. If art brut avoided abstraction, it also left behind concerns about the collective good and came to represent an alternative means of communicating with a larger audience. The brutalism in the work, it seems, was admired for shaking off the authority of the academy and its preconceived notions of beauty while embracing un art autre (fig. 2.5). Tapié described this sensibility as l’art informel. During this period in France, the informal and the theory of the everyday were being advanced by the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre.172 An informal aesthetic that operated beyond the control of the authorities of official culture and was capable of expressing “the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” was at the heart of the interest in the informal.173 Yet while Marxist theorists like Lefebvre used the informal as a critique of capitalism, non-Marxist theorists like Hayek and Popper found in it the basis for both a critique of the planned order of socialism and a celebration of the selforganizing power of the market. The younger generation in England sought a more radical or brutal form of spontaneity distinct from the humane images promoted by the new humanism and its diluted aesthetics of modern design. As Banham explained, “In the last resort what characterizes the New Brutalism in architecture as in painting is precisely its brutality, its je-m’en-foutisme, its bloody-mindedness.”174 These sentiments were directed toward the destruction of a conception of modern design that privileged a controlling designer. Yet Banham pointed out that “it is possible to abandon the position of autocratic dominance implicit in Bauhaus theory without losing control of the over-all design.”175

deSi gn A s A dirty Word And t h e vA Lue o f t he “A s fo und” In 1949, while studying architecture at Durham University, Alison Gill and Peter Smithson met. They later married, moved to London, and went to work at the London County Council (fig. 2.6). This experience offered them an 81 | n e W b r u t A L i s m A n d t h e c r i t i q u e o f s o c i A L i s m

f i g u r e 2 . 4 Schizophrenic patient, Asylzentrum Tübingen from Hans Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken: ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung (Berlin: Verlag Julius Springer, 1922), translated as Artistry of the Mentally Ill; A Contribution to the Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration (New York: SpringerVerlag, 1972). © Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg, Germany.

f i g u r e 2 . 5 Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review (December 1955). By permission.

extraordinary opportunity to learn the history of planning in London and to closely observe the various proposals that had been developed there following the war, such as the County of London Plan (1945). In 1950 they established their own architecture and urban planning partnership. Directly following the Festival of Britain (1951), a number of artists, architects, designers, critics, and intellectuals came together to discuss modern design and its relationship

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f i g u r e 2 . 6 Alison and Peter Smithson at 32 Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, London, circa 1950s. Photo by Anne Fischer.

to contemporary culture. This loose assembly of individuals, later known as the Independent Group, met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.176 Along with Banham, Richard Hamilton, John McHale, Toni del Renzio, and Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson became prominent members. Fascinated by technological industrial innovations as well as mass-market product design and advertising, the Independent Group introduced mass culture into debates about high culture and evaluated modern design according to the principles of free-market economics and consumer desires. As had the generation of designers before them, who were fascinated by the industrial products of American engineers, such as bridges, silos, and factories, the Independent Group pursued a critical and artistic engagement with products of American industry and mass production, which they referred to as “popular art.” This engagement with culture in the making helped them establish their own ideas about contemporary art and architecture, which stood opposed to many of the socialist-dominated views of modern design held by older critics, such as Herbert Read, at the time director of the ICA, and architectural critics and historians such as Nikolas Pevsner, directing editor of the Architectural Review. One of the most important innovations in challenging the modernist approach to culture was the “as found” aesthetic, developed by the Smithsons

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in the late 1940s and 1950s.177 Characterized by a valuation of materials in their as-found condition— that is, unmolested by design or designer-centered processes— this concept helped establish a new approach that formed the basis for the work of members of the Independent Group and the new brutalists. The as-found strategy examined the existing context of the city and extracted concepts for use in an open-ended design process. This method allowed for one to appreciate everything from common, non- designed environments, which were ignored by architects and planners, to highly mechanized consumer landscapes. The Smithsons argued that “the things a European most values from American culture are the throw-away objects, such as the magnificent magazines, advertising and packages. In the refrigerators and motor cars, as in heavy earth-moving equipment and freight trains, the feeling for American values is communicated through an imagery created without selfconsciousness.”178 The American “organizational and aesthetic techniques” were embraced for their non-design characteristic, which they believed functioned according to a more complex process beyond conscious control of the individual designer. Reflecting on the 1940s, the Smithsons wrote, “For us ‘design’ was a dirty word.”179 The term design had become increasingly “contaminated,” as modern architecture and urban planning endured a critique associated with central planning as a means of social control— an explosive issue following the horrors of Nazi Germany and the left’s disappointment with Stalin. The Smithsons abetted a shift from what they saw as an overbearing interest in total design and control of the built environment toward an embrace of non-design strategies that were characterized by an interest in common undesigned, uncontrollable aspects of daily life. They sought to engage various types of fragmented and incongruent spaces, chaotic formations and patterns, as well unplanned and unconscious aspects of urban and social life, which they saw as having eluded the control of modern design. This interest in non-design and the “as found” was among the most significant characteristics that linked the diverse body of work of the Independent Group and the new brutalism.

A n t on ehrenzWeig: b eyond “ co ns cio us P LA nning A n d co ntroL” Commenting on new developments in art from the late 1940s and 1950s, Anton Ehrenzweig, a contemporary of Hayek from Vienna and a lecturer in art education at the University of London, argued of abstract expressionism and action painting that the “New American painting has made us more aware of this abstract pictorial space. It represents the secret independent life of art utterly beyond conscious planning and control” (fig. 2.7).180 Ehrenzweig’s art theories form a critical link between design aesthetics associated with subconscious forces at work and their relationship with spontaneous order. The emergence of a particular interest in the aesthetic value of non-design as a

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f igu re 2.7 Jackson Pollock at work in Long Island, New York, 1950. Photograph by Hans Namuth, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate. © 2020 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

means of eluding conscious planning and control found its greatest expression in unconscious or chaotic forms and patterns. This non-design characteristic was the most common feature of much of the new work in this period, developed as a reaction not only to design and control but also to the conflation of design as control. Referring to the artwork of Eduardo Paolozzi, Ehrenzweig wrote, “He certainly thrived on living tools possessing their own aesthetic judgment; and equally well on accident-inviting media that cannot be fully controlled.” Paolozzi, Ehrenzweig pointed out, initially prepared precise working drawings, then abandoned them for a process of thriving “on creative accidents imposed by the medium.” In Welded Aluminium Sculpture (Medea series), certain elements were prefabricated then assembled “spontaneously without resort to precise working drawings” (fig. 2.8). This method reinforced Ehrenzweig’s belief that truly creative artists have a particular “capacity for keeping their planning wide open, ready to absorb to advantage outside interferences

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f igu re 2 . 8 Eduardo Paolozzi, Welded Aluminium sculpture (Medea series). © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation. Licensed by DACS / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020.

that to other more rigid artists may appear as rude accident or disruption” (fig. 2.9).181 The same could be said of the ceiling paper he made for the London offices of Ove Arup and Partners, designed by the Smithsons, for which he superimposed semi-realistic images of a “double profile, an aeroplane insect and an architectural grid. He allowed the workmen to put up the roles of paper at random so that ‘accidental’ joints were produced” (fig. 2.10). These new expressions in design characterized a distinct sensibility that was part of a “self-destructive attack of unconscious functions on the rational surface sensibilities.” Ehrenzweig suggested that artists like Paolozzi are not capable of controlled working processes; they “need the stimulus of uncontrollable and unpredictable results in order to realize their true vision.”182 In this sense, the non-design aesthetic became associated with non-control as a design methodology— it was shared by many members of the Independent Group, and it became an important principle of new brutalism. In fact,

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f igu re 2.9 Eduardo Paolozzi, Head (2), 1953. Courtesy of the British Council Collection. Photo © The British Council. © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation. Licensed by DACS / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020.

of the three main characteristics of new brutalism outlined by Banham— memorability as an image, clear exhibition of structure, and valuation of materials as found— it can be argued that only the last item represented a true departure from modern design aesthetics.183 The Smithsons claimed that “the image was discovered within the process of making the work. It was not prefigured but looked for as a phenomenon within the process.”184 Yet as Ehrenzweig pointed out, each stage of the creative process imposes new choices and decisions. Moreover, as a design methodology, the as-found aesthetic was far from an objective approach in that the “cult of ugliness” was drawn to images of chaos and disorder as well as to unplanned and uncontrollable phenomena. The interest in spontaneous activities centered on an as-found approach to contemporary culture that distinguished the Independent Group from its predecessors such as the Bauhaus. The main difference between the two design methodologies, Ehrenzweig suggested, was that individuals guided by rational

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f i g u r e 2 . 1 0 Eduardo Paolozzi, screen-printed ceiling paper for the offices of Ove Arup and Partners, London, 1952 (architects: Alison and Peter Smithson). © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation. Licensed by DACS / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020.

decisions were “unable to tolerate their own spontaneity and the loosing up of their rigid planning” and consequently suffer from “the unconscious fear of losing control.”185 Importantly, Hayek’s critique of conscious design and planning in the 1940s led him to conceptualize the mechanism of the market as an alternative means of generating a new spontaneous order, neither designed (for it already existed) nor intended for a particular purpose. Hayek fully explored this aspect of the market in his classic 1945 essay “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,” in which he claimed, “It is fashionable today to minimize the importance of the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place,” and then argued, “If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant

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changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.”186 To use the Smithsons’ term, the mechanism of the market was an as-found functioning system. In both economic and design theory, the embrace of common existing conditions challenged more rational design methodologies. The asfound aesthetic in architecture denoted the specific informal qualities of time and place of “not only the adjacent buildings but all those marks that constitute remembrances in a place and that are to be read through finding out how the existing fabric of the place had come to be as it was.”187 In other words, everyday common objects or environments could be embraced as part of a critical design methodology. To be clear, Hayek resisted the word design. He argued that although “human institutions” are “entirely the result of human actions, they may yet not be designed, not be the intended product of these actions.”188 To describe an evolutionary process of human interaction, he resisted the word design and suggested that “a more neutral term like ‘formations’ (in a similar sense to that which the geologists use it, and corresponding to the German Gebilde) could be used for those phenomena, which, like money or language, have not been so created.”189 Through an empirical study of a social phenomenon and its various formations, Hayek articulated the idea that an alternative mechanism structured social relationships without needing to impose control. Hayek explained that the liberal “will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for plants.”190 Relatedly, Hayek argued that the distinctive virtues of the British people were “independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, non-interference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicious of power and authority.”191 Furthermore, “British strength, British character, and British achievements are to a great extent the result of a cultivation of the spontaneous.”192 Supporting the evolution and flourishing of these traits was therefore central to imaging a new society. In similar fashion, the Smithsons wrote of their design process: “We worked with a belief in the gradual revealing by a building-in-formation of its own rules for its required form.”193 The Smithsons’ investigations into new design methodologies were intended to challenge not only modern design but also dominant socialist views on art and society. Reflecting on the shifting political landscape of England in the postwar period, the Smithsons wrote: “We rejected the then fashionable, but for us too simple, literal and literary attitudes, represented for socialist-minded intellectuals by the writings of Herbert Read. We were the generation stepping aside from politics as no longer appropriate to our needs.”194 The 1950s witnessed a shift from an interest in control to experiments in spontaneity. As did many associated with the Independent Group, the Smithsons deeply admired the painting of Jackson Pollock and claimed that they 90 | c h A P t e r t W o

were a “different sort from any we had seen before. It is more like a natural phenomenon, a manifestation rather than an artifact; complex, timeless, n-dimensional and multi-vocative.”195 Similarly, Lawrence Alloway considered Pollock one of the most important contemporary artists of the period, “not so much as a painter, but for his images . . . because the drip painting appeared to be examples of disorder and yet contained as works of art.”196 One of the ruling principles, based on action and spontaneity, that the Smithsons extracted from this work and applied to their own was that “people and objects in motion and change are both the stuff and the decoration of the urban scene.”197 In 1957 the architect Denys Lasdun explained that “the links and the spaces between the buildings and the relation of one to the other, of new buildings to the old in space and time, are just as important and just as worthy of architectural study as the buildings themselves.” To distinguish his approach from established modern design methods, he wrote, “we must not work down from a set of general principles conceived in the abstract, but must base our ideas on the particular facts of particular situations.”198 Referring to Popper’s wellknown theory of empirical falsification, Lasdun explained that in the process of design, “one must put down in drawings what they really think and feel, no matter how bad or unsatisfactory it may appear even to themselves . . . just as a scientist will begin by postulating an unverified, or false, hypothesis as the only means of reaching a true one.” Between technology and inspiration, he argued, one must approach the design through an “understanding based on research.” Further: This empirical approach by study and analysis is one that has always been favored in England. We have shown examples of the works of the past partly to remind ourselves of the integral place that architecture has held in English culture. This is not to say that architects should pay too much attention to the past. The immediate past is there for them to react against as violently as they can, the rest is open for the occasional raid for raw material, not to be pastiched but to be ground up small in the creative process. Only the ‘object found’ philosophy can, it seems to me, regenerate English architecture and create buildings that will solve specific English problems and not merely adapt, as far as possible, something that looks impressive somewhere abroad.199

The object-found philosophy, which shared aspects of the empirical philosophy of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, marked by its rejection of any authority not justified by reason, informed a design method of significant consequence.

t he n eW visuAL o rder Much has been written about the Hunstanton School as the exemplar of brutalist form, but perhaps a better place to examine fundamental changes that 91 | n e W b r u t A L i s m A n d t h e c r i t i q u e o f s o c i A L i s m

f i g u r e 2 . 1 1 Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi, Untitled (Study for Parallel of Life and Art), 1952. © Nigel Henderson Estate. © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation. Licensed by DACS / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020. Photo © Tate.

occurred in design culture due to new brutalism is a series of exhibitions in the early to mid-1950s in London, including Growth and Form, Parallel of Life and Art, and the “Patio and Pavilion” entry to This Is Tomorrow.200 People associated with new brutalism and the Independent Group were responsible for all three exhibitions. As we have seen, Richard Hamilton’s Growth and Form exhibition posited the polemic of growth versus design as a challenge to modern design principles. Two years later, it was followed at the ICA by Parallel of Life and Art: Indications of a New Visual Order, organized by Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and the Smithsons (fig. 2.11). The exhibition presented a bewildering array of “nature objects, works of art, architecture and technics” from past and present, juxtaposing work by Jackson Pollock to scientific artifacts, for example.201 Henderson and Paolozzi particularly resisted modernist abstraction, orthogonal form, “rational order,” and recognizable references. The result, as Ron Herron recalled, “was most extraordinary because it was primarily photographic and with apparently no sequence; it jumped around like anything. But it had just amazing images, things that one had never thought of looking at in that sort of way” (fig. 2.12).202 The curators themselves argued that “there is no single claim in this procedure” and explained they that they were interested in “images of which sometimes come to have a power of expression and plastic organization.” The final result, they wrote, “forms a poetic-lyrical order where images create a series of cross-relationships.”203 The exhibition suggested that individual objects, each with its own history, subjectivity, and imaginary trajectory, could form a new type of order based on various complex relationships between seemingly unrelated, discreet objects. As Lawrence Alloway explained, “The Independent Group theory of a fine art/ pop art continuum . . . replaces the absolute classes and divisions of an aesthetic of scarcity with appreciation of different functions and occasions.”204

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f igu re 2 . 12 Parallel of Life and Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1953. © Nigel Henderson Estate. Photo © Tate.

This non-hierarchical view of society was consistent with the vision of a spontaneous order ruled neither by a centralized state apparatus nor by class privilege. In rejecting a rational order in favor of a more open-ended process, the Smithsons claimed that “the ‘as found’ aesthetic fed the invention of the ‘random aesthetic’ of all their ‘cluster’ ideograms, diagrams and theories.”205 While thinking about these investigations of seemingly random urban patterns, it may be useful to consider Hayek’s notion of spontaneous order as made up of individuals compelled by their own initiative whose interactions inadvertently produce a complex order independent of anybody’s direction or design. Given that Hayek’s conception of spontaneous order was based on the complexity of individual choice, he stressed the Berkeleyan subjectivity of knowledge and the way it informs perceptions: Tools, food, medicine, weapons, words, sentences, communications, and acts of production . . . [are] fair samples of the kind of objects of human activity which constantly occur in the social sciences. . . . [A]ll these concepts . . . refer not to some objective properties possessed by the things, or which the observer can find out about them, but to views which some other person holds about the things. These objects cannot even be defined in physical terms, because there is no single physical property which any one member of a class must possess. These concepts are also not merely abstractions of the kind we use in all physical science; they abstract from all the physical properties of

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the things themselves. They are all instances of what are sometimes called “teleological concepts,” that is, they can be defined only by indicating relations between three terms: a purpose, somebody who holds that purpose, and an object which that person thinks to be a suitable means for that purpose. . . . [W]e could say that all these objects are defined not in terms of their ‘real’ properties but in terms of opinions people hold about them. In short, in the social sciences the things are what people think they are.206

The order of individualism was ruled by a subjectivity that embraced differences and complexities. The 1940s witnessed a shift from a formal to an informal paradigm, which had its counterpart in a new visual order. Unlike under collectivity, aesthetic competition was celebrated as an expression of diversity and complexity. If exclusion had once been the guiding principle by which modern art distinguished itself from the chaos of the world, designers now sought a new engagement with the suppressed. The new ethics of permissiveness and inclusion became the principal aesthetic behind the work of the Independent Group and new brutalism. Referring to Paolozzi’s works, Alloway claimed, “There is no doubt that they were part of an improvisatory nonhierarchic vision of the human image and his machines.”207 The logic of the new “mechanized environment” of technological mass production invaded the work, as did the logic of American ads. The Smithsons wrote: “In the twenties a work of art or a piece of architecture was a finite composition of simple elements, elements which have no separate identity but exist only in relations to the whole; the problem of the fifties is to retain the clarity of intention of the whole but to give the parts their own internal disciplines and complexities. This kind of ordering . . . must be the basis of all creative endeavors from the city to the object.”208 On the images in Parallel of Life and Art, it has been observed that “together, they signified disorder more than anything else.”209 Indeed, the exhibition was among the most striking visual experiments in the ongoing effort to theorize disorder, a condition that represented the opposite of a consciously planned order.210 Within the specific political and design debates of the period, Parallel of Life and Art might best be understood as the staging of a search for a negative order. In Anton Ehrenzweig’s terms, the exhibition made visible a hidden order beyond the control of man. Referring to art of the postwar period, Ehrenzweig argued that “there is a ‘hidden order’ in this chaos which only a properly attuned reader or art lover can grasp.” He maintained that all artistic structure is essentially polymorphic and evolved not in a single line of thought but in several superimposed strands at once. Thus, “creativity requires a diffused, scattered kind of attention that contradicts our normal logical habits of thinking.”211 This diffused logic was at the very heart of a new aesthetic and ethic that challenged cultural hierarchies directed by conscious control. Banham commented of the show that its diverse materials “come from societies and technologies almost unimaginably different, and yet to camera-

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eyed Western man the visual equivalence is unmistakable and perfectly convincing.”212 With neither direction nor instruction, one was allowed to proceed according to one’s own proclivity, leading to the “discover[y of] similarities and parallels . . . even where none exist.”213 The key to understanding the logic of a spontaneous order relied on the ability to appreciate unconscious affiliations between seemingly random parts, each with its own inherent logic, while resisting any form of overt meaning. Thus, chance and accident played a crucial role in conceptualizing the assemblage as a functioning order.

t he n eW ethic The impulse to shift from a socialist ethos of control, as manifested in the welfare state, to an ethic of permissiveness seems to have played a central role in the conception of new brutalism. This was evident in the “Patio and Pavilion” installation by Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison and Peter Smithson, which was part of the exhibition This Is Tomorrow (1956) at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The exhibition consisted of twelve “antagonistic cooperative groups,”214 an idea conceived by Theo Crosby, architectural critic, editor of Architectural Design magazine, and a member of the Independent Group. Since 1953, the time of Parallel of Life and Art, important developments in design culture had occurred. Crosby wrote: “A new and long overdue explosion took place in architectural theory. . . . [The year] 1954 [saw] . . . American advertising equal Dada in its impact of overlaid imagery; the automotive masterpiece, the Cadillac convertible, parallel-with-the-ground (four elevations) classic box on wheels; the start of a new way of thinking by CIAM; the revaluation of the work of Gropius; the repainting of the Villa at Garches.”215 While Crosby’s description of modernism in a state of disrepair was certainly apt, his summary also highlighted the various interests that had helped establish a new sensibility in design culture. In the mid-1950s, particularly in the work of Team 10, significant advances in architectural theory grew out of not only new concepts of “habitat” but also, and perhaps more importantly, from a greater understanding of the inhabitant. The shift of concern from abstract space to a space of subjectivity, motivated by specific individual desires and needs, became a major preoccupation in sociology, philosophy, and architecture.216 In a 1955 review, the Smithsons identified in a low-cost housing project in Morocco the “first manifestation of a new way of thinking.” Admiring the work of Vladimir Bodiansky and ATBATAfrique, specifically the concern that went into the design of the individual units, the Smithsons wrote, “In Morocco they have made it a principle of ‘habitat’ that each man shall be at liberty to adapt for himself.”217 This important innovation should be considered in the larger political context of the period, in which the term liberty meant a “contested moral and political principle that seeks freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.” Indeed, this idea marked the beginning of a new design philosophy, under which human

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beings were better able to govern themselves than were centralized governing organizations and agencies.218 This radical liberal, or libertarian, idea had great consequences in the transformation of modern design principles. The key aspect of this insight, as Banham noted, included “not only a close study of the way people actually lived, but also a fair degree of permissiveness in design as well.”219 These ideas were explored in “Patio and Pavilion,” which expressed “the way people actually lived.” Building on the as-found aesthetic, the installation resembled Henderson’s own informal and messy backyard, with informal shed structures and pigeon lofts (fig. 2.13).220 The Smithsons constructed a modest shed, built mostly from secondhand wood, with a roof made of translucent corrugated plastic panels. The walls surrounding the patio were lined with reflective aluminum-faced plywood. A large photo collage, parts of which had been in Parallel of Life and Art, was visible on the floor through sand that had been brushed away, leaving the impression of something strangely being uncovered, or found, rather than designed anew (figs. 2.14 and 2.15). Indeed, reusing images of their own work from previous exhibitions indicated the multiple ways in which the as-found principle was employed. As Peter Smithson explained, “In this way the architects’ work of providing a context for the individual to realize himself in, and the artists’ work of giving signs and images to the stages of this realization, meet in a single act, full of those inconsistencies and apparent irrelevancies of every movement, but full of life” (fig. 2.16).221 In The New Brutalism, Banham emphasized the movement’s permissive, or liberal, attitude toward the design of the built environment and its relationship to tolerance of social differences. He quoted extensively from the Japanese architectural critic Noboru Kawazoe who, referring to the Harumi apartments with their “streets suspended in the air,” observed: “Here children can play games, or ride tricycles as they do on the side-walk in other areas. Here too the petty hoodlums of the surrounding districts can prowl at night, to the disconsolence of the inhabitants . . . a building does not really belong to the people unless it is capable of absorbing the shadier sides of life along with the more pleasant. To be a true building it must melt into the history of its time.” Banham concluded: “This must be about the most permissive statement about the use of habitat ever made by a member of the British connection.” Significantly, Banham pointed out, this “permissive attitude toward the public spaces is matched by a related attitude to what goes on internally.” The new ethic of permissiveness defined the philosophy of new brutalism, while the aesthetic goal of the program was “to build the image of a building more concerned with ‘life’ than with ‘architecture.’” For Banham, “The face of the world does not conform to the Brutalist aesthetic, but the conscience of the world’s architecture has been permanently enriched by the Brutalist ethic.”222 Consequently, the ethical critique put forth by new brutalism was directed toward the mechanisms of oligarchic control held by centralized organizations and administrative bodies, such as the London County Council and the Council of Industrial Design. Likewise, 96 | c h A P t e r t W o

figure 2.13 Islington, North London. Backyard pattern from Alison and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories 1952– 1960 and Their Application in a Building Project 1963– 1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).

the new brutalists saw CIAM as a “corrupt parliamentary body in need of antioligarchic reform” and sought to challenge, expand, and redefine the definition and practice of modern design.223 For the new brutalists, an alternative to oligarchy existed in decentralized social structures. Consequently, they celebrated the automotive mechanized landscape of the decentralized city and explored a new type of open-ended order expressed in the design of mass-produced items that circulated in the supposedly uncontrolled free market. They looked to “American product- design 97 | n e W b r u t A L i s m A n d t h e c r i t i q u e o f s o c i A L i s m

f igu re 2.1 4 “Patio and Pavilion” in This Is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956. © Nigel Henderson Estate. © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation. Licensed by DACS / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020. Photo © Tate.

f igu re 2.1 5 “Patio and Pavilion” in This Is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956. John Maltby / RIBA Collections. © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation. Licensed by DACS / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020.

f igu re 2 . 16 Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson, This Is Tomorrow catalog, 1956. © Nigel Henderson Estate. © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation. Licensed by DACS / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020. Photo: Whitechapel Gallery Archive.

and advertising as the inheritors of the drive and adventure that had gone out of ‘Modern Art.’”224 Parallel to the economic liberal’s interest in the free market as a complex, decentralized mechanism for transmitting anonymous information among multiple participants without central command, individuals associated with new brutalism and the Independent Group looked to free-market capitalism as the embodiment of a new vitality. Collaboration and healthy competition were the hallmarks of this new epoch, in which individualism and the economic order fused to create a new vision of society. Referring to the theory of individualism and its contributions to the improvement of “institutions which have grown up spontaneously,” Hayek argued that “the part of our social order which can or ought to be made a conscious product of human reason is only a small part of all the forces of society. . . . [T]he state, the embodiment of deliberately organized and consciously directed power, ought to be only a small part of the much richer organism which we call ‘society,’ and . . . the former ought to provide merely a framework within which free (and therefore not ‘consciously directed’) collaboration of men has the maximum of scope.”225 According to Hayek, the obligation of the state should be limited to establishing a neutral set of laws, applied equally to all citizens. All should be free to make their own decisions about how they will interpret those laws and act according to them. This is the theoretical foundation of spontaneous order. For Hayek, this was part of an effort to conceptualize a new legal framework for an alternative economic and social order. He referred continuously to the traditions of the free English social institutions of the eighteenth century, the era of pragmatism and free trade. This no-nonsense approach to business and trade seems to have also informed the strategies of certain British designers

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in the postwar period. Banham noted that the “business-like methods of the Smithsons” had convinced their collaborators that they were “judging every case on its merits in the best traditions of British pragmatism.”226 This new attitude toward society and design was open-ended, in Popper’s sense of the term, and it attempted to distinguish itself from the long-dominant idea of a “morality of design.” Further criticizing the naive and growing confidence in central planning, in “Individualism: True and False” (1945), Hayek condemned the progressive tendency of the period toward central control of all social processes, an approach which insists that “everything must be tidily planned and made to show a recognizable order,” directed by an all-powerful central government.227 New brutalists’ theories about society and the built environment were informed by a non-design philosophy that exalted the disorder of human existence, which played a crucial role in helping define their “attempt to be objective about ‘reality.’”228

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3 : The Borax Debates from mod e r n d e si g n to no n - d e s i gn

A mer i c An design And co mm e rce The trade term borax first appeared as American furniture industry slang in the 1920s to describe cheap merchandise, especially tasteless furnishings. It was later used more generally to signify “gaudy and ephemeral” styling of products, meant to entice consumers with alluring yet superficial effects.1 In the mid1930s the term took on a new connotation after American industrial designers fashioned a new popular aesthetic called “streamlining,” which borrowed certain principles from the science of aerodynamics (fig. 3.1). In 1934 Norman Bel Geddes explained that streamlining described a “body which would move through air with a minimum of resistance,” although “advertising copy writers seized upon it as a handy synonym for the word ‘new,’ using it indiscriminately and often inexactly to describe automobiles and women’s dresses, railroad trains and men’s shoes.”2 While streamlining transformed American industrial design products, “bogus streamlining” was deemed “borax,” meaning “flashy, bulbous modernistic.” American industrial design, which grew out of the advertising industry in the 1920s, was closely aligned with the seductive strategies of advertising, such as the use of symbolic and evocative imagery.3 By contrast, European modern design at the time was dominated by socialist intellectuals who were skeptical of commercial interests and the “irrational” demands of an unregulated free-market economy. As the production and export of American products expanded, borax styling became increasingly widespread and popular in Europe. While borax became the bête noire of Sigfried Giedion, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., László Moholy-Nagy, Nikolaus Pevsner, and other modern design critics following World War II, it also became one of the most important concepts that Reyner Banham used to critique the principles of modern design theory that had dominated since the 1920s. After a decade of living in the United States and observing new technological developments in industrial mass production and American commercialism, László Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion (1947) and Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948) attempted to rethink the principles of modern design in relation to new industrial and

f i g u r e 3 . 1 Diagrams and illustrations explaining principle of streamlined design from Norman Bel Geddes, Horizons (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1932).

economic changes occurring in the postwar period.4 Unlike the 1920s, when modern architects celebrated the factories, silos, and other anonymous products of American industry and engineering, this new phase of development was marked by grave concerns about uncontrolled mechanization and its social impact in a free-market economy. The peculiar symbiotic relationship between American design and commerce became a major point of contention. In Vision in Motion, Moholy-Nagy asserted that “high-pressured by the salesman, the industrial designer succeeded to a superficial ‘styling.’ In the last ten years

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this has meant ‘streamlining,’ just as a generation ago it meant ornamentation.” The conflation of streamline styling and ornamentation suggested that the problems of design in the postwar period were reminiscent of those of the late nineteenth century, when a proliferation of styles had provoked the pursuit of a more unified modern style. Moholy-Nagy argued that “there is hardly any reason for an ashtray to be streamlined. Thus, when every product is blown up like a balloon— we have to fight against it.” He recognized that the justification for the streamlining of static objects was that it was “exceedingly economical in production.” The sharp edges that once defined the pure geometry of mass production of the 1920s had given way to new, smooth forms and finishes such as nickel and chrome plating, enamel and lacquer, creating the seductive “psycho-physical perfection” that animated a product in the competitive world of advertisement and commerce.5 The immense new developments in mass production of consumer products and the increasingly sophisticated advertisement strategies, Moholy-Nagy reasoned, demanded a “new method of approach” to design, even as “economic considerations deeply influence and direct design.” Therefore, the axiom “form follows function” had to be supplemented to recognize that “form also follows— or at least it should follow— existing scientific technical and artistic developments, including sociology and economy.” By contrast, wrote Moholy-Nagy, European design tried to produce long-lasting quality goods to conserve raw material; consequently, consumers bought less. He argued that as long as the United States remained rich in raw material and ingenuity, it could “afford to be wasteful.” Yet Moholy-Nagy warned that “competition on the world market will sooner or later require a revision of the American idea of forced obsolescence, i.e., the frequent replacement of merchandise by a new ‘design’ before the previous one become technically obsolete.”6 The economic conditions that gave rise to forced obsolescence were at the heart of the phenomenon of borax. In Mechanization Takes Command, Giedion summarized the history of the streamline style and its application to mass-produced industrial products. “How far this was a result of the depression and of the need to stimulate sales by playing on emotional responses,” Giedion wrote, “and how far it may be ascribed to European purification of form in prior decades, it is hard to say.” Yet borax was based on a design philosophy unconcerned with purity, and it became an immensely popular style that was embraced by consumers who felt indifferent or even hostile to modern design (fig. 3.2). Giedion lamented that while the “streamline form in the scientific sense aims at the utmost economy of form, at a minimum volume,” the “exploitation of the streamline form in the objects of daily use aims to produce an artificial swelling of volumes,” which he perceived as a debased indifference to the principles of modern design. Given the enormous number of such objects, Giedion was deeply concerned about the vast influence that the industrial designer had on the “shaping of public taste”; he believed that the influence of industrial products was “comparable

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f igu re 3.2 Sigfried Giedion, “Streamlining and Full Mechanization,” in Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). © 1948 by Oxford University Press. First University of Minnesota Press edition, 2013. Reprinted by permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

only to that of the cinema.” Giedion was alarmed by the immense power of the industrial designer for whom “only one consideration counts: the merchandizer, dictator of taste in the United States” and perceived these economic forces as a “source of danger and bondage.” Giedion acknowledged that if one compared a household appliance of 1914 with one of the 1940s, a certain progress had been achieved and that the “reformistic tendencies cannot be overlooked.” Nonetheless, he concluded that “in a strange way the principles of nineteenth-century ruling taste linger on in the twentieth.” He wrote: “William Morris could argue from moral grounds. Now, in the time of full mechanization, the reform takes place under dictatorship of the market.”7 Two philosophies of design were at work, each invested with a distinct attitude about the market and how it should function: as an extension of state planning or according to principles of laissez-faire economics. The former, driven by socialist ideals and contempt for capitalism, was associated with greed and selfish individualism, whereas the liberal philosophy embraced the free market’s potential to realize a free, individualist, and democratic society. Among many designers and critics of the postwar period, the rejection of superficial design was based on a set of principles and convictions that argued not only against crass commercial interests and popular design but also against the entire ethos of free-market economics, the very principle on which borax was based. Critics tended to perceive changes in product design as the result of commercial interests, whereas industrial designers saw a revolution that had been slowly unfolding. The prominent American advertiser Earnest Elmo Calkins wrote in 1932 that “strange as it may seem, a definite program for adapting goods to the needs and desires of the people who buy them is a comparatively new thing.”8 The idea that design mediated between the consumer and the product was distinct from the tenets of modern design. Less concerned with philosophical issues of aesthetics, industrial designers often focused on creating products that were attractive to consumers and capable of responding to their “needs and desires.” This design philosophy arose from teams that comprised engineers, technical consultants, advertisers, and marketing researchers. While many modern designers did still privilege their uncompromised autonomy and egalitarian politics, industrial designers often saw their role in a different light. Harold Van Doren, a prominent industrial designer, wrote that a designer must “realize that, important as his contribution might seem to him, its relative importance might not be so great. As a rule the artist is, and should be, only one of the gears in the train that includes management, sales promotion, advertising, engineering, research— all those departments making up the complex mechanism of modern commerce.”9 Van Doren asserted that, “stripped of hocus-pocus, the goal of design is sales— at a profit.”10 These men of commerce acknowledged and accepted, and even embraced, the idea that the “best designed product in the world cannot be sold without clever promotion, nor will it make a profit for its sponsor if it lacks sound engineering and has been made by uneconomical factory methods.”11 The attitude toward

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the market distinguished the philosophies of European modern design from American industrial design. By the 1940s, the merits of each had become the topic of important debates over design and culture.

i ndu striAL design, A ne W P ro fe s s io n On November 11– 14, 1946, some of America’s leading industrial designers attended the conference “Industrial Design, a New Profession,” convened by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The participants included Raymond Loewy; Henry Dreyfuss, initially a set designer; Philip McConnell, former secretary to the New York World’s Fair Design Commission; George Sakier, former magazine art director; and Walter Dorwin Teague, formerly an advertising artist. Many of these pioneers, along with Norman Bel Geddes, who did not attend, were part of the first generation to incorporate streamlining both as a science and as a means of developing a popular symbolic styling of the machine age. The conference was also attended by a number of distinguished modern designers and critics, including Edgar Kaufmann Jr.,12 director of the Department of Industrial Design at the Museum of Modern Art; Joseph Hudnut, dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard; László Moholy-Nagy; and Bernard Rudofsky. In his opening comments, Kaufmann offered his view of design and its role in modern society: “We think of design not as a question of immediate commercial necessity, as it must be considered by many other people, but as a result of the laws of development and appearance inherent in every object— the laws which produce forms often beautiful and sensible.” Hudnut then discussed design as a process embracing all the various activities by which “men create the conscious, the manufactured, part of their environment.”13 Hudnut reminded his audience that a true profession, as opposed to a business or a trade, is a body of people “who feel and have accepted some social responsibility.” With the flourishing of industrial-scale commerce, Hudnut argued, “the industrial designer as a professional man might contribute more to our environment, to the way of life which we have accepted, could he by chance control that invention and production or could he give it direction and meaning.”14 Hudnut suggested that if this could be accomplished, “then the industrial designer’s profession, among the hierarchy of professions, might stand almost first.” If industrial designers collectively could rise “above self-interest,” Hudnut insisted, they could ensure “that these horrible and ugly things that surround us, were changed in some way to bring them back to the ideal which nature sets us. . . . Through the creation of functional forms, of useful forms, [nature] surrounds us with a civilization more civilized than our own.” Hudnut concluded that industrial designers should consider their product “a social instrument,” and he posed a question: “Can industrial designers ever have the opportunity, the ability, to coordinate, control and influence the forces which affect a product, or are we to take merely what is given us?”15

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The first respondent was George Sakier, who called himself “probably the very first of the industrial designers.”16 The early years of American industrial design, Sakier recalled, were marked by a belief that it “occupied a position not identical with that of the old industrial arts that had been going on for centuries; we were now entering power industry, where there was a new type of problem to solve.” Since then designers had developed a capacity for adaptability, because, in order to succeed, “we had to choose a way which was practical and which permitted our ideas, though only in part, to see the light of day.”17 Following up, Philip McConnell, executive secretary of the Society of Industrial Designers, commented that “the industrial designer is almost never given carte blanche to produce the most beautiful or most perfect object imaginable. He is usually given a lot of information about the market to be met, the price to be met, the manufacturing difficulties circumscribing the situation, the tools to be used (that haven’t been fully amortized), and a number of things. All those things mean that what the designer has to do is to solve a problem, not indulge in some ivory-tower creative act.”18 McConnell’s condescension was apparently directed at modern designers, removed from the reality of the market and the conditions of industrial production. James Boudreau, dean of the Pratt Institute’s School of Art, commented: “In a capitalist society, as I understand it, the function of commerce and industry is to manufacture and sell goods at a profit. It is not their function to raise the aesthetic level of society; at least, it hasn’t been.” Boudreau described an experimental project of “creative aesthetic research” that Pratt was working on with major corporations, including General Motors, as part of an effort to produce fewer products that did not sell. Given that the business of corporations is to produce and move goods at a profit, Boudreau explained that “they are perfectly willing to raise the level of taste of the American public, if it will sell more goods, mean fewer loss items, and give them more profits. That is nothing to be ashamed of— that is the whole thesis of our American philosophy of government— and, as long as we have it, we might as well face it. It is not the function of commerce or industry to work in the area of culture at present.”19 Ray Patten, director of the Appearance Design Division at General Electric, said that his company had consumer research groups all over the country. However, he acknowledged that “surveys are helpful to a certain extent; you have to use your own judgment as to what people need.” He then explained that General Electric’s executive committees made final decisions because “a lot of the answers you receive, you know, may go against your better judgment.” Skeptical of the idea that surveys were actually representative of the “needs and desires of the consumer,” Moholy-Nagy responded: “Oh, I see. It would have been better then, to survey the executive committee.”20 Hudnut recalled that Alvar Aalto had once told him: “I don’t have to ask the people what they want. I know what they want better than they do.” Hudnut respected Aalto’s comments, because a great artist can feel “ideas and sentiments beyond the factual analysis.”21

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Patten pushed back, emphasizing that the needs of the consumer, together with the function of the product, are the first requisites, and these factors are in constant flux depending on market, location, and background: “Boston, it is conservative,” for example, and “Brooklyn, it is borax.” Thus, General Electric offered a variety of designs. In reaction to this, Kaufmann asserted, “There is a small body of people who still hope that good modern design is based on function.”22 Peggy Ann Rohde, industrial designer, asked Patten what would happen if General Electric decided that there was “no place in the world for borax design and refused to put out a borax iron or refrigerator” and instead invested all its money and advertisement solidly behind good design alone. Patten replied, “You have to sell what the customer will buy.” To this point, George Sakier commented that the “question of what is good design can become very puritanical if you insist that, when you think something is good design, everybody else should think so too. You couldn’t deny the fact that some people are going to like simple things and some people are going to like things that are not simple. No one can say that the first group is right and the second group is wrong.”23 These discussions highlighted the distinct social attitudes of, on the one hand, modern designers who believed in the importance of design and collectivist reform and, on the other hand, the many industrial designers who embraced the logic of free-market economics and a culture based on individual choice.

f ro m “form foLLoWs funct io n” t o “ s t y Le foLLoWs sALes” In 1948, Edgar Kaufmann Jr. published “Borax, or the Chromium-Plated Calf” in the Architectural Review, a reflection on the state of industrial design in America (fig. 3.3).24 Building on Giedion’s work, Kaufmann speculated, “Futurism in its day made a special fetish of speed; perhaps Futurist paintings as well as early photographs of fast-moving bodies influenced popular design in America to adopt ‘speed whiskers,’ the rhythmically repeated outlines fanning out to indicate motion.”25 He also pointed out that motifs of motion were common in comic strips. Kaufmann confirmed that industrial design began restyling products as a means to stimulate sales, and he claimed that since 1929, American popular design had also adapted and exhausted the “free forms introduced by Hans Arp, the cheese holes of [André] Lurçat, and the exaggerated use of rough, natural textures displayed by the Slavs and Balts at the 1938 Paris exposition.”26 Kaufmann was critical of this transformation within design culture, and he dismissed streamline styling as a superficial expression of modern life: “Streamlining is the Jazz of the drawing board . . . both are U.S. phenomena, both are ‘popular’ in their appeal, both are far removed from their characterizing sources (negro music and aerodynamics), and finally both are highly commercialized, and use the ‘star’ system.” Kaufmann objected to designers who

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f igu re 3 . 3 Edgar Kaufmann Jr., “Borax, or the Chromium-Plated Calf,” Architectural Review (August 1948). By permission.

“have evolved ways of relating design directly to sales, not only after the event, but by plausible preliminaries that have all the earmarks of a sound dollar investment.”27 To illustrate the extent of this co-optation, Kaufmann outlined the most questionable aspects of the designers who worked within it: They refuse to make or sell fanciful sketches showing how they think the client’s product ought to look, designing only after careful investigations. They

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study the sales records and financial statements of the company; they compare its product with competitive ones for quality, price and style; they examine the retail distributor through whom the product reaches the public and learn his servicing problems; they make it a point to gain the friendly cooperation of company designers, engineers and sales staff, and for this reason it is rarely announced that a particular product is designed by a particular industrial design office.28

For these reasons, Kaufmann argued, they had to put sales first, which he saw as a moral corruption of design. “Elevated on an altar of sales,” Kaufmann suggested, the idolizing of market forces was responsible for both widespread borax and the transformation of the philosophy of design from “form follows function” to “style follows sales.”29 As director of “Good Design” at the Museum of Modern Art, Kaufmann was involved in various efforts to educate the public about modern design and to ensure its availability on the open market at a reasonable price. Between 1950 and 1955, the Museum of Modern Art collaborated with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago on a series of exhibitions of home furnishings titled “Good Design.”30 To initiate this ambitious program, René d’Harnoncourt, the museum’s director, and Wallace O. Oliman, general manager of the Mart, issued a joint statement: “It is the first time an art museum and wholesale merchandising center have co-operated to present the best examples of modern design in home furnishings. . . . [T]hese two national institutions, whose very different careers began just 20 years ago, believe and hope that in combining their resources they will stimulate the appreciation and creation of the best design among manufactures, designers and retailers for good living in the American home.”31 Modern designers were prepared to engage commerce and the consumer as long as they could maintain their standards. Modern architects, such as Charles Eames and Ray Eames, Paul Rudolph, and others, were invited to design various exhibitions at the Mart and the Museum of Modern Art. Kaufmann insisted on limiting the selection of objects to products available on the market, to keep good design from being an “ivory tower” program.32 Kaufmann hoped that cutting-edge theories of design would lead to an expansion of choice, to the benefit of the consumer.33 The exhibitions were intended to convince visitors that modern design was simple, elegant, and functional, as well as affable and with its own cultural roots.34 Many items were listed at affordable prices, and surveys revealed which items visitors most liked and disliked, in order to show that good design was actually popular.

go o d design in engLAnd In England various efforts to establish good design had long been under way. In 1942 Herbert Read formed the Design Research Unit to foster a connection between modern designers and manufacturers. In 1945 designers Misha Black

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and Milner Gray joined it.35 In 1941 Nikolaus Pevsner was appointed assistant editor of the Architectural Review, and in 1943, as Jill Seddon has pointed out, Pevsner, in anticipating postwar reconstruction, “recognized that this was a significant moment in debates about the role of design.”36 Under Pevsner’s guidance, the Architectural Review introduced the regular “Design Review” section, which ran from 1944 until 1946.37 Pevsner was a scholar who had fled Germany in 1933.38 In the winter of 1933– 1934 he gave a series of lectures on mannerist and baroque painting at the Courtauld Institute of Art and was later offered a two-year research fellowship in the Department of Commerce at the University of Birmingham.39 In 1934 and 1935 he was involved in an extensive research project on industrial design that was suggested and supervised by economist Philip Sargant Florence. This research was published as An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England in 1937.40 In it, Pevsner claimed that 90 percent of English industrial products were “artistically objectionable.” Reasoning that good shapes and proportions do not cost more than bad, Pevsner asked, “Why then are they not to be found in cheap suites?”41 Pevsner wrote extensively about “public taste” and felt that it was part of his mission to make available to all classes products that embodied a “decent” standard of design. Of “vulgarly decorated” items on the market, Pevsner wrote: “If people disliked them as thoroughly as one would wish them to, they would not buy them even though they were on the market. The fault of the public in the matter is that very few people take as much trouble in buying a lamp or a vase as they do in buying a hat or a tie.” Pevsner devoted one section of the book to streamlining and was highly dismissive of its popular application to everything from “streamlined lipstick” to a “streamlined ashtray”: “Should one not ostracize such a hackneyed catchword altogether?”42 The book was clearly intended to advance the reform movement of modern design. Pevsner’s criticism of industrial products of “bastard deformities of the modern movement” made him an authority and embodied the belief of some in the importance of good design. In addition to Pevsner’s efforts, there were several attempts to institutionalize the principles of modern design through cultural and government agencies in the early years of the welfare state. In 1943, the Post-War Export Trade Committee of the Department of Overseas Trade recommended setting up a central design council as a permanent center for exhibitions of industrial design. In December 1944, the coalition government approved the efforts of Hugh Dalton, the president of the Board of Trade, to establish the Council of Industrial Design, the “first organization of its kind in the world.” While this central design agency was to be “independent, have executive powers and not be controlled by a government department,” it became one of the world’s most influential state-funded organizations to promote modern design.43 In 1947 the council established two divisions: the industrial division was concerned with manufacturers, designers, and the establishment of design centers, and the information division was responsible for propaganda for retailers, schools, and

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the public, as well as exhibitions and pamphlets. In 1949 the council launched Design, a monthly journal for manufacturers, retailers, and designers that promoted improvements in industrial products. In 1952 Michael Farr, a student of Pevsner’s, was appointed the journal’s editor. Both in England and America good design was promulgated by some of the most commanding government agencies and institutions under the direct influence of a powerful cultural elite. The Council of Industrial Design and the Museum of Modern Art acted as central control agencies in establishing, promoting, and enforcing a narrow set of design standards that reinforced their vision of good design. In England these efforts were directed toward influencing the policies of the government and trade organizations, and it was recommended that manufacturers make arrangements with “first-rate architects” or suitable commercial artists to improve the design of products. Following World War II, support for reform and state control over matters of aesthetics in industrial design, architecture, and town planning were greatly expanded by the welfare-state government, notably in the creation of “new towns.” These authoritative attitudes toward design, promulgated by the council, had a significant impact on many of the design debates in the early postwar period.

i ndu striAL Art in engL A nd In 1948 Cambridge University Press approached Pevsner to publish a second edition of An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England. Pevsner suggested that updating it adequately would amount to rewriting it. Pevsner recommended Michael Farr, a “man with faith in modern design,” to pursue this project, which he supervised, resulting in the book Design in British Industries: A Mid- Century Survey (1955).44 Farr wrote in the introduction, “I have written this book because I do not like the designs of between 80 and 90 percent of British domestic articles,” which suggested that not much had changed since the 1930s.45 In fact, in 1954 Herbert Read claimed that, since 1932, “there seems to have been an actual retrogression in design, and one can only conclude that the struggle for good design, which is now waged by an official body like the Council for Industrial Design as well as by private groups like the Design and Industries Association, is doomed to be long, exacting and without immediate reward.”46 Yet by the 1950s what had begun to change were attitudes toward strict control over principles of modern design— a development the younger generation resisted. Pevsner had written in the 1930s that “there was in the best design in Britain something of that dictatorial quality. . . . Ornament was taboo. . . . Modern was rectangular, smooth, even, puritanical. It was easy at that time to define what we meant by modern design.”47 During the postwar period, there was consensus among the older generation that the fundamental standards of modern design were still well founded and should not be altered. In 1953 Pevsner wrote that the “canons of style were laid down which are still valid to this day.”48

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Likewise, in 1954, Read insisted that not only were the 1930s standards of design still relevant but also the “general principles . . . are of universal application.”49 Read assured his readers that “there have been no defection[s] among the leaders of the modern movement, and a new generation of architects and industrial designers has now appeared.”50 Yet detractors of modern design persisted. Pevsner acknowledged that a “new ornament” or “jazz” in design, by which he meant “a lively modernity without creative effort and thought,” coexisted with, and in complete contradiction to, the style of architecture of the 1920s.51 As a force without “effort and thought,” this increasingly popular style stood in contrast to the conscious efforts invested in modern design. While Pevsner claimed that the jazz style had peaked in the late 1930s, he wrote in 1953, “The successor of Jazz is bogus streamlining or Borax.”52 Pevsner held that the shortcomings of contemporary design and the influences of the market were that much more evident in America, where “modern design is showing a particularly robust vitality, and one welcome to neither Mr. Farr nor myself.” In evaluating good and bad American design, Pevsner suggested that the “most illuminating way to tackle the problem of aesthetic standards in modern design is perhaps to . . . take three equally objectionable modes of expression, streamlining, the mouth-organ radiator fronts of motorcars, and multicolored printed ties.” Claiming that the argument against streamlining is “one of qualification,” Pevsner wrote that the “objection to the way cars used to display streamlining was merely that it was overdone— but overdoing is a common sin of the young and the naïve, and the Americans are both.” Pevsner made his feelings about America clear, taking a stand against what he saw as design aberrations. Commenting on the excessive use of chromium in American automobiles, for example, he wrote: “Must the result be that broad and ugly grin of a chromium-plated denture? Its justification is [that it] symbolizes riches and power, and what is wrong with it is that it does it so grossly. That sort of show comes off in the United States where it is at least in accordance with people. It is extremely un-British, indeed un-European.”53 The view that American culture lacked “good taste” was held by Pevsner and by many editors at the Architectural Review.54 Pevsner saw the problem not as an American “working-class” aesthetic per se but as a lack of artistic “control,” evident, again, in jazz’s boisterous improvisational sounds. Pevsner argued: “It is untrue that the common man was hostile to modern design. He went modern as lustily as Le Corbusier, but he went jazzy. The reason why what most people call modern architecture and design never became popular is its uncompromising purism and puritanism more than anything else.”55 Although purism and puritanism appear almost as virtues in Pevsner’s criticism, it was precisely these qualities of control that borax had been so successful at evading. “The plead for better design standards is not new,” Farr wrote, and indeed, since the late nineteenth century there had been considerable efforts in England to “consciously” reform the design of household objects, industrial

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products, buildings, and cities. Farr wrote that the public “remember[s] the exhibitions, the lectures, the questionnaires and all the propaganda on behalf of the Modern Movement in the 1930s. Now, since the war, they are hearing . . . even more about contemporary design standards.”56 Far from objective, these standards of modern design were often based on individual “taste” and selective assumptions about popular taste. Pevsner largely blamed the lack of good design in houses, for example, not on the public itself but on those responsible for their creation: “Here then the popular taste— and, as I said, a distinctly hideous taste— is not the taste of the public but that of the builders and merchants.”57 At the other end of the spectrum, as an outstanding example of design standards, Farr celebrated Italian cars with “short production runs which give flexibility in manufacturing methods, relatively unlimited time to spend on details, a small, wealthy and enterprising market (which makes cost unimportant) and services of brilliant designers.”58 Farr himself devoted significant attention to borax and its shortcomings, echoing many of his peers. Deeply critical of its unguarded relationship to commerce, Farr argued: “As a type of ornament borax lends itself to artistic excess and in this way it has become disreputable. . . . [B]orax indicates the wish of designers to obtain results quickly and their readiness to let their standards be swayed by expertise in salesmanship. From another point of view . . . borax represents the noisy and self-assertive element in the American character. And from yet another, it can be used to keep a particular make of car always new and different.”59 Farr’s assessment of borax highlighted attitudes that had long informed modern design, such as disdain for crass commercialism and a kind of anti-Americanism. For Pevsner and Farr, borax was the antithesis of modern design. Its lack of control resulted in riotous forms that proved wildly popular— a substantial challenge for the “good design” movement and its endeavors to make modern design widely available and popular, and at a reasonable price. In addressing the issue, Pevsner insisted on distinctions between good and bad design, and argued against purely subjective criteria. He asked, “Does bad design at any stage call for action? Is there anything in bad design that can be called bad for people? The answer must, I think, be Yes.” Pevsner also firmly distinguished between matters of aesthetics and social ethics, distinctions that allowed him to pursue good and bad design as though they were objective facts. In one example, he acknowledged that “some like their bread white and some like it brown,” and this is a matter of taste. “But,” he asked, “bread may be— American bread for instance— dead white and taste of paper. . . . [I]f it is at the same time bad for people’s teeth and digestion, then an honest baker who thinks in terms of a responsibility to the community ought to keep away from it.” Pevsner understood this to be a matter of health and social ethics. In the case of wine, Pevsner claimed that “only idiots say . . . that it is all a matter of taste and that one man’s taste is as good as another’s.”60 Pevsner’s refusal to accept purely subjective arguments based on individual taste underlined his belief in the more objective standards of “good design.” 114 | c h A P t e r t h r e e

At the heart of these discussions was a belief that “it is extremely improbable that good design will happen by chance,” which is to say, Pevsner thought it unreasonable to leave the process of design to individuals, guided by market forces, and expect an acceptable result. Recognizing the dynamic cultural force driving “superficial” American design, Pevsner wrote, “There is a strong argument in favour of even the nastiest of modernistic abominations. They are at least of our age,” which may endow them with a certain vitality that does not exist in historical imitations. For better or worse, “Jazz and streamlining are the outcome of the twentieth century; the forms, the colours, the rhythms of Oriental rugs belong to a world which cannot be ours.”61 Yet Pevsner’s conception of the style that embodied the zeitgeist of the twentieth century was a necessarily cold and austere one. As he wrote in 1936: The warm and direct feeling of the great men of the past may have gone; but then the artist who is representative of this century of ours must needs be cold, as he stands for a century cold as steel and glass, a century the precision of which leaves less space for self-expression than did any period before. However, the great creative brain will find its own way even in times of overpowering collective energy, even with the medium of this new style of the twentieth century which, because it is a genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion, is totalitarian.62

Following World War II, with the onslaught directed at the totalitarian states and philosophy of “rationalism,” such extreme language apparently appeared unacceptable in describing contemporary design, particularly to an American audience. In 1949, Pevsner revised this statement to read: The warmth and directness with which ages of craft and a more personal relation between architect and client endowed buildings of the past may have gone for good. The architect, to represent this century of ours, must be colder, cold to keep in command of mechanized production, cold to design for the satisfaction of anonymous clients. However, genius will find its own way even in times of overpowering collective energy, even within the medium of this new style of the twentieth century which, because it is a genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion, is universal.63

A s s es sing good design In December 1951 Pevsner wrote in the Architectural Review that far too many retailers and manufacturers in England lacked “firm aesthetic guidance.” Consequently, he promoted the idea that the Council of Industrial Design should not only educate and inform industries but also, when necessary, regulate “jazz in design and decoration.” Pevsner believed, as did Theodor Adorno, that “jazz”—which was shorthand for all popular music—is always “bad,” even if some of it is “good bad.” Adorno held that jazz appreciation reflected a false 115 | t h e b o r A x d e b A t e s

consciousness created by the totalitarianism of a profit-oriented “culture industry.”64 Pevsner saw similar peril in “jazz,” although he argued, “Jazz has gone out of fashion now, but borax has taken its place.” Pevsner acknowledged that it might be that borax “satisfies some of the smarter American stylists, but it does not satisfy the serious modern designer in England, nor, one hopes, the COID [Council of Industrial Design].”65 Refuting the idea that modern design cannot “invent its own fancy,” Pevsner pointed to the buildings in the Festival of Britain exhibition, which he found “revealing, and indeed epoch-making.” He saw in them proof that modern design was capable of great flexibility, claiming, “Here for the first time it was demonstrated how much of fancy can be done within the modern style and with only very occasional and limited Victorian borrowings and how much strictly modern fancy, without any Americanism will be enjoyed by all and sundry.”66 Pevsner saw the success of this style and the nature of the welfare state as intertwined, because the state was an agent in the struggle to promote modern design. He wrote: “There are many who deny that it should be the Government’s job at all to promote good design. They are in our view wrong. The Government should certainly not control design. If any control is acceptable, it can only be one of performance.” Regardless of these fine distinctions, to promote standards of good design while denying others certainly implied a type of control. Nevertheless, Pevsner argued: It is perfectly legitimate for anyone, . . . including the Government, to put before you what they regard as good design and explain why they regard it as such. What is more, design propaganda is even an educational duty of Government, provided the Government believes that a thoughtful, sensitive, telling work of art is a help to a more valuable life. . . . What matters is that exhibitions of good design, lists of good designs and good designers, and commissions for public buildings given to good architects, painters, sculptors and manufactures, must all be accepted as well within the scope of Government.67

As a central agency of the state, the Council of Industrial Design, therefore, was to him a necessary entity in the education of the general public and its taste. Indeed, Pevsner’s main criticism of the council’s role in the Festival of Britain was that it had not exerted enough “careful control” over it and had been “backing far too many things of an unpardonable or at least doubtful quality.”68 During this period, political debates focused on questions about the power of a central authority and who has the right to decide matters affecting all. In 1944 Friedrich Hayek wrote: “What the people who are so unwilling to renounce any of the powers of conscious control seem to be unable to comprehend is that this renunciation of conscious power, power which must always be power by men over other men, is for society as a whole only an apparent

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resignation, a self-denial individuals are called upon to exercise in order to . . . release the knowledge and energies of the countless individuals that could never be utilized in a society consciously directed from the top.”69 Referring to the extensive national planning efforts of the welfare state, including the development of the County of London Plan (1945), Hayek raised the imperative question of “who is to do the planning”: “Where the precise effects of government policy on particular people are known, where the government aims directly at such particular effects, it cannot help knowing these effects, and therefore it cannot be impartial. It must, of necessity, take sides, impose its valuations upon people and, instead of assisting them in the advancement of their own ends, choose the ends for them.”70 In so doing, Hayek argued, the state ceases to be neutral “utilitarian machinery” intended to empower individuals and becomes “an institution which imposes on its members its view on all moral questions, whether these views be moral or highly immoral.”71 This aspect of the collectivist philosophy that involved belief in the regulating power of the state remained a key target of liberals in their economic and political critique of central design. Within design culture, similar concerns were addressed by a younger generation that began to question the hierarchy of power maintained by historians and critics of modern design. By the early 1950s in England, efforts to rethink the standards of modern design took a turn in the hands of the artists, architects, and critics associated with the Independent Group at the ICA. In 1952, Reyner Banham, a student of Pevsner’s, began the PhD program at the Courtauld Institute of Art, became involved with the Independent Group, and became a staff writer at the Architectural Review.

ex P r essionism, mendeLso h n, A nd bo r A x In 1954 Banham published the article “Mendelsohn,” in which he used the term borax for the first time in his criticism, launching a concept that allowed him to link seemingly unrelated issues in architectural history. In Pioneers of Modern Design, Pevsner had emphasized that Erich Mendelsohn’s use of the curved façade and band of windows around corners became “one of the most popular motifs . . . between the First and Second World Wars and can be made responsible for much of that functionally unjustified but emotionally justifiable bogus streamlining which went on in refrigerators, prams, and many other industrially produced objects.”72 In this vein, Banham rethought certain common characteristics of streamline styling, with its deformation of pure shapes, and the emotionally charged work of the German expressionists, especially the early work of Erich Mendelsohn (fig. 3.4). Outlining the edgy relationship between borax and modern design, Edgar Kaufmann had pointed out that its two main points of origin were futurism and Germany of the 1910s.73 In Kaufmann’s wake, Banham reexamined expressionism as a manifestation of an emotional and symbolic art while reflecting on contemporary developments

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f igu re 3.4 Reyner Banham, “Mendelsohn,” Architectural Review (August 1954). By permission.

in popular product styling. Banham’s fascination with the work of Mendelsohn was based on its “stylistic aberrations,” a characteristic it shared with borax styling, which reinforced his idea that shapes could express emotions or attitudes, the very pathology that caused historians of modern architecture to “reject Expressionism as the employment of the insane, and to substitute for it a more sensible and humane view of the world.”74 In claiming that Mendelsohn’s early work was indebted to the futurists, and specifically the dynamic

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f igu re 3 . 5 Reyner Banham, “Mendelsohn,” Architectural Review (August 1954). By permission.

and expressive qualities of the work of the architect Antonio Sant’Elia, Banham only validates Pevsner’s hunch that “a connection between Sant’Elia and Mendelsohn seems at least probable” (fig. 3.5).75 The study of motion, the basis for much futurist work, developed into dynamic diagonal and elliptical lines that combined practicality and utility in a highly emotive form of expression, an aesthetic that modern theorists apparently found too unwieldy to be “functional.”76 That a “powerful plastic sensibility” shapes the aggressive forms

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in the work of Mendelsohn, futurism, and borax styling is the decisive insight that gave Banham the courage to launch his renowned claim: “Like Futurist, the term Expressionist has become a dirty word in architectural criticism, and it serves nowadays as a mask for our unwillingness to pay attention to a whole group of architects who lie outside the respectable genealogy of the descent of the Spirit of the Modern Movement.”77 In Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion acknowledged that the expressionist movement eloquently stated the “grievances of mishandled humanity and indicts a tragic situation,” but he dismissed expressionist architecture, as its influence “could not be a healthy one or perform any service for architecture.” Giedion went on to claim that while movements such as cubism and futurism “did not weep over a time out of joint” and had the spirit of invention in them, they “pointed to a way out,” finding amid the chaos “concealed patterns for a new life.”78 Built on a foundation of pure geometry, this “way out” was increasingly viewed with skepticism by a younger generation of designers and critics. In “On Abstract Theory” (1953), Banham had already pointed to the limitations of abstract art, including the “ultimate weakness of that theoretical position which has condemned most of their art to irrelevance.”79 Rather, Banham argued, “unlike criticism of the fine arts, the criticism of popular arts depends on an analysis of content, an appreciation of superficial rather than abstract qualities, and an outward orientation that sees the history of the product as an interaction between the sources of the symbols and the consumer’s understanding of them.”80 This thesis constituted the critical link between product design and architecture. Banham’s research on borax empowered him to recognize biases and refute important omissions in the history of modern design. The denouncement of borax by modern design critics in the 1950s incited Banham to reveal the lessthan-objective criteria by which a range of topological “deformation” had been excluded from the historiography of modern design and architecture; those same shaky criteria had been used to dismiss contemporary manifestations of a popular expression in American industrial products— that is, borax. Consequently, Banham’s interest in the topological irrationality of expressionist architecture led him to reexamine the plasticity of the design work of the Dutch Wendingen group as well as the expressionist tendencies in Mendelsohn’s architecture in order to better understand why they had become increasingly “unacceptable on formal grounds after 1918.”81 In Mendelsohn’s Einsteinturm (Einstein Tower) and the “amoebic villas” of A. Eibink, like the clay models used by the automobile stylists, the “exterior is conceived as if the buildings were composed of a soft plastic material that had been manipulated by a giant hand” (fig. 3.6).82 Combining evolutionary biological analogies with scientific accounts of fluid “streamlines” in motion, Banham described the shapes of the Einsteinturm as having an almost manually molded appearance “as if the ‘eyebrows’ over the windows had been pushed up by a giant thumb.”83 It was precisely this topological deformation that provoked Giedion to ask what

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f i g u r e 3 . 6 Erich Mendelsohn, Einstein Tower on front cover of Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, 1921. Jean-Pierre Dalbéra / Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY 2.0.

architecture could possibly hope to gain from the German interest in concrete towers as “flaccid as jellyfish.”84 Banham recognized in Mendelsohn’s work ideas that had great cultural significance to debates on style in mid-1950s England. Banham placed great significance on Mendelsohn’s visit to the United States in 1924, in which he was exposed to the dynamic world of commerce and where he witnessed, according to Banham, the “fully unrestrained mechanized environment of the Futurist dream.”85 On this trip, Mendelsohn met Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as the industrial designers Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes, the latter two pioneers in developing streamline styling and marketing it for the redesign of railroad trains, buses, cars, aircrafts, and countless consumer items.86 After 1924, Mendelsohn’s work uses curved forms of glass (which Banham links to the windows a Detroit streetcar) and long horizontal banding, features that were both indebted to Wright and “undeniably Futurist” (fig. 3.7). These developments led Mendelsohn to a formal resolution that Banham believed “anticipates in an astonishing way the pressed-steel Borax which his influence was to father in America some fifteen years later.”87 While there is a continuous Dutch influence on Mendelsohn’s work throughout the 1920s,88 Banham saw also the “development of a new style of publicity-architecture which was to be of critical importance in the shaping of the visual world of Western Man, and made, quantitatively, a greater contribution to product design than the more elevated conceptions of the Bauhaus and L’Ésprit Nouveau.” Carefully distinguishing his arguments from the functionalism of the Bauhaus and the purism of Le Corbusier, Banham insisted that, although European modernism may have had an initial impact, the widespread phenomenon of borax had a much larger effect on American industrial design objects. Consequently, it offered a “specific incentive to concentrate our view of Mendelsohn into a single image of Expressionist disorder, and that is Borax.” Mendelsohn’s Einsteinturm and the staircase tower of his Schocken Department Store in Stuttgart (1926), Banham insisted, “proves to be the substance of the Expressionist myth, and will presumably remain so until some doctorate-seeking drudge raises Borax to the status of a major style, and subjects it to the familiar disinfecting routines of art-history” (fig. 3.8).89 While Pevsner and Giedion disregarded expressionist forms on formal grounds, Mendelsohn’s pioneering work inspired Banham as he sought design strategies capable of responding to the new commercial logic of the postwar period; it proved that Mendelsohn was “less a vulgarian than an original and a nonconformist.”90 This thesis on borax laid the foundation on which Banham established a general critique of modern design theory.

i c A debAtes And b o rAx In 1955 the Independent Group organized a series of seminars at the ICA in London, convened by Lawrence Alloway and John McHale.91 The series

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f igu re 3 . 7 Reyner Banham, “Mendelsohn,” Architectural Review (August 1954). By permission.

focused on American mass culture, including popular music, Western movies, billboards and advertisements, and car design, and it investigated the relationship between the fine arts and popular art. Seminars included “Advertising 1,” a survey of technology and social symbolism, presented by Peter Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi, McHale, and Alloway, and “Advertising 2,” a discussion of sociology and the popular arts, presented by Alloway, McHale, Paolozzi, and Toni del Renzio.92 The analysis of graphics, themes, and symbols of advertisements was part of an exploration of the relationship among

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f i g u r e 3 . 8 Erich Mendelsohn, Schocken department store, Stuttgart, Germany, 1926– 1928. Peter Weiss / akg-images.

commerce, ads, and contemporary design as a dynamic, interactive form of public communication— consistent with the Independent Group’s understanding of mass media and mass-produced objects as a form of “popular art.” Investigating the interplay of social symbolism and advertisement, the group analyzed the images and recognizable symbols in the products of mass media, and its ability to communicate with various groups, or particular markets, in the complex and dynamic network of the postwar free-market system in America. This particular design methodology developed a symbiotic relationship with developments in manufacturing, technology, communications media, and commerce, presumably guided by little more than the need to ensure the perpetual sale of goods. While the Independent Group did not discover Marshall McLuhan’s work until 1956, his analysis of the meanings and messages of an advanced technological society’s mass media, including ads in popular magazines, was simpatico. McLuhan’s early work was often critical of the manipulation of advertisements and accused advertising designers of conflating consumption and freedom. He wrote: “The style of the old patent medicine man has certainly been getting slicked up by those college men in the ad agencies. And the starspangled scene of the free man cussing the bank or gypping the tired waitress who didn’t sparkle and zip around is a curious way of getting at the essence of freedom.”93 Although McLuhan’s analytical approach would have been welcomed by the Independent Group, his criticism of the “manipulative” advertisement industry would undoubtedly have been perceived as unnecessarily judgmental rather than descriptive. During this period more objective

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research on mass communication and public opinion was being conducted by American sociologists examining data that had a measurable effect on the population. Research reports such as “The Mass Media and an Informed Public” (1951) analyzed the dynamic interplay of the public and various communications media.94 Wilbur Schramm, a founder of communication studies, also produced influential studies in this period and shared his concerns in the coedited The Process and Effect of Mass Communication (1954). The essays dealt almost “exclusively with the notion of effects, reflecting on an increasing social-scientific preoccupation with questions of message construction, audience behavior and the impact of communication.”95 Publications such as Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (1957) made evident that, whether one agreed or disagreed that mass media was having negative effects on the population, a distinct form of communication had emerged.96 These issues contributed to a series of debates that challenged many of the basic assumptions of modern design theory. Banham’s specific contribution to the seminar discussions was a presentation on borax and automobile styling, titled “Borax, or the Thousand HorsePower Mink.”97 The only documentation of this talk that survives in the archives is Banham’s abstract: “Borax equals, in this context, current automobile styling. Its theme (vide Plymouth ads) is Metal in Motion, expressed by an iconography which refers to, e.g. sports and racing cars, aviation, science fiction; all relevant to theme of transportation, but all exotic to the American automobile. Auxiliary iconographies postulate brutalism, oral symbols and sex, emphasizing that Borax is popular art, as well as a universal style (in US not in Europe) and sex-iconography establishes the automobile’s dream rating— on the frontier of the dream that money can only just buy.”98 Extrapolating from his earlier work on Mendelsohn, Banham here introduced his remarkable hypothesis that borax is popular art. In doing so, Banham drew on a definition of popular art by Leslie Fiedler, an American literary critic whom he admired. Fiedler argued: “Contemporary popular culture, which is a function of an industrialized society, is distinguished from other folk art by its refusal to be shabby or second rate in appearance, by a refusal to know its place. Yet the articles of popular culture are made, not to be treasured, but to be thrown away.”99 The association of borax with a “refusal to know its place” suggested that popular art defied any cultural authority that sought to maintain a hierarchy of aesthetics. Banham and the Independent Group further extrapolated from Fiedler’s thesis that popular art was a vibrant manifestation of contemporary culture that included cinema, magazines, radio, television, dance music, as well as the products of industrial design, and that these were all part of a larger economic system that resulted in an “expendable aesthetic.” In 1946 Moholy-Nagy referred to expendability as “artificial obsolescence,” arguing that it resulted from the extreme wealth of the United States: “It didn’t mean anything to America, to throw away a useable product: we had affluence, the wheels were going faster, we had employment, money makes money, etcetera.”100 What modern design

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critics had seen as a by-product of an unpredictable and uncontrolled capitalist economy that had grave social consequences was interpreted by Banham and the Independent Group as not only a fact but also a vital aspect of contemporary culture. At the heart of this edgy argument was this belief: “It is impossible to see [the arts of the mass media] clearly within a code of aesthetics associated with minorities with pastoral and upper class ideas, because mass art is urban and democratic.”101 Both Alloway and Banham critiqued the hierarchy of cultural values upheld by the elite while positing mass consumption, which they conflated with democracy, as an alternative. During this same period, the symbolism of motion, captured in streamline styling, employed in a full range of technologically advanced transportation machines was of great interest to the Independent Group. When Banham next lectured on borax, on July 7, 1955, it was on the occasion of the ICA exhibition Man, Machine and Motion, which he had helped organize.102 This talk was titled “Metal in Motion.” Emphasizing the relationship between technologically advanced mass production of extravagant styling, seductive advertisements, and sexual symbolism of the American automobile, Banham’s work on borax was part of a larger investigation into commercial design strategies that infused industrial design products with an iconography defined by the seductive language that advertised them.103 Banham’s thesis concentrated on the American automobile industry and its relationship to contemporary design.104 He argued that contrary to principles of modern design based on functionalism and the machine aesthetic, borax was based on the industrial design principles which fused elements of commerce, marketing, and engineering with the unruly “desires of the public.” What resulted was not only the most common method of design in America but also, for Banham, the most relevant for engaging contemporary postwar culture.105 The cunning procedures of the commercial marketing strategies of industrial styling were analyzed but not judged or approached with moral apprehension, as much earlier design criticism had. Between 1954 and 1955 Banham’s conception of borax progressed from a formal analysis based on the architecture of Mendelsohn and the products of American industrial design to an explanation of the relationship between design and the logic of the market. In his essay on Mendelsohn, Banham explained that borax means, in general, “a bulbous pressed steel and/or moulded plastic manner, somewhat related to purely functional streamlining and normally enlivened by close-spaced horizontal or vertical striping, usually of chromium plate.”106 There is no mention there of the relationship between borax and automobile styling or of the idea of an emotional engineering. By 1955, he saw borax as a vital aspect of popular design that was deeply embedded in the forces of the market. When American business needed to resolve problems of overproduction and underconsumption in the late 1920s, industrial designers— whether commercial artists, stage designers, or advertising agents— began employing streamline styling and its various manifestations, such as so-called streamline moderne and art deco, all characterized by long

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horizontal lines and curved forms. These became integral to the design and marketing of consumer goods, including automobiles. The idea that the design of visual communication of cheap, mass-produced products constituted a form of popular art drove Banham and the Independent Group’s polemical debates about culture and art in the mid-1950s. They presumed that the design of mass-produced objects happened through an unfettered dialogue with the public, removed from the top-down elitist concerns of “good design.” Consequently, Banham’s contribution to the Independent Group discussions centered on the interplay of popular symbolism and consumer feedback. Borax offered Banham an insight not only into the relationship between design, commerce, and persuasive advertisement but also into a model of design not controlled by a mastermind architect, an aspect of design that historians had seldom appreciated. In contrast to modern design, which required the endless effort of training, education, and propaganda, promoted by a centralized design authority, borax appeared to be the result of a somewhat undesigned process that functioned without authoritative standards and was the result of various “spontaneous” market forces. This body of research and its relationship to free-market economics was of paramount importance in the development of Banham’s critique of modern design, insofar as it was one of his first significant, and perhaps most powerful, critique of modern design theory.107 As important as the concept of borax was for fostering a new understanding of industrial design products, its implications for the history of modern design theory were even greater.

bor A x And the mAc hine Aes t h e t ic of f unc tio nALism To fully appreciate the shift in Banham’s criticism that occurred from 1953 to 1955, consider his June 1953 review of an exhibit of Le Corbusier’s paintings, drawings, sculptures and tapestries at the ICA.108 His assessment of the show was indicative of his own ambivalent attitude toward Le Corbusier as well as that of the Independent Group. He seemed still under the spell of Le Corbusier’s prophetic declaration that “architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of form in light,” as he described the Indian city of Chandigarh as the “crowning achievement of his career” and described Le Corbusier as the “assembler of magnificent and cunning plays of volume in the sun.” By 1955, as the activities of the Independent Group intensified through weekly meetings, exhibitions, and public lectures, and as they developed a more penetrating criticism of modernism, Banham’s writing on Le Corbusier took on a decidedly different tone. Drawing on the main thesis of his lectures on borax, in April 1955 Banham published “Machine Aesthetic,” in which he isolated Le Corbusier as a selfdeceiver, a delusional character who twists reality to make it fit into his own version (fig. 3.9). Implicating Le Corbusier as well as many of the pioneers of

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f igu re 3.9 Reyner Banham, “Machine Aesthetic,” Architectural Review (April 1955). By permission.

modern architecture, Banham argued that they “give a false picture of the engineer’s methods and intentions.” Despite all the lip service modern architects gave to the machine, far from engaging it and technology generally, in reality “architects are frightened of machinery.”109 This criticism was the foundation of a long, drawn-out, violent attack on the principles of modern design.110 Taking issue specifically with Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier’s theory of purism (1925), in which they claimed “Le Purisme a mis en evidence la Loi de la Sélection Mécanique.”111 Ridiculing this idea, Banham accused them of having deluded themselves into believing that they had actually discovered a fundamental law of design aesthetics that was as important as Darwin’s law of natural selection.112 Challenging their argument that purist objects of cylinders, spheres, and cones are inherent qualities of machine production, and therefore “objects of maximum utility and lowest price have simple geometrical shapes,” Banham argued that, “To most architects this proposition would appear watertight, but to most production engineers it would appear too abstract to be useful, and demonstrably false in its outcome.” While accusing the authors of nothing more than propaganda for their own aesthetic prejudice, Banham reserved particular venom for Le Corbusier: “In the world of engineering, [he] was not even a provincial, but a complete backwoodsman” awash in naïve “wishful thinking.” Banham then set the record straight: “The demands of economic production do not . . . follow the laws of Nature, but those of economics.”113 Pointing out that Le Corbusier’s philosophy tended to reduce design to “utility,” Banham wrote that in the design process of consumer mass production this is merely one factor among many “bearing upon sales.”114 Banham then critiqued Le Corbusier’s notorious comparison of the

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evolution of the automobile form to the development of Greek architecture, culminating in the perfection of the Parthenon. Banham attacked Le Corbusier’s use of a universal design methodology, claiming that “amateurs of the Parthenon have thus no logical defence against Borax, nor, indeed, have believers in the Law of Mechanical Selection, for the contemporary motor-car is precisely the result of the interplay of utility and economical production— if those terms are realistically defined as factors of the mass-market for which cars are produced.”115 Relying on an analysis of the market-driven logic of the American model of consumer mass production, which stood worlds apart from the 1920s market of standardized production on which Le Corbusier had based his analysis, Banham outlined a theory of design based on economics, supported by endless examples of American commerce.116 Banham’s argument was based on an empirical analysis of the logic of the consumer market in which function was but one criterion among various design factors, such as cost and ornamentation; this exposed the “aesthetic prejudices” of Le Corbusier’s purism.117 Unlike Le Corbusier’s “selective and classicizing” theories of modern design, Banham promulgated a philosophy based on the commercial logic of American industrial design, which he saw as a more honest method of deriving form, arguing that “the need to chase the market led to the rapid evolution of an anti-Purist but eye-catching vocabulary of design— which we now call Borax.”118 Just as Le Corbusier and his contemporaries were deeply enamored of the anonymous products of American engineers— as he wrote in Toward an Architecture, “Here are American silos, magnificent first fruits of the new age. AmericAn engineers And their cALcuLAtions crush An exPiring Architecture”—Banham and the Independent Group found great inspiration in America, especially in the anonymous industrial design and advertisement strategies of consumer products, the “first fruits” of a new age of freemarket economics.119 These contemporary commercial artist-engineers, the stylists of a new era of industry, were celebrated as the pioneers of a new aesthetic and ethic capable of expressing the powerful new zeitgeist of the emerging era of individualism.120 While it embraced commerce and relinquished the need for control in the design process, this design philosophy could not have been more opposed to Pevsner’s political ideals of collectivism and reform. Between October and November 1955, Pevsner delivered lectures in which he argued that the principles of the English picturesque aesthetic could make a valid contribution to modern design.121 (Interestingly, during this period, the Architectural Review was running a campaign that, as Bridget Cherry has explained, was intended to “offer the English picturesque tradition as a valid contribution to a modernism that was too stark to achieve broad public appeal.”122) In 1953 Pevsner defined the essence of design as “beauty,” calling it a “word out of fashion but one which cannot be dispensed with. Beauty, I would describe as the controlled consonance and dissonance of forms and colours, controlled because control brings back at once the human element.”123 This idea of control over dissonance came, Pevsner said, from the eighteenth-century English

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authors of the picturesque. This concept became a distinguishing feature of his conception of good design, leading him to proclaim that, unlike the unruly expressions of borax, “impropriety must be controlled” because “no aesthetic value can be expected in design without one man being in control. The design must be the consistent expression of one mind. That does not eliminate teamwork but it keeps it in place.” Pevsner was well aware of the dictatorial implications of such a statement, yet he believed that it was an important aspect of design and offered the following warning: “The design of a textile or an ashtray can never be too perfect, the design of a room or a whole house can.”124 In 1953 Pevsner wrote: “In 1937 I pleaded for the architect as the best potential designer. Mr. [Michael] Farr now puts the case for the professional designer, or consultant designer, side by side with those for (and against) the architect, the so-called commercial artist.”125 The stylist, unlike Pevsner’s modern architect, as mastermind in central control of the design process (yet claiming to design for the collective welfare), accepted his collaborative role in the commercial system. In “‘Purposive’ Social Formations,” Hayek critiqued the collectivist philosophy that held that “society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals,” arguing, “In order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control.” Within this collectivist paradigm, Hayek noted that, paradoxically, the very conception of the larger social aggregate is based on the model of an individual mind: “It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.”126 The stylist (or consultant designer) by contrast, accepts mass production as an anonymous interindividual process, acting as one entity among multiple non-hierarchical forces converging to design consumer products. These uncontrollable forces, “blind and without direction,” were the very subject of the contemporary “anonymous history” of mechanization and mass production that had horrified Giedion, who demanded, “They must be canalized.”127

emotionAL engineering In September 1955 Banham published “Vehicles of Desire,” in which he argued that the aesthetic self-aggrandizement of architects and the “public’s Ruskinpowered terror of them” was so great that when Le Corbusier spoke, no one dared to argue. Consequently, it had since been assumed that all artifacts should be “designed architect-wise.” Banham exclaimed, “But what nonsense this is,” for the “aesthetic and psychological predisposition” of architects is too narrowly committed to “big permanent structures” to serve as a universal model of design. Banham again suggested that the standards of design

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culture must contend with free-market economics, observing that “the technical history of the automobile in a free market is a rugged rat-race of detail modifications and improvements,” finely tuned to the desires of the public. To account for this method, Banham elaborated on the concept of “emotionalengineering-by-public- consent.”128 He seems to have been drawing on the work of Edward Bernays, one of the American pioneers of what was originally termed propaganda, then renamed public relations after World War II. Using the work of psychoanalysis, Bernays developed advertising strategies that could shift the decision to purchase a product from a need to a desire by playing on deep irrational and emotional fears and desires of the unconscious. The emotional investment in reshaping the exterior envelope of everyday functional objects, including cars and appliances, played on emotions rather than reason. In The Engineering of Consent (1955), Bernays discussed the significance of symbols in “their selection and use to project, personify, and highlight themes” in public relations and advertisements: “As man’s ingenuity has devised new ways of communication or extended the field of influence of older forms, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of people who can be brought within the influence of a given symbol at a given time.”129 Using various symbols in the design process, from the 1930s to the 1950s the convergence of advertising and industrial design transformed the image of American products, which acquired a slick and seductive style, no longer emphasizing functional aspects. A product acquired a popular “symbolic” meaning through its distinctive expressive quality. The ability to “communicate” with the public through the development of popular symbolism embedded in borax styling was the very substance of design that fascinated many members of the Independent Group and was at the heart of their interest in advertisements. These concepts also underlined Banham’s thesis on borax. Sigfried Giedion’s speculation that objects of mass production were redesigned during the Depression “to stimulate sells by playing on emotional responses” seems credible when considered in the context of Bernays’s communication and advertising theories.130 Product engineering, which began in the early 1930s, paralleled the public relations strategies of engineering consent, defined by Bernays as the “art of manipulation of people.” In Propaganda (1928), Bernays explained: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our society.”131 Such extraordinary claims call into question the so-called non-hierarchical design collaboration between stylist and public, a process that Banham privileged over modern design. Banham claimed that the top body stylists in the automotive industry are the “anonymous heads of anonymous teams,” not Pevsner’s masterminds. But this claim depends on the neutrality of the market, even when it is “irrational.” The presumed ability to communicate to and through the market is at the

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heart of Banham’s interest in borax. He described the ephemeral art of product industrial design as a type of communication-in-formation, as though the products were the offspring of a sensitive living organism capable of mediating between the public and mass-produced items. Capable of giving voice to the public by infusing common mass-produced goods with a secret symbolic language, the body stylist was endorsed by Banham as a type of alchemist of design who acted as “arbiter and interpreter between the industry and the consumer” and deployed “not a farrage of meaningless ornament, as fine art critics insist, but a means of saying something of breathless, but unverbalisable, consequence to the live culture of the Technological Century.”132 For Hayek, it was crucial that the information needed for a free-market economy to function would emerge spontaneously from the rise and fall of prices through the free exchange of goods and services. He referred to this as the “mechanism of the market,” driven by individual choice and competition. For Hayek, the “uncontrolled” capitalist economy was a valuable means of disseminating knowledge from one individual to another through the pricing signals of the free market without the need to dictate values to consumers of what is good or bad. This has an obvious affinity with Banham’s conception of the ideal designer and critic. In November 1955, Banham attempted to formulate an intellectual attitude toward “living in a throwaway economy” as the basis for contemporary design.133 Unlike Moholy-Nagy, Banham accepted forced obsolescence and its economic implications. Banham attempted to articulate expendability as a popular aesthetic and its relevance for contemporary architecture and design. Referring to the proliferation of new iconographies of consumer products embedded with symbolism that reflects the pleasures of sex and conspicuous consumption found in any “progressive industrialized society,” Banham posited: “These trends, which become more pronounced as a culture becomes more mechanized and the mass-market is taken over by middle-class employees of increasing education, indicate the function of the product critic in the field of popular art: Not to disdain what sells but to help answer the now important question, ‘What will sell?’”134 Similarly, Hayek’s proposition rested on the assumption that the rise and the fall of demand for goods signaled decisions of consumers in various markets. As individuals pursued their own interests, the system remained in tune with the fluctuating demands and desires of the consumer. Like the liberal economists, Banham believed that adaptations to the demands of the market happened automatically, through feedback, and that industries knew very well that to not be in tune with new desires or demands would be “lethal enough to kill off a manufacturer who misses it by more than a couple of years.”135 For these reasons, Banham argued: Both designer and critic, by their command of market statistics and their imaginative skills in using them to predict, introduce an element of control that feeds back information into industry. Their interest in the field of

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design-as-popular-symbolism is in the pattern of the market as the crystallization of popular dreams and desire— the pattern as it is about to occur. Both designer and critic must be in close touch with the dynamics of masscommunication. The critic, especially, must have the ability to sell the public to the manufacturer, the courage to speak out in the face of academic hostility, the knowledge to decide where, when and to what extent the standards of the popular arts are preferable to those of the fine arts.136

Shifting from objective description to flowery rhetorical idealism, while embracing a rather naïve assumption that this commercial design process functioned in a neutral manner and was truly capable of accessing the “desires of the public,” Banham pleaded that the critic must “project the future dreams and desires of people as one who speaks from within their ranks. It is only thus that he can participate in the extraordinary adventure of mass-production, which counters the old aristocratic and defeatist 19th-century slogan, ‘Few, but roses’ and its implied corollary, ‘Multitudes are weeds’ with a new slogan that cuts across all academic categories: ‘Many, because orchids.’”137 In 1956, referring to new designs of motorcycles, Banham critiqued the “essentially middle-class concern for ‘good design’” and argued that, left to its own devices, the market actually functioned in a way that produced designs that were even acceptable by the standards of orthodox design criticism. For him, the motorcycle was the one area in British production that, without the “interference of aesthetic do-gooders,” the “natural laws of product design operate unhindered.” Banham further asserted: The new norm is, in fact, very much a stylists’ creation— few orthodox product-design critics, one imagines, would have noticed this from looking at the machines, for it is commonly taken to be axiomatic that styling is (a) “bad” design, and (b) Borax. To speak of styling where there is no Borax and no chromium will seem to many to be an attempt to break down one of the basic distinctions in design-evaluation, yet it can fairly easily be shown that the new norm is a result of the need to give a product enhanced visual appeal in the eyes of a very fanciful and rather irrational market.138

The evolution of borax styling offered proof for Banham of its trial-and-error engagement with public sentiment and implied the wrongheadedness of the entire philosophy of collectivism and its “social responsibility.” A crucial aspect of Hayek’s theory of economics was based on a close observation of a “very simple and commonplace instance of the action of the price system,”139 which he analyzed to understand its capabilities in a free market. His studies of the existing “mechanism of the market” led him to believe that the market functioned according to principles of competition and not coercion. Because competition and advertisement go hand in hand, the need for more sophisticated advertisement strategies became all the more crucial to

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the economic system. The need to communicate with consumers in a direct and immediate way, while enticing them with various images and symbols, was perceived by the Independent Group as the observable “facts” of a functioning system. Lawrence Alloway, referring to the autocratic nature of culture, wrote: “Acceptance of the media on some such basis, as entries in a descriptive account of a society’s communication system, is related to modern arrangements of knowledge in non-hierarchic forms. . . . Techniques are now available (statistics, psychology, Motivational Research) for recognizing in “low” places the patterns and interconnections of human acts which were once confined to the fine arts. The mass media are crucial in this general extension of interpretation outwards from the museum and library into the crowded world.”140 The principles by which mass-media advertisements functioned as a system of direct communication, infused in product design, became not only a major source of inspiration for the Independent Group but also the basis for a new critique of modern design. In “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek critiqued the centralization of knowledge and argued that “we need decentralization because only thus can we ensure that knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used.” The way individuals interacted and exchanged information in the market modeled “how to dispense with the need of conscious control and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.” Hayek argued that centralized planning was a system based on a single unified plan, whereas decentralized planning was based on competition by many separate people, each following their own plan.141 The critique of central control and its corollary embrace of decentralized market forces was established in Banham’s 1955 thesis on borax. If non-design is characterized by a rejection of conscious design and control, then Banham’s approach relied on an analysis of commercialization and the principles of non-design that takes for granted that the market functions as a neutral mechanism. This concern with design strategies that were capable of eluding control while allowing spontaneous market forces to infiltrate the design process distinguished Banham’s criticism in this period. As a design strategy closely aligned with market forces, the peculiar aesthetic of borax was indeed a powerful and apt symbol of an era of nonresistance to economic and commercial forces. The symbolic power of borax captured the essence of a non-design sensibility, concerned neither with the imposition of control nor with the aesthetic consequences of its outcome. In its capacity to evade central control and adhere to neither a plan nor an ideal vision, beyond that of the logic of the market, borax embodied non-design as a philosophy of a “shape offering least resistance.” As an expression of nondesign, borax functioned according to the rules devoid of an aesthetic ideal, changing and adapting itself to the demands of the market, while modern design remained fixated on the principles of functionalism, pure geometry, the ideals of “good design,” and a belief in the social responsibility of design

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to achieve a democratic society. Giedion’s account of the “dictatorship of the market” represented a position that was worlds apart from Hayek’s notion of the market as an anti-dictatorial open system of free competition. Banham maintained a faith in free-market capitalism and, like Hayek, believed it was the only viable means of generating a free and democratic society. Highly skeptical of the various control mechanisms imposed on design by agencies such as the welfare state, the Council of Industrial Design, and the Museum of Modern Art, Banham sought a free design philosophy. Yet observing the way the market functions is distinct from idolizing its forces as an expression of freedom, just as there is a fundamental difference between the use of the market as a practical means of exchanging goods and a belief in the market as a means of organizing society. The former represents a methodology of historical observation, whereas the later veers toward propaganda, the unforgivable sin of which Banham accused the modernists. Banham’s extraordinary contribution to design criticism is to have championed market expressions as a form of popular art. His thesis on borax raised fundamental questions about the nature of design and its relationship to advertisement and the market. In its wake, we are left with pressing questions: Is the goal of design synonymous with that of advertisement? Should it aspire only to stimulate and satisfy the desires of the consumer-user while avoiding design, plan, and direction of the designer, as Banham suggested? Or is design, as Moholy-Nagy claimed, “an attitude which everyone should have: namely, the attitude of the planner— whether it is a matter of family relationships or labor relationships or the producing of an object of utilitarian character or a free art work . . . planning, organizing, designing.”142

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4 : Spontaneous City jAne jAcobs An d th e c r i t i q u e of P L An n e d or d e r

After nearly a decade of working as assistant editor at Architectural Forum, Jane Jacobs confronted some of the most pressing problems in design concerning urban planning, control, and the future of the city. Various important, yet seemingly unrelated parallel developments in the postwar period appear to have had a crucial impact on the development of her theory of the city. This chapter explores the influence that the townscape philosophy and Warren Weaver’s theory of complexity had on Jacobs’s work. It also speculates on the role that the Austrian school of economics’ theory of spontaneous order played in helping to formulate the devastating critique of modern planning that was launched in her pioneering book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).1 Jacobs was one of the first to articulate in clear terms how the city functioned as an unplanned phenomenon, with all its complex social and economic relations, and in so doing she revealed the intrinsic and dynamic relationship between urbanism and economics. Jacobs employed the townscape approach, a revolutionary way of looking at cities, including all their anonymously, haphazardly arranged parts. In the late 1950s, Jacobs collaborated with two of the principal advocates of townscape, Ian Nairn, a strident critic of suburban sprawl, and Gordon Cullen, whose approach emphasized the art of relationship as a way of making sense of the jumbled planned and unplanned elements of the urban landscape. During this same period, Jacobs discovered Warren Weaver’s groundbreaking work on the science of complexity, which provided her with a scientific method to study complex patterns of social and economic phenomena as a form of “organized complexity,” or what most observers perceived as mere chaos.2 The townscape technique sharpened Jacobs’s ability to look at the diversity of relationships between various common parts of the unplanned city with a new critical eye, while Weaver’s theory of complexity facilitated her comprehension of the invisible patterns that constituted the underlying logic of the seemingly chaotic ordinary urban landscape. Through an exhaustive list of common examples of everyday life in the city, Jacobs demonstrated the coherence and vitality of the existing order of the unplanned city, and in so doing, she challenged what she referred to as an “all too

familiar kind of mind,” particularly evident in the rational approach of planners, “a mind seeing only disorder where a most intricate and unique order exists; the same kind of mind that sees only disorder in the life of the city streets, and itches to erase it, standardize it, suburbanize it.”3 One of the great shortcomings of planning was that it aimed to replace the existing order with a new order, thereby disrupting the intricate, complex web of preexisting unplanned social and economic relations— Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek called this “spontaneous order,” and Warren Weaver and Jacobs called it “organized complexity.”4 Jacobs’s conclusions about the city anticipated the views of an entire generation of designers and critics of the 1960s and beyond who would come to embrace the phenomenon of non-design and the non-planning paradigm that emerged following World War II. In a radical critique of modernism, many maintained that large-scale planning was an unnecessary imposition of control onto the social body and urban landscape. My main argument is that Jacobs’s approach to urbanism and economics was developed parallel to, and perhaps benefited from, a much broader field of knowledge than is generally understood. Therefore, the chapter considers a wide context, including the revolutionary critique of planning espoused by Alison and Peter Smithson throughout the 1950s, on the one hand, and the Austrian-school theory of spontaneous order, on the other. Decades before Jacobs’s remarkable hypotheses, liberal theorists had advanced a demoralizing critique of central design as a challenge to the legacy of collectivist planning while advocating market-based solutions and demonstrating the crucial role that informal commerce played in spontaneous order. In 1960, Hayek asserted a derisive critique of modern urban planning, dismissing its founders Frederick Law Olmstead, Patrick Geddes, and Lewis Mumford, as having developed a naïve sort of “anti-economics” approach to cities.5 These ideas emerged in a context that witnessed the arrival of Ludwig von Mises at New York University in 1945 and Hayek at the University of Chicago in 1950, marking the symbolic emergence in the United States of Austrian-school economics as the only sensible alternative to the socialist planned order. In addition, along with the rise of Chicago-school economic theorists such as Milton Friedman, libertarian ideas related to free markets, free choice, and decentralized decisionmaking characterized a non-planning paradigm that viewed economic tools as a means of dealing with traditional problems of political science and urbanism. Therefore, these various parallel developments are explored as a new way of interpreting Jacobs’s cutting-edge theories of the city and economics.

t oW n sc APe And non- design The philosophy of townscape emerged in the 1930s and was developed in the 1940s amid the devastation of World War II, during a period when the relationship between modern design and rationalism was subjected to increased scrutiny.6 Along with various other efforts of the Architectural Review’s editors

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to redefine modern design, Hubert de Cronin Hastings and his associates launched a campaign that would become known as townscape. In 1944 the core of the argument was published in “Exterior Furnishings or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscapes.” Explaining the context and need for a new approach, Hastings wrote: Planning theory at the moment might be described as a fight between three groups: the garden city people, the Bauhausians, and the County Councils. The garden city people . . . have on their side a keen sense of the cosy life, but they have little understanding of the metropolitan scene or of the intricacy of social contacts or even of the variety of human tastes and types. The Bauhausians have boldness and architectural imagination. But their new world does not appear to incorporate any of the old ones, and to many quite people it seems that, like other revolutionaries, they may destroy more than they can possibly create. They have no tolerance of accident. As for the councils, they are as a rule all out for Bankers’ Georgian and road-widening.7

The following year, the Architectural Review published “The English Planning Tradition and the City,” in which the editors warned about the shortcomings of the visual implications of existing planning policies. This new policy promoted by the Architectural Review, intended as “a contribution to visual planning,” rejected the tabula rasa approach of slum clearance and argued for a reconstruction method that could retain the old street plans, implement façade improvements, and embrace new developments in modern architecture: “A timid preservationist attitude aiming at mere street improvement falls as short of what is required as the fantasies of the brave-new-worlders. Constructive compromise is what the genius loci calls for, not tabula rasa.”8 This approach distinguished this campaign from others that were based on a total reconstruction of cities, thus leading to the destruction of the genius loci. The article posited that “to be effective, planning policy had to take into account the cultural history of the city it aimed to transform.” A comparison of Paris and London would reveal that Haussmann’s renovation of Paris had taken place under a “totalitarian” state. As previously noted, like many liberal critics of the period, Hastings was fond of contrasting English liberty and French tyranny, and he quoted George Mason, who argued that in England “the Spirit of liberty extends itself to the very fancies of the individuals. Independency has been as strongly asserted in matters of taste, as in religion and governments.”9 The “British character,” as expressed in the picturesque, was revealed as a tendency to plan irregularly, to disdain formality, and to resist grand planning schemes: “Any planner who thinks he can impose an overall pattern on London just hasn’t learnt the history.”10 This distinctive British characteristic was embedded in the city: “London has grown functionally, is an organism evoked largely without conscious control, a product of competing interests, from building speculators to pressure groups. The nature of an organism so evolved, though

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informal in the sense that it doesn’t fill out any preconceived intellectual pattern, is what we call functional”— and what Hayek called spontaneous order.11 To advance this campaign, Hastings believed it was crucial to understand not only British history but also Britain’s unacknowledged contribution to planning debates. In an effort to demonstrate the fundamental role that the picturesque aesthetic played in the nation’s cultural and artistic disposition, Hastings commissioned Nikolas Pevsner with the task of doing so. In a series of articles in the 1940s, Pevsner laid out the historical and scholarly argument for townscape, which was put forth in his address “The Picturesque in Architecture,” read to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1947. All this was part of Pevsner’s research for Visual Planning, a book that was never published.12 His research relied on a large body of literature to make its case. What education Pevsner may have had in Stadtbaukunst (the art of city building) is unclear, but he certainly knew Camillo Sitte’s 1889 Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (translated as The Art of Building Cities: City Building According to Its Artistic Fundamentals in 1945), whose core argument is for a development of the picturesque sensibility. Associated with theories related to Visual Planning, Pevsner explored the idea of “unconscious planning” that underlines urban ensembles, like the Inns of Court in London, and that can also account for the “unconscious continuity of the picturesque into modern planning ideas.”13 The Bauhaus must accept the picturesque, Hastings argued, and move away from “the making of large and meaningless geometric shapes.”14 This approach demonstrated a new direction away from planning as a rational and technical planimetric movement toward a three-dimensional visual exploration of complex urban ensembles composed of new and old, designed and non-designed elements of the urban landscape, all held together by an “organic” unity. Key to this method was training the eye to read in serial vision to comprehend the complex patterns of various elements and the underlying organizational logic of the urban landscape.15 Building on Alexander Pope’s dictum “Consult the genius of the place in all,” Pevsner elucidated: “The genius loci, if we put it in modern planning terms, is the charter of the site, and the character of the site is, in a town, not only the geographical but also the historical, social, and especially the aesthetic character.”16 Underlying all these efforts was the idea that the English, given their distinctive historical development of picturesque theory, have a unique approach to landscape design that could be extended to a place-based study of planning founded on tolerance of radical differences. Individuality, expressed as the uniqueness of each part, and the specific charter of the site played an important role in this new Visual Planning theory of the city. In 1949 Hubert de Cronin Hastings, under his pseudonym Ivor de Wolfe, launched the movement by name with the publication of “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy Founded on the True Rock of Sir Uvedale Price,” in which he outlined a new design philosophy for postwar England based on a revival of the political and aesthetic debates of the picturesque, the

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eighteenth-century school of art theory founded by Sir Uvedale Price and others.17 In this extraordinary manifesto, while reflecting on the history of France and Britain, Hastings referred to the “victims of despotism” as the followers of the French rational liberal tradition while endorsing the “sons of liberty,” which he associated with a British radical liberal ideal. The townscape theory continuously contrasted political and aesthetic ideas related to tyranny and democracy. Hastings quoted Wilhelm von Humboldt’s liberal view of government: “The State is a necessary evil; its powers must be limited in such a way that it hinders the free individual development as little as possible.”18 At the center of this new design philosophy was a radical idea of “liberty,” which Hastings described as “a departure from conformity, as a means of differentiation in the biological sense— of achieving, that is, an increase in complexity, or organization, equivalent to that which occurs when differentiation takes place in the embryo and the organs appear.”19 The reference to biology appears to be related to Alexander von Humboldt’s observation that “nature presents itself to meditative contemplation as a unity in diversity.”20 Humboldt saw the natural world as replete with complexity and connectedness: “Alles ist Wechselwirkung” (everything is interconnected).21 Artists became fascinated by his theory that all the diversity of nature could be understood in relationship to fundamental systems of order that lie beneath the visual, indicating that invisible structures based on the laws of nature were responsible for “organic” unity. “The ultimate aim of physical geography is,” Humboldt asserted, “to recognise unity in the vast diversity of phenomena, and by the exercise of thought and the combination of observations, to discern the constancy of phenomena in the midst of apparent changes.”22 As we shall see, this idea will inform not only Hastings view but also that of many other theorists, including Jacobs, who asserted that “cities, again, like the life sciences,” can be analyzed and understood. She also maintained: “The variables are many but they are not helter-skelter; they are ‘interrelated into an organic whole.’”23 For Hastings, complexity in the urban landscape meant recognition of the “urge of the parts to be themselves to make a new kind of whole,” which unified the planned and the unplanned elements into a single vision. Hastings recognized that the resulting “chaos may or may not be amusing, but it is inexorably accident (or the Unconscious at work) and thus not in our power to control.”24 This radical liberal theory of the city sought a new kind of organic unity among the individual, even opposing, parts of the urban landscape. Hastings implored planners to “love, or try to love” all the parts, including the common unplanned urban landscape with all the messy complexities that accompany a metropolitan democratic society. In formulating this new attitude of tolerance, with the nightmare of totalitarianism still lingering in the air, Hastings relied on the views of classical liberalism for this new vision. Consequently, in addition to the liberal political philosophy of the picturesque, Hastings argued that English artists, since the eighteenth century, had long shown an inclination “to treat life objectively and empirically,” which fostered an appreciation of the “irregular (meaning ‘let’s have more character,’ i.e., significant 140 | c h A P t e r f o u r

differentiation).” This laid the foundation for townscape and led to the idea of town planning as a visual art, “a modern conception of Landscape as the field of vision wherever and in whatever position one happens to be.”25 This empirical approach to the city, which begins with what exists, is fundamental to the doctrine of townscape. Townscape demands of its disciples a revolutionary way of looking at the interrelationships between the designed and non-designed artifacts in the haphazardly built urban landscape. In contrast to the history of rational planning as a form of control with “no tolerance of accident,” Hastings urged the contemporary planner to engage the “vast field of anonymous design and unacknowledged pattern” which had remained outside the realm of official town planning.26 By the early 1950s, townscape was articulated both as a design method and as a critique of the urban landscape. This far-reaching doctrine had a profound effect, garnering various reactions, on not only British but also American architects and critics, including Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell and assistant editor Jane Jacobs. In December 1950, the Architectural Review released the special issue “Man Made America,” consisting of various reflections on the American scene, prefacing them with, what Christopher Tunnard described as, “a blistering editorial announcing that man-made America was a mess.”27 At first Haskell was deeply offended by such a scathing critique of the laissez-faire American attitude toward commerce and the urban landscape, but he later realized that this in fact had made “many accurate and thought provoking points” that inspired him to advance a more critical view toward architecture and urban criticism in his own journal.28 Townscape offered a method for achieving visual coherence among the disarray of buildings, streets, and spaces that make up the urban environment. The aim of townscape, as advocated by Gordon Cullen, was not to promote an “orderly scene” composed of “symmetry, balance, perfection and conformity,” but rather to advance a liberal approach to the fabric of towns, as in politics and society, in which “conformity gives way to the agreement to differ within a recognized tolerance of behavior.”29 Explaining the aesthetic principle, Cullen argued that “there is an art of relationship just as there is an art of architecture,” which was crucial for uniting various designed and non-designed elements of the urban landscape into a dynamic organization informed by a liberal tolerance of radical differences. As a critique of the emerging car-based urbanism of the postwar period, townscape took aim at the failure of the urban planner to make sense of suburban sprawl, which was condemned for its lack of individuality of place. This approach was spearheaded by Ian Nairn, who edited the influential special issues titled “Outrage” (1955) and “Counter-Attack against Subtopia” (1956), published in in the Architectural Review. Neither town nor country, “subtopia” was condemned as a “world of universal low-density mess” that represented the failure of urban planning.30 Referring to the initial launch of the “Outrage” campaign, Nairn wrote: “In 1950 the Review traced this rake’s progress, both planned and unplanned, in some of its manifestations in the US, a piece of 141 | s P o n t A n e o u s c i t y

research which drew from some of its American readers subdued applause but raised the blood pressure alarmingly in others. Unnecessarily, since the fact that we are all in this thing together, first as the victims and then, in varying degrees, as the offenders, is the first thing we have to know about it. Here the Review (as it promised then) turns the searchlight upon this country.”31 The issue presented important research on large swaths of the British built environment, areas referred to as a characterless landscape, which highlighted problems that planning was not able solve. But planners could fight back, Nairn believed, by following a simple rule: “All our developments must be high density and small-area.”32 These views apparently made a significant impression on both Haskell and Jacobs, who would eventually collaborate with the review’s editors. Significantly, Jacobs acknowledged Ian Nairn and Gordon Cullen in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.33 In September 1956, Architectural Forum released its own response to the American city titled “What City Pattern?”34— a special issue with an introduction and contribution by Jacobs. In that same year, Jacobs, along with many prominent planners and critics, attended the Urban Design Conference at Harvard Graduate School of Design, which left her with an even more critical opinion of planners and their view of the city.35 In December 1956, the Architectural Review released another special issue edited by Nairn, titled “Counter-Attack against Subtopia,” which further advanced the campaign to save the built environment from the dilution of towns and the loss of individuality and spirit of place.36 Challenging the view of planners, many of whom were complicit, he called on ordinary citizen to act. To advance the cause, the Architectural Review employed a team of authors, some of whom, like Nairn (and Jacobs), had no professional architectural qualifications, yet were key in inspiring a popular movement capable of mobilizing public opinion. In 1958 Jacobs published “Downtown Is for People” in The Exploding Metropolis, which included an extensive series of drawings by Gordon Cullen with captions written by Ian Nairn, proponents of the townscape campaign associated with the Architectural Review who had produced the influential special issues “Outrage” and “Counter-Attack against Subtopia.”37 Jacobs, who was working on her book at the time, met and hosted Nairn in New York.38 During this same period she was involved in various activities related to the fight to save Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Her connection with Nairn undoubtedly provided her with an even greater opportunity to become more familiar with the townscape approach, as a public campaign, as a means of challenging the planner’s view, and as a radical new way of looking at “cities the way people actually see them.”39

A n ordinAry mAnifesto The first sentence of The Death and Life of Great American Cities announced, “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” Its declared

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mission was to “introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in . . . schools of architecture and planning.”40 In its attempt to overthrow received norms of planning, and “in setting forth different principles,” the manifesto continued, “I shall mainly be writing about common, ordinary things.”41 This declared interest in common and ordinary aspects of the city was perhaps the most shocking aspect of the polemic. Yet unlike many of the avant-garde manifestos of the early twentieth century, her radical message was not accompanied by provocative graphics or images. Rather, Jacobs had instructed her readers, on the opening page, to simply consult ordinary things all around them: “For illustrations, please look closely at real cities.” This was the first sign of a new movement that revealed its deeper objective: to arrest design and refuse it its presumed centrality and power in the discourse on the city. It was a strategy that she would slowly and carefully develop throughout the course of the book. This new attitude toward design distinguished itself from other crusades that sought to reshape the world according to a particular purpose. Instead, this movement claimed revolutionary importance for the existing, undirected, forces of the ordinary unplanned built environment.42 To advance the coup, it was first necessary to demoralize the cult of planners, a powerful establishment with strong ties to its utopian socialists ancestors, whose views had long dominated the discourse on the city.

t he critiqu e o f the c entrA L P LA nne r In one broad stroke Jacobs indicted the entire legacy of modern urban planners and their socialist ideals, including Ebenezer Howard, founder of the garden city movement in England and author of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898); Raymond Unwin; and the respected biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes. Jacobs argued that Howard’s notion of a garden city, where the “city poor might again live close to nature,” had “set spinning powerful and city-destroying ideas.”43 These ideas were later “enthusiastically adopted” in America during the 1920s and developed by a group that included Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and Catherine Bauer, who advocated for planning based on greenbelts, low density, and separate zones for different activities. In Europe these ideas were most boldly expressed by modern architects, especially Le Corbusier in his plan La Ville Radieuse (1924). Jacobs dismissed these approaches for their anti-city ideals, accusing them of central planning, an approach that violated every core principle of the “liberal way of planning.”44 Her attack shared many of the same concerns with a new philosophy that was championed by a generation of liberal critics, particularly Austrian-school theorists, who denounced all forms of a planned society by a centralize authority. By the 1950s this critique was familiar to many intellectuals in New York, including Max Eastman and others who attended the “exhilarating” seminars

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of Ludwig von Mises at New York University.45 Mises’s philosophy laid the foundation for the free-market libertarian movement, aimed at persuading the public of the vital role that spontaneity and free-market economics played in the formation of a democratic society. This effort was, of course, directed at the planned economy of the Soviet Union. Since the mid-1940s Jacobs worked in New York for the publication branches of the Office of War Information and served as a senior editor of Amerika, a publication of the US Department of State that was distributed in the Soviet Union with the intention of informing Soviet citizens about the virtues of American life.46 Jacobs had been drawn to liberalism since her early years as a student. The historian Peter Laurence noted that Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) shared themes with Jacobs’s Constitutional Chaff (1941) and her writings for the Office of War Information and Amerika about the American ideals of tolerance and local self-government while distinguishing her work by its “spirited defense of her beliefs in response to accusations of un-American activities.”47 As we have seen, the Austrian school of economics’ unabashed critique of the planned economy of the Soviet Union had been well established since the 1930s. Although there is a lack of evidence to support the claim that Jacobs was influenced by Austrian-school theory, it is nonetheless useful to establish the context in which she formulated her most incisive critiques. Given Jacobs’s work with the Department of State, it appears rather odd that she would not have been aware of Hayek’s work, especially given the incredible press in major newspapers across the country that he received for The Road to Serfdom (1944). Furthermore, as we saw in chapter 1, the Reader’s Digest condensed version of that book in April 1945 attracted a crowd of three thousand listeners to Town Hall in New York City while Jacobs was a student there. Since then, Hayek’s work gained notable recognition in the United States. As we will also see, Mises was based at New York University in Greenwich Village, in Jacobs’s backyard, so to speak. In the 1950s New York City became the center of libertarianism, including Ayn Rand’s movement of objectivism. Following Mises’s extremely influential Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949) and Planning for Freedom (1952) along with Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order (1948) and The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (1952), by the early 1950s Austrian-school ideas were widely distributed and the school’s anti-planning philosophy had become increasingly well known. Although it is reasonable to assume that Jacobs intentionally distinguished her position from that of free-market enthusiasts, it appears untenable to suggest that she was unaware of this body of literature,48 particularly its critique of central planning. One of the most penetrating analyses in Jacobs’s book was a critique of the central planner, whom she accused of being uninformed of the actual way cities worked. She condemned his tabula rasa “urban renewal” strategies to reorganize, if not obliterate, the traditional city, with its age-old coexisting relationships of commerce, housing, and the street, relationships that evolved

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unconsciously over time and were responsible for the dense and complex character of ordinary New York City neighborhoods. According to Jacobs, cultivating these social and economic networks of common people was vital to the success of cities. In terms of the market, Austrian-school theorists believed in the same principle of cultivating existing unplanned phenomena. Imposing control over this complex network of decentralized decision-making would prevent the system from functioning. Hayek’s polemic maintained that the “single mind” of a planner, with his notion of the master plan, could never accommodate the individual plans of the multitudes of citizens. Jacobs said of Howard’s garden city: “His aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own.” She then concluded, “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.”49 While echoing Popper’s 1957 attack on utopian planning, Jacobs’s critique also aligned with Hayek’s thesis in “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” from 1945, in which he posed the fundamental question concerning all centralized planning: “who is to do the planning?” He argued that the main issue was not about whether planning was to be done or not but whether planning was to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or be divided among many individuals.50 Hayek maintained that when considering any form of social organization, one should always respect the liberal principle that all individuals have the constitutional right to pursue their own “individual plan,” also referred to as a “liberal plan,” a condition that not only allowed ordinary citizens to pursue diverse activities but also encouraged them to do so according to their own interests.51 By the early 1960s, the deep discontent with central planning could be felt by many on both the left and the right, such as Ernest van den Haag, who argued, “The issue is not whether to plan, but who is to plan what, for whom, and with what powers.”52 This critique of power was especially important in Jacobs’s work. Throughout the 1950s, the liberal economists’ message that the free market, as a valuefree or neutral framework, was the only sensible alternative to state planning was generally known, if not accepted. As we have seen, Hayek conceded that modern planners would find his “liberal plan” to be no plan. In fact, he stressed that it was “not a plan designed to satisfy particular views about who should have what.” The distribution of resources did not need to be planned, by the state or otherwise, but rather should be allowed to emerge according to the rules of spontaneous order. In effect, Hayek was arguing that order did not need to be invented or planned; rather than designing a new society— and destroy vital living networks in the city thus privileging central control— Hayek, like Jacobs, argued for cultivating the dynamic existing social and economic phenomena. Jacobs specifically focused on a critique of central design in her attack on the modern planner. She noted: “Le Corbusier was planning not only a

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physical environment. He was planning for a social Utopia too. Le Corbusier’s Utopia was a condition of what he called maximum individual liberty, by which he seems to have meant not liberty to do anything much, but liberty from ordinary responsibility. In his Radiant City nobody, presumably, was going to have to be his brother’s keeper any more. Nobody was going to have to struggle with plans of his own.”53 Unlike the disconnected “self-sufficient small town” amid calm green fields, Jacobs affirmed that “cities are fantastically dynamic places, and this is strikingly true of their successful parts, which offer a fertile ground for the plans of thousands of people.”54 To fully appreciate the similarities, and possible differences, between Jacobs’s and Hayek’s approaches, we should keep in mind this theory of a liberal plan. Jacobs explained: “The Garden City was to be encircled with a belt of agriculture. Industry was to be in its planned preserves, schools, housing and greens in planned living preserves, and in the center were to be commercial, club and cultural places, held in common. The town and green belt, in their totality, were to be permanently controlled by the public authority under which the town was developed, to prevent speculation or supposedly irrational changes in land use and also to do away with temptations to increase its density— in brief, to prevent it from ever becoming a city.”55 But perhaps the greatest sin, as Jacobs pointed out, was that Howard envisioned “not simply a new physical environment and social life, but a paternalistic political and economic society.”56 This critique certainly resonated with Mises and Hayek, who had both previously established a critique of the paternalistic planned society and offered the free market as an alternative. As early as her article “Downtown Is for People,” Jacobs had recognized the value of specific zones of high concentration of economic exchange in which people can see “everybody in town.” She also noted that “this vital trading post is never marked on the official city map; nor have the city’s architects found space or color for it in their diagrams of Tomorrow’s City. In fact, if you ask some of them about it, all you get is a blank look, perhaps a bit of scorn.”57 This insight highlighted Jacobs’s view toward commerce and the city, and the important role it played in sustaining vitality in a specific place. Although this critique was perceived as a blow to the vision of the modern planner, it was not unique to Jacobs and can be found in the vast literature of Austrian-school economics. Just as Hayek believed in the extraordinary abilities of the free market, ruled by the complexity that arises from common people making their own decisions, Jacobs articulated this critical understanding of spontaneous order of the market as it related to the city. Jacobs saw this not merely as an abstract theory but rather as visible in numerous concrete examples from the direct observation of daily life in the streets of Greenwich Village— perhaps one of her more original and important contributions. As we have seen, the embrace of the free market, mass-produced consumer products, and individual choice was part of a growing criticism of modern design that was well articulated by the early 1950s in England by Independent Group members. They, too, rejected the paternalistic

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attitude of the socialist planners of the welfare state and their disregard, if not disdain, for the vitality of free-market economics. Jacobs was certainly not the first to launch such an attack on modern city planning. Karl Popper’s 1957 critique of utopian engineering and Team 10’s 1959 announcement of “the death of CIAM” had laid the foundation for a sustained attack on utopian planning. In “The Architecture of Utopia” (1959), Colin Rowe put forth a devastating account of the history of urban planning. Reflecting on the legacy of ideal cities and the propensity of those cities’ designers to create a “monotonous environment,” Rowe noted, one might quite rightly “withdraw in horror from this calculated elimination of variety.”58 In the United States, a critique of planning had been growing throughout the 1950s among many of the same theorists who were once the vanguard of modern planning in the early part of the century. For example, Catherine Bauer, author of the acclaimed Modern Housing (1934) and advocate of public housing in the 1930s, had become a great critic of the federal programs by the 1950s.59 Yet The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and much of the scholarship on it, largely ignores the divergent voices of a growing mistrust toward and resentment of central planning in general and modern urban planning specifically. Although it is important to recognize that before Jacobs no one had formulated such a comprehensive critique, with detailed case studies, and as carefully and persuasively as she had, her failure to provide a more sufficient account of the multiple precedents in architecture, urban planning, and other disciplines, particularly economics, creates a false impression and makes it difficult to ascertain Jacobs’s contribution. In doing battle with slum clearance programs and the massive new housing programs that passed for postwar renewal, Lewis Mumford acknowledged that Jacobs had given “firm shape to a misgiving that many people had begun to express.”60 Twenty years later, Colin Ward, an eloquent defender of the libertarian left, aptly described The Death and Life of Great American Cities as having been “the first book to articulate to a wide audience, misgivings which were widely felt, but for which an appropriate language had not yet been found.”61 Jacobs’s polemical book emerged at a time of great crisis, and as critics have noted, it “sparked a reformation” in planning. Its unabashed dismissal of the entire history of modern planning left many in the profession stunned and silent. Lewis Mumford’s scathing review of it did little more than reinforce the idea that the old guard had run its course and that a new generation of critics had emerged with very different attitudes toward planning and, perhaps more importantly, the role of free-market economics and individual choice in the reconstruction of cities. This perception was only intensified when Hastings (writing under his pseudonym) asserted in 1963 that Jacobs’s book was a “far more important work than Lewis Mumford’s portentous The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects.”62 In that same review, Hastings wrote: “Now comes a warm but high wind across the Atlantic and (one hopes and believes) a hot handshake for the Ian Nairns, Gordon Cullens and

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Kenneth Brownes of this continent in the shape of a book which is a must for all who believe the urban consequences of those odd bedfellows, Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, to be the spawn of the devil working through his chosen vessels.”63 An entirely new paradigm was emerging, one in which planning was beginning to be demonized by a new generation who struggled to reorient itself with a different set of values that opposed the history of collectivist central planning. One view of this emerging non-planning paradigm saw free markets, free choice, and decentralized decision-making as essential economic tools that could be used to address urban problems, no longer concerned with utopian ideals but rather grounded in the urban reality of common people. A comparison of Jacobs’s main conclusions with those of Mises and Hayek shows a striking similarity in core principles. For example, Jacobs wrote: “Planners, architects of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs are not consciously disdainful of the importance of knowing how things work. On the contrary, they have gone to great pains to learn what the saints and sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and business in them. They take this with such devotion that when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening to shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside.”64 Using a medical analogy, Jacobs wrote, “Bloodletting could heal only by accident or insofar as it broke the rules, until the time when it was abandoned in favor of the hard, complex business of assembling, using and testing, bit by bit, true descriptions of reality drawn not from how it ought to be, but from how it is.”65 Aside from the “bit by bit” or piecemeal trial-and-error reference to Popper’s method— Popper, like Hayek, had accused central planners of relying on a pseudoscience— Jacobs made similar claims in denouncing orthodox modern urbanism: “The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design, have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world.”66 Confident in her assessment of what constituted “reality,” she denounced, as did Hayek and Popper, all forms of utopian thinking and instead referred to the way the “real world” functioned, as opposed to how it “ought” to function according to the planner’s wishes. Pioneered by Austrian-school theorists, this core distinction became a hallmark of the non-planning philosophy of a new generation of designers and theorists. Jacobs’s defiant “celebration of the messy pluralism of the American city ‘as found’, unsullied by masterplans,” resonated with a young generation in Britain whose opinions and aspirations were given voice in New Society, a magazine founded in 1962.67 Its editor Paul Barker noted, “From its launch to its demise in 1988, the magazine was obsessed with pinning down how things were, rather than how they were supposed to be.”68 This doctrine informs a common non-design attitude among theorists of the 1960s toward a range of unplanned phenomena, described by their detractors as mere “chaos,”

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which they held in high esteem yet were seldom capable of articulating its special significance.

t he t heory o f the c ity: fro m t e A m 1 0 t o jA n e jAcob s Jacobs’s first book has too often been approached as though it were distinct from what architects and theorists, even those of her own generation, had been grappling with since the late 1940s.69 This confusion is only exacerbated by the fact that she does not acknowledge the most important developments in urban planning theory since World War II. Rather, she constructs her own peculiar history, leaving the reader, particularly the historian, obliged to fill in the blanks to gain a more accurate representation of the evolution of architectural criticism during the period (the same could be said of her history of economics). In explaining her general theory of the city, Jacobs famously emphasized the important role of streets and sidewalks in the “peculiar nature of cities,” particularly in slums, with their great diversity of social and economic activities.70 But Jacobs was certainly not the first to notice how close-knit communities in working-class areas were held together by a diversity of spontaneous activities that emanated from local commerce and by everyday occurrences such as children playing in the street. Between 1947 and 1952 the British artist and photographer Nigel Henderson shot the Bethnal Green neighborhood of East London, carefully documenting the active street life of this poor, working-class area that was still wrecked from the bombings of the war. Capturing ordinary people going about their daily lives, his photographs are said to have a “captivating authenticity; they show a street life that is almost tangible; the street as a place of meeting, communication, anonymity, and equality.”71 Henderson recalled, “I would think of the small box-like houses and shops etc. as a sort of stage set against which people were more or less unconsciously acting.”72 These everyday unconscious acts of social and economic exchange formed the foundation of the spontaneous order of the place, which seemed to be the ephemeral quality he sought to capture. Like Jacobs, Henderson also lived in the neighborhood he studied, and his work too began a reformation in city planning. Alison and Peter Smithson used Henderson’s photographs in their attack on modern architecture and city planning nearly a decade before Jacobs’s effort. In 1953 at the ninth CIAM conference in Aix- en-Provence, the Smithsons presented their concept of “Urban Reidentification,” an attack on the prevailing modernist dogma of the rational city with its separate functions. Henderson’s photographs of children playing in the street were used as a means of expressing the necessity of integrating the crucial house-street relationship. The architects were searching for a new architectural equivalent to the intuitive spatial networks they saw in the way children played in the streets and other forms of spontaneous social interaction in the traditional unplanned city.

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This was the first meeting at which the younger generation of CIAM, the socalled Team 10 members, concurred in their criticism of CIAM’s doctrine and the technocratic and rationalist modernism it propagated.73 In fact, the group came together because of its members’ “mutual realization of the inadequacies of the processes of architectural thought which they had inherited from the modern movement,” and specifically to critique CIAM’s principles of town planning.74 These efforts were crucial to advancing many critiques of modern planning that followed. During this period there was a dynamic dialogue between editors of the Architectural Review and of Architectural Forum that resulted in a series of collaborations.75 As previously noted, in 1956 Architectural Forum released “What City Pattern?”— with an introduction and contribution by Jacobs— that not only addressed urban renewal projects but also attempted to critically reassess the “over-all pattern of urbanization” as it related to issues of planning in America.76 That same year, in “An Alternative to the Garden City Idea,” published in Architectural Design, Alison and Peter Smithson noted, significantly, that “a town is by definition a specific pattern of association, a pattern unique for each group of people, in each location, at each time. To achieve this specific pattern the town must develop from principles which give the evolving organism consistency and unity.”77 They, like Jacobs, also attempted to “uncover a pattern of reality” by consulting the city’s genius loci, an observational technique pioneered in the early twentieth century by the planner Patrick Geddes,78 and a core principle behind townscape. The young British architects recognized the profound significance of Geddes’s theories, which they built upon, an approach that distinguishes them from the American critic, who seldom acknowledged her predecessors.79 In contrast to the previous generation of designers, the Smithsons noted that the “social structure to which the town planner has to give form is not only different but much more complex than ever before.”80 To achieve this end: “What is being proposed here is an abolition of planning as we know it; the disappearance of the ‘master-plan’ and all detailed town-form planning.” They concluded, “There should be no further controls.” This conclusion clarified in a striking way the powerful influence that the liberal critique of central control had on both British and American architectural criticism.81 The following year in the Architectural Review the Smithsons published “Cluster City— A New Shape for the Community” (1957), an attack on the principles of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Their “cluster city,” a new suburban typology, sought to challenge the planning of the new towns by creating “something more complex, and less geometric.” On the basis of their research on children playing, they sought a dense cluster of housing units in which the idea of the street played an essential role in daily life. In all these studies, the principle of the street as a vital social space, particularly in working-class neighborhoods, is well established, long before Jacobs’s narrative. And yet Jacobs began working as assistant editor at Architectural Forum in 1952, which

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coincided with the emergence of Team 10 and its organized attempt to overthrow the technocratic and top-down planning paradigm of CIAM. Team 10’s work was in turn in dialogue with Louis Kahn’s 1953 analysis of “existing movement patterns” and the “architecture of the street.” In their “Letter to America” (1958) in Architectural Design, the Smithsons acknowledged the extraordinary, if “half comprehended, ideological writing and project work of Louis Kahn, where something approaching the European new way of thinking seems to be present.”82 In that same year Architectural Forum published “Louis Kahn and the Living City.”83 Amid this dynamic exchange between British and American journals, Jacobs was undoubtedly well informed about important developments in architecture and urban planning criticism. Although the reason for her omission is unclear, Jacobs’s leaving unacknowledged important precedents in the critique of modern urban planning greatly enhanced the perception of her as a lone radical in her fight against modern planners.84

s P on tAneou s o rder: Loc ALit y, co o P e r At io n, A n d t h e ro Le o f the co nsu m e r A s PA r t iciPA nt In 1955, while addressing “Liberty-Loving Statesmen,” Hayek explained: “If our aim is to assist the formation of a spontaneous order and to restrict the use of coercion as much as possible, our main task must be to adjust our rules so as to make the spontaneous forces of society work as beneficially as possible. The first need . . . is that we learn to understand the working of those forces. The most import among the forces . . . are those of the market which will function in a desirable manner only if as much competition prevails or is at least possible as the nature of the various fields allows.”85 He then concluded, “We shall never create Utopia by state action.”86 Jacobs certainly paid close attention through observation and in-depth analysis of the “working of those forces” that made a city socially dynamic and economically prosperous. She also understood that these vital spontaneous forces were completely ignored, or worse intentionally obliterated, by planners. The economic diversity, or competition (as Hayek referred to it) of a place was crucial for creating an environment that allowed individuals to make their own choices about which products and services to consume. Jacobs’s great significance was to conceptualize the city as a form of spontaneous order, or a self- organized system, which she believed revealed the reality of the city, as opposed to the fiction of the planned order propagated by architects and planners. She understood that the complex social and economic networks of the thousands of ordinary people in a city was certainly not chaos, as planners had asserted, and could be demonstrated by the city’s functioning according to very specific rules that resulted in what she called “organized complexity” and what Hayek referred to as “spontaneous order.” This new understanding of cities coincided with Hayek’s attempt in the mid-1950s to further clarify the idea of the free market as a form of spontaneous order.

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In 1961, the year that The Death and Life of Great American Cities was released, Hayek completed “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” although it was not published until 1964. The work specifically emphasized new research in the science of complexity, following directly on The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek’s major treatise on liberty. Strategically released at the dawn of a new “decade of change,” he used The Constitution of Liberty as an opportunity to further elaborate the crucial role of spontaneity in forming a free social order. Hayek explained that “the enemies of liberty have always based their arguments on the contention that order in human affairs requires that some should give order and others obey.”87 In contrast, Hayek conceived of an order without direction or control. To help elucidate his ideas, Hayek cited Michael Polanyi, who described a system of spontaneous order in society as a “polycentric order” achieved by allowing individuals to interact with each other on their own initiative, structured only by laws which uniformly apply to all of them.88 Hayek asserted: “Such an order involving an adjustment to circumstance, knowledge of which is dispersed among a great many people, cannot be established by central direction. It can arise only from the mutual adjustment of the elements and their response to events that act immediately upon them.”89 Hayek concluded: “The use of these spontaneous forces, which in such instances is our only means of achieving the desired result, implies, then, that many features of the process creating the order will be beyond our control; we cannot, in other words, rely on these forces and at the same time make sure that particular atoms will occupy specific places in the resulting structure.”90 This remarkable explanation of what constituted a free society, based on neither direction nor control, underscored Hayek’s interest in “order without commands,” an indispensable aspect of any truly spontaneous social order, which he believed should be the ultimate goal of a liberal society. Conceptualizing the idea of coordination played an important role in Hayek’s research on “complex phenomena” and was crucial to his explanation of how an “effective co-ordination of human activities without deliberate organization by a commanding intelligence” could result in “a mutual adjustment of the spontaneous activities of individuals [which] is brought about by the market.”91 In order to move forward with this extraordinary thesis, Hayek relied on Warren Weaver’s understanding of “organized complexity,” which was essential to both Hayek and Jacobs in advancing their research on complexity and led to breakthroughs in the fields of economics, architecture, and urban planning.92 While Hayek and Jacobs each developed their own approach, many of their conclusions were strikingly similar and remarkably powerful. Just as Hayek’s numerous books and the “popularized versions of his thinking” had an impact “far beyond that of the standard academic treatise on economics,”93 Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities not only transformed the field of architecture and urban planning but, as Lewis Mumford noted, became “an exciting theme for dinner-table conversation all over the country.”94

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Consequently, the libertarian virtue of liberty, on the left and the right, was widely disseminated and embraced by many. Unlike socialist conceptions of cooperation that aimed for a social utopia of equality, Jacobs’s vision was more aligned with the liberal critics’ view of cooperation, which was based on the ordinary exchange that occurred in daily life, without coercion or commands from central authorities, when common people followed their own individual plans. In comparing Jacobs and Hayek, historians have recognized that The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Hayek’s celebrated essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” of 1945 “tell essentially the same story.”95 Referring to the crucial role that local knowledge played in the decision-making process that drove the decentralized exchange and coordination necessary for a free market economy to function, Hayek wrote: Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation.96

In the chapter “Governing and Planning Districts” Jacobs arrived at similar conclusions, using only slightly different terminology; she referred to “locality knowledge” and acknowledged that “no other expertise can substitute for locality knowledge in planning, whether the planning is creative, coordinating or predictive.” She went on to state that “the invention required is not a devise for coordination at the generalized top, but rather an invention to make coordination possible where the need is most acute— in specific and unique localities.”97 She, like Hayek, opposed the experts and their scientific knowledge and referred to ordinary people and their commonsense approach as a new kind of “expert.” Nearly fifteen years after Hayek’s essay had created a controversy in economics, the concept of local conditions and the related local knowledge helped bring about a “revolutionary” understanding of the city in Jacobs’s work. The architecture critic Paul Goldberger observed that Jacobs “believed deeply in the value of knowledge, but she drew a sharp distinction between the knowledge of an educated person and the information that experts carry around, much of which Jacobs considered not only useless but dangerous.”98 In current literature, the inability, or unwillingness, to understand Jacobs’s work in a larger context leaves the impression that it was conceived in isolation, reinforcing the cliché of the uniqueness of her critique, whereas her remarkable contribution might best lie in her extraordinary ability to formulate

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a theory of the city that paralleled the philosophy of freedom and the market advanced by radical economists of the period, specifically those associated with the Austrian school.

t h e neW PhiLoso Phy o f fr e e do m : cities, mArkets, And in t e r e s t Recent scholarship has greatly expanded the study of the aesthetic-economic paradigm of the postwar period, understood as the complex ways in which individuals engaged with the market in various aspects of cultural life— a condition that became pronounced in America by the late 1950s. Michael Clune has analyzed the important role that free choice and the free market played in the poetry of Frank O’Hara and the urban theories of Jane Jacobs, both of whom were based in New York City. Clune asserted, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published two years after ‘Personal Poem,’ argues that free, ‘abstract’ choice exposes new possibilities for urban life.”99 Reflecting on Jacobs’s theory of the city, he noted, “She argues that if all social and government planning were to cease, a spontaneous urban order would arise, and she devotes her book to detailing the workings of this ‘healthy’ city.”100 For Clune, “as in O’Hara’s poems, the free choice of individuals constitute the mechanism driving the unplanned order of Jacobs’ city streets. She borrows her characteristic rhetorical move from free market discourse, asking city dwellers whether they would prefer to make their own choices, or to have their choices made for them by planners.” Clune further observed: Jacobs’ term for value, like O’Hara’s, is “interest,” a word that is ubiquitous in her work. People must be “interested,” streets must be “interesting,” a healthy neighborhood is full of “interest”: planned developments are “uninteresting,” the people that move through them are “uninterested,” a “great blight of dullness” follows in the planners’ tracks. And like O’Hara, whose poems continually show him buying wristwatches, books, sodas, tickets, and hats, the closest meaning of interest for Jacobs is economic. Her “healthy” streets are saturated with commerce; the fundamental building block of a healthy city for her is the presence of shops, bars, and restaurants on every corner and in every block. What sparks individuals’ interest are the goods for sale that surround their bodies on the narrow, congested streets of Jacobs’ city. If one does away with zoning laws, she predicts our actual “dull” residential and industrial districts will light up with ‘interesting’ commerce. For her, as for O’Hara, what is important is not simply the equation of interest with the economic, but a new perception of how economic interest works.101

These observations highlight the ways in which Jacobs seemed to be overly concerned with the idea of a dynamic amalgamation of commerce and free choice, devoting numerous chapters to the “removal of limitations” and the various

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ways in which cities can foster and intensify the vitality of commerce. If these ideas appear “original,” they do so only in the world of architecture. By appreciating the role that economics played in the imagination of this generation and the power of its non-planning paradigm, we can begin to understand how it was experienced as a total sense of freedom and independence in making one’s own decisions.102 As an alternative to the perceived coercive authority of the planner, this aspect of Jacobs’s work was celebrated by many artists and designers across the United States and Europe and anticipated the near-euphoric celebration of the market in the work of Archigram and other “radical” neoavant-garde architects of the 1960s. Like Jacobs, they would come to understand the vitality of free-market economics as a dynamic “natural organism.”

chAos o r co mPLexity: the s cie nce o f s P on tAneo us o rder Following World War II, there were great developments toward a more scientific understanding of complexity. New research in biology, mathematical logic, physics, psychology, and electrical engineering, pursued by scientists such as Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and many others, were beginning to rationally identify a phenomenon that had long been disregarded as mere chaos.103 During this period, when many disciplines were intrigued by the relationship between cybernetics, selforganizing systems, and complexity, Warren Weaver published “Science and Complexity,” in which he put forth what would become an extremely influential thesis concerning “problems of organized complexity.”104 In this period, Hayek was further developing his idea of spontaneous order. In 1955 he published “Degrees of Explanation” in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science on the subject of scientific method.105 As Bruce Caldwell noted, Hayek understood sciences that study complex phenomena are able to “provide only a range, or pattern, of predicted values rather than specific predictions of particular events.”106 In The Counter-Revolution of Science Hayek had drawn a dividing line between the methods of the natural and social sciences that many found objectionable. The work of Weaver not only influenced Jacobs’s development but also, according to Caldwell, “showed Hayek the way out.” He explained, “Weaver was a referee for Hayek’s paper at the British Journal and sent Hayek a lengthy report criticizing his presentation. He included with the report a copy of his 1948 paper ‘Science and Complexity.’”107 From this time forward, Hayek “virtually always referenced Weaver’s paper when he discussed the study of complex phenomena.”108 Caldwell also noted, significantly, that The Political Idea of the Rule of Law (1955) was “one of the first places in which Hayek moves beyond market phenomena to apply the idea that individual elements, by following rules, may give rise to orders. It is also the first place that the phrase (though not the concept of!) ‘spontaneous order’ appears in Hayek’s work.”109 These ideas were further developed in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), in

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which Hayek was beginning to explicitly introduce the “twin ideas of evolution and spontaneous order” into his discussion of social theory.110 This is the crucial period when Jacobs moved from her (relatively unremarkable) observations about the city, documented in the 1958 “Downtown Is for People,” to her much more sophisticated understanding of the city as a “living organism.” Her critical views about complexity and its relationship to commerce were barely, if at all, developed in that essay. The use of biological analogies such as evolution and growth allowed Jacobs to develop a more productive understanding of the city as a dynamic form or living organism. As early as 1955, apparently before she discovered complexity science, Jacobs had already “associated the self-organizing dynamics of cities with those of natural systems.”111 Explaining her deep fascination with big cities, Jacobs noted that “as a sheer manifestation of energy it is awesome. It says as much about the power and doggedness of life as the leaves of the forest say in spring. Hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of plans and purposes built the city and only they will rebuild the city.”112 Peter Laurence argued that “these early conceptions were thus galvanized in Jacob’s mind in 1958 when she discovered an essay on complexity science by Warren Weaver.”113 In the concluding chapter to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs acknowledged “Science and Complexity” as having “direct pertinence to thought about cities.”114 Weaver outlined three stages of development in the history of scientific thought and, according to Jacobs, his “remarks sum up, in an oblique way, virtually the intellectual history of city planning.”115 The three stages are as follows. First, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, physical science learned to analyze two-variable problems— that is, problems of simplicity. Second, after 1900 a second method was developed that could deal with billions of variables. The “physical sciences (with the mathematicians often in the vanguard) developed powerful techniques of probability theory and of statistical mechanics” that could deal with problems of disorganized complexity. Third is the ability to deal with problems of organized complexity. It was this last phenomenon that Jacobs used to explore a new theory of urbanism which lead her to the conclusion that, like the life sciences, cities were problems in organized complexity.116 She then explained: “To be sure, while planners were assuming that cities were properly problems of simplicity, planning theorists and planners could not avoid seeing that real cities were not so in fact. But they took care of this in the traditional way that the incurious (or the disrespectful) have always regarded problems of organized complexity: as if these puzzles were, in Dr. Weaver’s words, ‘in some dark and foreboding way, irrational.’”117 For such insightful observations, Mumford praised Jacobs and acknowledged that “no one has surpassed her in understanding the reasons for the great metropolis’s complexity and the effect of this complexity, with its divisions of labor, its differentiations of occupations and interests its valuable racial, national, and cultural variety, upon its daily activities. She recognizes that one cannot handle such a multi-dimensional social organization as one 156 | c h A P t e r f o u r

might handle a simple machine, designed for a single function.”118 Yet he disagreed with her conclusion: “The forces that have formed our cities in the past are now almost automatically, by their insensate dynamism, wrecking them and threatening to destroy whole countries and continents. Against this background, the problem of policing public thoroughfares to prevent violence is minor; violence and vice are symptoms of those far graver forms of disorder that Mrs. Jacobs rules out of consideration, because they challenge her rosily sentimental picture of the ‘great American city.’”119 Mumford, like many of his generation no doubt, struggled to understand how someone who had demonstrated such clarity in observing the “uncontrollable” forces of the city could not see the necessity to direct such forces for some particular purpose. On this specific point, Mumford seemed particularly unsympathetic of Jacobs’s embrace of this strange “vitality,” which, in his mind, amounted to little more than disorder and chaos. “The prevailing economic and technological forces in the big city have broken away from the ecological pattern, as well as from the moral inhibitions and the social codes and the religious ideals that once, however imperfectly, kept them under some sort of control, and reduced their power to human dimensions,” wrote Mumford.120 He distinguished planned forces from unplanned forces, clearly aligning himself with the former while castigating Jacobs for her embrace of the latter. This debate anticipated the views of a generation of young architects who not only embraced the dynamic and vital forces of the unplanned city but also saw in it a radical alternative to modern design. The unplanned city represented a condition that was beyond the control of any “single mind,” and many believed it was a spontaneously living organism capable of responding to the needs of common people and, if its inhabitants were allowed to freely coordinate among themselves, they could address, if not resolve, many problems that ill-guided planners could not.121 Mumford’s repeated mantra, “The present metropolitan explosion is both the symbol and the agent of this uncontrollable power,” anticipated the debates on chaos or control that marked the early 1960s.122 Mumford perceived a contradiction in Jacobs’s “unqualified adoration of metropolitan bigness and dynamism” in that she rejected the “principles of urban design that would unite these complementary qualities.” He continued, “Her ultimate criteria of sound metropolitan planning are dynamism, density, and diversity, but she never allows herself to contemplate the unfortunate last term in the series— disintegration.”123 Mumford maintained, as he had in The Condition of Man (1944), that such uncontrolled processes of chaos represented little more than the “drama of disintegration.” While many of the older generation perceived these forces as merely chaos, the younger generation was persuaded by the new science of complexity, arguing that the phenomenon of the unplanned city followed certain rules and therefore could not possibly be considered chaos.124 If cities were a problem in organized complexity, then they should be considered as things that can be studied and understood, as opposed to being regarded as merely irrational.125 157 | s P o n t A n e o u s c i t y

This observation had an enormous impact on new ways of understanding the city. Jacobs explained, “Garden City planning theory had its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, and Ebenezer Howard attacked the problem of town planning much as if he were a nineteenth-century physical scientist analyzing a two-variable problem of simplicity.” The two variables, population and jobs, were “conceived of as simply and directly related to each other, in the form of relatively closed systems.” Any such simple system of two-variable relationships, such as “self-contained towns,” cannot possibly “be discerned in great cities— and never could be.”126 Jacobs then pointed out that the next generation of theorists, such as Le Corbusier with his vision of the radiant city, conceived of the city as a “vertical and more centralized version of the two-variable Garden City.” Jacobs clarified that “his scheme assumed the statistical reordering of a system of disorganized complexity, solvable mathematically; his towers in the park were a celebration, in art, of the potency of statistics and the triumph of the mathematical average.”127 Following Weaver, Jacobs believed that the life sciences were making great progress and “providing some of the concepts that city planning needs: along with providing the basic strategy of recognizing problems of organized complexity, they have provided hints about analyzing and handling this kind of problem.” She continued: “These advances have, of course, filtered from the life sciences into general knowledge; they have become part of the intellectual fund of our times. And so a growing number of people have begun, gradually, to think of cities as problems in organized complexity— organism that are replete with unexamined, but obviously intricately interconnected, and surely understandable, relationships.”128 Jacobs was indeed tapping into a new paradigm that was emerging in the sciences, yet her most significant insight appears to be not in relationship to the sciences per se but the view of science that understood complex phenomena as a form of living organism not unlike that found in nature. The biological concept of homeostasis, the ability of an organism to regulate its internal environment and maintain equilibrium through a system of feedback controls, played an important role in conceptualizing social phenomena as natural processes.129 For Hayek this idea was crucial to his understanding of a properly functioning free market, capable of self-adjustment, and for Jacobs it was equally fundamental to her understanding of cities as organisms, capable of constant growth, change, and adjustment, guided by its own internal logic. They both affirmed that, driven by thousands of “individual plans,” a complex set of factors interacted through spontaneous coordination that contributed to homeostasis of the economy and the city.

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range of different purposes, such as allowing pedestrian access to various places at all hours of the day. “The fact of a district lies in what it is internally, and in the internal continuity and overlapping with which it is used, not in the way it ends or in how it looks in an air view,” Jacobs explained. “Indeed, in many cases very popular city districts spontaneously extend their edges, unless prevented from doing so by physical barriers.”130 This dynamic yet amorphous organic quality had also posed problems for Hayek. Resorting to biological analogies to describe the ways we might relate to the forces of the market, Hayek wrote that “the attitude of the liberal toward society is like that of a gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.”131 Hayek’s reference to a gardener, not a planter, as one who cultivates an existing phenomenon (the garden), as opposed to one who ideally designs and plants a garden, offers insights into his idea of growth verses design. In an effort to describe the difference between a planned neighborhood and an “organic” neighborhood, Jacobs wrote that “the difference is the difference between dealing with living, complex organisms, capable of shaping their own destinies, and dealing with fixed and inert settlements, capable merely of custodial care (if that) of what has been bestowed upon them.”132 This view of cities as complex organisms capable of “shaping their own destinies” resonates with the idea of non-planning insofar as it suggests that the planner is an unnecessary agent of interference in the growth and development of cities. Jacobs considered cities as processes, “because the subject dictates this. . . . [I]t follows that one must think of catalysts of these processes.”133 As we will see, this idea would play an important role in the development of urban theory, especially in the work of Melvin Webber, whose view of the city was “orientated to metropolitan processes” in an effort to “pose a dynamic portrait of metropolitan form in action” (see chapter 5). Alfred North Whitehead, the renowned British mathematician and philosopher, pioneered the field of study of process of philosophy, described as a way of “coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us.”134 Yet Hayek wrote, “This belief that processes which are consciously directed are necessarily superior to any spontaneous process is an unfounded superstition.” He continued, “It would be truer to say, as A. N. Whitehead has argued . . . , that on the contrary ‘civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.’”135 Hayek believed that this phenomenon had profound significance, particularly in thinking about common practices that built on generations of habits and successful social institutions that in turn established the foundation of civilization. The fact of this, Hayek explained, “is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science.” Of the as-found systems that had spontaneously grown up, Hayek concluded, “nobody has yet succeeded in designing an alternative system in 159 | s P o n t A n e o u s c i t y

which certain features of the existing one can be preserved which are dear even to those who most violently assail it— such as particularly the extent to which the individual can choose his pursuits and consequently freely use his own knowledge and skill.”136 It would be difficult to find a passage that better described Jacobs’s own view of the city and the crucial role that its ordinary inhabitants played in constructing its dynamic order. Referring to the “social engineer,” in “The Influence of the Natural Sciences on Social Sciences,” the first chapter of The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952), Hayek wrote that “all the parts of the complex of operations are performed in the engineer’s mind before they start, that all the ‘data’ on which the work is based have explicitly entered his preliminary calculations and been condensed into the blueprint that governs the execution of the whole scheme.”137 “The engineer, in other words, has complete control of the particular little world with which he is concerned, surveys it in all its relevant aspects and has to deal only with ‘known quantities.’ So far as the solution of his engineering problem is concerned, he is not taking part in a social process in which others may take independent decision, but lives in a separate world of his own.” Hayek concluded that “the engineer’s view of his job as complete in itself is, in some measure, a delusion.”138 Offering an example of fluctuating market prices, Hayek explained that the central planner cannot understand them because “they are not objective attributes of things but reflections of a particular human situation at a given time and place. And as his knowledge does not explain why those changes in price occur which often interfere with his plans, any such interference appears to him due to irrational (that is, not consciously directed) forces, and he resents the necessity of paying attention to magnitudes which appear meaningless to him.”139 As did the unregulated market, cities posed new kinds of challenges, what Jacobs described as “a problem in organized complexity.”140 It is noteworthy that Hayek called out one of Jacobs’s great adversaries, accusing him of being obsessed with planning and denounced his endless efforts to impose order and control on all aspects of life. In a scathing critique of Saint-Simon’s attempt to organize all aspects of society, Hayek wrote: “One can sometimes believe that one is reading a contemporary work of an H. G. Wells, a Lewis Mumford, or an Otto Neurath. Nor is the complaint missing about the intellectual crisis, the moral chaos, which must be overcome by the imposition of a new scientific creed.”141 He concluded, “That anything is not consciously directed as a whole is regarded as itself a blemish, a proof of its irrationality and the need completely to replace it by a deliberately designed mechanism.”142 These theories about the undesigned nature of society and their great potential for moving beyond preconceived notions of a planned order undoubtedly made their way, consciously or not, into the core of Jacobs’s philosophy. Just as Hayek explored “the ways in which the knowledge of innumerable market participants culminated in an overall order of economic activity,”

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Jacobs used a similar logic and studied the ways in which countless city dwellers going about their daily lives, according to their own plans, produced an order of organized complexity. Hayek and Jacobs both reject the Cartesian rationalism associated with intentional design and planning in favor of a more organic formation or spontaneous order. The term natural together with organism has been used historically “to describe an orderliness or regularity that was not the product of deliberate human will,” and this was generally “understood to refer to the spontaneously grown in contrast to the invented or designed.” By the 1950s, Hayek noted, these ideas were becoming “widely accepted, at least within the field of social theory proper.”143 Therefore, it was not just that a greater understanding of these complex orders was emerging within the sciences but that this new understanding was accompanied by a belief that “the order which formed itself spontaneously was also the best order possible.”144 During this period, many scientists enthusiastically turned to the study of cybernetics to understand the complexity of social phenomena.

cyber netic s And seLf- o rgA nizing s y s t e m s The late 1950s were marked by extraordinary developments in cybernetics and systems theory.145 In 1958 the Vienna-born Heinz von Foerster founded the Biological Computer Laboratory, an independent division within the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois. That same year, Warren Weaver’s essay “Science and Complexity” was reprinted in the annual report of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had granted $10,000 to support “a study of the relation of function to design in large cities” to Jane Jacobs.146 In June 1961, shortly before the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Foerster hosted the “Symposium on Principles of Self- Organization,” which brought together such notables as the neurophysiologist and cybernetician Warren McCulloch, general systems theorists Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Anatol Rapoport, management cybernetician Stafford Beer, neuropsychiatrist Ross Ashby, logician Lars Löfgren, the eminent cybernetician Gordon Pask, and Friedrich Hayek.147 This, and other similar events, underscores Hayek’s ability to engage multiple disciplines and the consonance between his work and cutting-edge scientific debates. Hayek was not alone. This was a period in which multiple disciplines converged to explore the phenomenon of organized complexity and consider its impact on various fields of study. Some of this was due to the continuing impact of Weaver’s work. The economist Philip Mirowski urged his peers to become familiar with literature on cybernetics because “every major transformation of the postwar orthodoxy in economics can be understood as a more or less direct function of a prior development in related cyborg science.”148 For him, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949)149 provided the theoretical foundation for a list of extraordinary developments that followed.150 Hayek himself, reflecting on relationships

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between cybernetics and market processes, wrote that the “mutual adjustment of individual plans is brought about by what, since the physical sciences have also begun to concern themselves with spontaneous orders, or ‘self-organizing systems,’ we have learnt to call ‘negative feedback.’” Long before cybernetics, he wrote, “Adam Smith had just as clearly used the idea in his The Wealth of Nations (1776). The ‘invisible hand’ that regulates prices to a nicety is clearly this idea. In a free market, says Smith in effect, prices are regulated by negative feedback.”151 By 1961, as Jacobs was publishing The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as previously noted, Hayek had completed “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” in which he explored how social structures are made up of complex patterns.152 Relying on Weaver’s insight, he concluded that, unlike physical objects, social objects are not physical and thus “more complex because we call physical phenomena what can be described by relatively simple formulae.”153 In contrast, social objects elude such simple formulas because they are in large measure constituted by our beliefs and judgments, which are subjective.154 Proceeding from the inanimate to the “more highly organized” animate, such as social phenomena, requires explanations that are “much more elaborate than anything describing the general laws of mechanics.” This observation chimes with the work of Jacobs and others, who conceived of cities as organisms with highly complex behaviors that had previously not been fully understood or appreciated. In 1966, Hayek organized the “Analogy Symposium” in an attempt to investigate various fields in which spontaneous order might be found. He called it “a symposium on unconscious rules governing conscious action. The discussion would have to start by considering the role which rules not known to the actor play in physical skills, language, law and morals, the visual arts with the aim of throwing light on the cultural transmission of unformulated rules (i.e., their acquisition without explicit teaching).”155 It was reasoned that the unconscious aspects of knowledge, not unlike the unplanned city, were governed by organic rules far superior to those consciously contrived. The implications of these ideas were enormous. A year after the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Richard H. Meier, the regional planner and systems theorist published A Communications Theory of Urban Growth, in which he asserted what was quickly becoming a cliché: “A city is a complex living system.”156 That same year the social scientist Herbert A. Simon published “The Architecture of Complexity,” in which he expressed his gratitude for “valuable comments on the manuscript” to Meier and Warren Weaver.157 In addition to Weaver’s writings, Simon made use of the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948). He declined to offer “a formal definition of ‘complex systems,’” yet he wrote, “by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way.” Apparently, that was enough to convince Robert Venturi of the concept’s relevance for design debates; he quoted Simon’s definition in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi explained, “The difficult whole in an architecture of complexity

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and contradiction includes multiplicity and diversity of elements in relationships that are inconsistent or among the weaker kinds perceptually,” then asserted that “Gestalt psychology maintains that context contributes meaning to a part and change in context causes change in meaning. The architect thereby, through the organization of parts, creates meaningful contexts for them within the whole.”158 This new approach, as Venturi asserted, was meant to move beyond “those city planners who paint ‘fairy stories over our chaotic reality’ and suppress those complexities and contradictions inherent in art and experience.”159 But for Jacobs, these “complexities and contradictions” of the city were not merely part of a formal arrangement; they were integral to a much deeper structure of the city. These debates in architecture unfolded in a context in which the non-designed parts of cities were beginning to be appreciated for their vitality and complexity.

ci t i es A s nAtu re: co mPLexit y, s cie nce , A n d t he b io Lo gic AL AnALog y The concept of evolution helped Hayek to explain how, through trial and error, traditional social institutions had “developed by a process of the elimination of the less effective.”160 This Darwinian philosophy not only informed the work of Hayek, Popper, and others associated with classical liberalism but also informed Jacobs’s thinking about cities and the economy.161 She insisted that cities are part of nature and believed it a mistake to separate the two. Hayek not only had affirmed this notion but also had traced the mistake all the way back to the distinction made by Greek philosophers between the natural and the artificial, where the latter meant constructed by man. As Bruce Caldwell observed, “This apparently common-sensical distinction misses, of course, all those phenomena which arise . . . as the result of human action but not of human design.”162 Like Hayek and Popper, Jacobs championed an evolutionary epistemology. The notion that humans are just as much a part of nature as any other organism— an assumption that undergirded her groundbreaking theories on the city— is perhaps the most productive, but also the most dubious, aspect of her philosophy insofar as it drew analogies between healthy natural ecologies, on the one hand, and cities and economics, on the other. Weaver asked, “Why can a salamander regenerate an amputated limb, whereas a man cannot? How does the DNA molecule reproduce itself, and just how does it store genetic information?” He then noted that these “are not problems of disorganized complexity, to which statistical methods hold the key. They are all problems which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors, which are interrelated into an organic whole. They are all . . . problems of organized complexity.”163 Significantly, referring to the complex mechanism of the market, he then asked, “On what does the price of wheat depend? This too is a problem of organized complexity.” Presumably Jacobs took from this hypothesis basic principles that she believed could inform a

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new understanding of the city and economics. Biological analogies featured prominently in the work of Popper, Hayek, and Jacobs. Seductive as they may be, too often the generalizations associated with biological analogies reflect the biases of the observer rather than rigorous scientific inquiry. Just as Hayek was determined to demonstrate that free-market economies functioned like a garden, Jacobs seemed equally determined to prove that cities, like all living organisms, were natural phenomena: “Human beings are, of course, a part of nature, as much so as grizzly bears or bees or whales or sorghum cane. The cities of human beings are as natural, being a product of one form of nature, as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters.”164 Jacobs apparently associated such controversial insights with the work of the American botanist Edgar Anderson, particularly his essay “The City Is a Garden.”165 Yet her claim that Anderson wrote about “cities as a form of nature” is entirely misleading. While Anderson wrote compelling stories that examined the intimate relationship of gardens, animals, and other various forms of nature that existed in cities, he does not argue that cities are “natural.” Jacobs, apparently, held a certain parti pris that demanded justification: namely, just as the free-market economy was a natural phenomenon, cities are part of nature and governed by the rules of organicism. “There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature,” Jacobs warned, explaining that the destruction of the wild and rural countryside for suburban development was certainly not done out of respect for or love of nature but out of a “sentimental desire to toy, rather patronizingly, with some insipid, standardized, suburbanized shadow of nature— apparently in sheer disbelief that we and our cities, just by virtue of being, are a legitimate part of nature too, and involved with it in a much deeper and more inescapable way than grass trimming, sunbathing, and contemplative uplift.”166 Such outrage, undoubtedly gleaned from the lessons of “Counter-Attack against Subtopia” and other such incursions on low-density development, would form a line of division separating old cities and diffuse cities as two radically different vision of the unplanned city.167 It is both curious and telling that Jacobs understood cities but not suburbs to be part of nature. This discrepancy undoubtedly had to do with the dynamic concentration of economic and social relationships she identified with cities, unlike the “thin dispersions” of suburbs that “lack any reasonable degree of innate vitality, staying power, or inherent usefulness as settlements.”168 By the end of the 1960s British critics appeared, on the one hand, to have learned the lesson of Jacobs, proclaiming: “The planning system, as now constituted in Britain, is not merely negative. It has positively pernicious results.” Yet on the other hand, and perhaps to Jacobs’s consternation, they also argued: “The irony is that the planners themselves consistently talk— since the appearance of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities— about the need to restore spontaneity and vitality to urban life. They never seem to draw the obvious conclusion – that the monuments of our century that have spontaneity

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and vitality are found not in the old cities, but in the American west.”169 The one thing, it seems, that remained constant in their anti-establishment stance was a trust that a “living city would evolve, capable of self-adjusting, and thrive on the unfettered forces of the market and the proliferation of commerce. Jacobs pushed the biological analogy further, arguing: “In a natural ecology, the more diversity there is, the more flexibility, too, because of what ecologists call its greater numbers of ‘homeostatic feedback loops,’ meaning that it includes greater numbers of feedback controls for automatic self-correction. It is the same with our economics.”170 Similar biological analogies were used to draw parallels between freemarket economics and natural processes in postwar British design theory. Simon Sadler saw that in the work of Archigram: “Expendability was analogous to the healthy life-and-death cycle of the natural organism. Organicism had long lurked as the repressed alternative to the mechanistic, rationalistic discourse dominating modernism.”171 The liberal discourse on organicism, which perceives markets, cities, and other social institutions as part of a spontaneous order, informs the libertarian belief that only unrestrained capitalism can establish an open, free market order, sustained by impersonal laws rather than the guiding hand of political authority.

LudW ig vo n mises: rAdic AL Libe r tA r iA nis m i n gr e enWic h viLLAge Following World War II, the intellectual impact of Austrian exiles in the United States was particularly noticeable in many disciplines. One of these exiles was Hayek’s mentor, the economist Ludwig von Mises, who moved to the United States with the support of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the William Volker Fund. From 1945 to 1969 he was well established in Jacobs’s backyard, so to speak, as a visiting professor at New York University in Greenwich Village. He had established an influential critique of the “planned chaos” of economic planning and promoted free-market economics as an alternative in books such as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922) and Liberalismus (1927). While in New York, he produced his magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949), which was followed by Planning for Freedom (1952). “When Socialism first appeared in 1922, its impact was profound,” Hayek wrote. “It gradually but fundamentally altered the outlook of many of the young idealists returning to their university studies after World War I. I know, for I was one of them.” Hayek continued, “We felt that the civilization in which we had grown up had collapsed. We were determined to build a better world, and it was this desire to reconstruct society that led many of us to the study of economics. Socialism promised to fulfill our hopes for a more rational, more just world. And then came this book. Our hopes were dashed. Socialism told us that we had been looking for improvement in the wrong direction.”172 That message was received by an ever-expanding audience, particularly after

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World War II, when many began to seriously question the planned economy of state-sponsored socialism. In Planning for Freedom, Mises contrasted conscious planning with automatic forces: “As the self-styled ‘progressives’ see things, the alternative is: ‘automatic forces’ or ‘conscious planning.’ It is obvious, they go on saying, that to rely upon automatic processes is sheer stupidity. No reasonable man can seriously recommend doing nothing and letting things go without any interference through purposive action. A plan, by the very fact that it is a display of conscious action, is incomparably superior to the absence of any planning. Laissez faire means: let evils last and do not try to improve the lot of mankind by reasonable action.”173 He concluded unequivocally, “This is utterly fallacious and deceptive talk.” His libertarianism placed the individual and the individual’s liberty to determine his or her own affairs at the center of all debates. Continuing, he claimed that “the truth is that the choice is not between a dead mechanism and a rigid automatism on the one hand and conscious planning on the other hand. The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is: whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself or should the paternal government alone plan for all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action: it is spontaneous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence.”174 This powerful discourse on individual choice had an enormous impact on the development of countercultural ideas that spread across the nation. Mises soon “was the focal center of the libertarian movement of the post-war period in the United States: a guide and an eternal inspiration to us all,” said Murray Rothbard.175 Over the course of two decades, Mises attracted high school and college students who listened reverentially while he recited carefully prepared lectures from notes. His seminars were attended by many who would become hugely influential in economics, politics, and business in the following decades, including Henry Hazlitt, Israel Kirzner, George Reisman, Hans Sennholz, and members of the “Circle Bastiat,” which thrived from 1953 to 1959 and included Robert Hessen, Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico, and Murray Rothbard.176 Mises’s philosophy persuaded many important economists and political analysts including Benjamin Anderson, Max Eastman, Sylvester J. Petro, Leonard Read, and Ayn Rand, who hosted the birth of the objectivist movement in her apartment.177 Between the publication of Planning for Freedom and Rand’s magnum opus Atlas Shrugged (1957), these informal networks of libertarian philosophy spread across many disciplines. This movement rejected collectivism in support of individualism and championed an unregulated free-market economy as a radical alternative to statism. By the late 1950s the libertarian view was one of the most powerfully independent voices in the United States, informing some of the most radical ideas of the New Left and the New Right in the 1960s.178 The British historian David Goodway, an authority on anarchism and libertarian socialism, recognizes the frequent confusion over the past few decades caused by the ambiguous overlap of extreme left libertarianism and extreme right libertarianism, and the need

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to distinguish the two.179 Both of these extremes reject planning and the state while promoting spontaneous order. Although Jane Jacobs may not have been associated with this New York libertarian movement, its provocative conclusion about individual choice and planning was reflected in her insistence on the right of common citizens to freely pursue their own “individual plan.” Jacobs’s “planning for vitality” mantra, repeated continuously in the chapter “Governing and Planning Districts” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, reflected many of the views that were circulating in New York in libertarian circles. As an alternative to planning, Hayek and Mises had long supported the spontaneous actions of free individuals pursing their own individual plans. They objected to planning and government interference because, they believed, it interrupted or repressed the processes of the free-market economy. Mises concluded that “laissez faire means: let the individual citizen, the much talked-about common man, choose and act and do not force him to yield to a dictator.”180 This is the social and political context in which Jacobs formulated her critique of modern city planning. She believed that cities developed best when left to spontaneous order, sustained by the vitality, diversity, and ingenuity of individual free choice and a free market economy. She saw the city, like the free market, as a dynamic and spontaneous social and economic phenomenon; if the goal was to thrive, neither the market nor the city should be subjected to the arbitrary controls of planning. It was undoubtedly these types of conclusions that caught the attention of libertarians, many of whom see in Jacobs’s work an anti-establishment, anti-government, and certainly an anti-planning position. Jacobs was not, at least in the latter years, against all forms of planning. Hayek and others in the Austrian school of economics believed that planners simply could not gather all the information necessary to satisfy individual preference (only individuals have access to that kind of information). Consequently, they, like she, believed in a type of planning that would allow individuals to freely plan their own affairs. The literature on the relationship between Jacobs and libertarianism is vast, much of it in the popular press, and since the 1990s has grown significantly. In “Jane Jacobs: Libertarian Outsider” (2012), Jeff Riggenbach argued that “the basic logic of Jane Jacobs’s work must lead an attentive reader inexorably to a libertarian view of human social relations. Jane Jacobs never realized that a libertarian was exactly what she was, however reluctant or half-hearted her commitment to it may have seemed to her. She was perhaps the ultimate libertarian outsider.”181 This view of her work is not a recent phenomenon. Already in the February 15, 1970, issue of The Libertarian Forum, Murray Rothbard concluded that Jacobs’s The Economy of Cities was a “brilliant, scintillating work celebrating the primacy for economic development, past and present, of free-market cities.”182 For nearly a century now the assertion that a free market is the only viable means of developing a free society has been repeated countless times in various disciplines, including architecture and urban planning.

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The polemic of planned order versus spontaneous order has guided, consciously or not, some of the most powerful critiques of modern planning since the 1920s.183 Jacobs’s work is firmly established in this lineage, and, rightfully or wrongfully, it may be largely responsible for the widespread dissemination of anti-planning views in academic as well as popular literature. A decade after the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the repercussions of its critique could be felt across many disciplines. Just as Hayek had argued that the control of economic and social forces tended to produce a form of totalitarianism, many young architects and urbanists of the period came to similar conclusions about central planning. In After the Planners (1971), Robert Goodman denounced the state-sponsored “urban renewal” housing projects of the period, which he defined as the “Architecture of Repression.” In a section titled “Metaphors of Fascism,” he drew relentless parallels between architects and urban planners and Adolf Hitler, highlighting their common error in “glorifying the state by making individual efforts seem insignificant.” Castigating architects for their tendency to reproduce hierarchical power structures, Goodman wrote, “It’s an old game, historically played out not only by the governments but by churches and other institutions. It forms the basis for present-day visions of glorifying government through architectural propaganda.”184 Since that period there is no shortage of literature that attests to the continuing influence of Jacobs’s work on new generations of architects, planners, and preservationists. For her insights into the “real” way cities work and her political activism, Jacobs was hailed as a radical and a representative of the common man against the powerful bureaucracy of government and urban planning agencies that dominated city politics. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of the mostly widely read books on cities, and many claim that the revolution it created in planning and design disciplines has inspired a powerful movement that continues even to the present.185 Unlike previous generations of ideologically driven, well-meaning socialists, Jacobs, like many of her generation, believed that she was simply describing the reality of the city as found. She offered that “through the embodied energy and experience of [cities’] hundreds of thousands of self-organizing designers, new life would emerge out of the nonlinear dynamics of great cities.”186 She, like advocates of the Austrian school, believed that free choice and a free market not only produced a condition that could rectify the destructive ideologies of rationalist modern planning but also provided a radical alternative to the impulse to impose arbitrary order through design. Jacobs maintained, to the end and seemingly with great pride, that her views were “not ideological,” an assertion endorsed by many of her disciples.187 The idea that a spontaneous order embodies a greater form of freedom than a planned order remains one of the most powerful and persistent myths of the postwar period.

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5 : Chaos or Control no n- de si g n An d th e A m e ri c A n c i t y

Following World War II, parallel to the rise of modern urban planning in the United States, the American metropolis expanded enormously. Marked by widespread economic and technological changes, the period witnessed soaring numbers of automobiles along with the development of thousands of miles of highways that stretched across the country, connecting the old city centers with new, far-flung, detached single-family houses. In cities of the Southwest, such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas, an unprecedented car-based urbanism centered on commercial strips, and extravagant roadside advertisement signs emerged. This “unplanned” urban development, which became ever more pronounced throughout the 1950s, became the central topic of major public debates.1

d eformAtion And AutomAt ic P ro ce s s e s One of the most persistent images of the American city is that of a commercially vibrant yet disorganized landscape. As the historian John L. Hancock pointed out, throughout much of its history, urban policy in the United States was merely “commercial-expansionist, permitting any local standards and practices not in conflict with mercantile contracts or democratic constitutions from which the towns derived their charters.”2 As a result, American attitudes toward the built environment have often been inseparable from deeply rooted views of commerce. This sentiment was well articulated by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1886, when he wrote: “The American . . . need not fear the unhealthy or abnormal growth of cities. . . . The free play of economic laws is keeping all quite right. . . . Oh, these grand, immutable, all-wise laws of natural forces, how perfectly they work if human legislators would only let them alone!”3 This laissez-faire attitude toward the American city, with its haphazard growth and development, produced its own peculiar cultural attitude toward urban space. For urban theorists such as Lewis Mumford, the widespread transformation of the American city throughout the twentieth century was just one more

f igu re 5.1 Representations in art of shock, disfigurement, and deformation of civilization from Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944). © 2020 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

symptom of a larger cultural paradigm he referred to as the “drama of disintegration.”4 In The Condition of Man (1944), in a chapter titled “Barbarism and Dissolution,” Mumford described a world in a state of dissolution. Of the shattered universe of Guernica depicted by Pablo Picasso, Mumford wrote, “Disintegration can go no further this side of sanity.” Following the removal of limits, which unleashed “deeper psychal and social disintegration,” the deformation of cities through dispersion, Mumford suggested, should be understood as the emergence of a monstrous mutation, and its formless manifestations could be accompanied only by grave social disorders (fig. 5.1).5 The relationship between urban form and social order was fundamental to theorists like Patrick Geddes and his disciple Mumford.6 Any form of urbanism that veered away from an idealized form raised the fear of losing aesthetic control over the urban and social body.

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mA n - mAde Americ A The Visual character of the United States, compared with Western Europe, is that of a young, highly industrialized country whose most conspicuous features seldom go back more than a century . . . which lacks the ancient harmony created by centuries of cultivation. Dotted with factories, crossed by railways, traversed by great automobile highways and bridges, all mingled with survivals of a simple rural past, it is a landscape which has not yet fully assimilated the machine age. But in both city and country, sheer engineering grandeur often achieves an unintended beauty. LLoy d g o o dr ic h

However unfortunate those swayed by the prejudice of a deeply rooted European cultural sensibility may find it, what the American art historian Lloyd Goodrich called the “unintended beauty” of the American landscape has fascinated many American and European observers. This vexing aesthetic problem of the American city became the point of departure for an investigation into this phenomenon. “Man Made America: A Special Number of the Architectural Review for December 1950” examined the contemporary American scene (fig. 5.2).7 The British editors and contributors relied on extensive research and on a long lineage of writers, including the American Henry James, who, after living in England for forty years, had traveled throughout the United States and documented his observations in The American Scene (1907), consistently criticizing the rampant materialism and greed of American commerce and noting what he perceived as its accompanying frayed social structure.8 James wrote eloquently about the “questionable beauty” of the American city and what he saw as its “bad bold beauty.”9 This view of American culture was not uncommon among many British writers of the period. “Unintended beauty,” the editors complained, “is real enough and frequently to be found. So, unfortunately, is the unintended squalor.”10 As a theoretical framework to explore this phenomenon, the editors set out to prove the theory that the man-made urban and rural landscape, in all its totality, whether created consciously or unconsciously, by acts of commission or omission, was the realization of that society’s “form-will.”11 In a place where visual chaos reigns, the editors asked, can America develop such a will? The research was ultimately intended to provide answers to questions that deeply troubled them, such as whether the United States wished to be, as other communities have been, “directly instrumental in moulding its own environment, in such a way as to reflect a visual ideal— a concept of what constitutes order and propriety in the environment— or has the American community rejected a visual ideal, in favour of a laissez-faire environment— a universe of uncontrollable chaos sparsely inhabited by happy accidents?”12 From the editors’ perspective, the idea that a society would be prepared to let go of “form-will” and become formless was unthinkable, which is to say, the idea that a civilized nation could be comfortable among urban chance and “happy accidents” was irrational. To investigate this phenomenon, the editors invited Christopher Tunnard,

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f i g u r e 5 . 2 “Man Made America,” special issue of Architectural Review (December 1950). By permission.

Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Winston Weisman, and Gerhard Kallmann to contribute essays to the issue, which also featured photographs and illustrations by Saul Steinberg, Walker Evans, and Gordon Cullen. Tunnard, a Canada-born city planner and landscape architect, taught city planning at Yale, where he subsequently became head of the City Planning Department.13 In 1950, a joint Yale University– Connecticut Development Commission conference was held to discuss the expanding urban core of the state, consisting of several cities

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figure 5.3 Christopher Tunnard, “Man Made America,” Architectural Review (December 1950). By permission.

and many towns stretching along the coast— a description that paralleled, as we shall see, Jean Gottmann’s work in Megalopolis (1961). In this same year, a visual survey of the “man-made scene” was prepared with the help of students in the Graduate Program in City Planning at Yale; this was included in the special issue (figs. 5.3– 5.6).14 Tunnard introduced his essay in the issue with a quote from James’s The American Scene that referred to the promiscuous nature of the place: “It might have struck you that great cities, with the eyes of the world on them, as the phrase is, should be capable either of a proper form or (failing this) of a proper compunction; which tributes to propriety were (on the part of American cities) equally wanting.”15 James’s observation was, for Tunnard, “the most acute description (naturally it is the most literate) of the visible American city.” Although this questionable aesthetic dominated the landscape, it was still possible to find “where suddenly the city becomes something more than commerce and takes on special character.” Tunnard noted that on the “city’s fringe, where the naïve gardens and unarchitectural houses of those who supply the central markets offer the stimulus of a loudly coloured folk art, making the timid inner suburbs seem pale and sickly replicas of a monument called Taste.”16 The acknowledgment of both planned and nonplanned aspects of the city was significant, demonstrating the extent to which the townscape doctrine informed debates.

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figure 5.4 Christopher Tunnard, “Man Made America,” Architectural Review (December 1950). By permission.

The country’s most remarkable achievement, Tunnard suggested, was the triumph in engineering and science in “making the city work,” seen in the boldness of skyscrapers and superhighways, which represented the “sum-total of American enterprise, ingenuity of getting things done.” Even if much of that boldness “cannot be comprehended by the eye,” it nonetheless characterized the most significant aspect of American urbanism. But ultimately it lacked “significant urban forms.” While one may find spots of “pleasing buildings,” the “architectural complex was rare.” Tunnard concluded his observations: “Planning in the United States is still in the ‘control’ and educational phase; there are even now far too many people in high places who are unable or unwilling to recognize chaos when they see it. It is up to American planners to convince these people that over-all planning for metropolitan areas is an immediate necessity.”17 In 1951 Douglas Haskell, editor of Architectural Forum, published a reply to “Man Made America.” Upon reading its “wholesale condemnation of American civilization,” Haskell noted, “stunned U.S. readers were to experience how an innocent savage feels when set upon by an outraged and consecrated missionary.” In defense of America, Haskell noted that “its scale and tempo both lie outside European experience.” And to the “European cliché thinking” that characterized America as “squalor” and a “visually scrofulous wasteland,”

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figure 5.5 Christopher Tunnard, “Man Made America,” Architectural Review (December 1950). By permission.

Haskell retorted that “no European country was born of the concurrent release of the energy and self-steering initiative of the common people.” In considering the “high velocity of change” that characterized the place, Haskell warned that “in the realm of pattern we must be wary of precisely the best articulated and most elegantly polished European solutions— they can be ridiculous at our big scale, and are subject to the quickest obsolescence.” He concluded: “Some final question remains as to what is ugly? These are great reservoirs of

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figure 5.6 Christopher Tunnard, “Man Made America,” Architectural Review (December 1950). By permission.

vitality even [in] its honky-tonk. Democracy has her victories. To paraphrase Whitman, the gross and the soil’d she moves among need not make her gross and soil’d . . . she is none the less considerate or friendly therefore.”18 Haskell’s support of popular non-designed environments was rare among intellectuals of the period and would prove influential for a new generation of architects and critics in the 1960s.19 176 | c h A P t e r f i v e

In contrast to the more tolerant attitude that Haskell maintained toward the non-design artifact, the young critic Ian Nairn took a more determined stance. In “Outrage,” a special issue of the Architectural Review published in June 1955, Nairn turned his attention to the “uglification” of the British landscape, with his work supplemented by Gordon Cullen’s illustrations of a range of the banal accoutrements that he felt defaced British suburbs.20 Further denouncing “urban chaos,” in December 1956 the Architectural Review released another special issue, “Counter-Attack against Subtopia,” edited by Nairn, which offered a scathing critique of suburbs, the “new towns,” and the legacy of the garden city.21 The issue opened with a photograph of Los Angeles, which apparently represented for the editors the worst example of suburban sprawl. For the authors, low-density development was the principal crisis of the contemporary city; consequently, they insisted on the importance of urban density. This campaign attracted widespread attention among many British and American academics and professionals, particularly William H. Whyte.

t he unPLAnned exPLosion Sponsored by Fortune magazine to conduct extensive interviews with executives of corporations such as General Electric and Ford, in 1956 the American sociologist and journalist William H. Whyte published The Organization Man, in which he criticized the demise of individuality and the rise of a new conformity in postwar American culture.22 Whyte described an overarching organizational system that bonded a new kind of conformed man to the corporate system, encompassing everything from the office environment to the new suburbs.23 Directly following the publication of The Organization Man, Whyte, along with other editors of Fortune, turned his attention to the new suburban developments in The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (1958).24 The essays were intended to sound an alarm about the centrifugal movement from the center city and to demonstrate how “uncontrollable development on the fringe of the metropolitan area is going to extend its limits vastly— and ruin much of it at the same time.”25 Whyte narrated an impending future of America as an alienated landscape of chaos. Supported by foreboding statistics, he indicated that in 1945 “more Americans were home owners than renters; each year since, almost a million families have been joining the majority, and almost all of this increase has been taking place in the new subdivisions of suburbia.”26 Nonetheless, Whyte argued that suburbanites are “reluctant émigrés” who, with proper persuasion, could be convinced to return to the city. While asserting that the “norm of American aspiration is now in suburbia” and reinforcing the theme of conformity expressed in The Organization Man, Whyte wrote that “the happy family of TV commercials, of magazine covers and ads, lives in suburbia.”27 Attempting to empathize with individuals who felt alienated by such environments, Whyte informed his readers that this book “concerns everyone who finds no home for himself in the bewildering jumble of our present American cities and their 177 | c h A o s o r c o n t r o L

suburbs.”28 The collection of essays attempted to assess the situation and offer reasonable solutions and guidelines for establishing a sense of place in the urban environment based on the “scale of the city.” At a time when urban development was dominated by “pompous formalist patterns” of anti-city modern architecture and planning, the essays articulated a plea for a “return to the city.” The critiques were directed at both the planned modern projects and the unplanned suburban city, a distinction that would become increasingly important in the 1960s.29 Inserted between Whyte’s chapter, “Urban Sprawl,” and Jane Jacobs’s closing chapter, “Downtown Is for People,” was an extensive series of drawings. The editors had asked Gordon Cullen and Ian Nairn to look at American cities and depict not the “horrors known so well, but the strengths, so easily overlooked” (fig. 5.7).30 The book captured a defining moment in the rise of a new attitude toward the transformations of the built American landscape. Reinforcing the attitude of the editors, one reviewer of the book wrote that “it is a warning to city-dwellers and suburbanites of ‘the coming chaos’ in suburb and city alike if big city projects and suburban overdevelopment are not studied from the viewpoint of human requirements.”31 Despite criticism by planners and architects for its journalistic approach, the book expanded on a growing body of literature attacking non-planned suburban developments, circulating its views in a widely read national business periodical while perpetuating the stereotypes of suburbs. That same year, the young scholar and sociologist Herbert Gans moved into Levittown, New Jersey, with his wife to research the new settlement, which resulted in the extremely influential book The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (1967). The book undermined many prevailing stereotypes about the people living among the “formidable changes” occurring across the United States. As one critic reported, “Running throughout the book is the theme that there is nothing about suburbanism as such which makes people different, more ready to conform, seek togetherness or become conservative, and there is nothing about the suburban society as a society which makes it more or less desirable than any other society man has created for himself.”32 The book proved a significant and incisive critique of the attitudes of many planners, sociologists, and critics of the mid-twentieth-century American city. In 1961, the same year that Lewis Mumford published The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects and Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jean Gottmann, a Ukraine-born, French-educated geographer, published Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States,33 which conceptualized a six-hundred-milelong “city” along the Eastern Seaboard, stretching from Massachusetts to Virginia (fig. 5.8). Fleeing France during the Nazi invasion, Gottmann emigrated to the United States, where he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Between 1952 and 1955, at the request of Paul Mellon, of Washington’s Old Dominican Foundation, and

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f i g u r e 5 . 7 (above, center, below) Gordon Cullen and Ian Nairn, “The Scale of the City” from William H. Whyte Jr., ed., The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958).

figure 5.8 Map of suburbanization pattern in 1950 from Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961). Reprinted courtesy of the MIT Press.

Abraham Flexner, founder of the Institute for Advanced Study, he combined research on economy, society, and geography to produce the first regional study of the state of Virginia.34 In addition to frequent trips along the Eastern Seaboard between teaching positions in Boston and Washington, his research on Virginia allowed him to become increasingly familiar with the American landscape. In 1956 the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who became director of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947 and was also a director

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of the Twentieth Century Fund, persuaded Gottmann to become research director for metropolitan studies at the Fund’s New York base, which provided funding and allowed him to develop the study with a research team. After five years of working with his research team, he produced a detailed study of the urbanized northeastern part of the seaboard, which was published as Megalopolis. According to Gottmann, the research was the culmination of at least fifteen years of conscious concentration on the subject.35 Rather than focus on individual cities, Megalopolis emphasized instead the extensive network of cities and described an almost-continuous system of deeply interwoven urban and suburban areas stretching from approximately southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia, and from the Atlantic shore to the Appalachian foothills, with a population of about thirty-seven million people in 1960.36 Unlike the philosophy of urban theorists such as Mumford, and in light of the formless characteristics of the American metropolis, Gottmann’s research offered a coherent way to help understand the amorphous territory, described as a single functional region but not continuous urban sprawl. For Gottmann, the emergence of this massive conurbation established a paradigm of the future. Although each individual city may have been seen as a product of fragmentation, disintegration, and dispersal, the concept of megalopolis recuperated a semblance of coherence. Yet this understanding was possible only if one were prepared to let go of received definitions of city. The thesis of the book reinforced a growing sentiment, at least in America, that the country was rising to world-historical prominence.37 It stamped the emerging American city as a new and important urban paradigm, illustrating its strengths and successes. In fact, Gottmann claimed that Megalopolis “was, on the average, the richest, best educated, best housed, and best serviced group of similar size . . . in the world.”38 Furthermore, Gottmann suggested that the “region ought to be studied as a separate entity, both as a section of the United States and for its role in the world system that was arising.”39 Consciously or not, the study also reinforced the perception that midcentury American cities were perpetually and increasingly “out of control,” which is to say, beyond the control of central agencies. Coming from the discipline of geography, Gottmann’s “objective” descriptions significantly lacked the normative tone of Mumford and Geddes and described, rather, the ultimate manifestation of conurbation as a productive explosion and merging of amorphous, megaurban regions. Such neutral descriptions undoubtedly further alarmed, if not exacerbated, urban concerns of the period. Furthermore, the research presented urbanization in America not as some entity designed by planners but as a condition independent of both design and control.

mA n - mAde Americ A: c hAo s o r co nt ro L? About this same time and to the contrary, Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev collaborated on the book Man-Made America: Chaos or Control?

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An Inquiry into Selected Problems of Design in the Urbanized Landscape (1963).40 The authors lamented that “instead of placing man at the center of the American environment, we apparently have left it either empty or cluttered with waste. Not only are our creations without soul, but they seem to be aimless and without forethought.”41 In provocative chapter section headings, such as “The Non-Beautiful” and “A Special Problem: The Roadside Commercial Strip,” they made their case for “the need for visual order.” In their effort to bring good design to the American landscape, they insisted that “urban regions must be shaped consciously with an end in view, rather than evolving, as they do now, from the haphazard results of thousands of uncoordinated private, corporate, municipal, and higher governmental decisions.”42 They chose to focus on “low-density residential areas, industry and commerce, open space, and preservation of the older urban fabric” precisely “because they are phenomena new on the American scene or demand new techniques in the exercise of control and development.”43 They saw this as “a job for many experts, but especially for the planner and the regional scientist.”44 As we have seen, both Hayek and Jacobs characterized the job otherwise. Tunnard and Pushkarev’s interest in the “appearance of rapidly-developing urban regions” formally began in 1950, at a conference held at Yale. They completed their work in the fall of 1961, which coincided with the publication of Gottmann’s Megalopolis and Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This was also the period when the term non-design was routinely used in design literature to describe a condition thought to be beyond the official aesthetic control of governing agencies and authorities. In their preface, Tunnard and Pushkarev wrote, “Today’s aesthetic failures are not in the ‘pure’ design problems, but rather in those areas which are generally considered ‘non-design’ and hence are left to decision makers who fail to take esthetic values into account.”45 In an effort to realize “The Emergence of Form,” the authors were well aware that “all this implies a change in our social values, as well as a corresponding re-allocation of resources.”46 National planning and regulations of many aspects of daily life were necessary, they said, to arrive at a new vision. Tunnard and Pushkarev were hardly alone in seeking coordinated control in the name of aesthetics. The critiques of the period launched by many planners and concerned officials could be traced back to the Architectural Review crusades of “Outrage” (1955) and “Counter-Attack against Subtopia” (1956), which not only had a strong influence over British academic and professional circles but also had helped consolidate an international design movement that sought to extend aesthetic control over the ordinary non-designed aspects of the built environment. The cryptic townscape doctrine, based on serial vision of the picturesque and the plea for a new visual order, inspired a particular way of looking at both the designed and the non-designed aspects of cities.47 It promoted the notion of visual planning and argued that “modern picturesque is different from and superior to the nineteenth-century scenographic

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architecture.”48 It advocated that one should “take the picturesque to be a visual formalism in which objects and their relations are subsumed into relations of pictorial composition from particular points of view,”49 an approach that became greatly influential throughout the postwar period. Kevin Lynch described The Image of the City (1960) as a “book about the look of cities, and whether this look is of any importance, and whether it can be changed.”50 Inspired by the British campaign, Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960) extended the “rage against visual squalor.” Like many other modern architects, Boyd believed education was key to changing the “awful mess” that characterized the urban landscape of industrialized nations. He wrote, “To learn to appreciate sound design when it does appear is part of the essential artistic education of everybody.”51 And yet some highly educated artistic Australians did not share his aesthetic views. Boyd reported that “when a few architects in New South Wales published the latest broadside against non-design in 1966, called Australian Outrage, the critic Max Harris called them old fogies and found the photographs ravishing.”52 As we shall see, this strategy of inverting the moral outrage of the planner’s argument became a recurrent strategy of many critics of the younger generation.53 By the mid-1960s the townscape doctrine dominated the debates of many American planners and concerned civic organizations. In 1964 Peter Blake, the editor of Architectural Forum, added to these debates with the publication of God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape, which began: “This book is not written in anger. It is written in fury— though not, I trust, in blind fury. It is a deliberate attack upon all those who have already befouled a large portion of this country for private gain, and are engaged in befouling the rest” (fig. 5.9).54 Conjuring up the mythology of the founding fathers, Blake believed that “America represented not merely a political challenge, but also an esthetic one: a challenge to preserve (and quite possibly, to improve upon) what someone called ‘God’s Own Country.’”55 He noted important debates of the late 1950s concerning outdoor advertising and the struggle to “preserve the scenic values of America.”56 The chief culprits, according to Blake, were the forces of unbridled capitalism driving the free market and the disregard for the resultant environment it created in its effort to promote sales. Blake explained, “Our suburbs are interminable wastelands dotted with millions of monotonous little houses on monotonous little lots and crisscrossed by highways lined with billboards, jazzed-up diners, used-car lots, drive-in movies, beflagged gas stations, and garish motels.”57 This moral outrage, which had been brewing in certain circles of American urbanism, echoed that of editors and critics of British journals such as the Architectural Review as well as a growing number of books on the postwar United States. After generations of critics, including modern architects and planners, had condemned the sprawling metropolis of the non-place suburbs and the “degenerate” roadside environments, the urban discourse of the early twentieth century had come full circle, extending from Geddes’s depictions of the “horrors” of conurbation

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f i g u r e 5 . 9 Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). Image courtesy of the estate of Elaine Lustig Cohen.

to Mumford’s writings on the American city from the 1930s to the 1960s. Consequently “the mess that is man-made American” inspired critics around the world to attack the non-designed aspects of their cities and call for “sound design” in their reorganization. But it also inspired a new generation of architects and critics to aggressively embrace the non-design phenomena as a new source of vitality as part of a critique of modern architecture. As the diffused city fully blossomed in the mid-1960s, the deep emotions that it triggered exploded.

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According to Reyner Banham, a significant change occurred “in the summer of 1965, when Tom Wolfe published The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, in which he reprinted his famous essay on Las Vegas.”58 As the newly appointed design and architecture critic of New Society, Banham’s first major contribution was a review of Wolfe’s book. He characterized a selection of essays titled “The New Culture Makers” as being “about pop and cars, and about Las Vegas. But they are of an entirely different order of social and cultural awareness to most other writing, pro or con, on these themes.”59 Banham made his first visit to Las Vegas in December 1965, and, as he pointed out, “by the summer of ’66 it was required viewing for all architectural students visiting North America.”60 It was also in 1965 that Denise Scott Brown first visited Las Vegas on her way to take a teaching position in California, and the following year she was joined by Robert Venturi. The shift in focus from the East Coast to the West Coast was significant. While much of the urban debates, including Jane Jacobs’s hugely influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities, had focused on traditional pedestrian-oriented, high-density cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the younger generation had turned its attention to the new automobile-oriented, low-density cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas, urban manifestations that the architecture and planning establishment had largely dismissed as a debased form of urbanism driven by unscrupulous moneymakers. Banham, who had long been an avid observer of American culture and its technological developments, argued that Wolfe’s preoccupation with exposing the “irrelevance of established fine-art standards of judgment” to what was actually happening in America had an immediate impact on new ways of understanding culture and its relationship to the ordinary existing conditions of the contemporary city.61 In the context of a growing consciousness of planning, informed by idealized aesthetic attitudes based on the “European city,” Banham demonstrated how a certain “debased” outlook toward American culture, persisted well into the 1960s, including among Americans themselves. Commenting on this condition, Banham wrote: “I have a problem with American food— my American friends won’t let me eat it.” He described how they inevitably direct him toward some “amusing little Swiss place.” Connecting this attitude to a larger cultural phenomenon, he wrote: “The problem is one that must increasingly concern any student of the American scene, because that scene is increasingly composed of buildings— motels, supermarkets, bowling alleys, filling stations, hamburger stands, even private houses— conceived in this mode of emotional engineering.” Yet, if one takes this problem to US architectural critics and journalists, their normal response is the same as to American food, and they start to talk about [L]e Corbusier or [Walter] Gropius instead.”62 Within this context, an exceptional approach to the American city could be found in the work of Louis Kahn, whose unorthodox theories led some to find in his work an idea of “the road as liberator.”63

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Lo uis kAhn: the fLuid A nd A m o r P h o us cit y In the depths of the Great Depression, with little work for architects, Louis Kahn, Dominique Berninger, and others in Philadelphia began in earnest to study modern architecture.64 In 1932 they formed the Architectural Research Group to explore modern architecture and housing. During this period, like many other young architects, Kahn fell under the spell of Le Corbusier, and he began to seriously study his books, which would have included Vers une architecture and Urbanisme, both of which had been translated, and the first installment of the Oeuvre complète.65 Of particular interest to Kahn would have been Le Corbusier’s study of water as an analogy for the fluidity of automobile traffic in the city. In a 1929 lecture, Le Corbusier analyzed the forces of a river and demonstrated his fascination with the law of the meander: “I draw a river. The goal is precise: to get from one point to another: river or idea.”66 Then, in La Ville Radieuse: Eléments d’une doctrine d’urbanisme pour l’équipement de la civilisation machiniste (1935), Le Corbusier further developed his ideas about the dynamic substance, noting that “water is fluid, and what is fluid is mobile.” With great admiration, he analyzed the movement of water across the landscape from streams to rivers to deltas: “This simple and beautiful lesson ought never to be out of our minds when the time comes for us, as city planners, to establish the correct bed for that new fluid of the modern era: the automobile.” He also noted that within the fluid process there was an exception, when water meets a depression and a lake is formed. The event is a place where water is stationary. Le Corbusier explained, “We should keep this effect in mind for the day when we are forced to consider the manner in which our automobiles are to be allowed to become stationary too: parking— a lake of traffic.”67 In an attempt to prepare Europe for the massive efforts of postwar reconstruction, in 1941 Le Corbusier published The Four Routes, which was released in Britain in 1947. The study was based on four main types of movement routes: highways, railways, waterways, and airways, which extended his theoretical research on “actual plans of cities.” In the section on waterways, shifting his fascination from the design of ships to the substance that sustained them, Le Corbusier elaborated on the extraordinary quality of water and its patterns of movement: “The eternal poetic dream of ships on the ocean! Why does it always move us? . . . Feeling of space and the fluidity of matter. . . . The waterways are as old as the highways; together they serve the towns. And then there are the ports, those water towns, centres which a thousand years of planning had prepared for our ships. . . . Nothing has that fascinating purity of line which would accord so well with the changeless horizon, with the elements, with our consciousness of floating in some sacred ark between two continents.”68 His provocative writings on urbanism, undoubtedly, informed Kahn’s thinking about cities, traffic, and flows. In Kahn’s own poetic way, he developed an extensive analogy of traffic movement as water to analyze and document the midcentury American city (fig. 5.10). Kahn’s conception of the city as a fluid condition of mobility was developed in his well-known study “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia,” published in Perspecta in 1953, in which he wrote 186 | c h A P t e r f i v e

f i g u r e 5 . 1 0 Louis Kahn, “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia” in Perspecta, Vol. 2., 1953. © Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Courtesy of the MIT Press.

Expressways are like rivers These rivers frame the area to be served rivers have Harbors hArbors are the municipal parking towers From the hArbors branch a system of cAnALs that serve the interim. The cAnALs are the go streets. From the cAnALs branch cul-de-sac docks. the docks serve as the entrance hall to the buildings.69 187 | c h A o s o r c o n t r o L

A precedent for Kahn’s extraordinary drawings of the flow of traffic, using only arrows, can be found in Urbanisme, in which Le Corbusier reprinted Eugène Hénard’s scheme of 1906 for gyratory traffic or a “merry-go-round” for “mouvement continu des voitures,” a diagram using arrows to indicate traffic movement.70 Kahn’s drawings captured the essence of the motorized American city and its various forms of movement. He explained: “Architecture is also the street. . . . The design of the street is design for movement.”71 Kahn’s embrace of the city, including areas uncontrolled by design, comprising ordinary people going on about their daily lives, shopping, commerce, and its accompanying traffic and pedestrian patterns, along with parks, open spaces, and civic life, were all considered. Kahn’s dynamic all-encompassing approach “to buildings, to streets to whole cities,” is, wrote Jane Jacobs and Walter McQuade, “best translated by words like ‘nature’ or ‘organism.’”72 “A street wants to be a building” and a “‘building’ is a living thing,” like the city, therefore the “inspired planner” must “let the street live.”73 The pulsating and conflicting forces were directed but not dominated by Kahn who devised an ingenious way of studying these various flows of the “living city.” Following the modernist ideals of functional zones of segregation, Kahn proposed redefining the uses of the street by separating one type of movement from another so that cars, buses, trolleys, trucks, and pedestrians would move and stop more freely. Yet unlike many modern planning projects, Kahn’s design “utilizes the old streets,” infused with informal activities. Consequently, “zoning would grow naturally out of the type of movement on a street. Architecture would tend to be related to the type of movement.”74 His approach suggested that the living city, like water, was part of a world beyond the control of man. “For in his mind,” wrote Jane Jacobs and Walter McQuade, the city and all its parts “are not inanimate things— they are alive, or can be if they are created from a ‘principle of order.’” For Kahn, “‘order’ has little to do with orderliness or discipline.”75 According to Robert Stern, Kahn was the first American architect of stature since the decline of the Beaux arts to look at the design of cities in an architectural way. He argued that Kahn’s traffic scheme and design plan for central Philadelphia “demonstrate a measure of concern that goes deep into the nature of city problems; all is considered, local and regional implications, commercial and civic development, the scale of man and motor.”76 But perhaps the most important aspect of Kahn’s thinking about the redesign of cities, which distinguished it from most European modern city-planning ideas, notably those of Le Corbusier, was that his approach incorporated many of the existing conditions of the traditional city and attempted to deal with land-use planning in three-dimensional terms tout ensemble, as an urban strategy that was tolerant of extreme differences between planned and unplanned aspects of the city.77 As we saw in chapter 4, this approach shared certain affinities with townscape, that radical liberal doctrine that recognized and promoted in the urban landscape “the urge of the parts to be themselves to make a new kind of whole.”78

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From Kahn’s drawings and descriptions, a radically different conception of the city emerged. Unlike many postwar plans that attempted to expel the automobile from the city, Kahn’s proposal was accepting of the complexity of the city and the automobile movement patterns, without imposing an either-or solution. Kahn conceived of a “viaduct architecture,” an “entirely new concept of street movement” in which urban flows are “like rivers.”79 In a section titled “House and Harbor,” he proposed a new typology of housing using a cul-de-sac, which he called “harbor types,” as an alternative to the row-house system used by builders in Philadelphia. Kahn explained the logic behind the design: “In city planning, connection is very important to me. Not passage, not going from place to place, but simply places, areas which are treated as events in the plan and which give a feeling of connecting one thing to another, a feeling of belonging to everything in the city.”80 Both as a poetic reading of contemporary urban conditions and as a precise and realistic analysis of the multiple systems of traffic at various speeds competing with pedestrian uses of the city, Kahn’s approach to the city struggled with the various conflicting forces while allowing for a new urban form to emerge from the specific circumstances to redefine the civic nature of downtown for the postwar era. Kahn’s ideas inspired many young European architects, including Team 10 and particularly Alison and Peter Smithson, as well as many Americans, especially those who were increasingly growing dissatisfied with the creed of modern architecture.81

chA r L es mo o re: WAter, mov e m e nt, A nd P LAce Kahn’s ideas undoubtedly had a great impact on young American architects, particularly Robert Venturi and Charles Moore, the latter of whom had served as Kahn’s teaching assistant at Princeton from 1955 to 1956. Furthermore, Kahn’s reading of the city as a space of mobility and fluidity served as the key inspiration for the topic of Moore’s dissertation, water and architecture, which questioned the static nature of architecture and the city by reexamining definitions that limit architecture to the creation of enclosed static spaces.82 Declaring that dissatisfaction is the provocation for every thesis, Moore asserted that “a Ph.D. thesis in Architecture seems the proper place to try to discover a possible place for water in our design.” He wrote: “Water very rarely contributes to the enclose of space, but it contributes heavily to man’s environment. . . . [W]ater offers constant change and movement coupled in a paradox with a suggestion of the infinity of time and space. It offers qualities of splash and play and delights, and other qualities of calm, profundity, and invitation to meditation.”83 His themes of water, movement, and fluid spaces served him well in describing the new conditions of the emerging urbanism of Southern California and the far-reaching implications of the automobile. In 1962, at a time of incredible change, Charles Moore became chairman of the architecture department at Berkeley. In 1959, the university had approved the establishment of the College

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of Environmental Design, to unite the departments of architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture, and the college began operations in 1964. This interdisciplinary attitude toward design coincided with and reinforced Moore’s approach to the city, as well that of Denise Scott Brown, who met Moore upon her arrival at Berkeley in 1965. Reflecting on the contemporary urbanism of Southern California, in “You Have to Pay for the Public Life” (1965), Moore explored the meaning of urban form and monumentality. Moore insisted that “any discussion of monumental architecture in its urban setting should proceed from a definition of (or, if you prefer, an airing of prejudice about) what constitutes ‘monumental,’ and what ‘urban’ means to us.”84 He argued that “the process of achieving an urban focus is the same as that of achieving monumentality.” Building on Charles Eames’s notion that civilization depends on individuals giving up something in order that the public realm be enhanced, Moore asserted, “In the city, that is to say, urban and monumental places, indeed urbanity and monumentality themselves, can occur only when something is given over by people to the public.” Referring to José Ortega y Gasset, who, in his 1929 work La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses), after defining the origin of the polis as the Mediterranean open square, elaborated on some of the more troublesome contemporary aspects of forming unity among an otherwise dispersed people. Gasset affirmed: “The state begins when groups naturally divided find themselves obliged to live in common. This obligation is not of brute force, but implies an impelling purpose, a common task which is set before the dispersed group.”85 Furthermore, the question of whether unity should be imposed on society or allowed to emerge on its own, appeared to be crucial. Struggling with similar questions related to the organization of urban space, Moore explained: “Planners have a way of a starting every speech by articulating their (private) discovery that the public body’s chief concern is people. The speech then says unrelatedly that it’s too bad the sprawling metropolis is formless. It might well be that if the shibboleth about people were turned inside out, if planning efforts went towards enlarging people’s concerns— and sacrifices— for the public realm, that the urban scene would more closely approach the planners’ vision, and that the pleasures of the people would be better served.”86 Alluding to the individualistic, or libertarian, spirit of Southern California, Moore wrote, “The most evident thing about Los Angeles” is that “hardly anybody gives anything to the public realm.”87 Moore appears to recognize, like many liberal critics, certain limitations imposed from above. “The gravest danger that today threatens civilization,” argued Ortega y Gasset, is that of “state intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.”88 Reconsidering normative assumptions about monumentality, Moore developed an approach that viewed the public realm in Los Angeles as an expression of pure dynamism emanating from the spontaneity of everyday life.

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f i g u r e 5 . 1 1 (above, center, below) Charles Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” Perspecta 9/10, 1965. © Charles Moore Foundation. Courtesy of the MIT Press.

Moore sought to replace the planner’s vision of an organized and designed city with an idea that was capable of engaging the desires of its inhabitants, on their own terms (fig. 5.11). According to Moore, the attempts of the previous several decades to “find order by excluding disorder and confusion” and organizing whatever fragment remained into a system, was the order that characterized the same absurdities at work in attempting to fit and accommodate oneself in the rigid, awkwardly designed spaces of the angled rooms of, for example, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna-Honeycomb House (1936), which has no right angles in the floor plan (fig. 5.13).89 In contrast to the all-too-often rigid conceptions of the city, Moore saw the city as fluid urbanism, like the ocean, with a form of architecture that appeared to be almost floating. On the new forms of urbanism emerging in

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figure 5.12 Charles Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” Perspecta 9/10, 1965. © Charles Moore Foundation. Courtesy of the MIT Press.

California, he wrote: “The houses are not tied down to any place much more than the trailer homes are, or the automobiles. They are adrift in the suburban sea, not so mobile as the cars, but just as unattached. They are less islands along which the cars are moored than little yachts, dwarfed by the great chrome-trimmed dinghys that seek their lee.”90 Moore’s poetic analogy relied upon Kahn’s conception while further developing it.91 The analogy explored a new language capable of expressing a more open-ended, less-rigid conception of design, one that resisted the notion that the architect was the center of control while simultaneously suggesting that the city had a dynamic and vital life of its own (fig. 5.12). Moore continued, “This is after all, a floating world in which a floating population can island-hop with impunity; one needs never go ashore.” He pointed out that the flows continue right through the urban fabric to the new typologies such as drive-in banks, movies, shoe repair, even a drive-in civic center in Marin County designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Referring to this building, Moore commented that “it might have been . . . a sort of dock to which our floating populace might come, monumental in that it marked a special place which was somewhere and which, for its importance, was civic if not urban. But instead of a dock for floating suburbanites, it is just another ship, much larger than most, to be sure, and presently beached (wedged, in fact) between two hills.”92 Moore’s oceanic analogy, whereby a city’s buildings and traffic form a new pattern of movement, freely dispersed across the surface of the landscape with minimal connection to the earth, both

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played off of and developed the mythology of Californians as a detached and uprooted free flowing population. While other observers of this period, such as Ian Nairn, had decried the American suburbs as a “problem of mobility or rootlessness at its most extreme,”93 Moore found an open-ended quality that suited the culture of the period. At the invitation of Kingman Brewster, Moore arrived at Yale in 1965 serving first as chair and later as dean of the School of Architecture. During the late 1960s, the school became, as Moore described it, “an extraordinarily turned- on school, thanks first to the quality of the students and then to the absence of restrictions on their imagination and their involvement.”94 As Eve Blau noted, Moore expanded the curriculum to include a wide range of environmental concerns and media of design, to explore multisensory experiences and multifarious connections to disciplines and practices traditionally considered to lie outside architecture. He encouraged pluralism and debate in the studio, and allowed (without endorsing) protest and radical action within the school.95 In 1967 Moore published “Plug It In, Rameses, and See If It Lights Up. Because We Aren’t Going to Keep It Unless It Works,” in which he wrote that “for some time the modern city, like the modern corporation, has been a model of the new unhierarchy; Los Angeles for instance has poured itself unhierarchically across the landscape,” which demonstrated the emergence of a new urban order with extensive social implication (fig. 5.13). Commenting on the transformation of the American city, Moore wrote: “The manifestation of all this vitality must have some message for us, even as the enormously successful sales of suburban tract houses must be saying something about what people what to live in. I doubt that the message is that the architect who produces at enormous expense a replica of the commercial strip which could have been done as well without him is about to save the world.”96 The key word vitality, used by numerous writers during this period, including Jane Jacobs, Venturi and Scott Brown, and Banham, indicated an environment defined by an “organic” quality that they related to a non-designed form of spontaneity, unlike environments designed by architects and planners. Reflecting on the tendency to design the world according to some predetermined form, Moore paid tribute to a new building with “no architect of record,” which offered an example of an “architecture of inclusion”: the roadside architecture of the Madonna Inn along California’s Pacific Coast Highway (fig. 5.14). Moore wrote that the design “would never get a passing grade in a school of architecture where tastefulness was prized,” yet nonetheless he noted, “Here there is everything instead of nothing.” Moore elevated a building that was constructed by a family of highway contractors “untrained in design” to a model of the times, describing it as an “architecture for the electric present.”97 Moore’s insights and analysis of the existing conditions of the city served to increase an already-growing interest in and support for the phenomenon of non-design— environments beyond the control of architects, planners, and design professionals.

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f i g u r e 5 . 1 3 (above and below) Charles Moore, “Plug It In, Rameses, and See If It Lights Up. Because We Aren’t Going to Keep It Unless It Works,” Perspecta 11, 1967. © Charles Moore Foundation. Courtesy of the MIT Press.

Moore connected the new sensibility emerging in American culture to an architectural discourse, manifesting itself as a “relaxed and tolerant inclusiveness.” He found it “helpful and interesting” to read Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture alongside Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby— although he noted that this eclecticism brought on particularly “virulent attacks.”98 Moore himself reprimanded the authors of Learning from Las Vegas, claiming, “I grow especially uneasy at the barricades thrown up between Ugly and Ordinary on the one side and Heroic and Original on the other.” Moore seems inclined to accept Venturi’s thesis more for its “gently devastating” effects than as an abrasive confrontation with differing

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f i g u r e 5 . 1 4 (above and below) Charles Moore, “Plug It In, Rameses, and See If It Lights Up. Because We Aren’t Going to Keep It Unless It Works,” Perspecta 11, 1967. © Charles Moore Foundation. Courtesy of the MIT Press.

values of aesthetics. He wrote: “I take this ability to tolerate and accept opposing points of view, to include nuances, and to ennoble reconciliation by removing its urgency as a sign of a high level of civilization.”99 Not unlike the divergent, even repulsive, qualities of the picturesque, Moore sought a design method, akin to collage, to arrange “the familiar and the unfamiliar in ways that make sense of both without losing the wonder of surprise and delight.” He called this approach the “Doctrine of Immaculate Collision,” an idea, he claimed, that was “based on six weeks in Rome.”100 From Disneyland, bric-abrac, and Venetian Gothic, to the “hopped-up forms of the commercial strip” and all the rest of this “special vitality,” the radical planner, urged Hastings,

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must “produce his practical surrealist picture.” Moore’s comments about Venturi, along with his own apparent ease in the use of various references, exposed the subtleties of the historical knowledge of architectural thought that both he and Venturi acquired at Princeton.101

ro b ert ventu ri: co nte xt, co m P Le xit y, A nd the existing LAnds cA P e Robert Venturi received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Princeton in 1947 and his MFA there in 1950; shortly thereafter, Moore was a graduate student there, between 1954 and 1958.102 Venturi’s early work had an unusual ability to analyze various subtle conditions of an existing context, accounting for the commingling of new and old elements and their unintended, seemingly arbitrary, relationships. This thinking informed his MFA thesis, “Context in Architectural Composition,” which argued that meaning was derived from context. The thesis project was a proposed chapel for the Episcopal Academy, in Pennsylvania, which had recently adopted a plan to build a colonial revival chapel. Venturi’s counterproposal situated the project between two late nineteenth-century country houses, the school’s foremost monuments, carefully siting the chapel among the disparate elements of its surroundings.103 The attentive approach to context drew from a copious list of multiple historical examples that were carefully analyzed not only as a source of inspiration but also as models to be explored and appropriated. This history-based method of design led to surprising results. As modern architecture came to dominate American architecture, Venturi’s pursuit of context certainly distinguished his work, while also laying the groundwork for his later theoretical speculations. Both Venturi and Moore studied under Jean Labatut, a French architect trained at the École des BeauxArts, at a time when history was taught as a source of inspiration to be studied, abstracted, extended, reacted to, or reshaped— an approach in the 1940s and 1950s that was quite distinct from that of other universities, especially Harvard under the direction of Walter Gropius.104 In Siegfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941), history appeared to be explored insofar as it could be “bent to prove a point” and serve as a justification for, or antecedent of, modern architecture. At Princeton, Venturi received a broad historical education of architecture under the direction of Labatut and the noted architectural historian Donald Drew Egbert.105 Reflecting on this period, Venturi claimed that Egbert “saw Modern architecture as part of the complex of nineteenth and twentieth century civilization and his eyes were open to realities of that time that more doctrinaire historians, bent on proving points, couldn’t see.”106 Venturi continued: “Egbert’s history of Modern architecture was inclusive— a complex evolution rather than a dramatic revolution made up of social and symbolic as well as formal and technological imperatives.”107 Another important aspect of

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Egbert’s work was that he “focused on Beaux-Arts architecture at a time when Giedion’s spatial-technological, Bauhaus-oriented view predominated in art history. His Social Radicalism and the Arts [1970] countered another important trend in Modern architectural history, that pressed by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, whose influential work on the International Style had de-emphasized the radical social content of the Modern movement and set the stage for the dominance of formalism in Modern architecture in America.”108 Finally, Venturi pointed out that Egbert’s Social Radicalism and the Arts was greatly admired by many who were shocked to find out that “its author was not a Marxist.”109 Subsequently, Venturi’s keen knowledge of architectural history served as a vital source of inspiration. Complementing his study of historical architecture, between 1950 and 1954 Venturi worked in the architectural offices of Oscar Stonorov and Eero Saarinen, where he acquired extensive knowledge of modern architecture. As previously mentioned, Stonorov and Willy Boesiger had done extensive research, resulting in the 1929 publication of Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret: Oeuvre complète 1910– 1929 and were deeply steeped in the history of modern design.110 For both Venturi and Moore, Kahn was a major influence in their conception of architecture, the city, and its relationship to history. Venturi followed in Kahn’s footsteps and, from 1954 to 1956, advanced his studies of architectural history at the American Academy in Rome, where he came to admire mannerist and baroque architecture. In the work of the illustrious artist and architect Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475– 1564) and Francesco Borromini (1599– 1667) in particular, Venturi gained inspiration from the free use of traditional architectural vocabulary of columns, arches, and pediments to create original structures. The relationship of history, architecture, and the city was fundamental to Venturi’s early conception of context, what he described as the most critical aspect of architecture. In somewhat different terms, Moore described a similar phenomenon as place. These concepts were closely related to principles found in Kahn’s philosophy. Kahn’s own conception of context was driven by his understanding of nature as an amalgamation of various forces coming together under specific conditions. According to Kahn: “Nature is not concerned with form, only man is concerned with form. It makes it according to circumstance.”111 Thus, the circumstantial conditions of nature produced both meaning and form, which is to say, forces and function were what generated design.112 Kahn was invited by Alison and Peter Smithson to speak at the Otterlo Congress in the Netherlands in 1959, which ushered in the end of CIAM and the ascendancy of Team 10. There, Kahn used the example of the curious form of a porcupine and a giraffe to illustrate his understanding of the process of design, which he distinguished from what he called “sheer design,” or a forced process of design: “I accuse design for such approaches because designers invariably start with a square wheel and eventually have to use round ones.”113 Kahn’s concept of “existence-will” suggested a process of working from the inside out that relied on identifying certain forces that gave rise to design. For Kahn, form was

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the spiritual essence of a thing (not the physical manifestation) and design was the molding of that “spirit” of the essence. He argued that this process should emerge from the inherent qualities and characteristics of a situation. This process can be understood as distinct from the modern abstraction of pure forms and its corollary processes of designing from the outside in. In the 1950s, Kahn’s declaration that “form has no shape or dimension . . . form is ‘what.’ Design is ‘how.’ Form is impersonal,”114 certainly opened up new interpretation of form making and created a schism in discussions on design. Attempting to distinguish his ideas from an interest in historicism, Kahn stated: “Form is not an idealized ‘stereotype and uninspiring’ typology, it is a ‘spirit’ of becoming.” These conceptions of form undoubtedly had a powerful effect on both Venturi and Moore. Venturi’s courses included the fundamental elements of architecture, from the Vitruvian elements to an account of twentieth-century exigencies such as mechanical equipment and his method of incorporating multiple, even opposing, forms of expression.115 Venturi argued that “everywhere, except in architecture, complexity and contradiction have been acknowledged.” He explained: “But architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness, and delight. And today the wants of program, structure, mechanical equipment, and expression, even in single buildings in simple contexts, are diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable. The increasing dimension and scale of architecture in urban and regional planning add to the difficulties. I welcome the problems and exploit the uncertainties. By embracing contradiction as well as complexity, I aim for vitality as well as validity.”116 Illustrating the main idea, Venturi constructed a virtual landscape of images of buildings from various historic periods, representing plurality and complexity, which reinforced the spatial coexistence of multiple systems (fig. 5.15). Simultaneously, he presented the contemporary city as an open system, untouched by the prejudice of modernism. These ideas were greatly informed by the work of Denise Scott Brown, whom he first met in 1960 at the University of Pennsylvania where they served as faculty members. Since that time, they had developed a close collaboration that explored shared interest in popular culture, the uses and misuses of history, the rule breaking of mannerism, pop art, and the everyday American landscape. The mess of the sprawling metropolis was raised to the level of an American vernacular expression, born of its own making beyond the influence of Europe. Vincent Scully acknowledged Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture as “a very American book, rigorously pluralistic,” indicating that indeed a new attitude toward architecture was being formulated in the United States.117 Venturi’s polemic is not only a testament against modernism; it is a testament against a European-dominated view of the world.118 An architecture of complexity and contradiction, Venturi argued, “must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.” Like Banham and Wolfe, Venturi and Scott Brown’s work at its core critiques a set of European values that informed views about architecture and the American city. 198 | c h A P t e r f i v e

f igu re 5. 15 (above, center, below) Robert Venturi, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book,” Perspecta 9– 10, 1965. By permission of Denise Scott Brown and the estate of Robert Venturi.

To understand these critiques, it is necessary to understand the judgments that modern architecture implied. While accusing modern architects of puritanically striving for the “separation and exclusion of elements over the inclusion of diverse elements and their juxtapositions”— the aesthetic of the haphazard landscapes of the American city—Venturi outlined the limitations of a modernist formal methodology while attempting to expose the detrimental side effects of a tendency toward a minimal formal aesthetic. For Venturi, the “limiting of the problem” in architecture was a confession of architecture’s inability to extend itself to the larger problems of the city. He argued that one can “exclude important problems only at the risk of separating his architecture from the experience of life and the needs of society.” According to Robert Stern, even in the early 1950s Venturi had “recognized the limitations of the neoclassical method as well as the antiurbanism which underlay much of the thinking of the leaders of the International Style.”119 An important aspect of Venturi’s argument lies in a response to Paul Rudolph, who argued: “Architects must be uniquely prejudiced. If his work is to ring with conviction, he will be completely committed to his particular way of seeing the universe. It is only then 199 | c h A o s o r c o n t r o L

that every man sees his particular truth.”120 Similar prejudiced views of the world held by the architects of the international style led to Venturi’s notorious deformation of the Miesian maxim of “less is more” as “less is a bore.”121 Furthermore, this prejudice, for Venturi, united individual architects and critics as wildly different as Mies and Peter Blake, who were both implicated for their adherence to principles of modern architecture. The strategy of inversion became a central aspect of Venturi’s critique. In challenging Blake’s “outrage” manifesto, which condemned the unplanned American built environment, Venturi wrote: Peter Blake has compared the chaos of commercial Main Street with the orderliness of the University of Virginia. Beside the irrelevancy of the comparison, is not Main Street almost alright? Indeed, is not the commercial strip of a Route 66 almost alright? As I have said, our question is: what slight twist of context will make them all right? Perhaps more signs more contained. Illustrations in God’s Own Junkyard of Times Square and roadtown are compared with illustrations of New England villages and arcadian countryside. But the pictures in this book that are supposed to be bad are often good. The seemingly chaotic juxtapositions of honky-tonk elements express an intriguing kind of vitality and validity, and they produce an unexpected approach to unity as well.122

Venturi believed that the ordinary messy cityscape presented a new and vital sense of “unity.” In this, he echoed Hastings’s 1944 denunciation of the Bauhaus theory of modern design, which used the principles of townscape theory to call for the embrace of all aspects of the urban scene as one system. Hastings wrote, “The aesthetic qualities of the individual items are quite irrelevant. Let them be ugly, let them be incongruous. What matters alone is the unity and congruity of the pattern.”123 Following a similar line of argument, Venturi explained, “It is not the obvious or easy unity derived from the dominate binder or the motival order of simpler, less contradictory compositions, but that derived from a complex and illusive order of the difficult whole.” Citing August Heckscher, Venturi argued that it is the unity that “maintains, but only just maintains, a control over the clashing elements which compose it. Chaos is very near; its nearness, but its avoidance, gives . . . force.”124 He concluded his argument: “Some of the vivid lessons of Pop Art, involving contradiction of scale and context, should have awakened architects from prim dreams of pure order, which, unfortunately, are imposed in the easy Gestalt unities of the urban renewal projects of establishment Modern architecture and yet, fortunately are really impossible to achieve at any great scope. And it is perhaps from the everyday landscape, vulgar and disdained, that we can draw the complex and contradictory order that is valid and vital for our architecture as an urbanistic whole.”125

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Not unlike Banham, Venturi was more than willing to confront the modern judgment of the city. When Venturi wrote, “I am not intimidated by the puritanical, moral language of modern architecture,” he was addressing many modern planners’ and architects’ moral outrage at the sprawling American metropolis. This critique informed much of his future work. In refuting many of the received definitions of urban space and calling for an open-ended urbanism, Venturi wrote: “Our great American cities do not conform to the European urban ideal, where a whole is defined within confining borders and axial terminations, but acknowledge rather an order that is incomplete— fragmented— as it accommodates inherent expansion and progress toward eternal frontiers.”126 Beginning in the mid-1960s, a peculiar new criticism emerged that was centered on the existing landscape of the decentralized America city, fueled by the deregulated free-market economy, which advanced the debate of design versus non-design, particularly in the collaborative work of Venturi and Scott Brown, including the Las Vegas study.

d en i s e scott b roWn: urbAn m A P P ing , Act iv e s oci oPLA stic s, And the dete r m inA nt s o f ur bA n fo rm In 1952 Denise Scott Brown (née Lakofski) arrived in London from Johannesburg, South Africa, to study at the Architectural Association (AA).127 As we have seen, many of the political debates of the period were polarized as socialists versus nonsocialists, as well as planning versus non-planning. When Scott Brown arrived at the AA, the student body was split into two mutually exclusive groups. There were working-class students who had received scholarships, and there were those who could afford to be there, from English public schools. As an outsider to both milieus, Scott Brown moved between the two circles, conversing with both yet belonging to neither. During this period there was a sense of excitement and vitality associated with the activities of the Independent Group and its boisterous members— artists, architects, and critics— as they attempted to define their position as the new avant-garde. In their reassessment of culture, a critique of class played an important role. The Smithsons came from the North of England, which was considered “non-U” (not upper-class),128 while Reyner Banham, born in Norwich, claimed, “[The] working class is where I come from.” Consequently, the new brutalists consciously embraced working- class culture or “popular culture,” against upper-class society. This perspective informed much of their criticism of modernism and their approach to design, in which the Smithsons turned their attention to everyday life in the city, particularly the non-designed environments in which ordinary working-class families lived. Affirming this crucial distinction, in a 1955 statement, they wrote, “What is new about the New Brutalism is that it finds its closet affinities, not in a part architectural style, but in peasant dwelling forms. It has nothing to do with craft. We see

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architecture as the direct expression of a way of life.”129 In turn, Scott Brown commented on this in a variety of contexts: Working with Team 10, the European rebels against CIAM, they turned to life in the streets of poor city neighborhoods. In this, they heeded some English sociologists, who were calling on planners to understand how people lived in the East End of London, saying that those who had been bombed out of housing could not simply be moved to the suburban environment of the new towns. In low-income neighborhoods social connections and networks of family and friends protected them from the hardship of poverty. Their life on the streets was a support system.130 Brutalists, unlike the official planners of London, began to canvass the street life of the East End for ideas on how to design housing where the benefits of neighborly relationship could be maintained. This outlook was named “active socioplastics” by the Smithsons.131 But when they found sociology was difficult to incorporate into design, they declared that sociologists should extend their discipline to meet the needs of architects. I told them that they should be the ones to extend, but they gave up. I kept trying.132 In this context, a debate on “is” and “ought” arose, . . . concerning workingclass and middle-class values to planning. Here the “is” to learn from was the street life of East Enders. In both South Africa and England, proponents of “is” turned for lessons to sources unacceptable to taste of the educated. In South Africa, these lay in the “impure” urban folk-pop culture. In London New Brutalists revisited Le Corbusier’s admonition to look at the scorned architecture of industry and his early Modernist castigation of “eyes which do not see.” But they augmented the list of impolite sources to include artifacts of the popular commercial culture of mass society.133

The shift toward existing ordinary culture was accompanied by a declining faith in the role of modern design, which was otherwise an article of faith at the Architectural Association. Scott Brown gave one example: “I fell under the tutelage of my student advisor, Arthur Korn, a German refugee, old communist warhorse of the Bauhaus and November Group, and member of the MARS planning group that produced a counter plan for the rebuilding of London. We of Korn’s studio were his ‘commandos’ for saving the world through architecture.”134 Another important influence on Scott Brown was architectural historian John Summerson, who introduced her to mannerism and the “distinctive, sometimes quirky, classical architecture of Britain.” It was Summerson’s interest in reviving architectural history that helped “open students’ eyes” to “real urbanism, not the CIAM kind.” As Scott Brown recalled: “His lectures

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on Georgian London and Bath covered the tissue of buildings, squares and streets; described builders’ housing that followed pattern books; and had us looking around us in London at the order in Georgian town architecture and the variety within the order. He showed us solutions others had found to archetypal problems in urban design such as the handling of corners of blocks and the marking of front doors.”135 This approach to studying the existing city coincided with an emerging criticism of CIAM. Scott Brown affirmed, “The Brutalist favoured a much looser, less doctrinaire view of urbanism, one tied to local neighborhood and community development.” While the active socioplastics approach, which emphasized a sociological rather than formal concern of architecture, lost momentum in England, it continued to inspire Scott Brown, who remained committed to the idea that “the proper focus for architecture was urbanism.”136 The Smithsons’ interest in socioplastics coincided with aspects of the work of the sociologists Michael Young and Peter Willmott. The two worked with Judith Henderson in the late 1940s and early 1950s to study the urban, workingclass, tight-knit communities of Bethnal Green in the East End of London.137 They studied the London poor “to learn what happened to people who were moved away from their homes and families to the new towns.”138 Their approach opened up new ways of studying “ordinary” culture and their conclusions had an enormous influence in changing the way working- class people were perceived in society and the dynamic ways in which they related to their built environment.139 Scott Brown believed that Herbert Gans, whose urban sociology course she took in her first semester at Penn, was influenced by their work— evident in his study of community organization, The Levittowners.140 That work, too, had a noticeable impact in changing attitudes about the people who lived in suburban developments.141 In 1965, Denise Scott Brown accepted a visiting position in urban planning at the School of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, for the spring semester. On her way to California, she visited Las Vegas for the first time, and “the architecture of bright lights and big signs made an impression that she had to share with Robert Venturi.”142 Soon after she moved to Los Angeles to accept the position of cochair, with Henry Liu, to establish the Urban Design Program at the University of California, Los Angeles.143 Los Angeles proved an ideal place to advance her research on cities. In “The Meaningful City” essay she published that year, Scott Brown highlighted her interest in mass communication and popular culture and the vital role these played in cities. This approach complimented Venturi’s essay of that year titled “A Justification for a Pop Architecture,” in which he observed fundamental differences in approach between artists and architects: “Architecture always relates to practice before speculation. Like the politician, the architect is expedient because he deals with things as they are.” Whereas for the artist “His question is ‘Does it?’ rather than ‘Ought it?’ His visions are only incidentally visionary.”144 These observations relate to significant differences between the way things are

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(non-design aspects of the city, or what Venturi and Scott Brown referred to as the existing landscape) as opposed to the way things should be (the desired outcome brought about by design and planning)— an important distinction, as we have seen in the work of Jane Jacobs and others, between orthodox modernism and much of the criticism of the 1960s. In addition to a sociological reading of the city, Scott Brown’s interest in urban communication was highlighted in an article she wrote with Gordon Cullen in which they claimed “the system of signs and signal in American cities come close to anarchy.” These views reflected Cullen’s observations about outdoor publicity and its vital role in the everyday life of cities. He noted, “One contribution to modern townscape, startlingly conspicuous everywhere you look, but almost entirely ignored by the town planner, is street publicity.”145 Referring to “nighttime development” in Piccadilly Circus and Times Square as “a surrealist drama of shapes, lights and movement,” he wrote that “Broadway, vulgar and vital, [was] to be emulated rather than imitated.” He concluded: “Architecture? We could do without it and have a neat framework for the variations of publicity.”146 The ideas explored by Scott Brown and Cullen previewed the study of the city as a “message system,” which she and Venturi would later pursue in a studio on Las Vegas in 1968 at Yale, where Moore was dean.147 Scott Brown invited Venturi to California. In November 1966 he visited Las Vegas for the first time, where Scott Brown introduced him to a world of emerging forms of urbanism. It was during this period that she decided to teach her second studio at UCLA on Las Vegas. In 1967, Scott Brown and Venturi married in Los Angeles. After they married, Scott Brown moved back to Philadelphia to join the firm of Venturi and Rauch, but her time on the West Coast had deeply informed her views on contemporary urbanism. Soon, under her influence, young planners at the University of Pennsylvania “were not considered fully prepared until they experienced West Coast urbanism.”148 Scott Brown’s philosophy, a mixture of British and American urban theories, relied particularly on the Smithsons’ active socioplastics ideas, which were themselves shaped by the postwar studies of British working-class neighborhoods by Michael Young, an anthropologist.149 Even though these ideas had not survived in Britain beyond the 1950s, this theory continued to play an important role in her work: “They used the term socioplastics to suggest tying together the social and the physical, creating physical containers for the social at different scales. The term active referred to the life of people on the streets and discovering means of learning about it— achieving vitality and allowing for change— what we were talking about in Las Vegas and what we are after in our research for design.”150 According to Scott Brown, the “theoretical underpinnings for social planning were provided by social thinkers such as Gans, Webber, Davidoff and Reiner[,] who taught that important planning decisions should be made by people not the planners. They warned that planners and architects had upper middle-class values and asked that they respect other people’s views too.”151 Describing how an interest in ordinary working-class people and their

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relationship to modern architecture and urban planning informed debates, Scott Brown wrote: “During this time some aspects of the social critique of American planning heard at Penn and Berkeley were introduced to a wider circle by the writer Jane Jacobs. There was mounting public criticism that urban renewal, as then practiced, did not achieve social aims, that it looked ugly, that its architecture was dead and that the public voted with their feet by not using the places architects designed. This criticism was made part of the exegesis of the New Left in 1962.”152 The entangled discourse on the American city created multiple schisms amid a tenuous network of shifting alliances. Vincent Scully, professor of the history of art in architecture at Yale University, who had once called Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture” now appeared to be aligned with the modern planners. In an article published in 1967 titled “America’s Architectural Nightmare: The Motorized Megalopolis,” referring to the American landscape as a “field of Armageddon,” Scully demanded (not unlike the editors of the Architectural Review and Peter Blake): “Who is responsible? Who did this to our world?”153 Furthermore, he declared that the “hatred for the city, the contempt for the past, the love of the road” had arrived at an incalculable impasse. Scully clarified: “The cultural, social, and political attitudes of Los Angeles, which is all one automobile suburb, offer a frightening glimpse of our possible common future. The sick joke of the matter, one supposes, is that the private auto is clearly a temporary social phenomenon. The thing as we know it will probably be as extinct as the sedan chair within a century, leaving behind it a set of urban shapes and conditions that may be somewhat more difficult to get rid of.”154 During the mid-1960s, various conflicting attitudes emerged toward automobile-oriented urbanism. On the one hand, some expressed an attitude of tolerance of the unplanned or nondesign aspects of American cities; on the other hand, some believed that only a program of systematic design and planning could control unplanned urban processes. After several trips to Las Vegas to research the urban phenomenon of the commercial strip, Scott Brown and Venturi published their analysis in Architectural Forum as “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas,” which symbolized the growing fascination with unplanned cities as a form of “popular art.”155 Not unlike the Independent Group and its members, particularly Banham, who argued that commercial consumer products were a form of popular art, the wild and chaotic organization of urban space and the proliferation of signage was understood as a form of popular urban expression. Two principle references for understanding this new emerging urbanism were the writings of Tom Wolfe and the photo books of the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha. Following Wolfe’s account of Las Vegas and “pop society,” Venturi and Scott Brown’s essay catapulted Las Vegas into the spotlight of architectural debate and laid the foundation for what would prove to be one of their

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most provocative studies of architecture and the contemporary city. The first sentence of the manifesto clearly stated the polemic: “Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect.”156 By “existing landscape,” they meant the entirety of the built environment, particularly the non-designed aspects that modern architects had excluded. In an attempt to distinguish their position from that of Le Corbusier, who wanted to “tear down Paris and begin again,” they sought “another way which is more tolerant.” They put forth a method that accepted the full range of the built environment including the ordinary and chaotic realities of the unplanned city. “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots” appeared a year after Ed Ruscha published Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles. Following his photo books on gasoline stations, Ruscha’s book advanced his meticulous study of the postwar city and its significance for an emerging social order.157 Commenting on the actual conditions of the various parking lots he featured, Ruscha remarked, “Those patterns and their abstract design qualities mean nothing to me.” He continued, “I’ll tell you what is more interesting: the oil drippings on the ground.” David Bourdon explained that noting which parking places were the most desirable, as indicated by the size of the oil spots, is a means of mapping patterns of behavior in Southern California— reflecting a sociological approach to the urban landscape.158 While ostensibly inspired by Ruscha’s work, Scott Brown and Venturi’s approach grappled with the relationship between parking lots and the larger urban order: The A&P parking lot is a current phase in the evolution of vast space since Versailles. . . . The space that divides high-speed highway and low, sparse building produces no enclosure and little direction. To move through a piazza is to move between high enclosing forms. To move through this landscape is to move over vast expansive textures: the megatexture of the commercial landscape. The parking lot is the parterre of the asphalt landscape. The patterns of parking lines give direction much as the paving patterns, curbs, borders, and tapis verts give direction in Versailles; grids of lamp posts substitute for obelisks and rows of urns and statues, as points of identity and continuity in the vast space.159

In an attempt to find order without resorting to the imposition of design, and, as Michael Golec observed, “rather than contending, like Lynch, that the city had to be exceptionally organized in ways that were immediately apprehensible, Venturi and Scott Brown suggested that the city, regardless of its apparent organization or disorganization, retained latent patterns that could be discovered and disclosed by the architect-planner.”160 In “Pop Architecture,” published in Architecture Canada the following year, Venturi and Scott Brown explained the relationship between the unplanned commercial landscape of the contemporary city and pop architecture,

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asserting: “We believe a new interest in the architecture of communication involving symbolism and mixed media will lead us to reevaluate the eclectic and picturesque styles of the last century, to reappraise our own commercial architecture— Pop architecture, if you wish— and finally to face the question of decoration.”161 In attempting to find new ways of transforming architecture into a new means of communication able to express decoration, the commercial signage of Las Vegas with all its glitzy extravagance became the model. It is interesting that their all-inclusive approach to commercial architecture as pop seems to go against the very precision of Ruscha’s work. Ruscha’s interest in the common aspects of the city cannot necessarily be reduced to an iconic pop aesthetic. Venturi and Scott Brown’s approach to the subject was the opposite of the blanket condemnation that informed the views of many modern critics. For Reyner Banham, the larger implication of their study of Las Vegas was profound: “Against the grain of conventional planning wisdom, the two writers applauded the profusion of shameless illuminated signs, the total independence of those signs from the architecture of the buildings to which they referred, and the total independence of those buildings from urban planning as normally understood.”162 They had tapped into an alternative urban order that operated outside the central control of the planning discipline. In fact, this spontaneous order had already been identified by Venturi and informed his main conclusion in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in which he asked, “Is not Main Street almost all right?” Likewise, the authors acknowledged that “billboards are almost all right.” Banham explained the importance of their assertions: “The international standing both of the authors and of the magazine [Architectural Forum] meant that their views were heeded or rejected throughout the international architectural community.” He continued, “As a result, Las Vegas became not only a planning problem but . . . a political paradigm of capitalism as well.”163 This embrace of the chaotic world of non-design as a valid and vivid example of urbanism was polarizing for the period. Again, Banham explained, “Against the 1968 image of the Strip as a working example of a more flexible and less absolutist style of urbanism than that proffered by European theorists from Ebenezer Howard to Le Corbusier and Doxiadis, there was now ranged the counter-image of Las Vegas as the total surrender of all social and moral standards to the false glamour of naked commercial competition.”164 As we have seen, the role that commercial competition played in the design and marketing of consumer products had been at the center of Banham’s critique of modern design since the 1950s. This logic was now extended to consider the full environment as a product of pop consumer culture. In the summer following the publication of “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots,” Venturi and Scott Brown developed the brief for a design studio. Their “pedagogical interest in evolving the traditional architectural ‘studio’ into a new tool for teaching architecture” and “finding graphic means, more suitable than those now used by architects and planners, to describe ‘urban sprawl’

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urbanism and particularly the commercial strip” led to their renowned studio, with Steven Izenour, at Yale University in the fall of 1968 titled “Learning from Las Vegas, or Form Analysis as Design Research.”165 One of the greatest challenges in studying this unusual site was finding new methods of mapping and analyzing its formless spontaneous order.

t h e Persistenc e o f toWns cA P e Following Jane Jacobs, consciously or not, Scott Brown and Venturi’s approach (as well as that of Banham) engaged the visual philosophy of townscape, which called for new ways of incorporating both planned and unplanned aspects of the built environment into a single vision.166 Specifically, it called for the visual planner to engage the field of anonymous design and the “unacknowledged pattern” of the contemporary city which had eluded the official town planners. 167 Deeply impressed with the British townscape approach, Jacobs appropriated many aspects of its philosophy into her classic study The Death and Life of Great American Cities and, like Ian Nairn, a key advocate of the doctrine, resisted the decentralized city. Nearly a decade later Venturi and Scott Brown would also fall under the sway of this highly influential theory, yet they maintained a “non-judgmental” attitude toward the “chaos” of the sprawling, unplanned American city. They feared that “architects are out of the habit of looking nonjudgmentally at the environment because orthodox Modern architecture is progressive, if not revolutionary, utopian, and puristic; it is dissatisfied with existing conditions. Modern architecture has been anything but permissive: architects have preferred to change the existing environment rather than enhance what is there.”168 Their more tolerant, or liberal, attitude embraced the complexities and contradictions of the entirety of the existing built environment with all its haphazard growth. Yet this approach was rooted in the townscape aesthetic. In contrast to the “rational Liberal theory” that sought to “achieve congruity through harmony,” townscape’s “radical Liberal theory” aspired to “achieve a new kind of organization through the cultivation of significant differences.”169 Its foremost propagator, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, clarified: “Not any old differences. The significant ones. By concentration on the urge of the parts to be themselves to make a new kind of whole.” Expounding on the implications of this idea, he explained that, as in politics, this radical theory involves “a radical idea of the meaning of parts.”170 Hastings’s call for “an increase in complexity, or organization” was part a critical new approach that “aimed at reconciling by accentuating varieties of form, and establishing . . . the conditions for a democracy of things.”171 Following Uvedale Price’s distinction between the beautiful and the picturesque, Hastings contrasted the ideal classical beauty of form with “ugliness, the ugly being the ‘lumpish’ and ‘unformed.’”172 These ideas appear to have influenced not only the “cult of ugliness” said to characterize the work of the new brutalists, but also some of the key theories behind Venturi and Scott

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Brown’s study of Las Vegas, particularly their “Theory of Ugly and Ordinary.” These ideas related to Banham’s characterization of the urbanism of Las Vegas as “formlessness and tastelessness,” which served as a foundation upon which much of their polemic depended.173 In the subsequent book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour established a “comparison of urban sprawl with megastructure,” the former referring to the non-designed artifacts of the built environment and the latter to products of the design profession. They contrasted “ugly and ordinary” with “heroic and original,” “big signs designed by commercial artists” with “little signs (and only if absolutely necessary) designed by ‘graphic artists,’” “building for markets” with “building for Man,” and “vital mess” with “‘total design’ (and design review boards),” to list but a few. They explained that “Sprawl City’s image is a result of process,” and that modern architects “do not recognize the image of the process city when they see it on the Strip, because it is both too familiar and too different from what they have been trained to accept.”174 Referring to the organic or piecemeal approach promoted by Popper, Hayek, and Jacobs, they wrote: “Total design is the opposite of the incremental city that grows through the decisions of many: total design conceives a messianic role for the architect as corrector of the mess of urban sprawl; it promotes a city dominated by pure architecture and maintained through ‘design review,’ and supports today’s architecture of urban renewal and fine art commissions.”175 These and other forms of centralized control over design processes led them to conclude: “‘Total design’ comes to mean ‘total control’ as confident art commissioners who have learned what is right promote a deadening mediocrity, all of which, in combination and in the end, make the city.”176 As we have seen, propagated by Hayek and others, the theory of non-design, which sees design as a form of control, informed some of the most common critiques of this period. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour later noted that the Las Vegas Beautification Committee would continue to “recommend turning the Strip into a western Champs-Élysées, obscuring the signs with trees and raising the humidity level with giant fountains, and that the local planning and zoning agencies would continue to try to persuade the gasoline stations to imitate the architecture of the casinos, in the interest of architectural unity.”177 This form of imposed unity served only to illustrate the typical top-down approach to planning, while also highlighting the inability of architects and planners to work with the existing landscape, which required a sensitive knowledge of the specificity of the place and its operational logic. In contrast to the overly selfconscious planned order, which lacked the vitality of the existing city that had emerged, seemingly unconsciously, on its own, the spontaneous order was celebrated for its effectiveness in serving a wide range of needs of its users. Drawing on Scott Brown’s interest in socioplastics, Venturi and Scott Brown studied working-class people and their relationship with “responsive” pop environments. This study revealed an order behind what was previously assumed

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to be merely chaos. Just as Banham had demonstrated in the 1950s that the designs of pop, mass-produced products were in touch with the desires of its users, or consumers (see chapter 3), Venturi and Scott Brown attempted to demonstrate how the non-designed commercial logic of pop urbanism communicated with its users, especially effective from the perspective of the driver’s-eye view. This they contrasted with the ill- conceived approach to design promoted by planners. “Unlike the dead spaces of architect-designed urban renewal, the Las Vegas Strip was somewhere that people actually went,” argued Scott Brown. Furthermore, she asserted, “They seemed to enjoy it. I didn’t see frowns on their faces as if they were being coerced into going there.”178 As we have seen, one of the key features of the liberal philosophy was the concept of social, political, and economic liberty, allowing each individual to pursue his or her own interest, understood as the “absence of coercion.”179 Not unlike radical libertarian anarcho-capitalists, many young architects and critics during this period believed that the market was the only viable means of providing freedom of choice without coercion. The shift from a Marxist perception of free-market capitalism as a system of exploitation, in which the role of the state was to protect against such injustices, to one of a spontaneous order, a dynamic and unruly system based on individual free choice without the need for centralized control, was paramount to a new understanding and appreciation of places such as Las Vegas created by non-architects. In 1967 Hayek published Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, in which he elaborated on the idea of spontaneous order, particularly in the chapters titled “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” “The Result of Human Action but Not of Human Design,” and “The Principles of a Liberal Social Order.” He wrote, “The distinction between a spontaneous order based on abstract rules which leave individuals free to use their own knowledge for their own purposes, and an organization or arrangement based on commands, is of critical importance for the understanding of the principles of a free society.”180 Freed of what was perceived to be paternalistic values of the welfare state and the ruling of taste by powerful design and planning institutions, many of the younger generation embraced a wide range of phenomena associated with non-design. In a review of Hayek’s book, William C. Mitchell observed the extraordinary, even unexpected, impact that Hayek’s work had on countercultural groups: “The quest for greater individualism and free choice, in all walks of life, through greater decentralization of power appears a major theme not only in Hayek’s writings but those of today’s self-proclaimed radicals. Few radicals demand socialism anymore even if their heroes may be Mao, Castro, or Ho.”181 Much of Hayek’s work rested upon the idea of an alternative, decentralized social order, an “order without commands” based on individual free choice and the free market’s role in manifesting that order. From the Independent Group’s celebration in the 1950s of mass-produced consumer products as a form of popular art to the 1960s validation of the decentralized built environment, the American commercial model of design

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based on free-market economics was upheld by a new generation of architects as an alternative to European modern design. The postwar avant-garde identified the industrial-commercial vernacular as a valid and responsive environment of an advanced capitalist society. Venturi and Scott Brown asserted: “Architects who can accept the lessons of primitive vernacular architecture, so easy to take in an exhibit like ‘Architecture Without Architects,’ and of industrial, vernacular architecture, so easy to adapt to an electronic and space as elaborate Neo-Brutalist or Neo- Constructivist megastructures, do not easily acknowledge the validity of the commercial vernacular. Creating the new for the artist may mean choosing the old or the existing. Pop artist have relearned this. Our acknowledging existing, commercial architecture at the scale of the highway is within this tradition.”182 For Banham, Las Vegas was “a classic Pop artefact, as that term had come to be understood by the end of the fifties— an expendable dream that money could just about buy, designed for immediate point- of-sale impact, outside the canons of Fine Art.”183 It was perceived as the epitome of a non-planned phenomenon. Using extremely precise terms to clarify what was at stake, Banham explained: It had, in fact, barely reached its definitive form by the mid-sixties, and what then made it characteristic was its formlessness and tastelessness— by the standards of established culture, that is. The scatter along the strip had no discernible plan; the signs were simply commercial art raised to an intense pitch, while the establishments they advertised were basic motels with added gaming rooms. Whereas the great image of Manhattan had been of an undesigned but distinct form composed of designed elements of architecture, that of Las Vegas appeared to be an indistinct and undesigned formlessness composed of elements that fell below the threshold of architectural attention.184

Banham’s enthusiasm for this diffused “undesigned formlessness” provoked him to consider “why there would never be a Las Vegas in England,” which he concluded was primarily because of “the entrenched power of the planning establishment to prevent it.” Deeply inspired by the power of the place and the idea that the unrestrained forces of the market, and its accompanying culture, could generate new and vibrant urban forms, in 1969 Banham contributed to “one of a set of studies of what might happen if certain areas of England were opened to Strip-type development.”185 From the 1920s, when modern designers sought to replace the existing city with a new order, to the 1960s, when the non-designed paradigm became a powerful symbol of a spontaneously grown society, upheld as the model for a new kind of architecture and urbanism, design theory had come full circle. If debates had once centered on questions of order versus disorder, by the late 1960s disorder was increasingly understood in the sciences and the arts as a form of complex order. Expanding on the significance of complexity and its

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relationship to design, in “The Results of Human Action but Not of Human Design” (1967), Hayek wrote: Up to the appearance of modern social theory in the eighteenth century, the only generally understood term through which it could be expressed that certain observed regularities in human affairs were not the product of design was the term “natural.” And, indeed, until the rationalist reinterpretation of the law of nature in the seventeenth century, the term “natural” was used to describe an orderliness or regularity that was not the product of deliberate human will. Together with “organism” it was one of the two terms generally understood to refer to the spontaneously grown in contrast to the invented or designed.186

Terms such as popular, common, ordinary, and chaos played a central role in conceptualizing the city as spontaneous order, as did the ambitious notion of “organic unity,” which challenged former notions of design and its relationship to order.

non- design, c hAo s, And t h e ne W A e s t h e t ic In 1969 the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, writing for the New York Times, reported on “a surprising historical objectivity” in the intellectual attitudes of the latest avant-garde who were making “the case for chaos.”187 She noted that a new generation was “examining the phenomenon of the present, not with the sweeping a priori attitudes of condemnation that have become pious clichés, but with a cool, analytical acuity.”188 Huxtable pointed out that the “drive for order and elegance,” which had been the “cause of concerned architects, planners, and intellectuals, representing the avant garde of social and esthetic thought for the past 50 years,” was being challenged. She wrote: “O.K. Turn it upside down. Like everything else today. And you have the social, esthetic, and intellectual attitudes of the latest avant garde: the case for chaos.” The conception of modern design was radically altered by a new understanding of design by young critics and designers: “Is Chaos really so chaotic, they ask? Does it not contain valuable elements of vitality and variety, complexity and contrast? Can we not learn from the organically evolving environment? What about planning by adoptive processes? Is there an esthetic of the Pop landscape?”189 She noted that the protagonists claimed that the non-designed aspects of the built environment might even have an order of its own: “It is an order of ‘inclusion’ and ‘the difficult whole,’ rather than an order of ‘exclusion,’ or ‘rejection.’” While she referred specifically to Scott Brown, Venturi, and Banham, her assessment of the “new doctrine” of adaptation and accommodation described a fundamental shift in architectural theory.190 As the trust in professional designers waned, it was replaced by an optimistic faith in the creativity of the common individual and his or her relationship with the chaotic, non-planned environments of American cities, which were 212 | c h A P t e r f i v e

celebrated as sites of vitality, creativity, and innovation. Central to this new sensibility and appreciation for the commercial non-planned city appears to be a (conscious or unconscious) faith in the power of the unfettered forces of the free market to facilitate people in “doing their own thing,” resulting in spontaneous order. This fascination with the chaotic American scene was at the heart of many key issues raised in Learning from Las Vegas and, as we shall see, in Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). This may help explain the obsession with these decentralized unplanned cities and why they became the center of international debates.

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6 : The Indeterminate City

As Friedrich Hayek’s theories continued to influence planning debates throughout the postwar period, by the 1960s the work of Karl Popper and Ernst Gombrich began to have a greater, more explicit impact on design theory.1 For young architects in England, Popper’s “open society” and the doctrine of indeterminism implied, as Banham noted, the “downfall of all closed and determined systems such as Plato’s politics— or classical architecture based on elementary geometry,” which manifested as an interest in various nondeterministic topics.2 This chapter explores the philosophy of non-design and its relationship to design discourse related to indeterminacy.

kArL P o PPer And the e nd o f ut o P iA n e ng ine e r ing In 1957 Karl Popper published The Poverty of Historicism, which he dedicated to the “countless men and women of all creeds or nations or races who fell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.”3 One of his key targets was utopian planning and its relationship to institutional control and centralized power. He explained, “If one should replace the words ‘the God-fearing Prince’ with some of their more obvious modern counterparts, such as ‘the benevolent planning authority’ then one would have a ‘description of the credulity of our own time.’”4 Popper quoted from Hayek’s Collectivist Economic Planning (1938) and relied on Hayek’s critique of central planning to make his case.5 Popper explained: “Although the piecemeal technologist will agree with the historicist view that large-scale or holistic social experiments, if at all possible, are extremely unsuitable for scientific purposes, he will emphatically deny the assumption, common to both historicism and Utopianism, that social experiments, in order to be realistic, must be of the character of Utopian attempts at re-modeling the whole of society.”6 Advancing the strategy of “piecemeal engineering,” Popper wrote, “The piecemeal technologist or engineer recognizes that only a minority of social institutions are consciously designed while the vast majority have just ‘grown’, as the undesigned results of human actions.”7 As did Hayek,

Popper referred to the eighteenth-century liberal theorists, such as David Hume, and outlined two distinct philosophies: “social institutions are either ‘designed’ or that they just ‘grow.’”8 He continued, “This position might be elaborated into a Darwinian explanation of the instrumental character of undesigned institutions (such as language): if they have no useful function, they have no chance of surviving.”9 The terms by which evolutionary social phenomena were described is noteworthy, given that the concept of social institutions as organisms that grow according to the same laws of nature gained acceptance in both scientific and architectural theory. Popper defined social engineering as the construction of “social institutions according to plan,” in contrast to the formation of a society without a deterministic central authority, which informed the main concept behind an open society.10 This anti-authoritarian view of the world had far-reaching implications for many disciplines.11 The absence of conscious control, and support for open-ended processes, was a crucial idea in the work of Popper and Hayek and informed a non- deterministic paradigm in design, architecture, and urbanism.12 In 1949 John Summerson, the British architectural historian, asserted, “If the ‘functionalism’ crisis can be dated at 1927, the next critical year will be 1957.”13 The Royal Institute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal was awarded in 1957 to Alvar Aalto for his “outstanding ability to bring a human quality and gentleness to modern architectural technology.” In his acceptance speech, Aalto said, “The Architectural revolution is still going on but it is like all revolutions: it starts with enthusiasm and it stops with some sort of dictatorship.”14 Indeed, 1957 witnessed a more explicit critique of modern design as a form of totalitarian control, evident in the “collapse of CIAM.”15 In his own 1957 lecture to the Royal Institute of British Architects, “The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture,”16 Summerson contrasted the French rational tradition with the concept of the biological (or organic) developed by László Moholy-Nagy, which served as an alternative organizational principle of design distinct from one that was “sanctioned by the static, axially grouped dominates and subordinates of the classical tradition— different, but carrying an equivalent authority.” This alternative unity was described as “a biological or organic unity, because it is the unity of a process.”17 Moholy-Nagy, and after him Sigfried Giedion, understood this unity as a space-time continuum.18 This conception of biological processes unfolding in space and time was quite distinct from the classical orders in significant ways and established the ruling principle that guided Moholy-Nagy’s philosophy of design. The idea of biological unity offered a different model of design. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), following Summerson, Banham explored the theories of Moholy-Nagy, who spoke of “the biological taken as the guide in everything.”19 The biotechnique theory informed Moholy-Nagy’s understanding of space, movement, and dynamism, evident in his study of the spiral as well as his film script “Dynamic of the Metropolis” (1921– 1922).

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Rejecting the “Functionalist- determinist attitude” that he associated with Le Corbusier, Banham defended Moholy-Nagy’s view of “experienced space,” arguing “his attitude emerges as a kind of non-Deterministic Functionalism, based no longer on the bare logic of structural Rationalism, but upon the study of man as a variable organism.” According to Banham, Moholy-Nagy’s “system was built on more liberal foundations” and consequently “was capable of interpretation and reinterpretation in a wider context than that of the International Style.” Banham concluded that Von Material zu Architektur (1929) “occupies the unexpected position of being at the same time the first book entirely derived from the Modern Movement, and also one of the first to point the way to the next steps forward.”20 In “The History of the Immediate Future,” a lecture delivered to the Royal Institute of British Architects in February 1961, Banham announced, “The next move for architecture is to follow the human sciences inside the human being.”21 Along with obscure references to “the new biology,” Banham’s presentation concentrated on the work of the biologist Peter Medawar, who, along with Frank Macfarlane Burnet, was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize.22 Referring to a radio broadcast interview with Macfarlane Burnet on the theory of clones, Banham argued that his scientific approach “reveals most perfectly the mixture of insight, statistical research, biological know how and blunt common sense, that characterized also Professor Medawar’s Reith Lectures, and ought— I submit— to characterise architectural thinking.”23 In his 1959 BBC Reith Lecture titled “The Future of Man,” advancing a provocative theory of evolution, Medawar explained: “I am, of course, saying something utterly obvious: society changes; we pass on knowledge and skills and understanding from one person to another and from one generation to the next; a man can indeed influence posterity by other than genetic means. But I wanted to put the matter in a way which shows that we must not distinguish a strictly biological evolution from a social, cultural, or technological evolution: both are biological evolutions: the distinction between them is that the one is genetical and the other is not.”24 Dissolving the distinction between natural and man-made artifacts, arguing that they were part of the same system, enabled Medawar to put forth a novel understanding of the way cultures evolved. The biological analogy was used to describe the complex “organic” relationships responsible for an open-ended cultural evolution. The “evolution of bicycles or wireless sets or aircraft,” he explained, “do not really evolve, but they are appendages, exosomatic organs if you like, that evolve with us.” The “two kinds of evolution,” genetic and cultural, are both gradual and follow similar principles. The “organism learns by experience,” said Popper, gaining its knowledge through slow piecemeal processes, not unlike man-made artifacts.25 Medawar argued, “Pneumatic tires did not suddenly appear in the whole population of bicycles— but in a few members of the population: and if these novelties confer economic fitness, or fitness in some more ordinary and obvious sense, then the objects that possess them will spread through the population as a whole and become the prevailing

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types. In both styles of evolution we can witness an adaptive radiation, a deployment into different environments: there are wireless sets not only for the home, but for use in motor-cars or for carrying about.” He continued, “We can see in our exosomatic appendages something equivalent to vestigial organs: how else should we describe those functionless buttons on the cuffs of men’s coats?” Whether considering industrial objects or organisms, Medawar held that these “two kinds of evolution” were informed by a type of “economic fitness” and should be considered “biological.”26 Medawar’s ideas about evolution could be extended to suggest that the motor car, like bicycles, scooters, flying machines, and rockets, was as an extension of the human body, the very thesis put forth in the Man, Machine and Motion (1955) exhibition, organized by Richard Hamilton, with a catalog essay by Banham. This new understanding of evolution and culture suggested that mass-produced consumer items and the built environment were part of a dynamic technological evolutionary process, yet without being directed by any central agency.27 In 1959, reflecting on the new science of biology, the Canadian architectural historian Peter Collins argued that “biologists have become very conscious of ‘biotic’ environment (i.e. the influence of free organisms on each other), so we are becoming much more aware that ‘environment’ does not only comprise natural scenery, but also the accumulated legacy of the buildings in our towns. The urban scene, especially in America, is in many districts predominately ‘contemporary,’ so that modern architecture has no longer an excuse for ignoring its neighbours.”28 The theory of the biotic environment relied on a new understanding of context and the mechanism of adaptation in the process of evolution (fig. 6.1). It distinguished itself from other models by asserting, like Medawar, that natural and man-made artifacts were part of the same organismic system.29 This provocative interpretation of the built environment, understood as a vital living organism, anticipated views that emerged in the 1960s and helped usher in new theories of architecture and urban planning. Just as architects and critics were becoming fascinated by the urban scene in America, in 1958 Lawrence Alloway visited several cities in the United States. He found that “the architect, accustomed to think of himself as the potential creator of environments, and encouraged to do so by much architectural theory, has exaggerated the significance of his contributions to the city.” While Alloway admired the “architect-controlled places,” such as Rockefeller Center, he argued that “the real city is more than this.” In light of the “complex, untidy, fantastic, quick-paced environment” of the decentralized cities, Alloway concluded that the “city seems to be unplannable in popular terms.”30 Also in 1959 Banham published “City as Scrambled Egg,” in which he argued that the American drive-in cinema was the “first of the radically new centres of popular aggregation produced by the diffuse, well-mechanised culture of motorized conurbations.”31 Affirming the significance of the unplanned parts of the built environment laid the foundation for his evolving theory of the “diffuse city.”32 Already in 1955, connecting his fascination with futurism and the American

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figure 6.1 “The cover reproduces XXX, Medusa Octostyla, from the Icones Rerum Naturalium (1776) of Petrus Forsskal. Although he died at the early age of thirty- one, Forsskal was one of the outstanding pupils of Linnaeus, and the posthumous books based on his researches are considered to be classics of the systematic literature of Natural History. Such systematic studies, and the speculative hypotheses based on them in the late eighteenth century, were the foundations of the new science of biology, whose profound and various influence on architectural thought is discussed by Peter Collins in an article to honour the centenary of the most influential biological work of all, The Origin of Species.” Architectural Review (December 1959), cover. By permission.

city, Banham had written that “an examination of the Città Futurista drawings suggest[s] that far from trying to ‘introduce’ movement, Sant’Elia is basing his whole design on a recognition of the fact that in the mechanized city one must circulate or perish.”33 Banham continued, “He seems to have foreseen the technological cities of the fifties, each of which, in Gerhard Kallmann’s neo-Futurist phrases, ‘is a dramatic demonstration of motion-existence articulating space. At the centre of congress motion surges upwards . . . in towers that pin-point the sky . . . horizontally it articulates highway ribbons charged with a continuity of energy missiles; omnidirectionally it radiates outwards by aeroplanes arriving and departing.’”34 At least for Banham, the unplanned mechanized environment of man-made America represented an unrestrained vitality that would challenge any form of planned order. Having recently been appointed assistant executive editor at the Architectural Review, Banham launched a series of articles under the title “Architecture after 1960.” In the first installment, “Stocktaking,” while assessing the state of postwar theory, Banham staged a confrontation between tradition and technology, which correlated to history and science, respectively (the former was seen as an impediment to progress and the latter celebrated as an undirected evolution of technology), which sparked a debate that raged throughout the 1960s. In contrast to Peter Blake’s esteem of Le Corbusier as “a plastic artist of supreme authority,” Banham shockingly placed Le Corbusier’s work in the category of “tradition” (fig. 6.2).35 Following Summerson, who had explained that “the Modulor, like any other apparatus of the kind, is a system of control, not of expression (Le Corbusier says this as clearly as it could be said),”36 Banham regarded Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism and Le Corbusier’s Modulor as a crude return to the divina proportione of Palladio, a move that had induced an “addiction to formality.” In the conclusion, “The Gap-Town Planning,” Banham announced, “When all this has been said, and stock has been taken of the present situation, there remains one yawning and alarming chasm between technology and tradition, between operational lore and apparent intelligence— town planning.”37 Critiquing postwar urban planning theory, Banham argued: “The idea of cities is an ineradicable part of the operational lore of civilization— a word which implies cities anyhow. The concepts we have of cities are as old as philosophy and are so rooted in the language of cultural discourse that to say ‘Cities should be compact’ is to commit a tautology— we cannot conceive of a diffuse city, and have invented other words, such as conurbation, subtopia, to underline our inability to conceive it.”38 Exposing the degree to which concepts such as the compact city of Europe were culturally circumscribed, in “City as Scrambled Egg,” Banham referred to Le Corbusier’s simile of the medieval city: “The city is closed like an egg, full as an egg.”39 The yolk was its center, with the cathedral; the white was the urban fabric; and the shell was the wall of fortification. This analogy illustrated for Banham how such powerful preconception “still grips the minds of architects when they think town-planning.” In distinction to

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f igu re 6.2 Reyner Banham, “Stocktaking,” Architectural Review (February 1960). By permission.

Le Corbusier’s egg-city, for Banham, the active motorized communications city was “scrambled egg with all its elements irrevocably stirred.”40 The decentralized diffuse city suggested a type of indeterminate form with no one in command of its organization or expression, a configuration that horrified many modern designers and critics, including Giedion, who in 1948 professed, “Before our eyes our cities have swollen into amorphous agglomerations.” Rejecting such sentiments, Banham accused the profession of ignoring

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manifestations of “apparent intelligence” such as services, entertainment, and sports, “all dealing with the here and now” and expressing the urban condition. Banham argued that although there may be any number of solutions for dealing with the complexities of the contemporary city, “the one we have so far is the relatively desperate solution of handing over responsibility to the will of a dictator— Le Corbusier at Chandigarh, Lucio Costa at Brasilia— and we are entitled to ask whether this is an adequate solution for our most pressing problem in design.”41 That pressing problem, for Banham, was the relationship between design and totalitarian control. Banham’s use of the word dictator in reference to the planner sought to expose the problem of determinism in the design process. This approach, like that of Jane Jacobs the following year, was based on a critique of centralized planning as a form of control. Further developing this line of criticism, the following year Banham argued, “Built-in equipment is little more than an attempt to impose a veneer of totalitarian order in a situation where something like democratic give and take may have been more to the point.” While in the early 1960s Banham still believed that it was “possible to abandon the position of autocratic dominance implicit in Bauhaus theory without losing control of the over-all design,” by the end of the decade his criticism increasingly distanced itself from the need for control in the design process.42 In response to a lecture by Victor Gruen in London in 1962, Cedric Price, after denouncing the planners’ fixation with the “heart of the city,” questioned whether words like town and city should even be used, for the “new freedom that we have through extra leisure and through eventually 100 per cent mobility means that as long as the architects do not stop us and the planners do not stop us, the pattern of life and the fullness of life and therefore the resultant civilization patterns can be free and multi-directional.”43 This call for a diffuse, undirected, and indeterminate form represented an extreme model of openended urban evolution.44 Also in attendance at that lecture was Peter Smithson, who, decrying the “bleak artificiality” of urban redevelopment, insisted that there was “something still very ‘screwed up’ about New Towns.” Concerning the dilemma of the period, he believed, “It is a question of deciding what architecture is now. It has changed. It has become environment.”45 While Darwin’s theory of evolution continued to exert great influence over the theoretical sciences, especially as an explanation of morphological development, the critique launched by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, followed by Medawar, had a considerable impact on postwar design theory.46 Thompson’s critique of teleology as a universal explanation of the environment drove the polemic that informed the work of the Independent Group as well as the design revolt of the 1960s.47 Furthermore, the denunciation of teleology was also at the heart of the controversial theories espoused by Hayek and Popper. Banham and Price were the protagonists who most clearly articulated the implications of this indeterminate philosophy as it related to design theory and urban planning.48 The rejection of planning controls and the promulgation

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of a diffuse city confronted a long tradition of anti-sprawl urban policies in Britain, promoted in publications such as The Preservation of Rural England (1926), by Patrick Abercrombie, professor of town planning at University College, London.49 Likewise, Clough Williams-Ellis, founder of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and author of England and the Octopus (1928), had championed an anti-sprawl polemic that raged against the evils of the “aesthetic degradation” of the countryside. Through planned efforts to control the sprawling metropolis, Williams-Ellis believed, modern design could save England from ecological destruction.50 These well- entrenched methods of planning for the collective good were challenged by a new permissive attitude that privileged individual choice. The shift from collectivism to individualism implied a fundamentally new approach to decision-making and choice.

i ndeterminAc y, o rgAnicis m , A nd t h e t rAditio nAL c ity In 1963 the British architect Royston Landau organized the “Context for Decision Making” symposium at the Architectural Association, where he was teaching.51 Upon the recommendation of Karl Popper, Landau invited William Bartley, a philosopher who had studied with Popper at the London School of Economics, and several other scientists, to consider aspects of decisionmaking in the arts and sciences.52 On the last evening of the event, the American architectural historian Stanford Anderson and Ernst Gombrich took on the task of relating the lectures to architecture. In their response, “they drew only on the lecture of Bartley, the one member of the group who was not a scientist, but who, as a philosopher, had presented a lucid account of Popper’s theory of science.”53 The event occurred shortly after the release of a new edition of Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, which introduced a younger generation to his central theory of indeterminacy, and the publication of Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, which was dedicated to Hayek.54 During this period Landau was in close communication with Popper. As late as March 1965, Landau recalled to Popper that Bartley’s presentation “was an enormous success and has proven to be very influential” (fig. 6.3).55 Landau continued, “Several of us in architecture have, for a number of years, been very influenced by your work in epistemology, and this might be an appropriate time for me to thank you for the enormous help you have given us in our own attempts to understand the status of knowledge, and particularly in our attempts at characterizing the architectural activity.”56 Landau’s recognition of Popper’s influence on design theory highlights the crucial, yet seldom appreciated role it played in informing architectural debates.57 During this period Popper was considered one of the most important philosophers in England. Delivering the prestigious British Academy’s Annual Philosophical Lecture of 1960, “On the Sources of Knowledge and of

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f igu re 6 . 3 Letter from Royston Landau to Karl Popper, March 15, 1965. Image: Karl Popper papers, box 383, folder 17, Hoover Institution Archives. By permission of The Architectural Association.

Ignorance,” Popper established that “not only has empiricism, still the ruling doctrine in England, conquered the United States, but is now widely accepted even on the European Continent as the true theory of scientific knowledge. Cartesian intellectualism, alas, has been only too often distorted into one or another of the various forms of modern irrationalism.”58 While important debates centered on questioning the authority of the architectural discipline,

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f i g u r e 6 . 4 Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Beauty of Old Towns,” Arena: the Architectural Association Journal (April 1965). AA Archives, London, Historic England Archive, E. H. Gombrich Estate. By permission.

Popper’s work was often cited in an ongoing battle to purge the discourse of “irrational arguments” and to forge a new open-ended approach to design. His theory of piecemeal knowledge and its relationship to tradition was vastly influential. Based on the observation that “the organism learns by experience,” Popper explained: “It may learn only slowly from the (partial) repetition of its history, but it cannot be doubted that it does learn, in so far as it is partially conditioned by its past. Tradition and traditional loyalties and resentments, trust and distrust, could not otherwise play their important role in social life.”59 The idea behind this theory had far-reaching implications for many disciplines, including urban planning. In “The Beauty of Old Towns,” presented at “Context for Decision Making,” Ernst Gombrich challenged modernist conceptions of city planning while arguing for a new understanding of tradition and the role that complex social processes played in shaping the built environment (fig. 6.4). Unlike new cities planned by modern designers, Gombrich concentrated on the subtle layers that emerge over time and form the complexities of historic cities. Gombrich stated, “I know that there are many young architects who are intrigued, fascinated, and perhaps occasionally exasperated by the secret magic of old towns.” He continued, “This secret seems to lie in some quality that is only inadvertently described by the word ‘organic.’ Compared to these products of slow and almost unplanned growth the products of the boldest plans of our urbanists often look mechanical, cold and cheerless.”60 Yet he announced: “I shall propose the hypothesis that the very conditions of slow and unplanned growth may sometimes be productive of qualities that are hard to imitate by deliberate

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planning. Those who know Professor Popper’s writings, particularly his rejection of Utopian planning in favour of what he calls ‘piecemeal engineering’ will no doubt be able to anticipate my second argument.”61 Gombrich’s comments indicated not only the extent to which the students at the Architectural Association were familiar with Popper’s work but also its importance for addressing some of the most pressing design issues of the period.62 Gombrich said his hypothesis “might be called one of conservative aesthetics. I would not want this to be confused with romantic or reactionary aesthetics.”63 He hoped this thesis might “assist the modern architect in the criticism of his decisions and therefore lead to a closer approximation in the modern idiom of the happy results that marked the growth of the old towns.”64 For a generation that is generally taken to have identified as left and positioned itself in the lineage of the 1920s avant-garde and its rejection of tradition, it seems it would have been difficult to incorporate Gombrich’s views into a radical agenda for rethinking the role of design in contemporary culture. Unlike the ideal or utopian plans executed by modern designers, Gombrich presented evidence that “piecemeal changes were more acceptable in the 15th and 16th century and that the plan or model was very frequently altered during the process of erection as the building began to take shape and either patron or architect had second thoughts,” arguing that there were many advantages that could come from such “slow and inefficient building organization.”65 These slow processes implied that some sort of feedback mechanism was at work that ensured the supposedly organic balance in the growth and organization of the built environment. Gombrich concluded that what one “sees, however unplanned and (if the word is permitted) unplannable it may be, represents the outcome of an ‘organic’ growth, precisely, maybe, because it is not the outcome of a few large decisions but of innumerable small and manageable ones.”66 Following Popper, the crucial lesson in decision-making was that small-scale, piecemeal choices, as opposed to grand utopian plans, could ensure a well-balanced organic society. Understanding unselfconscious processes appeared to be key to grasping the “secret magic” responsible for producing a vital, organic society. Hayek had demonstrated the crucial role that complex, non-linear, and undirected social processes played in a spontaneous order. Noting how determinists fail to trust this, Hayek wrote “that anything is not consciously directed as a whole is regarded as itself a blemish, a proof of its irrationality and of the need completely to replace it by a deliberately designed mechanism.”67 Hayek continued: “If it is true that the spontaneous interplay of social forces sometime solve problems no individual mind could consciously solve, or perhaps even perceives, and if they thereby create an ordered structure which increases the power of the individuals without having been designed by any one of them, they are superior to conscious action. Indeed, any social process which deserves to be called ‘social’ in distinction from the action of individuals are almost ex definitione not conscious.”68 These anonymous social processes, many of which were thought

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to be irrational, and therefore irrelevant, were presented in a logical fashion as having their own internal logic and intelligence that were superior to modern techniques. Social processes that slowly evolved, Gombrich reasoned, allowed sufficient time for the “criticism of earlier mistakes and the grouping for better solutions,” imploring: “It need not be pure romanticism, therefore, if we feel instinctively that many an old building, from a Cathedral to a lowly farmhouse, exhibits a sureness of touch, a balancing of effect and an air of appropriateness that is often absent from present day solutions. These solutions really ‘evolved’ more or less as organisms do, through the survival of the fittest and the elimination of undesirable mutations. If the snail’s house or the seashell strikes us as ‘organic,’ so does the form of the tribal hut or of the castle with its keep.”69 Informed by the extraordinary work of Aby Warburg, Gombrich’s theories anticipated debates associated with vernacular environments, including the exhibition Architecture without Architects (1964) at the Museum of Modern Art.70 Reflecting on the evolution of premodern environments, following Popper, Gombrich argued that tradition played a crucial role in these organic societies. Similar theories circulated in philosophy, art history, economics, and urbanism, and were largely based on a belief that science could explain complex social phenomena, considered part of an undesigned or spontaneous order. Gombrich’s thesis that the built environment produced by “slow growth” was indistinguishable from nature informed the polemic. While cities were generally understood to be ideological artifacts, the conception of the city as a “natural” phenomenon was common to the philosophy espoused by Medawar, Collins, and Gombrich (and Jacobs).71 Like an organism, the city was able to incrementally learn, respond, and adapt to its environment. Gombrich acknowledged that “the kind of evolution I had in mind has meanwhile been described more fully and explicitly by Christopher Alexander,” the mathematician-architect who taught at the University of California at Berkeley.72 Like many designers of the period who were searching for alternative design methods, in Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), Alexander suggested that “small and manageable” decisions concerning “form-context” should be taken up as part of a larger investigation into the nature of environmental problems.73 Referring to the studies in On Growth and Form (1917), in which form was defined as a complex convergence of forces resulting from the irregularities of an environment, Alexander argued that in order to achieve “fitness” between a form and its context, one would need an in-depth understanding of the complex social processes at work.74 The central question dominating debates was how to incorporate “unselfconscious” processes, like those found in nature and in anonymous buildings, into contemporary design.75 This further motivated the interest in non-design artifacts that drove research ranging from Gombrich’s study of the “magic” of old towns, responsible for the “organic” beauty of the premodern environment, to Aldo van Eyck’s extraordinary study “Architecture of the Dogon” (1961).76 At the Team 10 meeting in 1964, at which Alexander was a guest, van Eyck

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f igu re 6 . 5 Christopher Alexander, “A City Is Not a Tree” (pt. 1), Architectural Forum (April 1965).

presented his “leaf-tree, house-city” concept, which was meant to “replace the current false ‘organic’ city-tree analogy” that claimed the “man-made city” should be “planned” according to the ascending order of a tree.77 In response, Alexander wrote his celebrated essay “A City Is Not a Tree,” in which he distinguished two models of the built environment: one based on the hierarchical structure of a tree and the other based on a more complex structure called a semilattice (fig. 6.5).78 He was interested, ultimately, in explaining how “the semilattice is potentially a much more complex and subtle structure than a tree.” Relying on Popper, Alexander compared the hierarchical structure of a “traditional society,” characterized by a “closed group of friends,” with an “open society,” based on a more complex structure of social networks of selfinitiated communities, indicated by “overlapping groups of friends” (fig. 6.6). As we have seen, this view of an open society resonated not only with Alison and Peter Smithson’s notion of a community based on “voluntary association” and Jacobs’s view of a vital city life, but also with the view of Alexander’s colleague Melvin Webber in “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm” (1964).79 Webber’s non-place polemic built on the ideas of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who, in the 1930s, had claimed that “more and more it becomes possible to choose our companions on account of congeniality rather than on account of mere propinquity.”80 The key concept in all the examples was based on the liberal principle of individual choice, which challenged the notion of centralized planning. Outlining two distinct models of cities (designed and non-designed), using concepts that had long ago been established by Hayek, Alexander wrote: “I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call

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f i g u r e 6 . 6 Christopher Alexander, “A City Is Not a Tree” (pt. 1), Architectural Forum (April 1965). Note the diagrams describing a “traditional society” versus an “open society.”

those cities and parts of cities which have been deliberately created by designers and planners artificial cities. Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.”81 Alexander’s model of natural cities shared many of the organic characteristics of Hayek’s model of spontaneous order, and his notion of artificial cities corresponded to the concept of a planned order. In Alexander’s natural cities, social institutions are the result of spontaneous actions that occur over time and have not been “deliberately created by designers,” whereas artificial cities are the result of deliberate action and design. Reflecting on the various attempts to “combat the glass box future” of

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modernism, “all hoping to recreate in modern form the various characteristics of the natural city which seem to give it life,” Alexander concluded, “But so far these designs have only remade the old. They have not been able to create the new.” The inability to identify and capture the essence of spontaneous cities created an enormous dilemma for designers. Acknowledging this crisis, Alexander wrote: “It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.” Alexander continued, “It is vital that we discover the property of old towns which gave them life and get it back into our own artificial cities.”82 More broadly, wrote Alexander, “It is much too easy to say that these opinions represent only people’s unwillingness to forget the past, and their determination to be traditional. For myself, I trust this conservatism.”83 The Austrian architect and city-planning theorist Camillo Sitte had put forth a similar argument in Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (1889), which was revived in the postwar period when methods associated with unplanned and incrementally developed towns were presented as an alternative to the CIAM doctrine of town planning.84 Contemporary society was confronted with the “problem of complexity,” as Alexander understood it, and it was the task of the designer to figure out the “problem of organizing form under complex constraints.”85 Modern architecture and city planning, he alleged, was hopelessly trapped in a cycle of reproducing dysfunctional artificial cities through self-conscious form-making processes. As an alternative, he sought to understand the underlying principles of unselfconscious processes and turned to new studies in science that were exploring the phenomenon of spontaneous order, understood in terms of homeostasis, self-organization, and organized complexity.86 Alexander then acknowledged, “Another very brilliant critic of the deadness which is everywhere is Jane Jacobs.”87 As we have seen, Jacobs identified the unselfconscious phenomenon of a spontaneous city with its underlying organic order that had slowly developed over time, free of intention, design, and of the tyranny of an environment conceived by a single mind. Alexander’s approach relied less on the market than on the invisible hand of the self-organizing organic order. He pursued an unselfconscious process of form making with the hope that “the timeless way of building” might arise in society.88 The dispute over tradition was taken up by Stanford Anderson, who, in “Architecture and Tradition That Isn’t ‘Trad, Dad,’” presented at the “Context for Decision Making” symposium, confronted Banham’s enthusiastic historiography of technology and science.89 Relying on Popper’s theory of knowledge, Anderson challenged the notion of tradition as a regressive counterpoint to technology, which he claimed Banham had put forth in his “Stocktaking” essay that instigated the traditionalists-versus-technologists dispute. After acknowledging that traditionalism, understood as maintaining the status quo,

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had been rightly attacked by most twentieth-century architects, Anderson argued that “having rejected the authority of tradition, modern architects have then sought a new authority” in science and technology. In the last article of the 1960 series, titled “Propositions,” Banham concluded that the “failure of nerve” after 1927 could perhaps best explain modern architecture in terms of “its past, not its present.”90 He also claimed: “The lesson, in either case, seems to be clear— to go with our scientific surf-ride on which we are newly launched, to play it for all the kicks it can produce, and stay with it till it is exhausted, instead of trying to jump off while we think the going is good and finding ourselves at the mercy of the next breaker behind.”91 It was this extreme fervor that concerned Anderson, who noted a type of “scientific determinism” in Banham, who “warns architects to throw themselves wholeheartedly into technology— or else,” to discard their “cultural load” and go with the flow of an open-ended, undirected, and technologically advanced market-driven cultural evolution. Anderson repeated this lecture in 1964 at the AIA-ACSA teacher seminar at Cranbrook, where, for the first time, he met Colin Rowe and discovered their “parallel intellectual paths through Karl Popper and Rudolf Wittkower.”92 Rowe was introduced to Popper, through Ernst Gombrich, while he was teaching at Cambridge between 1958 and 1962.93 This constellation of figures evolved a distinct critique of modern architecture. Rowe’s view of history, and the important role that tradition played, may help explain his impatience with the space-age obsession and the cult of the future of the 1960s, a millenarian attitude that he and Koetter rejected for its historical determinist implications of having to follow the “path” of progress and technology.94 The discourse on the future reached new heights with John McHale’s “2000+,” a special issue he edited for Architectural Design (February 1967), with Buckminster Fuller’s introduction “The Year 2000.” This was reprinted for an American audience in Design Quarterly (August 1968) and was further developed in his The Future of the Future (1969).95 This mania among architects (what Popper referred to as moral futurism) that had infected the imagination of writers for centuries provoked Rowe and Koetter to ask, imploringly, “Why should we be obliged to prefer a nostalgia for the future to that for the past?”96 If the technologists looked too sternly to the future, those on the traditionalist side of the argument were often accused of fixating on the past. In understanding the philosophy promulgated by Popper, Hayek, and Gombrich, it was critical to see that it was based on “The Principles of a Liberal Social Order” and the unshakable belief that “older (pre-rationalist) theories of the law of nature” were superior to principles espoused in the modern era.97 They were superior, it was reasoned, because they offered a more concrete foundation for building a theory of society that was independent of the rationalist traditions of determinism and a deliberately designed social order. The search for solutions to the crises of modern design often referred to archaic environments. Following Sybil Moholy-Nagy’s Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (1957) and Aldo van Eyck’s “Architecture of the Dogon” (1961),

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f i g u r e 6 . 7 Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects (1964), Marrakech, Morocco.

Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects (1964) exhibition featured built environments from around the world that were outside the scope of trained architects (fig. 6.7).98 The range of non-design artifacts was presented with the intention of making evident that elusive “mechanism,” the key element missing in modern town planning, responsible for producing an organic, harmonious environment of habitat. This unfamiliar world, Rudofsky argued, was “not produced by a few intellectuals or specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activities of a whole people with a common heritage.” Consequently, “The shapes of the houses, sometimes transmitted through a hundred

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generations, seem eternally valid, like those of their tools.”99 Like Gombrich’s account of the “secret” of old towns, tradition played a crucial role in the evolution of these spontaneously built environments. The anonymous builders, Rudofsky noted, “rarely subordinate the general welfare to the pursuit of profit and progress.” This point helps distinguish two competing models of the built environment, one based on tradition and a non-market approach, and another based on Banham’s technologically charged pop architecture and the diffuse city, where the market and profit were vital forces. While the latter was based on a celebration of the market, the former was not; yet, significantly, both were perceived as indeterminate, that is, beyond the control of architects and other authorities.

endLessness, c LiP - o n, A nd i ndeterminAte Arc hitect ur e Postwar Britain saw austerity and economic restraint. In contrast, postwar America witnessed a proliferation in mass-produced consumer goods, from automobiles to washing machines, which paralleled a rise in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants, all of which provided endless fascination for young British architects. This dynamic, burgeoning, market-driven American scene of personal mobility and decentralized car-based urbanism, along with its advanced research and technology related to space travel, inspired new ways of thinking about architecture and the city. As Peter Cook noted, “The determination of your environment need no longer be left in the hands of the designer . . . it can be turned over to you yourself. You turn the switches and choose the conditions to sustain you at that point in time. The building is reduced to the role of carcass or less.”100 Inspired by technology and popular culture, the Archigram group— formed by young British architects in 1960 who worked toward uncompromised engagement with popular culture and industrial mass production— put forth a radical vision of postwar Britain defined by its unabashed embrace of the logic of consumer goods in a free market. Archigram’s philosophy of indeterminism profited from organicism and cybernetics to create a popular architecture of ever-changing replaceable component parts.101 Galvanized by Jane Jacobs and William Whyte’s critique of the homogenizing effects of the modern city, the Archigram Living City exhibition of 1963,102 like much of the work that followed, explored “everyday life rather than the grand plan,” while also endorsing a belief in the vitality of the organic city driven by countless individuals “freed from the yoke of collectivism by their own, personal agendas for the city.”103 Archigram’s vision “encouraged socioeconomic liberalism,” said one critic.104 Another asserted that “much of the criticism leveled at the group has been based in a disdain for their social position, characterized as libertarian, or even anarchic.”105 The same could be said of the group’s spokesman Banham, if not also of its hero Cedric Price. The design and production of consumer items in a free market served as their

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model, and individual decision-making and choice was key. For Archigram, as for Banham, the automobile industry demonstrated the crucial role that consumer choice played in the design process, allowing one to choose from various models, colors, and finishes, creating an endless feedback of market innovations that satisfied consumer desires. Archigram took this concept and extended it to consider the construction of the built environment. Archigram’s Plug-In City (1964) was based on the concept of obsolescence: following the model of the automobile industry, individuals could routinely update their houses, along with their cars, to the latest model. Archigram proposed expendable, mass-produced customized “capsule houses” that could be plugged in to a gigantic megastructure, then periodically replaced. These capsule houses offered a type of user manual for the city, and obsolescence was assumed as follows: bathroom, kitchen, and living-room floor, three years; living rooms and bedrooms, five to eight years; location of house unit, fifteen years; immediate-use sales space in shop, six months; shopping location, three to six years; work computers, four years; car silos and roads, twenty years; and main megastructure, forty years. Guided by boundless enthusiasm for the promise of technology and the free market, they explored the liberating potential of obsolescence and expendability as a means of serving and actively cultivating individual desire. With the highly successful release of Amazing Archigram 4 in 1964, featuring a flamboyant cover dominated by a comic superhero blasting the word zoom, the group gained international standing. That summer Banham had taken his position as historian at University College London, where, it was reported, he “polemically distributed” copies of Archigram 4.106 Archigram’s views of the promise of a market society and the rejection of the welfare state were also widely disseminated in major international architectural journals.107 In 1965 Banham published “A Clip- On Architecture” as a special issue of the journal Design Quarterly, one of the first magazines in the United States to feature Archigram and the work of emerging architects in Britain (fig. 6.8).108 Highlighting Alison and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future, which was “styled” following the logic of automobile production, Ionel Schein and René Coulon’s prefabricated motel units, Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, and Archigram’s Plug-In City, Banham offered a theoretical context for conceptualizing architecture as “indeterminate form,” also referred to as “endless architecture,” assembled from expendable components, a concept defined as clip-on or plug-in. He wrote: “The origins of the British theory that the architecture of technology should consist of endlessly repeated structural grids lay in observations of U.S. trends of the early 1950s. Yet practically the only surviving examples of the ‘endless aesthetic’ are the facades of the buildings at General Motors Technical Center by Eero Saarinen.”109 This distinctly evolved style, with its formal roots in American glass and steel architecture of the 1950s, developed the ideas of openness and permissiveness of systems using components of prefabricated parts and products, which led to not only an indeterminate architecture but a

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f i g u r e 6 . 8 Reyner Banham, “A Clip- On Architecture,” Design Quarterly 63 (1965), cover. Design Quarterly, Walker Art Center. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.

new form of urbanism as well. The burgeoning artistic production in America also provided important influences. Stressing the importance of the interaction of artistic ideas with new technical innovations, Banham wrote: “Somewhere in the background another concept had floated into the argument unnoticed— the informal or even a-formal order of the composition of action paintings.”110 The large-scale gestural effects of motion were beginning to manifest as proposals for an indeterminate urban order based on informal and flexible infrastructure (fig. 6.9). Mobility, Banham argued, had become an essential

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f igu re 6 . 9 Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, Park Hill Housing Development, Sheffield, England, 1957– 1961, in “A Clip- On Architecture.” Design Quarterly, Walker Art Center. By permission of the estates of Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith.

intellectual component of any clip-on architecture, including indeterminacy of location.111 To this point, Ron Herron’s astonishing proposal A Walking City combined the fascination with biology, cybernetics, and indeterminacy that dominated the imagination of postwar English designers (fig. 6.10). The proposal consists of massive mobile structures (conceived of as bionic robots) that are guided by their own intelligence and can freely roam the earth, moving to wherever their resources or manufacturing abilities were needed. This powerful vision, based on a fusion of biology and technology, resonated with the

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f igu re 6.1 0 Ron Herron, A Walking City, 1964. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS / Artimage, London. Photo: Ron Herron Archive.

biotic theory of the environment. Swarms of these cybernetic organisms could interconnect to form larger walking metropolises when needed, and then they could spontaneously disperse when their concentrated power was no longer necessary. Libertarian fantasies of nomadism were pushed to new heights. The preoccupation with growth, evident since the exhibition Growth and Form (1951), gave way to the idea of unplanned urban growth as an organic environment, which informed a new body of urban theory in the 1960s, especially work coming out of the Berkeley school of planning. By the mid-1960s, as we have seen, many had come to the conclusion that “a city is a complex livingsystem.”112 Responding to the growing complexity of postwar society, in 1963 John Weeks published “Indeterminate Architecture,” which outlined how architects conceived of dynamics buildings as biological organisms and sought flexible solutions capable of responding to fluctuating input from the environment.113 Indeterminacy manifested in architecture as technological anonymity, developed through open systems that could be freely arranged, and in urbanism as biological, organic conceptions of the environment, with the two often fused into one. The project A Walking City, with its nomadic, frenetic energy, also engaged ideas of radical decentralization based on individual mobility, an identifying feature of American culture associated with the diffuse city. Banham elaborated: “The epitome of the clip-on concept, at the time, was the outboard motor, whose consequences for the theory of design intrigued many of us then, in the following terms: given an Evinrude or a Johnson Seahorse, you can convert practically any floating object into a navigable vessel.”114 Further expounding the idea of diffusion, in “The Great Gizmo” (1965) Banham explored the proliferation of technological gadgets and their importance in the development of American culture, arguing that they were an integral part of colonizing both the rural landscapes of the past and present suburbia. Banham’s interest in the novelty of such technological products led him to believe that they could 236 | c h A P t e r s i x

facilitate a spontaneous conversion of the contemporary city into a landscape activated by individual desires. This radical vision of a city was related to the idea of spontaneous order (no planning regulations, no one in control): citizens would pursue their own individual plan according to their own desires, an anti-planning sentiment that resonated with non-hierarchical, decentralized, social structures based on freedom, personal mobility, and choice. The interest in indeterminacy remained a preoccupation for Banham throughout the 1960s. In Problemas de historia ambiental (1969), Banham elaborated on indeterminate architecture. Explaining how to critically discuss the legacy of indeterminacy in British design, Banham wrote that “in the case of indeterminate or non-formal architecture, one begins to call attention to the form in which John Weeks, or Cedric Price or Archigram would have conceived these buildings without a final form, and one shows what procedures have been followed in order to approximate a contemporary form, and I believe that an approach begins in this way.”115 Banham discussed Cedric Price’s Fun Palace as the emblematic project of “indeterminate architecture,” claiming it was “indeterminacy raised to a new power.”116 In New Directions in British Architecture (1968), Royston Landau had noted that “the idea of indeterminate architecture has featured as a central interest in much of the work of Cedric Price. He has approached indeterminacy as an idea which can be shown to have a very special appropriateness to a range of architectural questions.”117 The Fun Palace called for an architecture that was “informal, flexible, unenclosed, and impermanent.” No part of it was “designed to last for more than ten years, and parts of it for possibly only ten days.”118 The idea of obsolescence was further explored by Price in Potteries Thinkbelt (1964– 1966), a proposal for a student campus located over one hundred square miles in the once-vital area of North Staffordshire. The campus would be built around a road and neglected railroad network, which “emphasises temporary housing and ties students to the community.”119 The revitalized network would transport people and new mobile components, including rail-based lecture halls, teaching units, faculty units, and housing units, all of which were to be dispersed along the rail system and supplemented by the use of private cars. The project, according to Landau, “carries the ideas on obsolescence beyond the Fun Palace and into a more complex field where regional planning, national educational policies, and communications patterning form part of a context, and, as in the Fun Palace, it makes the point that architects have a responsibility to the problems beyond simply providing the architectural hardware.”120 Addressing the problem of specialization in architecture, while eluding to Popper’s “On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance” (1960),121 Landau claimed that “with the growth of knowledge and the loss of certainty, the architect might be said to be knowing less and less about more and more, while even what he does know, he is to doubt.”122 Perhaps more than any other designer, Cedric Price embraced the logic of doubt as a critical design strategy.123 While Banham commended Price for his uncanny ability to strategically 237 | t h e i n d e t e r m i n A t e c i t y

employ a range of mechanical techniques to achieve indeterminate form, he was concerned with the lack of a critical agenda in the work of Archigram, who revered Price, and thought that the group should be more “cautious and not admit that a technical novelty is valuable in and of itself.” By 1969 Banham concluded that “a great deal of what appears in their projects is nothing more than an unstoppable enthusiasm for technological innovations,”124 suggesting that his own interest in technology was more specific than is generally acknowledged. It has been suggested that, by the early 1970s, Banham had “curiously little to say” about much of the high-tech architecture of the period, presumably based on the tactics outlined in “A Clip-On Architecture.”125 Yet if Banham was a “technology enthusiast,” as many have asserted, his passion was largely defined by, and in support of, the proliferation of the “common technology” of US products, what he referred to as “back-porch technologies.” He celebrated technological products that did not require “high skill at the point of application” but rather the kind that, “ideally, you peel off the packaging, fix four bolts and press the Go button.”126 He observed, “These portable gadgets, have coloured American thought and action far more deeply— I suspect— than is commonly understood.” This interest was directly related to Banham’s idea of a diffuse city, a decentralized mechanized urban landscape profusely animated by citizens and their gizmos, guided by a philosophy in which the terms commodity, pop, and technology were practically indistinguishable. His fascination with new products caused him to consider whether they might even be capable of offering solutions to problems like the war in Vietnam, and he wondered whether the State Department might not wish for some “opinion-forming gizmo” to unleash an “Arsenal-of-Democracy” and help “spread sweetness and light and democracy and free-enterprise.”127 By the mid-1960s, Banham was convinced that this vision had become a real possibility, especially given that “the distributive civilization of gizmo culture is here already.” Intriguingly, Banham echoed Frank Lloyd Wright in feeling that, as a result, cities were “outmoded” because “if the nation is to continue defining its purpose as the pursuit of rural happiness, and if its population is to continue expanding at the present rate, then it may soon become necessary to re-suburbanize existing urban sites and to reduce them to quasi-rural population densities. You have only to go up to the Cloisters or Fort Tryon and look around you, to realize that Manhattan Island would be the most paradisal of American Gardens if only they would get New York off it.”128 The rejection of urban density, a key aspect of Wright’s Broadacre City, an anti-urban proposal begun in the early 1930s, informed his radical vision of a decentralized urban environment, supported by technological innovation in individual mechanized movement on the ground and in the air. Even though Broadacre City was highly designed, with every aspect carefully controlled by the architect, it nonetheless contained key characteristics associated with thinly dispersed urban formations spread across the landscape; Banham was highly attracted to this, and it helped him in formulating his vision of a diffuse city. Drawing inspiration from the power of Wright’s

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vision, which shifted the interest from the compact city of Europe and the East Coast to the more open, decentralized, and car-based cities of the West Coast, Banham pushed these ideas even further.129 During this period, Banham was beginning to conceive of non-planning ideas in which the market, with its proliferation of gizmos, could replace the planner in facilitating the population in adapting to its environment. The market could also play a vital role in advancing the evolution of the diffuse city while eliminating the need for control, a vision that would have undoubtedly horrified Wright but that Banham associated with freedom. Banham’s interest in unplanned cities was central to this idea, as was his research on “unrecognized American architecture,” such as the “native genius” of anonymous industrial roadside commercial architecture. In “The Missing Motel” (1965), Banham argued passionately in support of the “unselfconscious” American scene of motels, supermarkets, bowling alleys, filling stations, hamburger stands, and even houses created in a mode of “emotional engineering.”130 Banham had previously enthused over “the dynamism of that extraordinary continuum of emotional engineering-by-public-consent” that he saw in car stylings in the 1950s.131 In that instance, Banham had argued that the stylists were the anonymous heads of anonymous teams, “whose ultimate power lies in their firm grounding in popular taste.” He projected that model onto the unplanned built environment, particularly anonymous structures in roadside environments that were “conceived straight in the motel/supermarket mode, and . . . not designed by architects in the European sense.”132 Banham noted that “unprecedented developments, like new building types or the emergence of pop architecture, have erupted in the Nevada deserts,” while complaining that such buildings were systematically excluded from formal “architecture,” including the exhibition Modern Architecture USA (1965), organized by Arthur Drexler, director of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Banham was not alone in his support of the “valid and vivid” banalities of the American landscape.133 Like Tom Wolfe, who celebrated the work of the “nondesigners” responsible for the extravagant signs and neon sculptures of Las Vegas as America’s first “unconscious avant-garde,”134 many young designers and critics were part of a powerful, yet seldom recognized, non-design movement that embraced the chaos of the American scene.

P er mi ssive PLAnning The postwar discourse on permissiveness and freedom in planning was greatly advanced by the American urban designer and theorist Melvin Webber, who was based at the University of California, Berkeley, since the mid-1950s.135 In the early 1960s Webber made his first major contribution to the design and urban planning literature with two extremely persuasive essays: “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity” (1963) and “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm” (1964).136 In both essays, Webber questioned the

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accepted notion of place and argued that new forms of social electronic networks, telecommunications, and an ever-expanding transportation network of mobility were more important than the physical places where they happened to be and constituted a new kind of spatial phenomenon: “non-place.” Outmoded concepts of geography, Webber suggested, weighed down studies of urban formation. He cited Bertrand Russell, who wrote, “Indeed the whole notion that one is always in some definite ‘place’ is due to the fortunate immobility of most of the large objects on the earth’s surface. The idea of ‘place’ is only a rough practical approximation; there is nothing logically necessary about it, and it cannot be made precise.”137 Webber argued that technological networks allowed individuals to freely communicate across non-places and to form the vital social connections that any community needs to thrive. The concept of territory, Webber claimed, was becoming increasingly irrelevant as a means of understanding the complex patterns of social processes. His work attempted to shift the discourse on urban communities from the point of view that privileged the physical and the stable to a more open discourse on the ephemeral and changing nature of the contemporary city. Webber explained that his interpretation of the city was “oriented to metropolitan processes (a verb view) for which it seeks to identify the matching spatial form (a noun view), and hence it seeks to pose a dynamic portrait of metropolitan form in action (a gerund view).”138 He continued, “By dealing with process and form simultaneously, I am looking for a clearer conception of the urban communities as spatially structured processes.”139 Webber’s conclusions synthesized a growing anti-planning philosophy that had gained currency in the postwar years with the study of complex urban phenomena. Combining acute observations of the intertwined relationships of economics and urban formations in the production of complex, undesigned social processes, Webber, perhaps more than any other urban scholar, and his theories of non-place most closely approximated Hayek’s ideas of spontaneous order. Reflecting on the evolution of cities in Europe, using terminology borrowed from Hayek practically verbatim, Webber and his colleague Frederick C. Collignon concluded that “both city and region were territorially defined and physically tangible objects, subject to conscious design and to deliberate manipulation in pursuit of both aesthetic and social ends.”140 But they described a “different paradigm” in planning that emerged in the postwar period, one that was “no doubt influenced by the likes of von Hayek’s castigation of planning as the enemy of both freedom and capitalism and by the Soviet Union’s pervasive reliance on planning, Congress explicitly rejected national planning and peremptorily abolished the [National Resources Planning Board]. The idea of planning had come to symbolize both virtue and sin.”141 By the mid-1960s many young architects had veered away from the “sin” of planning and, entangled in a discourse of freedom and choice, had embraced the philosophy of indeterminacy of urban form as an aesthetic and social ideal. In this new understanding of urban society, the governing principles of

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hierarchy and determinacy were replaced with notions of freedom of action, and the automobile played a central role. As did Hayek, Webber pursued a vision that embraced the increasing complexity of social and urban patterns in the decentralized automotive environments, which he believed allowed individuals more freedom to make choices about how to live. He advocated modeling the city on the way it actually functioned, not on the way planners thought it should function. He rejected officially sanctioned notions of culture and city while privileging ephemeral social networks and amorphous urban formations as expressions of a new dynamic social life. Webber believed that a combination of individual choice, free-market economics, and a car-based decentralized metropolis provided the necessary means by which an open society could function. These ideas further exacerbated the planning verses nonplanning polemic that dominated political and design debates of the period in the United States and England. The validation of a decentralized diffuse city accessible by automobile in which individuals determined their own network of voluntary associations was seen by many, especially Banham and Price, as a model of utmost freedom while demonstrating that denser urban forms were not necessarily more desirable. Webber’s work was not only influential in the United States but also important to young planners, architects, and critics in Britain in the 1960s, particularly the English town planner, urbanist, and geographer Peter Hall, whose career was greatly advanced with the publication of London 2000 (1963).142 In the mid-1960s, Hall became fascinated by Webber’s work, particularly his views on dispersed urban formations as an alternative solution to dense, planned environments. His advocacy made a powerful impression on a generation of young designers and critics, especially Banham, who were struggling to reimagine the role of planning and the modern urban paradigm. As Hall said, “In 1963, Mel Webber had seen the future of the world already arrived around him, and found that it worked.”143 In 1966 Hall met Webber at Berkeley. Thereafter the two maintained a dynamic relationship that fostered an exchange of ideas between England and California. From Berkeley, Webber advanced the “revolutionary hypothesis that European and American planners had been too obsessed with traditional forms rather than the way towns performed functions— in particular the essential function of getting people and goods about.”144 The city that best exemplified this vision was Los Angeles, and Webber played an important role in transforming its perception as a place of chaos to that of a viable model. Hall wrote that “Los Angeles, the traditional planner’s nightmare, was in Webber’s view at least as efficient as traditional cities because it provided for a multiplicity of high speed car journeys to and from a host of dispersed locations.” In addition, and perhaps more important, Hall highlighted Webber’s conclusion that “its lack of centralization, often dismissed as a vice, was in reality its great virtue.”145 Commenting on the impact these ideas had in England, Hall pointed out that in Washington New Town, Richard Llewelyn-Davies and John

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Weeks created an “interim plan for a town in the Webber image.” Hall saw that “the idea of the planned conurbation could well prove the most important concept in British planning since Howard’s Garden City.” He concluded: “We need an end to the conservative attitude that rallies to the barricades every time a southern English town advances within six miles of another. In short, we need re-education in planning.”146 Hall was instrumental in Webber’s being a visiting scholar for the academic year 1968– 1969 at the newly founded Centre for Environmental Studies, a London think tank chaired by Richard LlewelynDavies that researched urban and environmental issues.147 Webber’s controversial ideas soon became even more influential in Britain, as he delivered two persuasive lectures, published as “Planning in an Environment of Change: Part I: Beyond the Industrial Age” (1968) and “Planning in an Environment of Change: Part II: Permissive Planning” (1969).148 Hall recalled that “no one present at those inaugural seminars will ever forget the power with which he argued for a town freed of all conventional concepts of place or hierarchy.”149 In a review of “Permissive Planning,” P. R. Haywood wrote, “There is already evidence of an acute interest among academic planners that could be prelude to the development of a new fashion as influential in its own way as ‘Master Planning’ and ‘Comprehensive Planning’ were in theirs.”150 Indeed, the nonplanning doctrine signaled a more permissive attitude toward an aesthetic of diffusion evident in the work of pop artists, architects, and planners who explored the social and urban conditions associated with decentralized uncontrolled urban development.151

miLton key nes And the o P e n cit y The Centre for Environmental Studies, founded in large part by Richard Llewelyn-Davies and Richard Crossman and funded by the Ford Foundation, sought to bring together scientists, government agencies, and new research from fields such as sociology, economics, and urban planning to examine the problems of urbanization.152 One of the most remarkable projects to come of this effort, which benefited from ongoing discussions, seminars, and collaborative design processes, was the master plan for Milton Keynes, a product of an Anglo-American network of town planners, including Herbert Gans and Melvin Webber. In 1968 Gans presented a paper at the center entitled “Planning for People, Not Buildings,” and Webber was invited to help delineate the nature of the “urban society of the future.”153 Using California as an example, Webber argued that as cities expanded their dispersed forms, they did not disintegrate social and economic relations, as many urban theorists had asserted, but were held together by the automobile and various forms of telecommunications. The telephone, television, and computer provided information to people wherever they happened to be located. Observations of Los Angeles helped Webber define the “post-city age” as a new era based on plurality, diversity, individualism, mobility, and affluence, resulting in an ever-changing process of urban dispersion. He urged planners to embrace this new reality. 242 | c h A P t e r s i x

The planners of Milton Keynes, a British new town founded in 1967, generally shared this urban vision, and they sought to design an environment that would reflect freedom of movement and choice. As historians have noted, to fulfill this goal, they “demonstrated an enthusiasm for a marriage between the English Garden City tradition and a pseudo- California cityscape.”154 Their ideas were also influenced by the theories of Christopher Alexander, particularly his essay “A City Is Not a Tree” (1965), which cautioned designers against using a tree schema in which a single element could connect to other elements only in simple and limited ways. Instead, he urged an approach that would provide a diversity of options and networks connected with needs and services. And indeed, the master plan developed by LlewelynDavies was based on a “neutral” net of communication routes. In a 1966 article, he had noted that “deliberately planned towns, whatever their geometric form, have up to date been based on absurdly narrow concepts of social interaction and organization.”155 He warned, “We must be careful not to confuse visual or formal regularity with regimentation in patterns of living.”156 Skeptical of preconceived notions of the compact city, he recalled, “Not long ago it was commonly held by planners that a town could be designed within fixed boundaries and its future growth prevented by planning control.”157 In contrast, he believed that a proper approach to the contemporary city should begin with an “acceptance of the need for growth and change.” The master plan for Milton Keynes favored greater dispersal, following a “substantial body of opinion that the functional organization of a town should be loose and free.”158 Consequently, “The goal of the free choice in mode of transportation was taken as starting point.”159 For Milton Keynes he employed a framework for development that was sufficiently flexible to absorb changes, and he used the term unfinished planning to convey his intentions. Once completed, Milton Keynes had the lowest density of the new towns, as it embodied Webber’s paradigm in which “hierarchy and determinacy were out, freedom of action was the governing principle,”160 and automobility was key. It was, in sum, “planning for people and the way they wanted to live, not the way planners thought they ought to live: a very American, above all Californian, view of the world.”161

non - P LAn: An exPeriment in fr e e do m In 1969 the British weekly New Society devoted a special issue to non-planning, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” a manifesto written collaboratively by Banham, Paul Barker (editor of New Society), Peter Hall, and Cedric Price (fig. 6.11).162 The authors claimed that “most planning is aristocratic or oligarchic in method,” and asked, “Why not have the courage, where practical, to let people shape their own environment?”163 Reminiscent of Hayek’s critique of planning as a form of control, the non-planners claimed that the “most rigorously planned cities— like Haussmann’s and Napoleon III’s Paris have nearly always been the least democratic.”164 Challenging this legacy, the non-planners 243 | t h e i n d e t e r m i n A t e c i t y

f i g u r e 6 . 1 1 Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society (March 20, 1969), cover. By permission of New Society.

noted “how little planning and the accompanying architecture have changed.” In fact, “The whole ethos,” they argued, “is doctrinaire.”165 The authors decried the prescriptive interventions of the experts and advocated for what they termed non-planning— which is to say, they argued for the removal of regulations and in favor of the “spontaneous” urban development

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f i g u r e 6 . 1 2 Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society (March 20, 1969). By permission of New Society. Photos by Christopher Ridley.

that would follow. In the section “Spontaneity and Space” (fig. 6.12) they put it succinctly: “The notion that the planner has the right to say what is ‘right’ is really an extraordinary hangover from the day of collectivism in left-wing thought, which has long ago been abandoned elsewhere.”166 This section most clearly approximated Hayek idea of spontaneous order, characterized by highly dynamic systems resulting from the lack of “conscious” design and control. Like Hayek, who was so enamored of developments in the United States as an expression of freedom that he dedicated The Constitution of Liberty “to the unknown civilization that is growing in America,”167 the authors of “Non-Plan” were powerfully drawn to the laissez-faire, decentralized cities of the United States, which they perceived as free of centralized state control. Also like Hayek, they tended to equate personal freedom with free-market capitalism. The non-plan was first conceived sometime in 1967, the year that Hall met Webber.168 Then, in the summer of 1968, Banham spent time in Los Angeles, where he witnessed the non-plan phenomenon in context: the market logic of urban form responsible for the new social and urban formations born of the intense forces of unrestrained capital. Banham argued that Los Angeles, far from the chaos that many had claimed, “has a comprehensible system that works, and can be applied elsewhere.”169 But it was not until 1969 that the nonplan concept was fully developed as a non- design proposal that speculated

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what might happen if free zones were established in England, where planning restrictions were removed, allowing the unplanned forces of American-style commercial-strip development to flourish. Growing increasingly suspicious of planning doctrine, planners were drawn to experiments that might loosen the grip of control associated with regulations and state planning. The non-planners wrote: “The New City plan for Milton Keynes tries to shy away completely from planning. . . . What would happen if there were no plan? What would people prefer to do, if their choice were untrammeled?”170 They wondered, “[If] minds can cure themselves[,] maybe people can plan themselves?” They argued: “The right approach is to take the plunge into heterogeneity: to seize on a few appropriate zones of the country, which are subject to a characteristic range of pressures, and use them as launch pads for Non-Plan. At the least, one would find out what people want; at the most, one might discover the hidden style of mid-20th century Britain.”171 This anarchic suggestion reveals a core belief that style should not be invented, and certainly not by some elite group, but rather should simply emerge spontaneously, without the direction of authorities and state agencies. The group’s observations about American culture and urbanism offered them the means to critique many of the norms of urban planning in the welfare state while exposing the value-laden planning objectives of the profession. The non-plan proposal argued that “what ordinary people wanted— rather than what planners, architects and other aesthetic judges said they ought to want— was the best guide (rampant conservatism or rampant anarchism, depending on your viewpoint).”172 In revealing the “arbitrary” decisions that typically informed planning, the non-planners cited Webber’s contention that “planning is the only branch of knowledge purporting to be some kind of science which regards a plan as being fulfilled when it is completed; there’s seldom any sort of check on whether the plan actually does what it was meant to do, and whether, if it does something different, this is for the better or worse.”173 The four British authors of the proposal were interested in urban change, and they shared a deep admiration of American culture, lifestyles, and cities, which they viewed as free of centralized state control. Since the 1950s Banham had written extensively and enthusiastically about American culture under consumer capitalism and its decentralized cities with drive-in cinemas and roadside architecture. In 1965 Banham became the design and architecture critic for New Society, and as a result, “the Non-Plan idea was strongly influenced by Banham’s essays in the magazine.”174 As editor of New Society, Barker featured long excerpts from The Levittowners (1967), by the controversial American sociologist Herbert Gans, which had a major influence on the group’s thinking in that it showed them that, within the non-design environments, including the “most despised form of American suburban speculative housing,” a genuine spirit of community had evolved.175 Furthermore, after living among the residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, Gans concluded, “They are not apathetic conformists ripe for takeover by a totalitarian

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f i g u r e 6 . 1 3 Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society (March 20, 1969). By permission of New Society and the estate of Graham Percy.

elite or corporate merchandiser,”176 challenging myths about the suburbs and other unplanned environments. Accompanying the text was an illustration representing the (presumably desired) outcome of the experiment at the urban scale, which ostensibly provided the answer to the authors’ burning question: “What would happen if there were no plan?” (fig. 6.13).177 The question challenged the long-held assumptions put forth by the Labour Party, published in its pamphlet The Old World and the New Society (1942), which argued that “a planned society can be a far more free society than the competitive laisser-faire order it has come to replace.”178 It was precisely this vision of freedom articulated by socialists and sustained through government regulations that non-planners viewed as most problematic. The move toward increased government control and planning regulation of the greater London area was one of the prime targets of the nonplan. Complaining that “institutionalized socialism” dominated England, Banham argued in 1964 that “the whole planning concept is a paradigm of the new class system of the Welfare State.”179 Likewise, the authors of the non-plan protested that under central government control, “Each project must be weighed, and planned, and approved,” everything “must be watched; nothing must be allowed simply to ‘happen.’”180 In contrast, the non-plan, they argued, was in defense of spontaneity, the commonplace, and freedom of choice. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, passed by the Labour government, at the time led by Clement Attlee, established that planning permission

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was required for land development. To control this, the act gave local authorities wide-ranging powers, including approval of planning proposals. In addition, it gave them powers to control outdoor advertising. Envious of places that lacked this type of control, the non-planners cited Frank Lloyd Wright, who had instructed his disciples: “Watch the little filling-station. It is the agent of decentralization.”181 Intending to rid England of its socialist planning legacy, the non-planners proposed that the United Kingdom establish free zones to encourage the freedom, vitality, and spontaneity of the roadside commercial strips, like those of the American West. The principle behind this “precise and carefully observed experiment in non-planning” was that “no land use pattern could be regarded as sacrosanct.”182 With its illustrations of supermarkets, laundries, gas stations, and burger joints, non-planning was in essence an effort to discredit the role of centralized planning and design in shaping the built environment. In support of the diffuse city, the non-plan proposed letting “what is trying to happen anyhow” simply occur by “taking the planning lid off.”183 This, they believed, would help immerse its citizens in the freedom of choice afforded by mass consumption and urban decentralization. They anticipated “the result will be life in far-flung suburbs,” as in America.184 Clarifying their position, they wrote, “We are arguing that the word planning itself is misused; that it has also been used for the imposition of certain physical arrangements, based on value judgements or prejudices; and that it should be scrapped.”185 Citing recent developments such as the “cybernetic revolution, the mass affluence revolution, and the pop/youth culture revolution,” the authors believed that the proposal engaged questions concerning the “science of decision making” (hence the significance of the “Context for Decision Making” symposium at the Architectural Association in 1963), which cybernetics had greatly advanced, and suggested that the chief decision of all, as Hayek had shown, was “who was to do the planning.” Was planning to be done by a small elite group, or were individuals to be allowed to make plans of their own? Informed by Hayek’s critique of the central planner, the nonplan was based on the same concern at the heart of Jane Jacobs’s polemic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Non-plan might best be understood as the logical outcome of the legacy of that impassioned indictment of central planning, which informed the top-down-versus-bottom-up debates that have raged for decades since. Similar to Banham’s definition of pop architecture as a product of economics and consumer desires, the non-plan embodied non-design strategies at the urban scale to advance spontaneous order that resulted from the undirected forces of a free market.186 As Jacobs had, the non-planners exposed the dynamic relationship of economics and urban order, highlighting how interventions and commercial regulations could strangle the vitality of a place. They argued that “pop culture in Britain has produced the biggest visual explosion for decades. . . . Yet its effect on the British landscape has been nil, for the simple reason that planners have suppressed it.”187 They explained: “The planning

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system, as now constituted in Britain, is not merely negative; it has positively pernicious results.” They noted that since the publication of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, “planners themselves constantly talk about the need to restore spontaneity and vitality to urban life.” But, the non-planners argued, planners fail to realize that the “monuments of our century” that are infused with “spontaneity and vitality are found not in the old cities, but in the American west.”188 Challenging the preoccupation of Jacobs, as well as that of Ernst Gombrich and others, with dense, pedestrian-oriented traditional neighborhoods of “old cities,” the non-planners celebrated the new social and urban formations of the diffuse city. They argued that, “in the desert and Pacific states, creations like Fremont Street in Las Vegas or Sunset Strip in Beverly Hills represent the living architecture of our age.”189 The non-planners believed that as people become richer and “demand more space,” for example, they should be allowed to acquire it. Otherwise, problems and contradictions would arise: “To impose rigid control, in order to frustrate people in achieving the space standards they require, represents simply the received personal or class judgements of the people who are making the decision.” They continued, “Worst of all: they are judgements about how they think other people— not of their acquaintance or class— should live. A remarkable number of architects and planner who advocate togetherness, themselves live among space and green fields.”190 In contrast, the non-plan was an attempt to devise a plan that could manifest a non-coercive environment that allowed individuals to make their own choice about how and where they wanted to work and live. At the heart of non-plan was an argument for spontaneous order driven by a free market, where all individuals were free to pursue their own plan. The non-plan was an attempt to develop a practical application of market liberalism in the discipline of design. As such, it stands out as one of the most explicit examples of a scheme informed by non-design principles that attempt to resist design and control to manifest an indeterminate environment. The arbitrary decisions held by a small group of specialists generally responsible for planning were a prime target not only of Hayek but of the non-planners as well.191 Peter Hall observed that the Town and Country Planning Act “assumed that the private sector wouldn’t be very important any more, that most of the houses would be built by the public sector for the workers— a bit like a liberal communist country.”192 In contrast, the market was seen as key to the development of alternative strategies. During this period, the promise of a permissive environment fueled experimentation with various non-design strategies involving market forces that sought to allow social and urban formations to emerge without the imposition of direction or design. It was believed that such environments were free of the types of coercion inherent in a master plan. The non-plan resonated with the demonization of state-based urban planning by non-conformist groups across the political spectrum. As the political historian Ben Franks has pointed out, the New Left and the New Right shared

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many of the same anti-authoritarian concerns: “Both viewed the planned economies of the Soviet Union and the paternalistic liberalism of the Western Welfare State as their enemies; and both were interested in new social theory in opposition to the repressive orthodoxy of Marxist-Leninism.”193 Franks argued, though, that the “Non-Plan has much more in common with the New Right than the New Left, and shares many key characteristics with Frederick Hayek.”194 Indeed, like Hayek, the non-planners were opposed to government control and restrictive laws. Part of the novelty of the non-plan was that it attacked many of the same targets as the New Left, such as government bureaucracy and its restrictive laws, yet it did so by employing the economic strategies of the New Right. Hayek argued that the grand modern urban proposals of government reform designed to resolve social problems actually exacerbated them.195 In contrast, the market was upheld for its ability to satisfy complex problems while accommodating the needs and desires of the common man. Referring to the vital role of pop culture, the authors claimed, “Most importantly for Non-Plan, it is frenetic and immediate culture, based on the rapid obsolescence cycle.”196 As Simon Sadler pointed out, “The promotion of obsolescence and deregulation, since associated with the free-market policies of the New Right, appeared to its left-leaning advocates of the 1960s to be a truly radical anti-establishment stance.”197 For many involved in the countercultural movements of the period, “the traditional leftist maxims of orderly solidarity were made to seem distinctly backward.” Sadler explained that the authors of the non-plan “broke more completely as well with the discredited, blatantly repressive central planning of the Soviet bloc, and here it is worth remembering the Popperian intellectual provenance of Non-Plan, from the tutelage of Friedrich Hayek, who, in works like The Road to Serfdom of 1944, had argued for a free-market libertarianism that approximated to the position taken by Banham, Price, Hall and Barker.”198 Not surprisingly, as Barker noted, “one of the few friendly reactions, at the time, came from an ex- Communist turned Daily Telegraph editorialist, Alfred Sherman,” who would later be described as Margaret Thatcher’s “right hand man.”199 Like many of his generation, Sherman turned against Stalin and socialism to fully embrace free-market economics as a means of achieving democracy. The non-planners wrote, “Simply to demand an end to planning, all planning, would be sentimentalism; it would deny the very basis of economic life in the second half of the 20th century.”200 Following Hayek, their plan was a “liberal plan,” based on each individual pursing his or her own interest. As Hayek explained, “The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful means that human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from trying to do better.”201 The subtitle of “The Non-Plan” special issue, “An Experiment in Freedom,” is noteworthy. By the late 1960s the word freedom had acquired a new meaning. In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Milton Friedman argued that economic

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freedom was a precondition for political freedom and that capitalism plays a crucial role in the formation of a liberal society.202 Like Hayek and his supporters, the authors of the non-plan based their argument on the assumption that political freedom was synonymous with market freedom. Both Hayek and the non-planners believed that the market served as a non- coercive framework for the development of a democratic society. Therefore, when the nonplanners wrote that Britain “seemed so afraid of freedom,” they were invoking the particular species of freedom defined by life in an unrestrained market economy.203 Given their unwavering criticism of planning and state regulations, the one thing the non-planners were apparently not compelled to criticize was the principle of free-market capitalism, leaving the impression that it was the only viable option. Reinforcing the idea that the market, not the government, was better at negotiating where and how people want to live, Cedric Price explained that, “through enabling uneven development, the particularization of occupation, habit and appetite will be more likely to occur in places and at times best suited to it.” In “Cycles of the Price-Mechanism,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to economics, Banham explained that Price understood that “all things become potentially transient if any one part can be varied beyond the architect’s control.”204 Connecting this idea with Webber’s permissive planning approach, Price maintained, “Non-plan, through its permissive attitude to change, is likely to increase the validity of continuous redevelopment resulting in activities and forms as yet unrealized.”205 Sustained by unruly indeterminate forces of what many believed to be a self-organizing system, the non-plan promised Britain the spontaneity and vitality of a non-regulated life in a diffuse city.

t he s eLf- orgAnizing c ity Six months after the publication of “Non-Plan,” in September 1969, Architectural Design, released the special issue “Despite Popular Demand,” dedicated to “thinking about architecture and planning.” Guest edited by Royston Landau, the issue was devoted to examining “a present which alters fast and which is widely sensitive to change,” while exploring “techniques previously regarded as belonging to the realms of mathematics” (fig. 6.14).206 Landau explained that architecture and planning were “question asking activities” popularly classified as “problem-solving” and therefore consulted the scientific enterprise as a problem-solving paradigm. Many of the essays were dominated by architecture and planning theory that attempted to account for an urban paradigm as a physical system resembling “highly irregular” behavior while investigating concepts based on self-organization and cybernetics, popular among scientists of the period.207 Whether by employing analogies of cybernetics, biology, or the free market, the concept of indeterminism was a common concern of many of the essays. The desire to remove the conscious intention of the

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f i g u r e 6 . 1 4 “Despite Popular Demand . . . AD’s Thinking about Architecture and Planning,” Architectural Design (September 1969), cover. Reproduced by permission of Philip Castle.

designer in the design process, the key characteristic of non-design, became even more pronounced during this period.208 Not unlike the symposium that Landau organized in the early 1960s at the Architectural Association, many of the essays referenced Karl Popper’s scientific theories. Concerned about the lack of a sound method of problem solving, Landau’s introductory essay complained that building and planning proposals too often

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appeared to have been produced “without the introduction of novelty in the scientific sense.”209 Landau denounced the “restrictions and influences which act upon a designer in a particular context,” explaining: “In architecture and planning today, one such major influence can come from law-makers and their administrative agents who produce comprehensive ‘closed systems’ of rules from which it is not possible to deviate without administrative consent.”210 For new insight into alternative “ways and means” of conceptualizing the idea of an “open system,” Landau turned to the work of Popper, making specific reference to his essay “Of Clocks and Clouds,” which provided the inspiration for the issue’s cover, adding to the sense that the issue was a commemoration of Popper’s contributions to intellectual and scientific thought that helped advance architectural theory. In addition, portraits of Popper and Landau appeared in the “Cosmorama” section of the issue (fig. 6.15). The cover illustration of the September 1969 issue of Architectural Design was an interpretation of Popper’s essay “Of Clocks and Clouds” (included in the issue), providing curious insight into a peculiar British and American phenomenon of the late 1960s.211 It visualized the built environment as the product of two overlapping systems, each with its own distinct logic. The cover attempted to represent the schema Popper put forth in the essay, juxtaposing a “very disturbed or disorderly cloud” with a very reliable pendulum clock, intended to “represent physical systems which are regular, orderly, and highly predictable in their behavior.”212 As an example of a cloudlike phenomenon, Popper used a “cluster of small flies or gnats,” explaining that “the individual gnats which together form a cluster of gnats move in an astonishingly irregular way.” To explain how the cloud keeps together, Popper suggested that “those that find that they are getting away from the crowd turn back towards that part which is denser.” For Popper, the cluster is guided neither by a rational mechanism of control nor a plan, “and no structure— only a random statistical distribution resulting from the fact that each gnat does exactly what he likes, in a lawless or random manner, together with the fact that he does not stray too far from his comrades.” While a “philosophical gnat,” Popper said, might think that this “gnat society” is a great society since “it is the most egalitarian, free, and democratic society imaginable.” Popper concluded, “I would deny that the gnat society is an open society”: “For I take it to be one of the characteristics of an open society that it cherishes, apart from a democratic form of government, the freedom of association, and that it protects and even encourages the formation of free sub-societies, each holding different opinions and beliefs. But every reasonable gnat would have to admit that in his society this kind of pluralism is lacking.”213 While Popper may not have intended to discuss “any of the social or political issues connected with the problem of freedom,” the model nonetheless suggested a type of coordination without hierarchy, a formless arrangement in which control was managed by means other than central command. Not unlike Medawar and Collins, Popper conceived of the contemporary scene as

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f igu re 6.1 5 “Cosmorama” featuring Karl Popper and Royston Landau, Architectural Design (September 1969).

a biological system ranging from clockwork precision to cloudlike organization, each guided by its own internal logic. The concept of spontaneous order included many aspects of contemporary life, science could offer a more rational explanation of such “biological” phenomena. The interest in thinking about the city as an organism, with its own intelligent self- generating feedback mechanism capable of transforming itself independent of human design coincided closely with Hayek’s theory of the mechanism of the market, with its own inherent ability to maintain equilibrium. Commenting on this phenomenon,

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Landau explained that another concern addressed in the special issue’s essays “especially relevant to architects and planners” was “how to account for large systems that are ever-changing (e.g. regions, cities, aspects of cities).” The biological organism served as a model by which to understand complex systems displaying various types of “information flows.” It was reasoned that “biological (organic) systems need to possess a capacity for adaptation to changing conditions in order to survive. Certain types of inorganic systems such as cities, universities or business organizations . . . likewise need to possess a capacity for adaption.”214 The desire to understand the rules emerging out of an invisible-hand process of evolution had dominated the work of Popper and Hayek since the 1940s and seemed to gain particular relevance for a younger generation in the 1960s.215 In “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” published in The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Karl R. Popper (1964) as a “token of critical admiration,” Hayek explained that physical phenomena may achieve any degree of complexity and described how the “increasing complexity as we proceed from the inanimate to the (‘more highly organized’) animate and social phenomena becomes fairly obvious.” For him, “even such relatively simple constituents of biological phenomena as feedback or cybernetic systems” required a description much more elaborate than the general laws of mechanics.216 He explained that “complex wholes” consisting of large patterns resulting from multiple variables were much more “difficult to ascertain and control than [were] simple phenomena.” Hayek reprinted this essay in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967), dedicated to Popper, seeming to indicate a particular importance he attributed to the piece vis-à-vis Popper’s work. Many of the essays collected by Landau relied on a type of evolutionary cybernetic approach as the theoretical basis to explain complex phenomena: “Self-organizing systems have the characteristic of adjusting to the disturbances within their context. But in architecture and planning systems, their adaption and adjustment capacities can be inhibited by over-control.”217 Exploring this idea, in “Urban Chaos or Self- Organization,” Chris Abel explained that in adapting to a changed environment an “organic system is seen to generate its own constraints, and is accordingly called self-organizing” (fig. 6.16).218 Referring specifically to dispersed and fragmented urban regions, Abel claimed that “in the evolution of living systems, their spontaneous reactions preclude this being taken advantage of by any arbitrary imposition of order.”219 These ideas gave credence to the theory of dynamic equilibrium, suggesting that urban regions were inherently intelligent organisms operating according to their own internal logic. Where Landau maintained that “self-organizing systems have the characteristic of adjusting to the disturbances within their context,”220 Abel argued that any deficiencies in the system should be understood not as a “failure of self-organization, but on the contrary, [as] the result of the absence of self-organization.”221 Furthermore, he warned that such deficiencies

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figure 6.16 Chis Abel, “Urban Chaos or Self-Organization,” Architectural Design (September 1969).

not be used to justify the “imposition of some preconceived and irrelevant idea of general order” and that “the planner will succeed in eliminating such faults only by restoration of the natural organization.”222 Implicit in this philosophy was a belief in the inherent ability of these non-design “biological systems” to achieve equilibrium; to interfere with a system’s mechanism, especially by planning, would cause unbalanced and unnatural disturbances, if not disasters.223 This narrative was not only fundamental to Hayek and the Austrian school of economics; it was a core principle they associated with the philosophy of classical liberalism. As we have seen, a similar argument was made in economics, which claimed that to interfere with the market was to interfere with an allwise, self-regulating, balanced system. This neo-Darwinian interest lead to a general theory in which biological organisms, free-market economics, and diffuse or unplanned cities were considered part of a common phenomenon and, guided by a philosophy of indeterminacy, perceived as beyond the conscious control of human design. While manifesting in various ways, this doctrine was at the heart of the complex, if not contradictory, phenomenon of non-design.

Lo s AngeLes A s indeter m inAt e fo r m Having traveled regularly to Southern California in the late 1960s, Banham penned a four-part radio series on Los Angeles for broadcast on the BBC.224 Recounting his first visit to Los Angeles, traveling through the “uniquely scattered city” by bus, Banham wrote: “I was late and I was lost— and bitterly humiliated. I had been saving up Los Angeles in the way that some travelers save

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up Venice or Kyoto, an experience to be anticipated and relished to the full. I was not going to be like namby-pamby English architects and town-planners who were terrified of Los Angeles and its sprawl— only I was.”225 Of this “totally incomprehensible” place, where “citizens live at conspicuously low densities” and are prepared to travel extraordinary distances “within their diffuse metropolis,”226 Banham observed, “Almost everything is profoundly, disturbingly different.” In the quick transition from terror to fascination (within twentyfour hours he was “feeling perfectly at home”), Banham would come to perceive this anarchy of dispersed form as a radical negation of all previous categories. While arguing that Los Angeles “makes nonsense of history and breaks all the rules,” he confessed, “Well I love the place with a passion that goes beyond sense or reason.”227 Banham remained impressed by the way individual mechanized mobility allowed citizens to move about Los Angeles in an “astonishingly irregular way,” not unlike the gnats buzzing about in Popper’s cloud. Suggesting that the wild, dispersed urban form of Los Angeles corresponded to a radical political philosophy, Banham explained that the “free-swinging libertarian ethic that makes so much of Angeleno life irresistibly attractive” had its “ugly backside,” which manifested as an “apparently total indifference to the needs of all communities except one’s own”228 The “continually unnerving” libertarian principle informing the Angeleno attitude was expressed as “the refusal to accept that society has any claims on the individual.”229 This radicalism, Banham informed readers and listeners, could be heard at dinner parties in Los Angeles articulated as “no government on earth has the right to tell me to do anything.”230 He observed that “almost equally extreme views are held by decent, upright and humane Angelenos of many political shades,” noting that “objections to the draft can be so deeply felt on the radical right as on the radical left.”231 In Los Angeles, Banham connected the radical philosophy of libertarianism with the radical aesthetic of its diffuse form. In “Townscape” (1949), Hubert de Cronin Hastings, whom Banham regarded as “probably the greatest architectural editor who ever lived,” put forth a theory of the city based on radical liberal ideas of eighteenth- century English democracy.232 In contrast to “universal conformity,” Hastings based the townscape doctrine on the theory of liberty, responsible for “the philosophy of both political and aesthetic radicalism.” As previously noted, he explained, “I have called the radical canon, of English democracy, based on the belief in individualism per se; as a departure from conformity, as a means of differentiation in the biological sense— of achieving, that is, an increase in complexity, or organization, equivalent to that which occurs when differentiation takes place in the embryo and the organs appear.”233 Townscape was the urban-theory equivalent of the economic and political philosophy that radical liberal theorists had espoused since the 1940s, offered as a challenge to totalitarianism. Postwar libertarianism has its roots in eighteenth-century radical English liberalism and its celebration of liberty and freedom to differ. It is only when one

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considers that the radical aesthetic of the townscape doctrine and the radical philosophy of postwar libertarianism were both founded on classical liberalism, based on the economics of Adam Smith, that one can begin to fully appreciate Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s assessment that “much of present-day activity is incomprehensible unless we are prepared to recognize the ramifications of townscape’s influence.”234 While Banham rejected the sentimental imagery associated with the picturesque, and its corresponding term townscape, used to describe “those irregular charms” said to create character, he engaged the more radical aspects of the proposition, especially where Hastings implored his readers to consider the relationship between townscape and mechanization and to explore the social and technical implications of “living as we do in an era of advanced scientific industrialization.”235 Much of the confusion of the townscape legacy lies in the fact that little of the radical liberal ideas espoused in the 1940s survived in its later manifestations. Significantly, in Gordon Cullen’s Townscape (1961), as in Hastings’s The Italian Townscape (1963), references to eighteenth-century radical liberal English politics and aesthetics are gone.236 By the 1960s townscape was largely perceived by the younger generation as a sentimental approach, accompanied by its banal definition: “one building is architecture but two buildings is townscape,” said Cullen.237 In the work of Banham, radical liberal ideas were revived and fully explored. While Banham rejected sentimental notions of Englishness, he most certainly identified with Hastings notion of radical liberalism and his commitment to “individualism and the ‘natural justice’ of Britain’s laissez-faire capitalism.”238 While Hastings identified the “temperamental radicalism” of the English, expressed as the right to choose at random, laissez-faire, and non-conformity, Banham associated these qualities with the “kind of free-for-all type of commercial development of the normal U.S. main street,” which he defined as nonplan, characterized by the anarchy and vitality of the commercial order.239 The boisterous economic logic that drove the city demonstrated for Banham that, “far from being a total and disorderly shambles, Los Angeles has a comprehensible system that works, and can be applied elsewhere.”240 As we have seen, this was the very idea behind “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom.” According to Hastings, the radical English doctrine of individualism was based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s command “be thyself,” which states “that man can be free to differ,” a philosophy that “seeks the higher social organization in the differentiation of the individual from the mass.”241 These ideas informed Banham’s view of life in Los Angeles. In the “The Art of Doing Your Thing” (1968), Banham associated the surfers, custom-car designers, nomads in vans, and the creator of Watts Towers, Simon Rodia, with the “be thyself” doctrine: “The promise of this affluent, permissive and free-swing culture is that every man, in his own lifetime and to his own complete satisfaction, shall do exactly what he wants to do.”242 Permissively, Banham asserted, “Los Angeles is so wild they should just let it swing and see what happens!”243 This provocation was put forth in an era that witnessed a rise in libertarian

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philosophy promoted by individuals such as Murray N. Rothbard, editor of Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought. Rothbard coined the term anarchocapitalism, a reaction to nineteenth-century anarcho-communism, to express the radical libertarian worldview that emerged in the mid-1960s, particularly in Southern California.244 Views even more radical than Banham’s could be found in the Los Angeles– based underground magazine Liberal Innovator: Applications, Experiments, and Advanced Developments of Liberty, which circulated libertarian ideas by Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and other New Right economists side by side with those of Buckminster Fuller, the writers of the Whole Earth Catalog, and other radical protagonists of the period.245 Writing about the anarchist philosopher Paul Goodman’s People or Personnel: Decentralization and the Mixed System (1965), Rothbard found passages “reminiscent of F. A. Hayek” that salute “the free market as the epitome of decentralized decisionmaking.” Rothbard explained that for Goodman, “decentralization is not lack of order or planning, but a kind of coordination that relies on different motives from top-down direction, standard rules, and extrinsic rewards like salary and status, to provide integration and cohesiveness.”246 These ideas about decentralization and coordination, informed by libertarian views of the market and the city, provoked a corresponding radical aesthetic associated with nondesign and the non-planned city. In his influential and controversial book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Banham rejected the conventional definition of architecture and, deviating from “accepted norms for architectural histories of cities,” presented the full spectrum of non-design artifacts, everything from freeway structures to hamburger bars, “pop ephemeridae,” dingbats, and other anonymous structures by non-architects that had previously been ignored or excluded, arguing that they were as “crucial to the human ecologies and built environment of Los Angeles as are dated works in classified styles by named architects.”247 Banham’s approach to the “higher organization” or complexity of the existing landscape resonated with other work of the period, including Rudofsky’s non-pedigreed architecture and Venturi and Scott Brown’s study of Las Vegas.248 Yet it was crucially guided by the philosophy that townscape commanded, including the need to recognize the “accident (or the Unconscious at work).”249 Hastings’s assertion that a radical political philosophy had its complement as a radical visual philosophy that accepted everything, the designed and non-designed parts of the city, offered the potential to form a unity “between dissimilar or even hostile objects.” It was part of a philosophy of “giving every object the best possible chance to be itself.”250 According to Hastings: “This is radical theory. It involves, as in politics, a radical idea of the meaning of parts.”251 While seldom acknowledged, it was this aspect of townscape theory that informed a new approach to the built environment while inspiring interest in non-design artifacts. Hastings presented the idea of unity— offered as an alternative to the rational notion of harmony— which he articulated as higher organization,

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complexity, or differentiation (Hayek referred to this as complex order, and Jacobs, as organized complexity). These ideas set the stage not only for Venturi but for Banham as well.252 The goal of radical liberal theory, said Hastings, was “to achieve a new kind of organization through the cultivation of significant differences.” In his effort to develop a radical visual philosophy for the postwar period, Hastings was unequivocal about the role of the radical planner to accept the haphazard and unplanned parts of the city that were “not in our power to control” but nonetheless needed to be considered part of the overall environment. By focusing on the “urge of the parts to be themselves to make a new kind of whole,” one might establish the “conditions for a democracy of things.”253 This extraordinary idea suggested that all things, whether designed or not, had equal significance; townscape offered a radical theory to unite them. Considering how to approach the haphazard mix of various styles resulting from the uncoordinated building of a city over time, Hastings wrote that “it is, for the town planner as opposed to the architect, rather a question.” Further clarifying the principle behind townscape, Hastings asked rhetorically, “Are we then going to accept Spec. Builders’ Venetian? As architects, no; as town planners, yes. Yes, we are. Whatever the elements out of which the scene is built, it is on purely visual and not professional architectural grounds that we as radical planners shall admit or spurn them.”254 If the full potential of these ideas was not fully grasped in the late 1940s, by the 1960s they were explosive, radiating throughout nearly every theory of the city. If protagonists in the 1960s had shunned the romantic imagery associated with townscape, they embraced the philosophy of a “democracy of things,” opening the discipline to wildly divergent interests, including Charles Moore’s fascination with works built by nonarchitects, like the Madonna Inn; Banham’s profound admiration for the artist (and non-architect) Simon Rodia and his Watts Towers, and Venturi and Scott Brown’s support of spec houses, to name but a few. It was evident as well in the new appreciation for commercial signs, particularly in the work of Venturi and Scott Brown, and in Banham’s appreciation of their visual and economic logic. Unlike the “planning propagandists” who fought against “visual pollution,” Banham remained fascinated by the perpetual sprouting of signs, a deciduous affair, along boulevards and identified with “those who find something to admire in them, their flamboyance, and the constant novelty induced by their obsolescence and replacement.”255 Of Los Angeles, Banham wrote that “when most observers report monotony, not unity, and within that monotony, confusion rather than variety, this is usually because the context has escaped them and it has escaped them because it is unique (like all the best unities).”256 Banham went on to claim that the “topographical and historical context of the total artifact that constitutes Greater Los Angeles” was what “binds the polymorphous architectures into a comprehensible unity.”257 The viewer’s ability to appreciate this context was crucial to grasping the unity that held it together while in motion, through

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“serial vision,” an essential element of townscape. In Learning from Las Vegas, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, and the 1972 BBC documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, moving through the urban scene in an automobile was key, as was the driver’s privileged perspective. Building on that most cherished maxim “circulate or perish,” Banham argued that “the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement.”258 Unlike mass transportation, the private automobile played a powerful symbolic role, offering the means to traverse a drastically decentralized urban landscape based on individual decision-making. What some perceived as chaos, Banham saw as engaged activities of a kind of “citizenship of the freeways, a democratic responsibility towards other drivers,” which was all the more impressive, he noted, for it unfolded in “a landscape more noted for extreme and intolerant individualism.”259 Central to Banham’s defense of Los Angeles was the assertion that this vital environment existed largely outside the influence of design and functioned according to its own complex internal logic. He acknowledged that “no city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demographics, mechanics and culture; nor is it likely that an even remotely similar mixture would ever occur again.”260 Suggesting that the city had spontaneously grown, like an organism, from the convergence and evolution of various forces in its particular environment, Banham conceptualized it as four distinct ecologies: Surfurbia (beach towns), Foothills (where higher ground means income), the Plains of Id (flatlands and valleys), and Autopia (freeways).261 The biological rational informed some of his more extraordinary, if naïve, assertions about the impact of local climate: “If Los Angeles is not monolithic Protestant moral tyranny— and it notoriously is not!— it is because the Mid-western agrarian culture underwent a profound transformation as it hit the coast, a sun-change that pervades moral postures, political attitudes, ethnic groupings, and individual psychologies.”262 As with organisms adapting to a new environment, a photosynthesis-like processes, not social, political, and economic factors, was said to drive changes in behavior. Privileging that which appeared to have just “grown” as the result of human action but not human design, Banham’s non-interventionist approach also resonated with much of the anti-authoritarian discourse of the period. According to Hastings the “meaning of the Picturesque offensive” was, “a protest against merely ideal Beauty which, together with frightening beauty (the sublime),” gave it its full power.263 In the 1960s, similar ideas informed debates. Embracing the totality of the city, Banham wrote, “The splendors and miseries of Los Angeles, the graces and grotesqueries, appear to me as unrepeatable as they are unprecedented.”264 Likewise, in “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning” (1969), Denise Scott Brown wrote: “In the fine arts a new horror-giving energy source has been discovered: the popular. This too is old. Beethoven doubtless once shocked the salons with his themes from folk tunes, but the Beatles have ‘made it’ into the intellectual elite, and Rauschenberg and

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figure 6.17 “Chaos on Echo Park” from Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Allen Lane, 1971). By permission of the estate of Reyner Banham.

Lichtenstein are on the cover of Time. Yet we are still outraged if an architect come out for billboards or if a planner removed the emotion from his voice when talking about urban sprawl. The first has ‘sold out to the crassest motivations in our society,’ and the second doesn’t recognize chaos when he sees it.”265 As the chaos of the unplanned city increasingly became a central topic in architectural debates, Banham argued, like Venturi and Scott Brown had for Las Vegas, that Los Angles had a complex but “comprehensible system” with rules.266 He suggested that movement was its genius loci, evident in its diffuse nature, an ideal environment for the non-plan, characterized by the anarchy of the commercial order, advertisement, and product distribution. Their synthesis gave rise to spontaneous order, the natural ecology of the of the city, which he illustrated with images of typical strip development captioned “Chaos on Echo Park” and “Commercial Non-Plan on Sepulveda Boulevard” (figs. 6.17 and 6.18).267 As Jacobs had, Banham passionately defended the organized complexity of commerce as proof that the city could thrive on its own, if only legislators would let it alone. In the words of Hayek, “governance requires humility in the face of complexity.”268 262 | c h A P t e r s i x

f igu re 6 . 18 “Commercial non-plan on Sepulveda Boulevard” from Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Allen Lane, 1971). By permission of the estate of Reyner Banham.

Crucial to his argument for indeterminate form, Banham emphasized that “Los Angeles emphatically suggests that there is no simple correlation between urban form and social form,”269 contravening a maxim asserted by many urban historians, including Lewis Mumford, who wrote that “mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.”270 Challenging such views, Banham argued that “Where [Los Angeles] threatens the ‘human values’– oriented tradition of town planning inherited from Renaissance humanism it is in revealing how simple-mindedly mechanistic that supposedly humane tradition can be, how deeply attached to the mechanical fallacy that there is a necessary causal connexion between built form and human life, between the mechanisms of the city and the styles of architecture practiced there.”271 Shifting the paradigm from clocks to clouds, as Popper had demonstrated, allowed for the integration of complexity theory, cybernetics, and systems thinking into new theories of urbanism. For some historians, the very fact that Banham was able “to take the city as it is as opposed to any utopian, idealistic, or nostalgic vision of what it might be,” served as validation of a more open, if not objective, view of urbanism, 263 | t h e i n d e t e r m i n A t e c i t y

helping debunk the myths of planning held by modern design theorists.272 Considered pragmatic by some, Banham’s non-interventionist approach was informed by libertarian values, which led him to sympathize with those who approached the city “without any nonsense about planning being for the good of the public at large.”273 Like Jacobs before him, in one sweeping move, Banham dismissed the entire legacy of twentieth-century design theorists, including Jacobs herself: Los Angeles threatens the intellectual repose and professional livelihood of many architects, artists, planners, and environmentalists because it breaks the rules of urban design that they promulgate in works and writings and teach to their students. In so far as Los Angeles performs the function of a great city, in terms of size, cosmopolitan style, creative energy, international influence, distinctive way of life, and corporate personality . . . to the extent that Los Angeles has these qualities, then to that same extent all the most admired theorists of the present century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, have been wrong. The belief that certain densities of population, and certain physical forms of structure are essential to the working of a great city, views shared by groups as diverse as the editors of the Architectural Review and the members of Team Ten, must be to that same extent false. And the methods of design taught, for instance, by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Planning in New York and similar schools, must be to that extent irrelevant.274

Banham’s disdain for earlier paradigms was profound. He described the “art” of planning as a “giant wastebin of sumptuously forgotten paper projects.”275 He continued: “Planning, as the disciple is normally understood in academic and professional circles, is one of those admired facets of the establishment Liberal approach to urban problems that has never struck root in the libertarian, but illiberal, atmosphere of Los Angeles. . . . Indeed, it is so much a stranger that one feels it could even do harm.”276 Yet while the modern theorists may have been wrong, so was Banham, concluded David Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton: “Los Angeles as we know it today was not created— as has often been suggested— by accident, chance, or non-planning. This classic non-city (in a traditional sense) was a planned non-city.”277 Banham ignored some crucial chapters in the history of the city’s urban development, including the pioneering transportation master plans of the 1940s, which laid out the highway patterns that would foster the decentralized, multicentered metropolis that would emerge over the following half century.278 Gebhard and von Breton noted that the 1941 Master Plan of Highways for Los Angeles County, which outlined the guiding principles of growth and expansion (e.g., “This region can and should remain one in which the single-family dwelling predominates”), encouraged the development of “various smaller cities and towns throughout the region, until one reaches an optimum size, rather than by the

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indiscriminate and unbroken expansion of the central urban area.”279 This vision of a decentralized multiple-hub environment guided the pattern of development in postwar Los Angeles, creating a milieu conducive to a plurality of social and urban conditions. In Banham’s all-inclusive approach to Los Angeles, which “omits nothing,” his exclusion of the extensive history of urban planning and policies that fostered the great “diffuse city” is ironic, as is his avoidance of the extensive history of socialism.280 Are we here witness to a parti pris in which the subjective views of the critic overshadow the more objective methods of the historian? At a 1976 lecture titled “Myths, Meanings, and Forms of Twentieth Century Architecture,” in response to a question about planning, Banham barked, emphatically, that “planning has always been impossible.”281 Yet he also once said, “The only way to prove you have a mind is to change it occasionally.”282 His unwavering defense of free-market economics and the indeterminate city, matched only by his staunch and consistent rejection of planning, reflected a philosophy that was strikingly akin to that of Hayek, who insisted that there was an “irreconcilable clash between planning and democracy.”283 In line with liberal values, while keeping the discipline on edge, Banham remained a freemarket radical to the very end.

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Conclusion

This book throughout has explored the theories of non- design and nonplanning, often intertwined with notions of organicism, complexity, indeterminacy, and self-organization, that were embraced by philosophers, scientists, and designers for their perceived ability to elude the manipulative powers of top-down control. The biological analogy was employed to describe cities, markets, and other social institutions as organisms to advance a particular view of the world as an undesigned phenomenon. This philosophy led to a powerful, if largely unacknowledged, movement in architecture and urbanism that became widespread throughout the second half of the twentieth century and has persisted, in one form or another, to the present. The generation that came to maturity after World War I— Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, along with its historians, particularly Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner— has been routinely subjected to scathing, often warranted, criticism. In contrast, the generation that came to maturity after World War II— Jane Jacobs, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, and others, particularly the historian Reyner Banham— has largely eluded that kind of scrutiny. Although the propaganda of the earlier period is acknowledged, too often the propaganda, myths, and ideologies of the latter remain obscured. This book has done its best to negotiate this discrepancy, portraying the diverse expressions of the theory of non-design, in all its subtlety and complexity. The result of this exploration suggests a rather simple schema in the development of modern design theory in the twentieth century, roughly expressed as the first modern period (1900– 1945), the second modern period (1945– 2000), and the third modern period (2000 and beyond).1 The chronology is not original, but its specific logic might be. Many historians of the twentieth century tend to see either excessive continuity, evident in Charles Jencks’s sweeping claim that “modernism had a virtual stranglehold on the profession and academies from the late 1930s to the 1970s,” or successive eruptions of largely unrelated episodes, demonstrated by the theories of postmodern historicism followed by deconstructivism.2 But as we have seen, the 1940s was a pivotal

moment in the history of modernism. The revolution in modern design of the 1920s was offset by the extraordinary counterrevolution brought about by the liberal critique of central design, accompanied by the theory of indeterminacy, which emerged following the war, established itself in the 1950s, surged with full force in the 1960s, and, subjected to periods of flourishing and fading, persists in present discourse. The first modern period, born in the shadow of utopian socialism, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had introduced in The Communist Manifesto (1848), sprang to life with countless exhilarating manifestos declaring passionate convictions to design a new world. This epoch witnessed the rise of modern design, which coincided with socialism’s golden age, from 1900 until World War I and the Russian Revolution. Ruled by collectivism, many intellectuals and workers around the world, Western democracies included, embraced efforts to manifest socialism’s goal of a better world through modern state planning. This was often referred to as the era of the master plan, epitomized by numerous utopian plans created in this period for new cities. The intertwined relationship between CIAM’s conference “The Functional City” (1933) and “The Socialist City” of the Soviet Union guided the rationalist vision of urban planning.3 Many saw this as the logical evolution in the essential role of humans in shaping their built environment; in 1922, Lewis Mumford had held that conscious planning was itself the objective: “It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal.”4 It was also a period marked by a revolution in sensibility, well known for its innovation in the arts and architecture from cubism, suprematism, constructivism, and De Stijl, as well as the extraordinary achievements of the Bauhaus method, a curious synthesis of aestheticism, mysticism, and socialism. In Walter Gropius’s vision of the Bauhaus, outlined in his manifesto of April 1919, invoking a social philosophy of art similar to that of John Ruskin and William Morris, he famously claimed: “Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”5 Gropius’s image of the Bauhaus as a “cathedral of socialism” was based on a collectivist conception of art and architecture that sought to combine all the arts into a single form, a method reminiscent of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk approach with promises of cultural integration.6 In Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), Nikolaus Pevsner affirmed the central role of socialism in helping shape modern design, proclaiming, “So far Morris is the true prophet of the twentieth century.”7 This assertion would become a point of great contention taken up by the following generation, chief among them Pevsner’s extraordinarily gifted protégé Reyner Banham. The second modern period witnessed various reactions to the previous

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generation, including the rejection of socialism and the revival of liberalism. This campaign was outlined in seminal publications including The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). The critique of socialist planning, articulated as a critique of central design, took shape in the 1940s and represented a decisive shift in theoretical understanding of social and economic order. Hubert de Cronin Hastings most clearly articulated this liberal critique in architecture and town planning with the establishment of the townscape paradigm. Responses to this turn could be felt as early as 1945, when the British Labour Party Election Manifesto accused “anti-planners” of wanting to “sweep away public controls.”8 Following the victory of the Conservative Party in 1951, the convergence of several political and philosophical critiques ushered in the non-planning paradigm, which coincided with the golden age of capitalism that was emerging throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In both planning and the arts, many in the West who remained critical of capitalism championed the imposition of central design by the Soviet state to create an “art for the people.” When the Athens Charter (1933) was published in 1943, it corresponded with an emerging critique of central design and rationalism in political, economic, and design discourse. Following World War II, the central design approach associated with socialism and the functional city would become increasingly discredited as technocratic and inhumane forms of social and urban orders. This period was marked by a shift toward decentralization and free-market economics, and it witnessed a change in philosophy from an abstract, socialist, and European sense of design toward a liberal, empirical, and American-oriented non-design sensibility. The American model of commercial industrial design had a profound effect on design criticism. The engagement with the market approach challenged what Banham called the “autocratic dominance” of Bauhaus theory, leading to important developments in the philosophy of non- design, manifesting as biological analogies of open-ended growth, change, and adaptability, on the one hand, and as informal strategies associated with a diffused or scattered aesthetic of a nonplanning approach tied to free-market economics, on the other hand. From the 1940s to the 1960s and beyond, irrespective of the near-endless architectural movements in England and the United States, a particular approach has remained consistently informed by the critique of central design and the theory of indeterminacy, even today. In 1960, Banham claimed: “We have lived in an Industrial Age for nearly a century and a half now, and may well be entering a Second Industrial Age with the current revolution in control mechanisms. But we have already entered the Second Machine Age, the age of domestic electronics and synthetic chemistry, and can look back on the First, the age of power from the mains and the reduction of machines to human scale, as a period of the past.”9 Banham was reflecting on the explosion of new technologies and consumer mass-produced products, along with a new understanding of control mechanisms in systems

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theory and cybernetics. On the cusp of this “second machine age,” Banham could claim, “Our accession to almost unlimited supplies of energy is balanced against the possibility of making our planet uninhabitable, but this again is balanced, as we stand at the threshold of space, by the growing possibility of quitting our island earth and letting down roots elsewhere.”10 As we move into what might be described as the third machine age, the fascination with technology— and limitless energy supply— as well as space travel and escape has largely lost its intrigue, if not its credibility. Yet this new era is both burdened and inspired by the knowledge that efforts to extract energy are intrinsically linked to the survival of fragile ecosystems that in turn are related to unprecedentedly catastrophic environmental changes. Unlike in the previous era of individualism, there is a growing awareness that each individual decision and action has global implications. The third modern period, extending from 2000 on, is accompanied by a subtle yet growing suspicion of limitations in the theories and approaches of the previous era. It is marked by a mounting awareness of the extensive influence that the philosophy of liberalism, free-market economics, and libertarianism had on design theory since World War II War and the resultant ideology. Nonetheless, many remain deeply impressed by the vestiges of complexity science, fascinated with organicism, and indebted to theories of complexity, cybernetics, self-organization, and indeterminacy. This interest is nowhere more apparent than in the biological analogies associated with parametricism in its evolutionary and sustainable approach to design.11 Many are inclined to see this as a continuation of the 1960s preoccupation with non-design theory rather than a critical avant-garde engagement with the new paradigm of the twenty-first century.

non - P LAnning And its After m At h By the 1970s the discipline of planning had come under such sustained attack that in many design schools the planning programs were jettisoned altogether and relocated— banished— to schools of policy and administration. As the urban agenda began to recede from both pedagogy and practice, the 1980s witnessed the triumph of postmodern historicism, as well as the newly intense focus on architecture as object and on the autonomy of the discipline. In the architectural debates of the period, the speculative work of Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture played a pivotal yet ambiguous role, with projects that sought to balance market urbanism with some semblance of public life. The proposal for the (unbuilt) new Parisian suburb Ville Nouvelle Melun-Sénart, from 1987, is especially remarkable in this regard: a competition entry that attempted to negotiate the tensions between planning and nonplanning while succumbing fully to neither approach, proposing a series of controlled zones, or “voids,” that could accommodate public life while ceding the rest of the territory, the “uncontrolled” zone of building fabric, to market

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forces. What is determined by planning is the unbuilt, and what is left undetermined is the built ruled by non-planning. “It would require a second innocence to believe, at this end of the 20th century, that the urban— the built— can be planned and mastered,” Koolhaas wrote in the project thesis. “Too many architects’ ‘visions’ have bitten the dust to propose new additions to this chimerical battalion.” And he continued: “The built is now fundamentally suspect. The unbuilt is green, ecological, popular. If the built— le plein— is now out of control— subject to permanent political, financial turmoil— the same is not yet true of the unbuilt; nothingness may be the last subject of plausible certainties.”12 Koolhaas would continue to investigate the fraught relationship between urban form and the politics of the contemporary metropolis. Even as he cautioned designers about the seeming futility of efforts to plan the city, or even to conceive it as a whole in an era of “pervasive urbanization,” he published provocative essays that sought to reinsert planning onto the architectural agenda. His “What Ever Happened to Urbanism?”— written in 1994 and published in S, M, L, XL— can be read as a kind of apotheosis of this argument: Sous le pavé, la plage (under the pavement, beach): initially, May ’68 launched the idea of a new beginning for the city. Since then, we have been engaged in two parallel operations: documenting our overwhelming awe for the existing city, developing philosophies, projects, prototypes for a preserved and reconstituted city and, at the same time, laughing the professional field of urbanism out of existence, dismantling it in our contempt for those who planned (and made huge mistakes in planning) airports, New Towns, satellite cities, highways, high-rise buildings, infrastructures, and all the other fallout of modernization. After sabotaging urbanism, we have ridiculed it to the point where entire university departments are closed, offices bankrupted, bureaucracies fired or privatized.13

By the end of the millennium— with the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions seemingly triumphant, with the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair dominating the political scene, with leading economists trumpeting a new era of endless prosperity— it seemed the long-running debate was nearly spent. Yet at this quiet moment there emerged growing efforts to break the lingering grip of the non-plan, to counteract the loss of faith in large-scale intervention. In the sphere of design, in architecture and urbanism the catalyst was a newly resurgent environmental movement and growing awareness of the planetary consequences of climate change. Speaking at the 2000 Bioneers conference, the architect William McDonough reviewed the unfolding catalog of ecological “tragedies in the making,” from global warming to toxic mother’s milk, and he reasserted the case for planning: “So we need to look at these tragedies and realize that if we are designers, we have to take responsibility. We can’t say it is not part of your plan that these things are going to happen. It is part of your

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de facto plan. It is the thing that is happening because you have no plan.” He added dryly, “Planning is most effective when it is practiced in advance.”14 Likewise, a few years later, designer Bruce Mau offered these cautionary words: “For most of us, design is invisible. Until it fails.”15 Referring to a new “community of purpose” that was reclaiming design to effect “positive change in the world,” Mau asserted, “It’s not about the world of design, but the design of the world.” Both McDonough and Mau were registering a fundamental shift then happening in design culture, initiating the third modern period. As the focus on environmental issues has intensified in the past decade, as first sustainability and then resilience have become new mantras, the limitations of the non-plan or no plan have become ever clearer— the environmental implications are only the most obvious. If as a discipline we thought we understood the history— and shortcomings— of planning, it is increasingly evident that we have paid comparatively little attention to the history of non-planning— to the tumultuous consequences of the lack of a plan. Scholars have devoted enormous attention to the devastating effects of high modernist planning fueled by an unshakable faith in progress and advocated by scientists, engineers, and planners, who routinely failed miserably in their lack of initiative and spontaneity, uncommunicativeness, and intractability, and are noted for their inability to incorporate selforganizing capacities.16 But if planning has been demonized beyond the point of resuscitation, what would it mean for the discipline should non-design and non-planning be condemned to a similar fate? Furthermore, what would it mean for the history of modern architecture if we were to realize that some of the most radical theories we have inherited in design, architecture, and urban planning in the postwar period came not from the left but the right? Like many other anti-authoritarian views of the period, Ben Franks argued that, “despite the egalitarian impulses of the authors of ‘Non-Plan’ and their desire to overcome the stultifying paternalist State, their response, in 1969, would have been to strengthen the power of multinationals and to impose business priorities on the public. Yet commercial predilections do not lead to ludic spontaneity, but to heteronomous control to check efficiency and the maximization of profit.”17 We should now be able to recognize the limitations of these various models and their forms of criticism.

t oWA rd A neW PArAdigm Reassessment of the past and present is vital for the forging of a new direction. In contrast to Hayek’s vision, a more sober account of our ambiguous relationship with self-organization can be found in William E. Connolly’s The Fragility of Things: Self- Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (2013). In this, Connolly puts forth a view of the world based on complex entanglements of various interacting self- organizing systems and, while countering dominant ideologies, presents an alternative and compelling

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understanding of the ecology of late capitalism. He appreciates how neoliberalism “diverts attention from multiple conjunctions between capitalism and a variety of nonhuman force fields with differential powers of selforganization” while obscuring that it “requires a very large state to support and protect its preconditions of being.”18 What distinguishes his approach is that he treats economic markets as “merely one type of imperfect self-regulating system in a cosmos composed of innumerable, interacting open systems with differential capacities of self-organization set on different scales of time, agency, creativity, viscosity, and speed” without succumbing to the “utopian image of markets.”19 Connolly rightly builds on the insight of Hayek’s “embryonic appreciation of spontaneity, creativity, and uncertainty inside freedom and extend[s] it to practices and institutions that Hayek omits or depreciates.”20 Increasingly, historians now recognize that the left has not effectively responded to Hayek’s anti-authoritarian views, philosophy of individualism, theory of self-organization, and relationship to free-market economics as the most viable means of ensuring democracy.21 In this transitional period, if architecture is to sustain itself as a critical endeavor, a more thorough appraisal of the current situation is required. While the first modern period was marked by design as a top-down imposition of the will of the architect, the second modern period was largely defined by its opposite and witnessed the rise of non-design. The third modern period recognizes the limitations of those models while struggling to reconcile their disparities in forging a new vision. Both the imposition of power through central design and the idealization of the free-market model appear deficient, incapable of achieving a just and vital democratic society. Following the financial crisis of 2008, many references were made to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Reporters routinely referred to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the necessity for large-scale federal action. Yet the debate about the role of government in American life remains as polarized as ever, fluctuating between reductive and contradictory notions of free-market capitalism and socialism, based on government coercion. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz famously put it, during the depths of the Great Recession, in the United States we have been “socializing losses and privatizing gains.” He concluded that there is “moral hazard everywhere.”22 The shock waves of the financial crash caused even the most zealous advocates of neoliberalism to reconsider their assumptions. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, acknowledged his mistake in believing in the self-regulating capacities of the market and acknowledged that there was a “flaw in the model” that defined “how the world works.”23 George Soros, the renowned financier, argued that “we need a new paradigm” to understand the events: “The currently prevailing paradigm, namely that financial markets tend towards equilibrium, is both false and misleading.”24 Almost a decade later, these and many other warnings about the misguided

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myths of the market appear to have caused little, if any, fundamental change in architectural theory.25 Nor have they altered the incessant optimism that often informs that peculiar Anglo-American school of thought that embraces the market as a form of indeterminism and self-organization, imbued with an elusive “invisible intelligence” associated with organic matter— however unsound this may be as a philosophy for the twenty-first century. In design and urban planning we continue to oppose the practices of large-scale planning against those of do-it-yourself and tactical intervention. New models are needed to move beyond the impasse that has dominated the debates for decades. If the goal of a democracy is to encourage an equitable distribution of resources, then neoliberalism may not be the most viable means of achieving this goal. As many socialists warned in the 1920s, one of the side effects of an unregulated market economy was that it tended to produce monopolistic concentrations of wealth. Currently, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans now receive nearly 50 percent of all the income earned in the United States, an even higher percentage than they did during the 1920s.26 Bluntly put, “three men own as much as the bottom half of Americans.”27 Given such disconcerting statistics, the recent interest in “the new economics” as a more democratic and equitable enterprise should come as little surprise.28 A growing number of scholars and activists have come around to understand that an economy that is neither just nor inclusive can never sustain the high levels of social cooperation necessary to enable a modern society to thrive. A new generation of theorists has argued that “the mere fact that communism and authoritarianism fail does not mean that unfettered capitalism succeeds.”29 In contrast to Walter Lippmann’s view, Nick Hanauer argued, “Successful economies are not jungles, they’re gardens— markets, like gardens, must be tended.” He affirmed that, “unlike the laws of physics, the laws of economics are a choice.”30 Understanding the delicate balance of spontaneity and planning, competition and cooperation, centralization and decentralization, may be key to achieving a new economic framework “based on science but grounded in justice.”31 Helping to restore faith in the legitimacy of democracy, science, and markets, the three social technologies that define the modern world, is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. As we have seen, complex relationships between economic and design theory have long existed. The growing recognition that an uncritical embrace of free-market theories was built more on superstition than science suggest that a significant body of architectural theory very well may stand on precarious foundations. The illusion of no control associated with non- design presents perhaps one of the greatest challenges in outlining a new design approach. To the degree that planning and collective action remain associated with concepts of control and authoritarianism, whereas diffusion and deregulation remain associated with forms of freedom, design theory will remain entangled in bottom-up and top-down polarities, limited in its ability to engage both market and state, public and private sectors, and to move beyond reductive labels of

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the left and the right. If the crisis in economic theory suggests a crisis in architectural theory, then perhaps we are on the cusp of a new emerging order. As the environmental crisis intensifies and the need for global cooperation becomes ever more evident, a new dynamic model of design is essential. In the struggle to move forward, there remains much to be learned from the powerful history of the non-design and non-planning paradigm, which continues to pose fascinating and challenging questions for modern architecture.

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Acknowledgments

My debts to colleagues, friends, and family are great. I am especially thankful for the advice and encouragement of M. Christine Boyer at Princeton University. Her extensive knowledge of the key debates in British and American architecture and urban planning of the postwar period has helped shape this project over the years. I am thankful for the support and comments of Beatriz Colomina, Eve Blau, and Alejandro Zaera-Polo. Special gratitude goes to my colleagues at Princeton for their insight shared in countless conversations throughout the years. I will forever be indebted to the Society of Woodrow Wilson Scholars at Princeton University for supporting the research with a two-year fellowship in the crucial early years of 2008– 2009 and 2009– 2010. The discussions I had with colleagues from various fields, especially economists and social scientists, were invaluable to the development of the project. I am grateful to Reinhold Martin and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation of Columbia University for inviting me to present this research. I would also like to thank the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles for providing me with a one-year fellowship to continue my research in 2010– 2011. The publication of this book was made possible by a generous grant by the Barr Ferree Publication Fund, administered by the Princeton University Art and Archaeology Department. Sincere gratitude is due to Denise Scott Brown and the late Robert Venturi for sharing their critical understanding of design debates of the postwar period in discussions and interviews. My conversations with Ron Filson, one of the students in the Learning from Las Vegas studio at Yale University, provided invaluable information about the studio research methodology. My deepest gratitude goes to the late Michael Sorkin, who, in many stimulating conversations, kept me inspired with his extraordinary knowledge of politics and design culture. I will always be beholden to the support of the late dean Norman Millar and of my colleagues at Woodbury University School of Architecture. My appreciation goes to Nancy Levinson for her careful comments and editing when parts of the manuscript were published in Places as “Notes toward

a History of Non-Planning: On Design, the Market, and the State” (2015). I am especially indebted to Edward Dimendberg, who has patiently and generously read versions of the manuscript and offered discerning and insightful suggestions. I would like to thank the University of Chicago Press for their endorsement of this project, which has been shaped over the years in response to various anonymous readers from the disciplines of design and economics who offered extraordinarily astute reports solicited by my devoted and gifted editor, Timothy Mennel, who, with the help of the team at the University of Chicago Press, made this book possible. My appreciation goes to Shabeha Baig- Gyan and the late Frances Chen of the architecture library at Princeton University for their endless assistance and support over the years. In addition, I thank the many patient individuals who have assisted me at various libraries and archives, including the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the Getty Research Institute, the Canadian Center for Architecture (which supported the project with a research grant), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the New York Public Library.

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Notes

i n t roduct i on 1. After considering undesigned (Hayek’s term) and liberal design, I’ve found nondesign to be more suitable for describing the liberal philosophy associated with a critique of central design and its affinity for “order without design.” This approach is largely based on Friedrich A. Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order, enunciated in numerous publications, including The Road to Serfdom (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1944), The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), and The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Note that the edition of Road to Serfdom I cite throughout this book is Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Although the origin of the term is unclear, non-design was routinely used in design literature to describe conditions that were beyond the official aesthetic control of governing agencies and authorities. For example, referring to the American built environment, in 1963 Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev explained that many “aesthetic failures” were not related to “pure” design problems but, rather, to areas which were generally considered “non-design” that were left to administrators and other officials who “fail to take esthetic values into account.” See Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), x. The term was also employed by Diana Agrest in “Design versus Non-Design,” a paper presented at the First International Congress of Semiotic Studies, Milan, July 1974, and reprinted in K. Michael Hays, ed., Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture, 1973– 1984 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 331– 54. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter noted that “total design and total non-design” are equally “total,” as opposed to a philosophy that pursues many ends. See Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 100. 2. Hastings was unambiguous that the theory of townscape, like the philosophy of the picturesque upon which it was based, was meant as a critique of rationalism and despotism. This radical visual philosophy was founded upon a revival of the eighteenthcentury aesthetic and political ideal of liberty. Hastings contrasted French rational liberalism and the symmetry of French classicism with the English radical liberalism, that is, “the temperamental radicalism of the English . . . to choose at random, laissez-faire, protestantism, nonconformity, empirical philosophers, singular Englishmen, parliamentary government . . . the Balance of Power and the Whigs.” See Ivor de Wolfe [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy Founded on the True Rock of Sir Uvedale Price,” Architectural Review (1949): 358. Hastings regularly used the pseudonym Ivor de Wolfe. On Hastings and the picturesque, see John

Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (New York: Routledge, 2007); Erdem Erten, “Shaping ‘The Second Half Century’: The Architectural Review, 1947– 1971” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004). 3. For a critique of neoliberalism, see R. T. Allen, Beyond Liberalism: The Political Thought of F. A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books and Henry Holt, 2007); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978– 1979 (New York: Picador, 2010); Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2012); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Naomi Beck, Hayek and the Evolution of Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 4. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science, 65. 5. See Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society, no. 338 (March 20, 1969). 6. In the early part of the twentieth century, liberalism was associated in the United States with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal, whereas in Europe it was more commonly associated with limited government and laissez-faire economic policies. As socialism (associated with state socialism) began to spread through Western democracies, Hayek and others established a movement to revive the principles of classical liberalism— what Ralph Raico calls “the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade.” Ralph Raico, “What Is Classical Liberalism?,” Mises Institute, https://mises.org/library/what-classical -liberalism. In America, the ideas of individualism and laissez-faire economics became the basis for the emerging school of libertarian thought. See David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (New York: Free Press, 1997); Eric Mack and Gerald F. Gaus, “Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism: The Liberty Tradition,” in A Handbook of Political Theory, ed. Gerald F. Gaus and Chandran Kukathas (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 115– 30; Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); John Gray, “Hayek and Classical Liberalism: A Bibliographical Essay,” Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought 5, no. 4 (Winter 1982). 7. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 11. 8. Walter Lippmann, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1938), xxix. 9. Lippmann, 362. 10. Lippmann, 362. 11. Lippmann, 362. 12. Lippmann, 364. 13. Le Corbusier expounded on the role of the despot in executing great planning projects in Urbanisme (Paris: G. Crès, 1925), translated by Frederick Etchells as The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (London: John Rodker, 1929), and in La Ville Radieuse: Eléments d’une doctrine d’urbanisme pour l’équipement de la civilisation machinist (Boulogne, France: Éditions de L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1935), translated by Pamela Knight, Eleanor Levieux, and Derek Coltman as The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization (New York: Orion, 1967). On the final page of City of Tomorrow is the engraving Louis XIV Commanding the Building

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of the Invalides. In the accompanying “Homage to a Great Town Planner,” Le Corbusier wrote, “This despot conceived immense projects and realized them.” Similar views can be found in Radiant City. Le Corbusier’s fascination with the power of depots and urban planning is explored in chapter 1 of this book. 14. Lippmann, Good Society, 365. Some forty years later, these views were clearly expressed in architecture in the criticism of Colin Rowe. Referring to the legacy of SaintSimon and Comte, in Collage City Rowe and Fred Koetter observed that in the “history of despotism, as in the history of utopia,” can be found the “myth of the rationally ordered and ‘scientific’ society” (94). 15. Lippmann, 366. 16. Lippmann, 364. 17. Lippmann, viii. Lippmann acknowledged that “the original discoverer of the idea that a planned economy in peace is incapable of ‘economic calculation’ appears to have been the Austrian economist, Professor Ludwig von Mises” (94n6). 18. Mises’s essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” appeared originally as “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen” in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften 47 (1920). The idea was further developed in Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus (Jena, Germany: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1922), published in English in 1936 as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. 19. The “socialist calculation” debate started with Mises’s critique of socialism, arguing that even market socialism would fail to achieve the efficiency of a free market. See Karen I. Vaughn, “Economic Calculation under Socialism: The Austrian Contribution,” Economic Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1980): 535– 54. 20. See François Denord, “The Origins of Neoliberalism in France,” Le Mouvement Social 2, no. 195 (2001). 21. The colloquium proceedings were published. See Centre International d’Études pour la Rénovation du Libéralisme, Compte rendu des séances du Colloque Walter Lippmann, 26– 30 août 1938 (Paris: Éditions de Médicis, 1939). At the meeting the term neoliberalism was coined by Alexander Rüstow to refer to the rejection of the (old) laissezfaire liberalism. 22. Hayek stressed that the Mont Pelerin Society should be a scholarly community arguing ideas against collectivism while not engaging in public relations or propaganda. The first meeting in Switzerland was attended by Hayek, Karl Popper, and Lionel Robbins of the London School of Economics; Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, and George Stigler of the University of Chicago; Leonard E. Read and F. A. Harper of the Foundation for Economic Education; Henry Hazlitt of Newsweek; Ludwig von Mises of New York University; Bertrand de Jouvenel of Paris; Trygve Hoff of Oslo; and twenty-seven other devotees of a free society. 23. Draft statement of Aims, April 7, 1947, reprinted in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 23. 24. Lippmann, Good Society, 267. 25. H. J. Laski, “A Planned Economic Democracy,” The Labour Party Report of the 41st Annual Conference (London: Transport House, 1942), 111, cited in Road to Serfdom, 13. The year 1942 saw publication of the famous Beveridge Report, which provided the foundation for the welfare state; central planning was key to fulfilling its vision. 26. Referring to a movement for the planning of science that emerged in the late 1930s in Britain, Michael Polanyi recounted the fierce debates at a conference in 1943 in which “anti-planners were castigated as people agitating for anarchy and ignorance.” By

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1948 the movement had practically vanished, he noted, and the “demand for a central planning of science is almost forgotten.” Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and Rejoinders (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), 107. The term was also employed in the 1945 Labour Party election manifesto, which condemned the “anti- controllers and anti-planners [who] desire to sweep away public controls.” Labour Party, Let Us Face the Future: A Declaration of Labour Policy for the Consideration of the Nation, http://www .labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1945/1945-labour-manifesto.shtml. 27. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 82. 28. Hayek, 60. 29. Hayek, 84. 30. Hayek, 86. 31. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 57. 32. Hayek, 400. Hayek expounded on the idea of spontaneous order in Road to Serfdom, Counter-Revolution of Science, Constitution of Liberty, and Law, Legislation and Liberty, among other publications. On the invisible hand, see Robert Nozick, “InvisibleHand Explanations,” American Economic Review 84, no. 2 (May 1994): 314– 18. The notion of the invisible hand would later be associated with emerging theories of complexity and self-organization. See Marshall Yovits and Scott Cameron, eds., Self- Organizing Systems: Proceedings (New York: Pergamon Press, 1960). See also chapter 4 in this volume. 33. Hayek, “The Result of Human Action but Not of Human Design,” in The Market and Other Orders, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 296. Hayek used the classical Greek terms taxis for “made order” and kosmos for “grown order” or spontaneous order, described as a self-generating or endogenous order. For Hayek, an organization is a directed social order (a made order), in contrast to a spontaneous order, which is not deliberately made. See F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), 35. He noted that the “authoritarian connotations of the concept of order derive[] . . . from the belief that order can be created only by forces outside the system (or ‘exogenously’).” In contrasting spontaneous order and organization, Hayek observed that “the general rules of law that a spontaneous order rests on aims at an abstract order, the particular or concrete of which is not known or foreseen by anyone; while the commands as well as the rules which govern an organization serve particular results aimed at by those who are in command of the organization.” Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 2013), 48. 34. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 74. 35. The theory of non- design is largely informed by Hayek’s notion of the undesigned nature of society and his theory of spontaneous order. 36. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 41. 37. On Hayek’s impact on planning debates, see Nigel Taylor, Urban Planning Theory since 1945 (London: Sage, 1998); Gordon E. Cherry, Town Planning in Britain since 1900: The Rise and Fall of the Planning Ideal (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). 38. See Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science. For a discussion concerning similarities and differences related to economic policy, planned economy, and state regulating bodies between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Joseph Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, see J. V. Stalin, “Marxism versus Liberalism: An Interview with H. G. Wells,” July 23, 1934, in Joseph Stalin, Works, vol. 14, 1934– 1940 (London: Red Star Press, 1978), 21– 44. 39. Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010), 1. 40. Janek Waserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 3. 280 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 5 – 7

41. Michael Polanyi, Logic of Liberty, 195. The Hungary-born British polymath Michael Polanyi made important theoretical contributions to chemistry, economics, and philosophy and is sometimes credited with having coined the term spontaneous order. 42. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 416. 43. Popper, 433. 44. For a review of Hastings, see Erdem Erten, “Shaping ‘The Second Half Century’: The Architectural Review, 1947– 1971” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004), who noted that “Marxist historians such as Edward Palmer Thompson, Christopher Hill and later Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams were interested in the Romantic tradition in terms of Romanticism’s opposition towards liberalism, utilitarianism and laissez faire capitalism in the early 1950s” (42). See The Editor [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscape,” Architectural Review (January 1944): 7. In 1944, before naming the method townscape, Hastings wrote, “whether we call it Exterior Furnishing or landscape architecture . . . Picturesque, or the Romantic Movement— or . . . Sharawaggi,” all were meant as a rejection of rationalism. Rationalists, who maintain that concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience, are generally contrasted with empiricists, who view sense experience as the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge. 45. Editor [Hastings], “Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi,” 7. Hayek and other liberals routinely contrasted the tradition of French rationalism with British anti-rationalism (empiricism). See Hayek, Constitution of Liberty. 46. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 360. 47. Wolfe [Hastings], 360. 48. On “A New Appeal to the Old Whigs,” see Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” 49. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, The Alternative Society: Software for the NineteenEighties (London: David & Charles, 1980), 103. Hastings’s views on libertarian democracy can be traced back to his interest in the theories of Sir Uvedale Price, who linked good government and good landscape in his “Essay on the Picturesque” as the regime that safeguards the coexistence of differences and enables the expression of character: “A good landscape is that in which all the parts are free and unconstrained, but in which, though some are prominent and highly illuminated, and others in shade and retirement; some rough and others more smooth and polished, yet they are all necessary to the beauty, energy, effect and harmony of the whole. I do not see how a good government can be more exactly defined; and as this definition suits every style of landscape, from the plainest and simplest to the most splendid and complicated, and excludes nothing but tameness and confusion, so it equally suits all free governments, and only excludes all anarchy and despotism.” In Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; And, On the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape (London: J. Mawman, 1810), 1:374– 75 (quoted in Erten, “Shaping ‘The Second Half Century,’” 38). 50. Editor [Hastings], “Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi, 7. 51. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 354. 52. In “Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi,” Hastings wrote: “In modern usage Picturesque = quaint, a meaning having almost nothing in common with the eighteenth century use of the term” (5n*). 53. Herbert Read, foreword to Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things: An Attempt to Establish Criteria by Which the Aesthetic Qualities of Design Can Be Judged (London: B. T. Batsford, 1946), 2. 54. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1973), vii. 281 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 7 – 1 0

55. For a historical review of the philosophical differences between empiricism and rationalism in design, see Geoffrey Broadbent, Emerging Concepts in Urban Space Design (London: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990). 56. J. M. Richards, “The New Humanism,” Architects’ Journal (July 6, 1944). 57. J. M. Richards, “The New Empiricism: Sweden’s Latest Style,” Architectural Review (June 1947). 58. Following the war, Western democracies massively expanded social welfare spending. As Binyamin Appelbaum noted, “Not even Sweden has slipped back into serfdom. Hayek, however, is still quoted by those concerned that the next government intervention will prove to be one step too far.” Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2019), 28n*. 59. The Independent Group consisted of radical young painters, sculptors, architects, writers, and critics who sought to challenge established modernist approaches to culture. They met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London from 1952 to 1955. Members included Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Toni del Renzio, Alison and Peter Smithson, and others. 60. Toni del Renzio, “Pioneers & Trendies” (excerpt), Art and Artists, February 1984, reprinted in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 179. 61. The theory of brutalism, articulated in the early 1950s in England, as a revolt against academic modernism, Marxism, and socialist realism, should be distinguished from the interest in massive and rough concrete buildings of the 1960s. See Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review (December 1955). 62. Banham, “New Brutalism.” Peter Reyner Banham (1922– 1988) was an English architectural historian. He studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London under Anthony Blunt, Sigfried Giedion, and Nikolaus Pevsner, who served as his doctoral supervisor. Banham is the author of many influential books, including Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960) and Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), as well and numerous articles. See A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 63. The lecture was published as Henry Hardy, ed., Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga (at that time capital of Livonia) in 1909 and moved to Petrograd, Russia, at the age of six, where he witnessed the revolutions of 1917. 64. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter explored these ideas in Collage City. 65. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953; Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 53. 66. On the theory of diffuse aesthetic, see Anton Ehrenzweig, “The Hidden Order of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics (June 1961). On Banham’s notion of the diffuse city, see chapter 6 in this volume. 67. Michel Tapié, Un art autre: Où il s’agit de nouveaux dévidages du réel (Paris: GabrielGiraud et Fils, 1952). 68. Nigel Henderson was an English documentary artist and photographer and a founding member of the Independent Group. 69. Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945– 1959 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 33. 70. In “Exterior Furnishings,” Hastings maintained that democracy is “by its nature diffuse” (7). In addition, a preoccupation in Ehrenzweig’s work was “the diffuse state of vision.” See Ehrenzweig, “Hidden Order of Art.” 282 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 0 – 1 2

71. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). For a review of Popper’s influence in architecture, see Rowe and Koetter, Collage City. See also Alvar Aalto, “The Architectural Struggle,” RIBA 1957, which is reprinted as “The RIBA Discourse: ‘The Architectural Struggle,” in Sketches: Alvar Aalto, ed. Göran Schildt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 144– 48. Team 10 was a group of architects who assembled starting in July 1953 at the Ninth Congress of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture and created a schism within CIAM by challenging its doctrinaire approach to urbanism. 72. References to modern design and dictatorship can be found in criticism at least since the 1920s. See Hugo Häring, “Wege zur Form,” Die Form: Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit, no. 1 (October 1925). The word dictatorship was used to describe the forced geometry in the work of Le Corbusier. 73. “Urban Form Seminar 12/10/54,” box 2, Gyorgy Kepes Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC, quoted in Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 217. This exchange occurred during a period when Cage was first exploring the idea of chance. 74. Austin Clarkson, “The Intent of the Musical Moment: Cage and the Transpersonal,” in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 83. If Cage “symbolically aims to halt the march of language, meaning, and human control,” as Daniel Herwitz put it, it is because in his approach “freedom from meaning was also freedom from domination, definition, and control in a very real-world sense. After all, to be a subordinated subject is to be defined by power.” Cage was known to have asserted, “I have everything against power.” Daniel Herwitz, “John Cage’s Approach to the Global,” in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 190. 75. Lawrence Alloway, “City Notes,” Architectural Design (January 1959), reprinted in Richard Kalina, ed., Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic (London: Routledge, 2006). 76. Alloway, 67. 77. Alloway, 69. 78. Reyner Banham, “City as Scrambled Egg,” Cambridge Opinion, no. 17 (1959): 19. 79. Peter Smithson, cited in Denise Scott Brown, “Team 10, Perspecta 10, and the Present State of Architectural Theory,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners (January 1967): 44. 80. Smithson, 44. 81. Reyner Banham, “Design by Choice,” Architectural Review (July 1961): 55. 82. In the introduction to the 1998 edition, Jeffrey M. Herbener, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Joseph T. Saierno wrote: “Not even such milestones in the history of economic thought as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Alfred Marshall’s Principles, Karl Marx’s Capital, or John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory can be said to have such enduring significance and embody such persuasive power that today’s students and scholars, as much as those who read it when it first appeared, are so fully drawn into the author’s way of thinking.” Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998), v. 83. Reyner Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” Art, September 1, 1955, 3. 84. On borax, see chapter 3 in this volume. 85. Lawrence Alloway, “L’intervention du spetateur,” Aujourd’hui Art et Architecture, November 5, 1955. 86. On Alloway and systems theory, see Courtney J. Martin, “Lawrence Alloway’s 283 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 2 – 1 4

Systems,” in Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator, ed. Lucy Bradnock, Courtney J. Martin, and Rebecca Peabody (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015). In economics and systems theory, feedback, invisible hand, and coordination are understood to be the central mechanisms allowing spontaneous order to function. 87. Banham, “Design by Choice,” 46. 88. Reyner Banham, “The Architecture of the Wampanoag,” in Meaning in Architecture, ed. Charles Jencks and George Baird (New York: G. Braziller, 1970), 101. See Reyner Banham, “Flatscape with Containers,” New Society, August 17, 1967; Banham, “Architecture of Wampanoag.” These ideas are reminiscent of earlier claims such as László Moholy-Nagy’s in “Constructivism and the Proletariat” (1922): “Everyone is equal before the machine. I can use it, so can you. It can crush me; the same can happen to you. There is no tradition in technology, no class-consciousness. Everybody can be the machine’s master, or its slave.” László Moholy-Nagy, “Constructivism and the Proletariat,” MA, May 1922, reprinted in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 19. 89. See Reyner Banham, “The Open City and Its Enemies,” Listener, September 23, 1976. 90. Reyner Banham, “A Flourish of Symbols,” Observer Weekend Review, November 17, 1963. 91. Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1947), 34. 92. Leslie A. Fiedler, “The Middle against Both Ends,” Encounter, August 1955, 16– 23. 93. Reyner Banham, “Industrial Design e arte popolare,” Civiltà della Machine 6 (November– December 1955). Also published in Industrial Design (March 1960) as “Industrial Design and Popular Art” and as “A Throw-Away Aesthetic” in Penny Sparke, ed., Design by Choice (New York: Rizzoli, 1981). 94. Reyner Banham, “Design by Choice,” originally appeared in the Architectural Review (July 1961): 43– 48, and was reprinted in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 76. 95. Reyner Banham, “On Trial 5. The Spec Builders: Towards a Pop Architecture,” Architectural Review (July 1962). 96. Banham, “On Trial 5.” In the early 1980s, Banham referred to Kenneth Clark’s views of the Renaissance in admitting that aspects of his thinking “must now appear as historically naïve as my own views of the ‘neutrality’ of technology!” See Banham’s notes on “Towards a Pop Architecture,” in Design by Choice, ed. Penny Sparke (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 141. 97. Banham, “Design by Choice,” 88. 98. Denise Scott Brown, “Learning from Brutalism,” in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 203– 6. 99. Aldo van Eyck, “Architecture of Dogon,” Architectural Forum (September 1961). 100. “A Significance for A&P Parking Lost or Learning from Las Vegas,” Architectural Forum (March 1968), 37. 101. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 350. 102. Hayek, 523. 103. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 433. 104. Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” American Scientist 36, no. 4 (October 1948): 536– 44. Weaver’s work was equally important to the development of Hayek’s theory of complexity and Jacobs’s notion of organized complexity. 284 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 4 – 1 7

105. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 433. 106. Jacobs, 433. 107. Hayek, “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” (1964), in The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy: In Honor of Karl R. Popper, ed. Mario Bunge (New York: Free Press, 1964), 332– 49, reprinted in F. A. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 257– 77. 108. Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950) outlined how information feedback was central to the creation of machines capable of responding to their environments. Consequently, cybernetics helped conceptualize the mechanism behind an evolving and dynamic environment. Wiener’s model attempted to parallel the natural world in which an organism’s development and survival was dependent on a dynamic and symbiotic feedback loop that linked an organism to its environment. In the work of Austrian-school economists, Adam Smith’s renowned theory and feedback are understood to be the central mechanism of spontaneous social order, organized by an invisible hand, which would appear to dispense with arbitrary power and promote individual liberty. 109. Peter Laurence observed similarities in the work of Jacobs and Hayek while pointing out important differences that, he believed, distinguished Jacobs from freemarket libertarians. See Peter L. Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 297– 99. 110. Melvin Webber, “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity,” in Cities and Space: The Future Use of Urban Land, ed. Lowdon Wingo Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 23– 56. 111. Webber, 25. 112. Tom Wolfe, “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t heAr you! too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!” Esquire, February 1, 1964, reprinted in Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored TangerineFlake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965). 113. Ernst Gombrich, “The Beauty of Old Towns,” Arena: The Architectural Association Journal (April 1965): 293. Gombrich denounced metaphysics in art history and the humanities and, following Karl Popper, rejected the Marxist version of Hegelianism for its historicism. In Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), Gombrich affirmed Popper’s view asserted in The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957): “I have not the slightest sympathy with these ‘spirits’; neither with their idealistic prototype nor with their dialectical and materialistic incarnations, and I am in full sympathy with those who treat them with contempt” (21). Gombrich argued that Arnold Hauser’s philosophy of art history, espoused in the 1951 Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur (The Social History of Art), reflected his views as a Marxist and a “collectivist.” Despite his effort at a materialist social history of art, according to Gombrich, Hauser remained “within the fantasy-world of Hegel’s metaphysical system.” E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1963), 86– 94, cited in Ján Bakoš, “Introductory: Gombrich’s Struggle against Metaphysics,” Human Affairs 19 (2009): 239– 50, 241. 114. Christopher Alexander, “A City Is Not a Tree” (pts. 1– 2), Architectural Forum 122, no. 1– 2 (April– May 1965): 58– 62 and 58– 61. Popper’s notion of an open society is a key reference. 115. Stanford Anderson, “Architecture and Tradition That Isn’t ‘Trad, Dad,’” in The History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture, ed. Marcus Whiffen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 71– 89. Rowe’s critique of utopian planning was influenced by the work of Karl Popper, which he discovered through Ernst Gombrich while teaching at Cambridge between 1958 and 1962, as well as by Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), 285 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 7 – 1 8

a history of millenarian thought in relation to modern totalitarian movements, and the philosophical writings of Michael Polanyi. See Joan Ockman, “Form without Utopia: Contextualizing Colin Rowe,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, no. 4 (December 1998): 448– 56. 116. Paul Grimley Kuntz, “The Hidden Order of Anton Ehrenzweig: A Review Article,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 27, no. 3 (Spring 1969): 349– 60, 350. 117. Grimley Kuntz, 350. 118. Anton Ehrenzweig, “The Hidden Order of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 1, no. 3 (June 1961): 125, 128. It should be noted that Ehrenzweig wrote extensively on spontaneity in the work of the Independent Group artist Eduardo Paolozzi. See Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 119. Charles W. Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” Perspecta 10 (1965): 58. 120. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1932), 85, 117, 118. These concepts were discussed in relationship to the static city and the active state. While referring to those who resist the state, José Ortega y Gasset wrote, “The few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience” (44). 121. Charles W. Moore, “Plug It In, Rameses, and See If It Lights Up, Because We Aren’t Going to Keep It Unless It Works,” Perspecta 11 (1967): 43. 122. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 104. See Peter L. Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,” Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 3 (February 2006). 123. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 104. 124. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 258. 125. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 53. 126. John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London: Routledge, 2007), 107. 127. William H. Whyte Jr., ed., The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958). 128. Vincent Scully, “American’s Architectural Nightmare: The Motorized Megalopolis,” Zodiac 17 (1967): 163. 129. See Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life”; Moore, “Plug It In, Rameses.” 130. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. 131. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, 155. 132. Libertarian ideas were widespread in the 1960s in Southern California and promulgated in various publications, including the self-published magazine Liberal Innovator, which advocated anarcho-libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, routinely featuring issues related to “self-liberation,” as well as articles by Ludwig von Mises and R. Buckminster Fuller, and ads for Whole Earth Catalog. In the 1960s Banham made several trips to Los Angeles, where he encountered the radical culture of libertarianism (see chapter 6). 133. Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” in Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, ed. Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000), 21.

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134. See Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom,” Reader’s Digest (April 1945). The notion of a liberal plan can be traced back to Adam Smith, who, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), argued for an approach that allowed “every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” Cited in John Cunningham Wood, ed., Adam Smith: Critical Assessments (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 1:538. 135. See Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945). 136. Robert Goodman, After the Planners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 12. 137. Agrest, “Design versus Non-Design.” Relying primarily on semiotics, Agrest makes no reference to liberal theory, indicating the extent to which ideas detached from their origins often circulated in design discourse. In contrast to Agrest’s account, see Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City, in which concepts espoused by Popper, Berlin, and other liberal theorists, including the idea of the “freedoms of open- endedness,” are extensively explored in relationship to design. 138. See Kenneth Frampton’s notes to Agrest’s “Design versus Non-Design” in the introduction to Oppositions. 139. According to Gombrich, Picasso “does not plan, he watches the weirdest beings rise under his hands and assume a life of their own.” See Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 356. 140. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 94. 141. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 357. 142. On Non-Art, Not Now, see Michael McNay, “Profession: Enfant Terrible,” The Guardian, October 26, 1968. The article noted that Banham and a friend considered writing an anti– Herbert Read book titled Non-Art Not Now, while Toni del Renzio referred to the book as Not Art, Not Now. Toni del Renzio, “Pioneers & Trendies,” Art and Artists (February 1984), reprinted in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 179. Undoubtedly, the title was a reference to Herbert Read’s Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), originally published in 1933. The concept of negative liberty, or negative freedom, refers to freedom from interference by other people. Isaiah Berlin uses the words freedom and liberty interchangeably. In a wellknown essay from 1958, Berlin explored the concepts of negative and positive liberty. See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 166– 217. On “the notion of negative freedom,” Berlin wrote: “Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act” (169). The ideas of negative liberty and negative rights raise questions concerning the idea, or even the possibility, of negative design. 143. Numerous scholars have commented on Hayek’s emphasis on the nonpurposive aspect of spontaneous order. For example, “Hayek’s ideal of a limited, non-purposive state can claim universal acceptance.” Prakash Sarangi, “State as Spontaneous Order: An Analysis of Hayek’s Thought,” Indian Journal of Political Science 56, nos. 1– 4 (1995): 45– 57, 55. 144. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 221.

c h AP t e r on e 1. Hayek taught at the London School of Economics until joining the University of Chicago in 1950. He was a founder of the Mont Pelerin Society, along with prominent economists, including his Chicago colleagues Milton Friedman, Frank Knight,

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and George Stigler. Hayek received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 for his pioneering work (with Gunnar Myrdal) in the theory of money and economic fluctuations as well as analysis of the interdependence of economic, social, and institutional phenomena. 2. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell (1944; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 114. The book’s main argument was first presented in “Freedom and the Economic System,” Contemporary Review (April 1938), and later enlarged in Public Policy Pamphlet no. 29, ed. H. D. Gideonse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939). 3. Hayek elaborated on the theory of the “undesigned” nature of social institutions in The Counter-Revolution of Science. Hayek saw the term order as neutral and designated the term organization for what was produced by design. See Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 87; Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1, Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). 4. In Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), he argued: “The ‘British tradition’ was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, seconded by their English contemporaries Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, and William Paley, and drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudence of the common law” (56). Hayek and Michael Polanyi developed parallel conceptions of spontaneous order. See Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and Rejoinders (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1951). For histories of spontaneous order, see Norman Barry, “The Tradition of Spontaneous Order,” Literature of Liberty 5 (Summer 1982): 7– 52; Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). 5. Friedrich Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism (London: G. Routledge, 1935). 6. See Max Eastman, The End of Socialism in Russia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937); Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (New York: Devin-Adair, 1955); W. H. Chamberlain, Collectivism: A False Utopia (New York: Macmillan, 1937); F. A. Voigt, Unto Caesar (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938). 7. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science, 87. 8. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 76. See also “Saint-Simonian Influence,” “Social Physics: Saint Simon and Comte,” and “The Religion of the Engineers: Enfantin and the SaintSimonians,” in Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science. 9. Herman Finer, a Fabian socialist, published Road to Reaction (1946) as a rebuttal to The Road to Serfdom, writing, “FA Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom constitutes the most sinister offensive against democracy to emerge from a democratic country for many decades.” A more nuanced critique can be found in the work of Karl Polanyi, who argued that the modern market economy and nation-state should be understood not as discrete elements but as the single invention that gave rise to the “market society.” In The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), Polanyi argued that “laissez-faire was planned” (141), whereas social protectionism was a spontaneous reaction to the social dislocation caused by an unrestrained free market. 10. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations (1776; New York: Bantam Classics, 2003), 572. 11. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 85.

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12. Hayek, 85. 13. Sir Karl Raimund Popper, an Austrian-British philosopher and professor at the London School of Economics, was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. He wrote extensively on social and political philosophy and was known for his persuasive defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism to advance an “open society.” For an overview of the logical positivism movement, see Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a review of logical positivism and modern design, see Peter Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 709– 52. On the influence of logical positivism on design culture in postwar England, see Isabelle Moffat, The Independent Group’s Encounter with Logical Positivism and Searches for Unity in the 1951 Growth and Form Exhibition (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002). 14. Austrian-school economists advocate voluntary contractual agreements between economic agents, the smallest possible imposition of coercive (especially governmentimposed) commercial transactions and the maximum openness to individual choice. The state should be confined to the provision of public goods, the regulation of common goods, and little else. After Hitler came to power, the school became based almost entirely in the United States. Peter Boettke and Peter Leeson, “The Austrian School of Economics: 1950– 2000,” in Blackwell Companion to the History of Economic Thought, ed. Jeff Biddle and Warren Samuels (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 2002). For a history of the Austrian school of economics, see Janek Waserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 15. The Austrian school of economics originated in Vienna with the work of Carl Menger (1840– 1921), Eugen Böhm von Bawerk (1851– 1914), and Friedrich von Wieser (1851– 1926). Many credit Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (1871) as the foundational treatise, translated into English as Principles of Economics. 16. Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist and sociologist, attended the University of Vienna, where he was influenced by the works of Carl Menger and awarded his doctorate from the school of law in 1906. He became a leading proponent of the Austrian school of economics. Ludwig von Mises’s Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus (Jena: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1922) was published in English as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936). 17. See Hayek’s foreword to Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981). 18. It originally appeared under the title “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen” in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften 47 (1920). An English translation was first published in Hayek, Collectivist Economic Planning. 19. Otto Neurath, Durch die Kriegswirtschaft zur Naturalwirtschaft (Munich: Callwey, 1919). See also Peter J. Boettke, ed., Socialism and the Market: The Socialist Calculation Debate Revisited, 9 vols. (London: Routledge, 2000). 20. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Planning and ‘The Road to Serfdom’: Friedrich Hayek Comments on Uses to Which His Book Has Been Put,” Chicago Sun, May 6, 1945. 21. Labour Party, The Old World and the New Society: A Report on the Problems of War and Peace Reconstruction (London: Transport House, Smith Square, 1942). 22. Labour Party, 3– 4. 23. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 60. 24. Hayek, 59. 25. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom” (address to the Economic Club

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of Detroit, April 23, 1945), 5, box 106, folder 8, Friedrich von Hayek, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA. 26. The plan was published in Architectural Review (June 1942). The Germany-born modernist architect and planner Arthur Korn, a committed socialist and a Marxist, played a key role in the development of the plan, which was influenced by the ideas of the Russian urban planner Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin and the German Ernst May. See Arthur Korn, Maxwell Fry, and Dennis Sharp, “The M.A.R.S. Plan for London,” Perspecta 13 (1971): 163– 73. On planning socialist cities, see N. A. Miliutin, Socgorod: Otázky stavby socialistických měst: Základy racionelního plánováni nových sídlišt v SSSR (Prague: n.p., 1931), translated by Arthur Sprague as Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974). 27. The County of London Plan was prepared for the London County Council in 1943 by Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie (1879– 1957) and John Henry Forshaw (1895– 1973). See also Andrew Higgott, Mediating Modernism: Architectural Cultures in Britain (London: Routledge, 2007), 58. 28. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 100. 29. Hayek, 71. 30. Hayek, 69. 31. Hayek, 73. While Hayek endorsed the “impersonal and anonymous” mechanism of the market, Siegfried Giedion was deeply concerned with the “limits of mechanization” and its “anonymous history” in Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1945; New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1975). 32. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 78. 33. Hayek, 60. 34. John Maynard Keynes read The Road to Serfdom in July 1944 while traveling to the Bretton Woods meeting, where forty-four nations designed a system to restore the global flow of money and commerce after World War II. Although Keynes advocated for interventionist government policy, he found The Road to Serfdom “a grand book” and said that “morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement”: Keynes to Hayek, June 28, 1944, in John Maynard Keynes, Activities 1940– 1946: Shaping the PostWar World: Employment and Commodities, ed. Donald Moggridge, vol. 27 of the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, cited in Bruce Caldwell, introduction to Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 24. 35. The Road to Serfdom was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944. The first American printing was two thousand copies, the second was five thousand copies, and the third was ten thousand copies. In the first fifty years after its publication, the press sold more than a quarter of a million copies. 36. Jacob Marschak, reader’s report, December 20, 1943, cited in the appendix to Road to Serfdom, 251– 52. 37. Advertisement for The Road to Serfdom, New York Times, April 8, 1945. 38. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom,” Reader’s Digest 46, no. 276 (April 1945). More than six hundred thousand copies were distributed by the Book-of-theMonth Club. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 264. (This is from an appendix section titled “Note on Publishing History.”) 39. Reader’s Digest estimated its readership in 1945 at 10 million. See Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 19. 40. Hayek, “Road to Serfdom,” Reader’s Digest, 3. 41. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 83.

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42. “The Road to Serfdom,” Look, February 6, 1945, 28– 29. Ludekens’s work was commonly circulated in American magazines. 43. “Road to Serfdom,” Look, 28. 44. Henry Grady Weaver, The Mainspring of Human Progress (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1953), 202. References included José Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses (1932); Walter Lippmann, Good Society; Hayek, Road to Serfdom; Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (1944); and Planned Chaos (1947), along with a statement that the bibliography “includes some items that are opposed to the philosophy of individual freedom and which are not recommended-except for antitoxin effects” (267). The works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which were listed, would undoubtedly belong in that category. 45. See David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (New York: Free Press, 1997) and Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007). 46. See Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945), esp. 521. 47. Hayek, 522. Hayek’s acknowledgment of “common” knowledge and the “particular circumstances of time and place” (521) are strikingly similar to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of common language in Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1953). Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist conception that common or “everyday” knowledge played an important role in the formation and activation of “social space” occurred during this same period; see his Critique de la vie quotidienne (Paris: Grasset, 1947). “Informality” gained a great importance in the postwar years in both France and the United Kingdom. 48. Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, and Sixteen Other Essays and Addresses (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1980), 171. 49. Mises, 1. 50. Mises, 49. Mises and Hayek were chief instigators of libertarian economics. Mises was a strong proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, whereas Hayek recognized a limited role for government to perform tasks of which free markets were not capable, applied equally to everyone and not used to control prices. 51. Hayek, “Use of Knowledge in Society,” esp. 527. 52. Hayek, 527. 53. Hayek, 528. 54. Polanyi’s “The Span of Central Direction,” originally published in The Manchester School (1948), was reprinted in Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and Rejoinders (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998). Polanyi had known and corresponded with Hayek since the 1930s and was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society. For a review on whether Hayek or Polanyi coined the term spontaneous order, see Struan W. Jacobs, “Michael Polanyi and Spontaneous Order, 1941– 1951,” Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 24, no. 2 (1997– 1998): 14– 28; Jacobs, “Michael Polanyi’s Theory of Spontaneous Orders,” Review of Austrian Economics 11, no. 1 (1999): 111– 27. See also Ryan T. Allen, Beyond Liberalism: The Political Thought of F. A. Hayek & Michael Polanyi (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998). 55. Polanyi, Logic of Liberty, xvii. 56. Polanyi, 195. 57. Polanyi, 196. 58. F. A. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 285n12. In The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,

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1967), Michael Polanyi argued, “We can know more than we can tell” (4). Polanyi referred to this type of prelogical knowledge, which included tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments, as tacit knowledge. See also Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post- Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958). 59. The Austria-born British mathematician and architect Christopher Alexander used strikingly similar diagrams to describe two contrasting urban models, described as “natural cities” (spontaneous) and “artificial cities” (designed), in “A City Is Not a Tree.” In 1954, Alexander was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge University, in chemistry and physics, then went on to study mathematics (see chapter 6). 60. Polanyi, Logic of Liberty, 245. 61. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 27. 62. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 43. In Logic of Liberty, Polanyi affirmed that views disseminated in Road to Serfdom “have become widely accepted” (152). 63. Phillips Bradley, review, American Political Science Review 37, no. 4 (August 1943): 728– 30. 64. See George Stigler, The Intellectual and the Marketplace (Selected Papers No. 3, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, 1962). Stigler and Friedman were key leaders of the Chicago School of Economics. 65. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 86. The Switzerland-born French essayist, painter, architect, and planner CharlesÉdouard Jeanneret (1887– 1965) went by the pseudonym Le Corbusier. 66. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Le Corbusier developed and expounded his theories of architecture and town planning in sixteen books, include Vers une architecture (Paris: G. Crès, 1923), translated by Frederick Etchells as Toward a New Architecture (London: J. Rodker, 1927) and translated by John Goodman as Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007); Urbanisme (Paris: G. Crès, 1925), translated by Frederick Etchells as The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (London: John Rodker, 1929); and La Ville Radieuse: Eléments d’une doctrine d’urbanisme pour l’équipement de la civilisation machinist (Boulogne, France: Éditions de l’Architecture d’Aujourd-hui, 1935), translated by Pamela Knight, Eleanor Levieux, and Derek Coltman as The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization (New York: Orion, 1967). In addition, he disseminated his ideas in numerous journals, including L’ésprit nouveau (1919– 1925), Plans (1930– 1932) and Prélude (1934– 1939). His key urban proposals included the Ville Contemporaine (1922), the Plan Voisin (1925), and the Plan Obus for Algiers (1931– 1933), among many others. 67. The original French reads: “Le Plan: Dictateur.” The English edition reads: “The Plan must rule.” Le Corbusier, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization (New York: Orion Press, 1967), 7. 68. Le Corbusier, Radiant City, 154 (original emphasis). 69. The final illustration in Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning is an engraving of Louis XIV commanding the construction of Les Invalides, with the caption: “Homage to a great town planner. This despot conceived immense projects and realized them. Over all the country his noble works still fill us with admiration. He was capable of saying, ‘We wish it’, or ‘Such is our pleasure.’” Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 302. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Reyner Banham noted that Le Corbusier added, “Ceci n’est pas une déclaration de ‘Action Française.’” Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978), 256. During the planning stages of

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the United Nations in 1946, Le Corbusier’s New York associates “felt obliged to remind this European member of the site committee that in an American democracy architects respected consensus planning. Le Corbusier responded, perhaps playfully and certainly dismissingly, ‘ah, you démocratic people. Only I’m dictateur.’” Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 245. 70. Le Corbusier, Radiant City, 73. 71. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 93. 72. Amit Tungare, “Le Corbusier’s Principles of City Planning and Their Application in Virtual Environments” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2001), 19. 73. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science, 166. 74. Hayek, 25, 166, 168. 75. Following Mises’s work of the early 1920s, starting in 1935, Hayek and others exposed the limitations of a system of central direction of human activities. See Hayek, Collectivist Economic Planning. For a critical review of Le Corbusier’s planning approach, see Mary McLeod, “Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to Vichy” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1985); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 76. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 85. 77. Hayek, “The Religion of the Engineers: Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians,” in Counter-Revolution of Science, 268. 78. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science, 167. This expression was first articulated by Joseph Stalin in a speech on October 26, 1932, at the home of Maxim Gorky, in which he proclaimed: “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks. . . . And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.” The idea was later discussed, at length, by Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov in a speech titled “Soviet Literature: The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature,” delivered in August 1934 at the Soviet Writers Congress (1934). Andrei Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature: The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature,” translated from the Russian, in Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, ed. H. G. Scott (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977). 79. Hayek, 166. 80. Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro- Concrete (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 85– 88. 81. Sokratis Georgiadis, introduction to Giedion, Building in France, 4. 82. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1948), 714. 83. Giedion, 715. As a critique of modern design, Banham claimed that “architects are frightened of machinery.” Reyner Banham, “The Machine Aesthetic,” Architectural Review (April 1955), reprinted in Reyner Banham, Design by Choice, ed. Penny Sparke (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 44. See also chapter 3 of this volume. 84. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command. 85. Hayek never published the grand project he conceived in a letter to Fritz Machlup in 1939. As described in the introduction, this work would “incorporate intellectual history, methodology, and an analysis of social problems, all aimed at shedding light on the consequences of socialism.” 86. In addition to the work of Austrians, the critique of totalitarianism came from multiple sources. See Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943); Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority

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(New York: John Day Company, 1943); Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943); John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1944). 87. Published in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Alan Ebenstein notes: “It was exciting and unexpected for Hayek to find someone else, from Vienna, who was interested in many of the same topics that he was. The Open Society and Its Enemies has three main parts, on Plato, Hegel, and Marx. The next main chapters in Hayek’s uncompleted “The Abuse and Decline of Reason,” on which he was at work then, were to be on Hegel and Marx.” Alan Ebenstein, Hayek’s Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 180. 88. Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1947), 34. 89. See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1945). 90. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science, 69. 91. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 716. 92. Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of a Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 77. 93. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 57. 94. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1776), 187, cited by Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 57. Hayek wrote: “This ‘anti-rationalist insight into historical happenings that Adam Smith shares with Hume, Adam Ferguson, and others’ enabled them for the first time to comprehend how institutions and morals, language and law, have evolved by a process of cumulative growth and that it is only with and within this framework that human reason has grown and can successfully operate” (57). 95. Hayek, 57. This worldview based on competition was contested by the Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (New York: McClure, Philips & Co., 1902), which demonstrated that mutually beneficial cooperation offered pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities both past and present. It is an argument against social Darwinism. 96. The Editor [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscape,” Architectural Review (January 1944): 7. Hastings was chairman of the Architectural Press and editor of Architectural Review and Architects’ Journal. 97. Hastings, 7. 98. The mid-twentieth-century townscape campaign was promoted by Architectural Review editors Nikolaus Pevsner, Gordon Cullen, Ian Nairn, and Hubert de Cronin Hastings. See John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London: Routledge, 2007); Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Planning and the Picturesque, ed. Mathew Aitchison (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010). Hastings’s theory of townscape is further explored in relationship to the theories of Jane Jacobs in chapter 4 and of Reyner Banham in chapter 6. 99. Uvedale Price, A Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the Beautiful in Answer to the Objections of Mr. Knight. Prefaced by an introductory Essay on Beauty; with Remarks on the Ideas of Sir Joshua Reynolds & Mr. Burke, upon That Subject (London: J. Robson, 1801). 100. Nikolaus Pevsner, “Humphry Reption: A Florilegium,” Architectural Review (February 1948); Pevsner, “The Genesis of the Picturesque,” Architectural Review (December

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1944). See also J. M. Richards, “Europe Rebuilt, 1946– 56: What Has Happened to the Modern Movement?” Architectural Review (March 1957). 101. On the reaction to the picturesque, see Reyner Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945– 1965,” in Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. John Summerson (London: Allen Lane, 1968); Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (New York: Routledge, 2002). On the impact on design and economics, see Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Freedom, Reason and Tradition,” in Constitution of Liberty. Robert Smithson argued that “[Edmund] Burke’s notion of “beautiful” and “sublime” functions as a thesis of smoothness, gentle curves, and delicacy of nature, and as an antithesis of terror, solitude, and vastness of nature, both of which are rooted in the real world, rather than in a Hegelian Ideal.” “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” Artforum (February 1973), reprinted in Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 159. 102. Friedrich A. von Hayek, Individualism and the Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 4. As we have seen, Hastings contrasted the eighteenth-century French rational liberalism, which he associated with the oppressive symmetry of French classicism, with the English radical liberalism, which he associated with freedom, marked by the following characteristics: “to choose at random, laissez-faire, protestantism, nonconformity, empirical philosophers, singular Englishmen, parliamentary government, the Common Law founded upon a multitude of single cases, the absence of a Constitution, the Balance of Power and the Whigs.” Note that, unlike Hayek, Hastings associated Rousseau with the radical tradition of English liberty. See Hastings, “Townscape,” 358. 103. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 75. 104. Hayek, 69 (my emphasis). 105. Hayek, 76. 106. See Ian Buruma, Anglomania: A European Love Affair (New York: Random House, 1998), particularly chapter 13, where he compares Pevsner and Hayek. 107. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 46. 108. Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), vii. 109. Pevsner, 294. 110. Pevsner, 294. 111. Nikolaus Pevsner, “Kunst und Staat,” Der Türmer (1934), 517, as cited in Boyd Whyte, “Nikolaus Pevsner: Art History, Nation, and Exile,” Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art (2013): 1– 33. 112. On controversies over Pevsner’s apparent politics, see David Watkin, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1977); David Watkin, Morality and Architecture Revisited (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 113. Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things: An Attempt to Establish Criteria by Which the Aesthetic Qualities of Design Can Be Judged (London: B. T. Batsford, 1946). The Council on Visual Education arose out of the common interests of a large number of institutions: Town and Country Planning Association, Council for the Preservation of Rural England, Central Institute of Art and Design, and Society for Education in Art. The Royal Institute of British Architects was not represented but was supportive.

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114. Herbert Read, foreword to Pevsner, Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things, 2. 115. Pevsner, Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things, 10. Reyner Banham titled his chronicle of the British revolt against modernism The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (London: Architectural Press, 1966). 116. Clough William-Ellis, foreword to Hervey Adams, Art and Everyman (London: B. T. Batsford for the Council for Education in Appreciation of Physical Environment, 1944), 2. 117. Hervey Adams, Art and Everyman (London: B. T. Batsford for the Council for Education in Appreciation of Physical Environment, 1944), 11. 118. Charles Reilly, Architecture as Communal Art (London: B. T. Batsford for the Council for Education in Appreciation of Physical Environment, 1944), 16. Sir Charles Herbert Reilly (1874– 1948) was an English architect and teacher who headed the Liverpool School of Architecture from 1904 to 1933. Reilly called for a more systematic approach to town planning in England to help control and coordinate unplanned new developments. 119. W. F. Morris, The Future Citizen and His Surroundings: Evidence to Sir Cyril Norwood’s Committee on Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools (London: B. T. Batsford, 1946). 120. S. A. de Smith, “Town and Country Planning Act, 1947,” Modern Law Review 11, no. 1 (January 1948): 72. 121. See Handbook: Facts and Figures for Socialists, 1951 (London: Labour Party Research Department, 1950). 122. J. M. Richards, An Introduction to Modern Architecture (Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1963), 115, 116, 117. 123. See Nikolaus Pevsner, “COID: Progress Report,” Architectural Review (December 1951). 124. F. A. Hayek, review of Charles M. Harr, Land Planning Law in a Free Society: A Study of the British Town and Country Planning Act (1951), University of Chicago Law Review 19, no. 3 (1951– 1952): 620. 125. Hayek, 620. 126. Hayek, 620. 127. Hayek, 624. 128. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 350. Hayek outlined his views of urbanism in a chapter titled “Housing and Town Planning.” See also Hayek, review of Harr, Land Planning Law in a Free Society. 129. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 523n10. The “anti-economics” of town planners was a key concern raised in Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). See chapter 4 in this volume. 130. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 342. 131. Hayek, 342. 132. Hayek, 21.

c h AP t er t Wo 1. New empiricism is a term British writers applied to new Swedish architecture of the mid-1940s— work invariably described as “gentle and self-effacing,” “new humanism,” “pragmatic,” and “welfare state architecture.” See J. M. Richards, “The New Humanism,” Architects’ Journal (November 23, 1944): 375– 76. 2. Banham outlined the aesthetic and ethical philosophy of new brutalism in “The

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New Brutalism,” Architectural Review (December 1955); The New Brutalism: Aesthetic or Ethic? (New York: Reinhold; Stuttgart: Krämer, 1966); and “Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945– 1965,” in Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. John Summerson (London: Allen Lane, 1968). 3. In postwar England, to embrace the “market” was a de facto embrace of “America” and its capitalism, as opposed to a socialist planned economy. 4. Vardan Azatyan, “Ernst Gombrich’s Politics of Art History: Exile, Cold War and The Story of Art,” Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 2 (2010): 129– 41, 130. 5. Reyner Banham, “New Brutalism,” 356. In 1949 Banham entered the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he committed himself to a course of study in art history under Anthony Blunt, Sigfried Giedion, and Nikolaus Pevsner, and then pursed his PhD (1952– 1958) there under Pevsner’s supervision. His dissertation was published as Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960) and became enormously influential. Banham served as assistant literary editor at the Architectural Review from 1953 to 1959 and as assistant executive editor from 1959 to 1964. His books included Guide to Modern Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1962), later retitled Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture (London: Architectural Press, 1975); The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (New York: Reinhold; Stuttgart: Krämer, 1966); The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); and Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Allen Lane, 1971). In 1947 the art historian Anthony Blunt (1907– 1983) became director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is noted for his landmark publications, including Nicolas Poussin: Plates (London: Phaidon; New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1967); Borromini (London: A. Lane, 1979); and Roman Baroque Architecture: The Other Side of the Medal (Henley-onThames: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). Blunt was a member of the Communist Party and served as a spy for the Soviet Union. See Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001). 6. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 355. 7. See the summary of new brutalism on the index page of the Architectural Review (December 1955). 8. Social Insurance and Allied Services: Report by Sir William Henry Beveridge (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1942), known as “The Beveridge Report.” 9. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 44. 10. Giedion, 610. 11. Herbert Read, foreword to Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things: An Attempt to Establish Criteria by Which the Aesthetic Qualities of Design Can Be Judged (London: B. T. Batsford, 1946), 2. 12. See Harold Macmillan, Tides of Fortune, 1945– 1955 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 32. Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, pointed out that Churchill had relayed a “second-hand version of the academic views of an Austrian professor, Friedrich August von Hayek.” See Robert Leeson, ed., Hayek: A Collaborative Biography, pt. 15, The Chicago School of Economics, Hayek’s ‘Luck’ and the 1974 Nobel Prize for Economic Science (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 181. 13. Labour Party, 1945 Labour Party Election Manifesto, http://www.labour-party.org .uk /manifestos/1945/1945-labour-manifesto.shtml. With the campaign slogan “Let us face the future,” the Labour Party promised to embrace Keynesian economic policies and create full employment, the tax-funded universal National Health Service, and a

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cradle-to-grave welfare state. The terms anti-controllers and anti-planners could hardly have been more apt for capturing a sentiment that younger designers would herald in the following decades. See Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler, eds., Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (London: Architectural Press, 2000). 14. Unpublished manuscript dated February 28, 1947, Yale University Library, cited in Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945– 59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 20. 15. Nigel Whiteley, “Pop, Consumerism, and the Design Shift,” Design Issues 2, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 32. 16. See Becky Conekin, The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003). 17. See Robert Anderson, “Circa 1951: Presenting Science to the British Public,” lecture at Oregon State University, http://scarc .library.oregonstate .edu /events /2007paulingconference/video-s2-3-anderson.html. 18. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 356. 19. Banham, 356n1. 20. Banham, 356. 21. Banham, 356. 22. See Allen S. Weiss, Shattered Forms: Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 23. As part of a critique of CIAM, Team 10 members were particularly fascinated by the “untainted” spontaneous world of children— as with Nigel Henderson’s photographs of children playing in the streets of the East End of London, used by the Smithsons in their presentation titled “Urban Reidentification” at the 1953 CIAM conference in Aixen-Provence, and Aldo van Eyck’s numerous designs for urban playgrounds in Amsterdam, which he began in 1947. The interest in anonymous “primitive,” premodern, and spontaneously built environments played an important role in the critique of modern design. See Aldo van Eyck, “Architecture of Dogon,” Architectural Forum (September 1961). 24. Reyner Banham, “The Atavism of the Short-Distance Mini-Cyclist,” in Design by Choice, ed. Penny Sparke (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 85. 25. Banham, 85. 26. As does non-design, these terms describe what is being challenged more than their own characteristics. 27. F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 2. Hayek was undoubtedly referring to the communist and socialist victories in the Russian Revolution and the German Revolution. 28. Hayek, 1. 29. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 14. 30. The five-part series “The Counter-Revolution of Science” was published in Economica, the journal of the London School of Economics, in 1941, and the three-part “Scientism and the Study of Society” series followed in August 1942, February 1943, and February 1944. These essays were collected in Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952). 31. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science. 32. Anatole de Baudot, address to the International Congress of Architects, 1889, cited in Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro- Concrete (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 96.

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Joseph-Eugène Anatole de Baudot was a French architect and author of L’architecture et le ciment armé (Paris: Office Général d’Éditions Artistiques, 1905). 33. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science, 167. 34. Quoted in Hayek, 166. 35. The first section of Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age was titled “Predisposing Causes: Academic and Rationalist Writers, 1900– 1914.” Referring to the “masters of Modern architecture,” Banham wrote: “The Rationalist attitude was held in high regard, yet effectively repudiated by most of them, and the academic tradition was generally vilified, yet many of the ideas it embodied were taken over by them.” Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: Praeger, 1978), 14. 36. J. M. Richards, “Towards a Rational Aesthetic: An Examination of the Characteristics of Modern Design with Particular Reference to the Influence of the Machine,” Architectural Review (December 1935): 211– 18; J. M. Richards, An Introduction to Modern Architecture (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1963), 117. The book was first published in 1940, with several subsequent revised editions. 37. Richards, Introduction, 87, 89. 38. Richards, 90. 39. Richards, 92. In the 1963 edition of this book, Richards explained: “The control exercised by local authorities and their architects has brought about a most welcome change since the speculative builder dominated the scene before the war. This control can probably be seen at its best in some of the new towns that are being built round London” (117). 40. In 1946 Richards published The Castles on the Ground. Here I cite to the second edition: J. M. Richards, The Castles on the Ground: The Anatomy of Suburbia (London: J. Murray, 1973). 41. Richards, 85. 42. Massey, Independent Group, 8. 43. Massey, 8. 44. First published as Pioneers of the Modern Movement (London: Faber & Faber, 1936). This revised and partly rewritten edition was published in Pelican Books in 1960, then reprinted with revisions in 1975. Nikolas Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 214. 45. See Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Planning and the Picturesque, ed. Mathew Aitchison (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010). This unfinished manuscript was initiated in the mid-1940s and offers important insight into debates on urban design and townscape in postwar Britain. 46. Pevsner, 187. 47. Pevsner. 48. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (1943; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), 431. 49. Pevsner, Visual Planning and the Picturesque, 195. 50. Pevsner, 196, 197. 51. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 9. 52. Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque,” 265. 53. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673– 1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 353. 54. Rudolf Wittkower, introduction to Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1971). Rudolf Wittkower was founding coeditor of the Journal of the Warburg Institute and later chairman of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.

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55. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 361. 56. Banham, 361. 57. Stuart Hall argued that the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks, coupled with the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone, which occurred within days of each other, exposed the violence of Western imperialism and Stalinism. In reaction to this violation of the “limits of the tolerable in politics,” the New Left was born. Stuart Hall, “Life and Times of the First New Left,” New Left Review 61 (2010): 177– 96, 177. 58. Stephen Kite and Sarah Menin, “Towards a New Cathedral: Mechanolatry and Metaphysics in the Milieu of Colin St John Wilson,” Architectural Research Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2005): 81– 90, 82. 59. Kite and Menin, “Towards a New Cathedral,” 82. 60. Kite and Menin, 82. 61. Kite and Menin, 82. 62. Alan Powers, Britain (London: Reaktion, 2006), 111. 63. See J. M. Richards, “The New Humanism,” Architects’ Journal (July 6, 1944); J. M. Richards, “The New Empiricism: Sweden’s Latest Style,” Architectural Review (June 1947): 199– 204, Eric de Maré, “The New Empiricism: Antecedents and Origins of Sweden’s Latest Style,” Architectural Review (1948): 9– 11. 64. Maré, “New Empiricism,” 10. 65. Kite and Menin, “Towards a New Cathedral,” 84. 66. Reyner Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945– 1965,” in Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. John Summerson (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 265. 67. According to Alison and Peter Smithson, “This period ended when absolute conviction in the movement died, around 1929.” Alison and Peter Smithson, The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 5. An earlier version of this Heroic Period was first published in Architectural Design, December 1965 (Whitefriars Press), editor Monica Pidgeon. 68. Kite and Menin, “Towards a New Cathedral,” 82. 69. Kite and Menin, 81. Wilson later appreciated the paradox of using Le Corbusier to challenge modern design and usher in a new approach. See Sarah Menin and Stephen Kite, An Architecture of Invitation: Colin St John Wilson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005). 70. Banham, New Brutalism, 11. As Banham indicated, many of these debates of the early 1950s were not published then and, consequently, there was a void in the historiography. See Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (New York: Routledge, 2002); Sarah Menin and Stephen Kite, An Architecture of Invitation: Colin St John Wilson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005) 71. Andrew Saint, “Oliver Cox Obituary,” The Guardian, June 2, 2010, https://www.the guardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jun/02/oliver-cox-obituary. 72. Colin A. St. John Wilson, British architect, lecturer and author, worked for the London County Council along with Ron Herron, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, and Alison and Peter Smithson. 73. Bullock, 118. See also Menin and Kite, Architecture of Invitation. 74. Kite and Menin, “Towards a New Cathedral,” 83. 75. Colin St. John Wilson, “Towards a New Cathedral,” The Observer, January 7, 1951; Colin St. John Wilson, “The Vertical City,” The Observer, February 17, 1952. 76. Todd Gannon, Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017), 17; Banham, New Brutalism, 11.

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77. Banham, New Brutalism, 11. 78. Banham, 11. Within the ranks of the LCC there were a number of card-carrying communists, including Kenneth Campbell and David Gregory-Jones, who was a particular enthusiast of William Morris’s work. In addition, major intellectuals and leaders of important cultural institutions during this period considered themselves socialists. Anthony Blunt, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, was a devout supporter of the Soviet cause. See Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason (London: Hutchinson, 1980). Herbert Read, professor of fine arts at the University of Edinburgh, editor of the important Burlington Magazine, author of several key books on art and design, and cofounder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, regarded himself a socialist and an anarchist in the tradition of William Morris and Edward Carpenter. 79. Graeme Shankland (Colin Lindsay-Shankland) was a leading figure in the design of the South Bank Centre, the redevelopment of Elephant and Castle town center, and the proposed new town at Hook in Hampshire and in Milton Keynes. He was a student of Arthur Korn at Oxford and the longtime communist scientist Professor J. Desmond Bernal. The Communist Party had a long tradition of recruiting architects; the Security Service (MI5) maintains a file of activities at the UK National Archives. See File Ref. KV 2/3108-3110-1942-1958. 80. “William Morris Society,” The (London) Times (September 13, 1955), 9. 81. “William Morris Society.” See also Helen E. Roberts, “Commemorating William Morris: Robin Page Arnot and the Early History of the William Morris Society,” Journal of the William Morris Society 11, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 33– 37. Perhaps Shankland’s most important work during this period was with the Communist Party’s Architects and Allied Technicians (A&AT) Group, founded in 1948, of which he was sometimes secretary. Under the direction of the party’s National Cultural Committee, the group aimed to “strengthen and increase the influence of the Party and of Marxism in the cultural and technical work of architects, technicians and students in building and physical planning.” Its activities included weekend classes, discussion groups, open meetings, and various associations with Soviet architects, as well as the publication of a regular bulletin that covered subjects including the improvement of the design and construction of prefabricated housing and “Marxism and Modern Architecture.” The latter discussion was prompted by Andrew Boyd, “Marxism and Modern Architecture,” Communist Review (May 1949). Many of the architects and planners working on new towns and the reconstruction of cities, such as Coventry and Plymouth, were either members of the Party’s A&AT group or influenced by it. 82. Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque,” 265, 266. 83. Interview with Oliver Cox in Utopia London (2010), a feature length documentary by Tom Cordell. For more information, see http://www.utopialondon.com/wiki/alton -east. 84. Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque,” 265, 266. 85. James MacQuedy [J. M. Richards], “Criticism,” Architectural Review (May 1940): 184, cited in Mumford, CIAM Discourse on Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 163. 86. Mumford, CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 164. 87. J. M. Richards, “The New Humanism,” Architect’s Journal (July 6, 1944): 375– 76, 376. The article was a review of Howard Robertson, Architecture Arising (1944). The following year Nikolaus Pevsner published “The New Humanism,” a review of A. Bertram’s The House, in Architectural Review (August 1945). 88. J. M. Richards, “The New Humanism,” Architects’ Journal (November 23, 1944):

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375– 76, 376. Richards’s reference to the “mechanization of human beings” refers to concerns raised by Sigfried Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). The research and writing for this book was done between December 1941 and December 1945; Richards corrected the manuscript. 89. Victor Terras, “Phenomenological Observations on the Aesthetics of Socialist Realism,” Slavic and East European Journal 23, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 445– 57. Terras noted: “Theorists of Socialist Realism see art as a truthful reflection of life in its entirety: not only of its empirical facts, but also of the ideal, inner links between Life’s various phenomena. Therefore art is expected to aim at a synthesis of the universal and the particular, or of the real and the ideal” (445). 90. Banham, New Brutalism, 11. 91. J. M. Richards, “The New Empiricism: Sweden’s Latest Style,” Architectural Review (June 1947): 199– 204. See also Maré, “The New Empiricism.” For a review of the impact of the new empiricism on architectural debates, see Mumford, CIAM Discourse on Urbanism. 92. Mumford, CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 167; Banham, New Brutalism, 41. 93. Banham, New Brutalism, 11. 94. Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque.” 95. See R. H. S. Crossman, Socialism and the New Despotism, no. 298 (London: Fabian Tracts, 1956), a book highly regarded by Margaret Thatcher. 96. Banham, New Brutalism, 11. Banham’s reference to the “worsening situation” reflects the waning political support for socialism in England, as expressed in the election of 1951. 97. Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque,” 266. 98. Banham published many of his other important essays of the 1950s and early 1960s in the Architectural Review, including “Ornament and Crime” (February 1957), “The Glass Paradise” (February 1959), “Design by Choice” (July 1961), and “Urbanism USA” (November 1961). He also served as editor for the “1960” series (January– June 1960), which included his “Stocktaking” (February 1960) and “History under Revision” (May 1960) articles, and the “On Trail” series (February– July 1962), which included his “The Spec-Builder: Towards a Pop Architecture” (July 1962). 99. Banham, New Brutalism, 10. 100. Popper was influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932), translated as The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1935), outlined differences between a closed society and an open society. 101. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 44. 102. Postwar Britain was characterized by fierce political debates centered on the question of state control. The Conservative Party General Election Manifesto of 1945, by Winston Churchill, stated: “This is the time for freeing energies, not stifling them. Britain’s greatness has been built on character and daring, not on docility to a State machine” (60). Churchill confirmed, “We stand for the removal of controls as quickly as the need for them disappears” (68). See “Mr. Churchill’s Declaration of Policy to the Electors,” in Liberal Party (Great Britain), Conservative Party General Election Manifestos, 1900– 1997, ed. Iain Dale (London: Routledge, 2000). 103. See Kirk Willis’s introduction to Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual (1949; New York: Routledge, 1995). 104. Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual: The Reith Lectures for 1948– 9 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949). Russell was a declared socialist, but after

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visiting the Soviet Union in 1920 and meeting Vladimir Lenin, he was deeply critical of the Bolshevik system, particularly “its indifference to love and beauty and the life of impulse.” Lenin, Russell felt, was cold and possessed “no love of liberty.” Bertrand Russell, Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919– 22, vol. 15 of Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, ed. Richard A. Rempel and Beryl Haslam (London: Routledge, 2000), lxviii. In the 1960s the American urban theorist Melvin Webber built on Russell’s notion of place to launch his well-known non-place polemic. See chapter 6 of this book. 105. Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung (Vienna: Julius Springer Verlag, 1935). The book distinguished Popper’s philosophy from that of the Vienna Circle and was greatly influential among many disciplines, including planning. Referring to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber asserted that “the planner has no right to be wrong.” Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155– 69, 166. 106. Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich taught in various capacities at the University of London from 1946 to 1959, when he was appointed director of the Warburg Institute and professor of the history of the classical tradition there. See “Ernst Gombrich and the Warburg Institute: 1936– 1976,” Burlington Magazine 118 (July 1976). 107. Their families knew each other well in Vienna, and Gombrich’s father did his law apprenticeship with Karl Popper’s father. See Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper— The Formative Years, 1902– 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 108. Karl Popper, “The Poverty of Historicism, I,” Economica, n.s., 11, no. 42 (May, 1944): 86. 109. Again, Popper was influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. 110. While in New Zealand, Popper asked Gombrich to search for a publisher. See “Personal Recollections of the Publication of the Open Society,” in Popper’s Open Society after Fifty Years, ed. Ian Jarvie and Sandra Pralong (New York: Routledge, 1999). 111. Popper, “Poverty of Historicism, I,” 86– 103, “The Poverty of Historicism, II: A Criticism of Historicist Methods,” Economica, n.s., 11, no. 43 (August 1944): 119– 37, and “The Poverty of Historicism, III,” Economica, n.s., 12, no. 46 (May 1945): 69– 89, later published as The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). An Italian translation (Milan, 1954) and a French translation (Paris, 1956) also have appeared in book form. 112. For details on Popper’s life, see Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1976). 113. The proposed title of The Open Society and Its Enemies was “A Social Philosophy for Everyman,” an aim that underscored Gombrich’s approach to art history in The Story of Art (New York: Phaidon, distributed by Oxford University Press, 1950). These two books are intimately linked. Both Popper and Gombrich “drew a direct connection between actual political violence and belief in progress, which they denominated historicism.” Vardan Azatyan, “Ernst Gombrich’s Politics of Art History: Exile, Cold War and The Story of Art,” Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 2 (2010): 129– 41, 129. 114. Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability: Auguste Comte Memorial Trust Lecture, May 12, 1953, London School of Economics and Political Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955). 115. Isaac Deutscher, “Determinists All, Historical Inevitability,” The Observer (January 16, 1955). Isaac Deutscher was a British Marxist historian, journalist, and political

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activist best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. His three-volume biography of Trotsky, The Prophet: Trotsky: 1879– 1940, was highly influential among the British New Left. 116. Popper served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1958 to 1959, and Isaiah Berlin served as president from 1963 to 1964. 117. W. Leslie Renwick, “Letters to the Editor,” The Observer (October 5, 1958). 118. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 355. In “Revenge of the Picturesque” (1968), Banham referenced Werner Heisenberg’s well-known “uncertainty principle,” or indeterminacy principle, of 1927. 119. Popper argued that neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis was science despite their claims. He considered falsifiability a test of whether theories were scientific, not of whether their propositions were true. 120. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 355. A debate had broken out between Taylor and Pevsner. Pevsner argued that the picturesque aesthetic was an integral part of the history of modern architecture. Taylor attacked the picturesque revival and the Architectural Review’s promotion of it on the BBC in 1954, arguing that the picturesque could not meet the conditions of modern society. Basil Taylor, a critic, reader in general studies at the Royal College of Art, and author of the pioneering study of Animal Painting in England from Barlow to Landseer (1955). 121. Reyner Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945-1965,” in Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. John Summerson (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 270. 122. Hacohen, Karl Popper, 353. 123. Karl Raimund Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 455. 124. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1945), 12. 125. Karl Popper, “What Is Dialectic?” Mind 49 (1940), reprinted with revisions in Conjectures and Refutations. During this same period, Henri Lefebvre published his antiStalinist critique of dialectics, Dialectical Materialism (1940). Hacohen, Karl Popper, 349. 126. Hacohen, Karl Popper, 348. 127. Popper, Open Society and Its Enemies, 4. 128. See “Comte and Hegel,” in Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science. 129. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Historicism of the Scientistic Approach,” in Counter-Revolution of Science, 111. 130. The critique of methodology was a hallmark of Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, and in 1960 he claimed that a “zone of silence” existed in the history of modern architecture. 131. Popper, “Poverty of Historicism, I,” 103. 132. Popper, 103. It should be noted that in the early 1950s Banham initiated research on futurism, particularly the radical “anti-art” manifestos, which helped his generation in England advance its polemical attack on the watered-down modernism of welfare state design culture. See Reyner Banham, “Primitives of a Mechanized Art,” Listener 62 (December 3, 1959): 974– 76. 133. Ernst Gombrich, “The Logic of Vanity Fair: Alternatives to Historicism in the Study of Fashions, Style and Taste,” in Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and in Art (Oxford, UK: Phaidon, 1979), 60, reprinted from Paul A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Popper (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974). 134. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 355.

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135. Banham, 355. 136. Fritz Saxl succeeded Aby Warburg as director of the Warburg Institute in 1929. With the rise of Nazi Germany, Saxl helped move the Warburg Institute from Hamburg to London in 1933. Rudolf Wittkower moved to London in 1934. He was a member of staff at the Warburg Institute and coedited the Warburg Journal. 137. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673– 1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 313. 138. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), xii. Both Gombrich and Peter Medawar, whose work influenced Banham, acknowledged Popper’s contribution to their work. See chapter 6 in this volume. 139. See Gombrich, “Logic of Vanity Fair.” 140. Historicism, in the sense used by Nikolaus Pevsner, refers to historical styles. Historicism, in the sense attributed to it by Karl Popper, is namely the (dubious) search for historical laws which shared certain features with German Historismus but the two were not the same. See Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper—The Formative Years, 1902– 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), particularly pages 352 to 358. 141. Nikolaus Pevsner, “The Return of Historicism,” reprinted in Nikolaus Pevsner: Pevsner on Art and Architecture: The Radio Talks, ed. Stephen Games (London: Methuen, 2002), 271. Referring to Pevsner’s use of the term historicism, in a footnote Games wrote: “He means the (improper) use of artistic and architectural forms developed in and associated with past ages, and in this sense the word always carries a negative connotation. This differs from its usage by Hegel, Marx, St-Simon, Comte, Spencer, Spengler and Toynbee for whom it means a law of history that reveals an inevitable sequence of cultural changes to which every age must conform, including future ages” (278). 142. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), 372. 143. See Ernst Gombrich’s Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser, originally published under the title Weltgeschichte von der Urzeit bis zu Gegenwart (Vienna: SteyrermühlVerlag, 1936) and translated into English as A Little History of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Significantly, the book described the beliefs of many religions around the world, including Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam, and incorporated these various perspectives into its historical narrative of people and events. It was banned by the National Socialists. 144. E. H. Gombrich (with David Carrier), “The Big Picture: David Carrier talks with Ernst Gombrich,” Artforum 34, no. 6 (February 1996): 66– 69, 106, 109. 145. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (New York: Phaidon, 1950), 9. 146. See E. H. Gombrich, Looking for Answers: Conversations on Art and Science (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993); Gombrich, “The Big Picture,” 66– 69, 106, 109. See also Alan Colquhoun, “Gombrich and Cultural History,” in On the Methodology of Architectural History, ed. Demetri Porphyrios, Architectural Design 51, nos. 6– 7 (1981): 35– 39. 147. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 17. 148. Arthur P. Molella, “Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command,” Technology and Culture 43 (April 2002): 379. 149. Richards, Memoirs of an Unjust Fella (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 202.

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150. Banham consistently maintained this view toward socialism, which can be discerned in much of his writing. See, e.g., “People’s Palaces,” New Statesman 68 (August 7, 1964): 191– 92, 191. In this he protested against “institutionalised socialism” as “something done on the working class from a great height by Fabians of gentler birth” (191). 151. Reyner Banham, “Review: Architecture You and Me,” Burlington Magazine 101, no. 673 (April 1959): 155; Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of a Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). 152. Banham, “Review.” 153. See E. H. Gombrich, “The Tyranny of Abstract Art,” The Atlantic 201, no. 4 (April 1958): 43– 48, reprinted as “The Vogue of Abstract Art” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse, and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1963). 154. E. H. Gombrich, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form,” in Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, ed. Lancelot Law White (London: Lund Humphries, 1951), later included in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. 155. E. H. Gombrich, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form,” in Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist, and Post-Modernist Thought, ed. Sally Everett (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991), 41. 156. Gombrich, 42. For a critique of historicism in art history, see Gombrich, “Logic of Vanity Fair.” 157. Gombrich, “Mediations on a Hobby Horse,” in Art Theory, 42– 43. For a critique of historicism in art history, see Gombrich, “Logic of Vanity Fair.” 158. Lawrence Alloway, “The Development of British Pop,” in Pop Art, ed. Lucy Lippard (New York: Praeger, 1966). 159. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 358. 160. Per Bertrand Russell in “The Philosophy of Bergson,” The Monist 22 (1912): 321– 47, Bergson wrote: “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ‘images.’ And by ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing— an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’” Russell was citing Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 9. Bergson in turn had been influenced by George Berkeley’s theory of immaterialism, or subjective idealism, which asserted the constitutive power of perception. 161. Anthony Vidler, “Towards a Theory of the Architectural Program,” October, no. 106 (Fall 2003): 59– 74. 162. Vidler. 163. The exhibition was initially proposed in 1949 as part of the Festival of Britain, although that idea was turned down. This polemical exhibition occurred a decade following the groundbreaking show Organic Design in Home Furnishings of 1941 marking a paradigm shift away from the interest in pure geometry featured in the Machine Art exhibition of 1934, both at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1940, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic design philosophy acquired during his fellowship at Taliesin, wrote to Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art to propose the Organic Design in Home Furnishings Competition. See Machine Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934); Eliot F. Noyes, Organic Design in Home Furnishings (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941); and Edgar Kaufmann Jr., What Is Modern Design? (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1950); Edgar Kaufmann Jr., ed., Taliesin Drawings: Recent Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Selected from His Drawings, Problems of Contemporary Art No. 6 (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1952), part of series on “modern arts for laymen.”

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164. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917). The citations are from an abridgment edited by John Tyler Bonner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 3. In the late 1940s Bruno Zevi explored the notion of the organic, particularly in the philosophy and work of Frank Lloyd Wright, as an alternative to the rationalism and purism of modern design. See Bruno Zevi, Towards an Organic Architecture (London: Faber and Faber, 1950). 165. Thompson, On Growth and Form, 3. 166. Thompson, 5. 167. Thompson, 7, citing Dunan’s Problème de la vie (1892). For a young generation struggling with a deflated tradition of modern design that privileged an orderly composition of “pure” geometry, it must have caused great excitement for them to read “‘My house is built,’ says the bee in the Arabian Nights, “according to the laws of severe architecture; and Euclid himself would learn by admiring the geometry of its cells.” Thompson, 108 (my translation). 168. Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 13. 169. Massey, Independent Group, 44. 170. Michel Tapié, Un art autre: Où il s’agit de nouveaux dévidages du réel (Paris: Gabriel- Giraud et Fils, 1952). 171. Hans Prinzhorn, the German psychiatrist and art historian, is the author of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Berlin: Verlag Julius Springer, 1922), translated as Artistry of the Mentally Ill (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1972). 172. Henri Lefebvre was a neo-Marxist French sociologist. His Critique de la vie quotidienne was published in three volumes (1947, 1962, 1981). In La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (1968), Lefebvre called for a “return to everyday life in order to dealienate modern society.” In contrast to Hayek and others who supported “free-market” economics, Lefebvre called for a revolt against “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption,” which he argued mystified knowledge and commodified culture, creating perpetual dissatisfaction. 173. Informal knowledge was central to Hayek’s theories of spontaneous order as it was to Jacobs. F. A. Hayek, “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945): 519– 30, 521. See also the chapter “Governing and Planning Districts” in Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). 174. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 357. 175. Reyner Banham, “Design by Choice,” in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 73. 176. The Institute of Contemporary Arts was founded in 1946 by Geoffrey Grigson, E. L. T. Mesens, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, and Peter Watson. 177. See Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, eds., As Found: The Discovery of the Ordinary (Baden: Lars Müller, 2001). 178. Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “Letter to America,” Architectural Design (March 1958), reprinted in Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories 1952– 1960 and Their Application in a Building Project 1963– 1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 139. 179. Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found,’” in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 201. 180. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University California Press, 1967), 58. His books included The Psycho-Analysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing: An Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious Perception (New York: Julian Press, 1953), with a

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second edition published in New York by George Braziller in 1965, and Oskar Kokoschka: Eine Psychographie (Vienna: Europa Verl., 1971). 181. Ehrenzweig, Hidden Order of Art, 101, 100. 182. Ehrenzweig, 101. 183. Banham, “New Brutalism,” 357. 184. Smithson and Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found,’” 202. 185. Ehrenzweig, Hidden Order of Art, 101– 2. 186. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,” in Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 84. 187. Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found,’” The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 201. 188. Hayek, “‘Purposive’ Social Formations,” in Counter-Revolution of Science, 83. 189. Hayek, 83. 190. Hayek, Road to Serfdom 71. 191. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), 220. 192. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge Classics, 2006). 193. Smithson and Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found,’” 201 (my emphasis). 194. Smithson and Smithson, 201. In the phrase “stepping aside from politics,” the Smithsons seem to have equated politics to socialism, with the implication that a move toward “liberalism” was apolitical, not an embrace of a new political ideology. Although liberalism in the early 1950s was hardly an established idea, it represented opposition to many of the old dogmas and offered one of the most incisive critiques of the period. For a discussion of various theories on the “end of ideology,” see Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960). The sociologist C. Wright Mills discussed this phenomenon in “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, no. 5 (September– October 1960). 195. Smithson and Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, 86. 196. See Massey, Independent Group, 57. Massey, though, mistakenly attributes the quote to Banham. 197. Massey, 84. 198. Denys Lasdun, “Thoughts in Progress: Summing Up III—The ‘Objects Found’ Philosophy,” Architectural Design (December 1957): 435. 199. Lasdun, 435. 200. Alison Smithson was twenty-one and Peter Smithson, twenty-six, when in 1950 they won a competition for the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School in England. It was hailed as the embodiment of new brutalist architecture and was featured in Banham’s “The New Brutalism” of 1955. 201. Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “Parallel of Life and Art: Indications of a New Visual Order” (August 31, 1953), ICA Archives, Tate Gallery, TGA 9211.5.1.2, reprinted in October 136 (Spring 2011): 7. 202. Ron Herron, “Interview, 10 January, 1983,” in The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, ed. David Robbins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 25. 203. Henderson, Paolozzi, and Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “Parallel of Life and Art.” 204. Henderson et al. 205. Smithson and Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found,’” 201.

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206. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 60. 207. Hayek, 60. 208. Smithson and Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, 84. 209. Smithson and Smithson, 80 (my emphasis). 210. In 1907, Henri Bergson had written that “the idea of disorder, in the sense of absence of order, is then what must be analyzed first. . . . [W]hen ordinarily we speak of disorder, we are thinking of something. But of what?” Bergson emphasized “how hard it is to determine the content of a negative idea.” Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 220, 221. 211. Ehrenzweig, Hidden Order of Art, xii. 212. Reyner Banham, “Review of Parallel of Life and Art,” Architectural Review (October 1953): 259– 61, reprinted in October 136 (Spring 2011): 10. 213. Banham. 214. Lawrence Alloway, “Design as a Human Activity,” in This Is Tomorrow, exhibition catalog (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956), cited in Robbins, Independent Group, 136. 215. Theo Crosby, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Design (1955), 1, reprinted in October 136 (Spring 2011): 17– 18. 216. See Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974), translated as The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 217. Banham, New Brutalism, 47. ATBAT-Afrique was the African branch of ATBAT, Atelier des Bâtisseurs, founded in 1947 by Le Corbusier, Vladimir Bodiansky, André Wogenscky, and Marcel Py, with Jacques Lefèbvre as commercial manager. 218. The main thesis of liberty, as a radical departure from conformity, that was espoused by Hastings in his 1949 townscape essay is the central idea that informs architectural ideas especially in the work of Alison and Peter Smithson. See Ivor de Wolfe [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy Founded on the True Rock of Sir Uvedale Price,” Architectural Review (1949). 219. Banham, New Brutalism. 220. See Robbins, Independent Group, 141. 221. From a statement by Peter Smithson, July 1956, requested by Leonie Cohn, Talks Department, BBC. Included in “Asides to ‘Thoughts on Exhibitions,’” unpublished manuscript from the archive of Alison and Peter Smithson, published in Robbins, Independent Group, 141. 222. Banham, New Brutalism, 131, 132, 133. The architectural critic Noboru Kawazoe was a member and spokesman of the Japanese Metabolist group. 223. Banham, 47. 224. Banham. 225. Hayek, Individualism and the Economic Order, 24. 226. Banham, New Brutalism, 62. 227. Hayek, Individualism and the Economic Order, 27. 228. [Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson?], “Opinion—Thoughts in Progress: The New Brutalism,” Architectural Design 27, no. 4 (1957): 113.

c h AP t e r t h ree 1. The origin of the term borax is somewhat unclear. Some speculate it is derived from the custom of giving away borax soap as a premium for the sale of cheap furniture; others argue it was slang for showy product promotions by the Borax soap company.

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Another account, by “Lee Nugent,” a pseudonymous furniture salesman, offered this etymology: “From baroque, originally describing ornate furniture, corrupted to borax.” “Here’s How I Gyp You,” Saturday Evening Post, June 29, 1957, 25. 2. Norman Bel Geddes, “Streamlining,” Atlantic Monthly (November 1934), 553– 65. 3. See Otis A. Pease, The Responsibilities of American Advertising; Private Control and Public Influence, 1920– 1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958). 4. The research of Moholy-Nagy and Giedion on American mass production was informed by direct experience, unlike the research by many of the younger generation of the Independent Group in England. 5. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1946); the citation is from the 1969 edition, 34. 6. Moholy-Nagy, 34, 33. 7. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), the citation from is (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1975), 607, 611, 610. For an account, from a practical, business point of view, of functional and non-functional streamlining, see Harold Van Doren, Industrial Design: A Practical Guide (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1940). 8. Earnest Elmo Calkins, “What Consumer Engineering Really Is,” in Consumer Engineering: A New Technique for Prosperity, ed. Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens (New York: Harper and Bros, 1932), reprinted in Carma Gorman, ed., The Industrial Design Reader (New York: Allworth Press, 2003), 130– 32, 130. Calkins’s theory of consumer engineering, which employs scientific management and the “painstaking collection of statistics,” establishes him as an important figure in early twentieth-century American advertising and graphic design. See Earnest Elmo Calkins, The Business of Advertising (New York: D. Appleton, 1915). 9. Harold Van Doren, Industrial Design: A Practical Guide (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1940), 17. A second edition in 1954 was titled Industrial Design: A Practical Guide to Product Design and Development. 10. Van Doren, xvii. 11. Van Doren, 22. 12. The architect and author Edgar Kaufmann Jr. was the son of Edgar J. Kaufmann, the Pittsburgh businessman and philanthropist who had commissioned Fallingwater (1936), designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Kaufmann House (1946), designed by Richard Neutra. Kaufmann went to New York to study painting, and then to Vienna to the Arts and Crafts School of the Austrian Museum, then to Florence. In 1933 he returned to the United States and became an apprentice architect at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship. He later worked in Pittsburgh in his father’s department store, during which time he organized the Museum of Modern Art’s first design show, Useful Objects, in 1938, which was followed by numerous similar exhibitions. Kaufmann served as head of the Department of Industrial Design from 1946 to 1949, and then as director of “Good Design.” He remained at the museum until 1955. 13. Conference on Industrial Design, A New Profession, minutes, Museum of Modern Art for the Society of Industrial Designers, November 11 to 14, 1946, Reports and Pamphlets, Folder 12.7, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, 1, 2. 14. Conference on Industrial Design, 3 (my emphasis). 15. Conference on Industrial Design, 3, 5. 16. George Sakier was an artist and the author of Machine Design and Descriptive Geometry (1916). In the 1920s he had worked in art direction at Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Modes and Manners. See Leslie A. Pina, Fostoria: Designer George Sakier: With Values (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1996). 310 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 0 1 – 1 0 7

17. Conference on Industrial Design, Reports and Pamphlets, 5, 6. 18. Conference on Industrial Design, 7. 19. Conference on Industrial Design, 53. 20. Conference on Industrial Design, 49. 21. Conference on Industrial Design. 22. Conference on Industrial Design, 50. 23. Conference on Industrial Design, 51. 24. Edgar Kaufmann Jr., “Borax, or the Chromium-Plated Calf,” Architectural Review (August 1948): 88– 93, 88. 25. In Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command, Giedion had pointed out that both futurism and various technical studies of motion had advanced a conception of space-time. 26. Kaufmann, “Borax, or the Chromium-Plated Calf,” 88. Kaufmann may be referring to the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life), held in Paris from May 25 to November 25, 1937. 27. Kaufmann, “Borax, or the Chromium-Plated Calf,” 89. 28. Kaufmann, 89. 29. Kaufmann, 89. 30. The Good Design exhibitions were held between 1950 and 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art and the Merchandise Mart. 31. Good Design: 5th Anniversary, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 32. Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure, 1940– 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 112. 33. Edgar Kaufmann Jr., “Good Design: Summary and Forecast,” in The Gift and Art Buyer (August 1954). 34. Arthur Pulos indicated that the exhibitions included antiques, such as a thirteenth-century Madonna and an eighteenth-century fork, perhaps to indicate that modern design had roots. See Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure, 1940-1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). This book continues the investigation of industrial design initiated by Pulos in American Design Ethic: A History of Industrial Design to 1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 35. Michael Farr, Design in British Industry: A Mid- Century Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 149. 36. Jill Seddon, “The Architect and the ‘Arch-Pedant’: Sadie Speight, Nikolaus Pevsner and ‘Design Review,’” Journal of Design History 20, no. 1 (2007): 29– 41, 31. 37. Seddon, 31. 38. Among other appointments, Pevsner was Slade Professor at Cambridge from 1949 to 1955. See Timothy Mowl’s review of Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), in Journal of Design History 19, no. 3 (2006): 268– 70. 39. See Pauline Madge, “An Enquiry into Pevsner’s Enquiry,” Journal of Design History 1, no. 2 (1988): 114. 40. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937). 41. Pevsner, 38. 42. Pevsner, 121, 133. 43. Farr, Design in British Industry, 208. 44. Nikolaus Pevsner, foreword to Farr, Design in British Industry, xxvii. 45. Farr, Design in British Industry, xxx. 311 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 0 7 – 1 1 2

46. Herbert Read, Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (New York: Horizon Press, 1954), 7. 47. Nikolaus Pevsner, postcript to Farr, Design in British Industry, 314. 48. Pevsner, 315. 49. Preface to the 1954 American edition of Herbert Read, Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (New York: Horizon Press, 1954). 50. Read. 51. Nikolaus Pevsner, “COID: Progress Report,” Architectural Review (December 1951): 352. 52. Pevsner, postcript to Farr, Design in British Industry, 315. 53. Pevsner, 316, 317 54. See the special issue “Man Made America,” Architectural Review (December 1950). 55. Farr, Design in British Industry, 319. 56. Farr, xxx. 57. Pevsner, An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England, 209. 58. Farr, Design in British Industry, 135. 59. Farr. 60. Pevsner, postscript to Farr, Design in British Industry, 313, 310. 61. Pevsner, 312, 316. 62. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 206. This book was frequently revised and reprinted and translated into six languages. 63. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949), 215. On Pevsner’s use of the term totalitarian, see David Watkins, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1977). In “Pevsner’s Progress,” a review of Morality and Architecture in the Times Literary Supplement, February 17, 1978, 191– 92, Reyner Banham wrote, “Most have been prepared to allow that in 1936 [totalitarian] might not have meant exactly what Allied wartime propaganda and Joe McCarthy had made it mean.” The definition of totalitarianism as “total” state political power was formulated in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola and took a positive cast in the writings of Giovanni Gentile, Italy’s leading theorist of fascism; for him, the state was to provide the “total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals.” For Benito Mussolini, this system politicizes everything spiritual and human: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Mussolini’s speech in Milan, October 28, 1925, in Opera Omnia 21:425. While efforts to organize total political power in a central government were apparent on the right in the formation of fascist states, they were also apparent on the left in the pursuit of the socialist goal of a classless and collective society. It seems reasonable to assume that Pevsner used totalitarian positively, to characterize an all-encompassing design aesthetic closely aligned with the goals of a socialist state. On Pevsner’s view of the role of the state in art education and aesthetics, see Academies of Art, Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951) is the standard work on totalitarianism. See also Franz Borkenau, The Totalitarian Enemy (London: Faber and Faber, 1940). 64. See Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (1948; New York: Seabury Press, 1973). See also Theodore A. Gracyk, “Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music,” Musical Quarterly 76, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 526– 42. 65. Pevsner, “COID: Progress Report,” 352. 66. Pevsner, postscript to Farr, Design in British Industry, 319. 312 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 1 2 – 1 1 6

67. Pevsner, “COID: Progress Report,” 352, 351. 68. Pevsner. 69. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Engineers and Planners,” in The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1952), 180. 70. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 115. 71. Hayek. 72. Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, 210. 73. In three of his earliest and most formative essays published in the Architectural Review, “Mendelsohn” (1954), “Sant’Elia” (1955) and “Machine Aesthetic” (1955), Banham developed a core critique of the theories of modern design. Banham argued that the work of Sant’Elia and the futurists was central to the history of the modern movement, influencing such radically different characters as Le Corbusier and Mendelsohn. Banham further linked the emotive and expressive plastic sensibility of Mendelsohn to futurism as part of an aesthetic interest in capturing the dynamics of motion. 74. Reyner Banham, “Mendelsohn,” Architectural Review (August 1954), reprinted in Reyner Banham, Design by Choice, ed. Penny Sparke (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 34. 75. Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, 210. 76. In the foreword to the 1934 Machine Art exhibition catalog, Alfred H. Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, noted that the Italian futurists were “romantically excited by the power and speed— the dinamismo— of machines.” Machine Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934), n.p. Two years prior, Barr had hired the architectural historian and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson to curate the museum’s first architectural exhibition: Modern Architecture: International Exhibition of 1932, which established the canon of the “international style.” In several articles of the 1950s and in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham asserted the vital contribution of futurism to modern design. See Reyner Banham, “Futurism and Modern Architecture,” RIBA Journal 64, no. 2 (1957): 129– 35; Banham, “Primitives of a Mechanized Art,” Listener 62 (December 3, 1959): 974– 76. 77. Banham, “Mendelsohn,” 34. 78. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 481, 482. 79. Reyner Banham, “On Abstract Theory,” Art News and Review (November 28, 1953). 80. Reyner Banham, “A Throw-Away Aesthetic,” Industrial Design (March 1960), reprinted in Banham, Design by Choice, 93. 81. Wendingen (Inversions) was a Dutch art magazine founded by Theo van der Wijdeveld that appeared from 1918 to 1932 and was a mouthpiece of the architectural association Architectura et Amicitia (Architects and Interior Decorators) and the Amsterdam school. Much attention in the magazine was given to beeldende, or beeldende kunsten (plastic arts), and design. 82. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960; New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978), 167. The use of clay models was standard in the styling processes of industrial designers. The discussion of clay models highlights Banham’s interest in topology and brings to mind various forms of morphology discussed in D’Arcy Thomson’s On Growth and Form (1917). In 1955 Banham argued that “an intuitive sense of topology,” not Platonic geometry, informed the alternative compositions in the paintings of Alberto Burri or Jackson Pollock, for example, and was key to the search for une architecture autre. Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review (December 1955): 354– 61, 361. 83. Banham, “Mendelsohn,” 35. 313 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 1 6 – 1 2 0

84. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 482. 85. Banham, “Mendelsohn,” 38. Mendelsohn published his observations and photographs in Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Berlin: R. Mosse, 1925). 86. Mendelsohn, with his onetime employee Richard Neutra translating, met Wright at Taliesin. See Patrick Hodgkinson, “Getting It Wright,” review of David G. De Long, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Designs for an American Landscape 1922– 1932 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 87. Banham, “Mendelsohn,” 38. 88. On the importance of De Stijl to the development of early-twentieth-century architectural modernism, see Bruno Zevi, Poetica dell’architettura neoplastica (Milan: Libreria Editrice Politecnica Tamburini, 1953). 89. Banham, “Mendelsohn,” 39. 90. Banham, 37, 39. 91. One of the first formal events organized by the Independent Group at the ICA was a lecture series, between October 1953 and February 1954, entitled “Aesthetic Problems of Contemporary Art.” It investigated how the visual artist could make use of new developments in technology and mass media to respond to contemporary culture. The members of the group gave talks such as “New Concepts of Space,” “Non-Formal Painting,” “New Sources of Form,” “Problems of Perception,” and “The Impact of Technology.” 92. “Advertising 1” was presented on April 15, 1955, and “Advertising 2” on May 27, 1955. The Independent Group’s second session occurred between February and July 1955. 93. See Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 94. Ralph O. Nafziger, Warren C. Engstrom, and Malcolm S. MacLean Jr., “The Mass Media and an Informed Public,” Public Opinion Quarterly 15 (1951): 105– 14. 95. Wilbur Lang Schramm, ed., The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954). 96. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). It is noteworthy that this press published the classic work of the founder of the Austrian school of economics, Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), as well as many books by Hayek, A. J. Ayer, and other liberal critics. 97. This lecture was attended by eighteen people on March 4, 1955, at one of Independent Group’s closed meetings. 98. “Appendix 2: Independent Group Session 1955” was reproduced in Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945– 59 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 142. 99. Banham, “Throw-Away Aesthetic,” 92. Fiedler, acknowledged as one of the early postmodernist critics, wrote numerous essays and books on American culture, including Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). 100. Conference on Industrial Design, A New Profession, 55. 101. Lawrence Alloway, “The Arts and the Mass Media,” Architectural Design (February 1958), excerpt reprinted in David Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 166. 102. Man, Machine and Motion was organized primarily by Richard Hamilton. Before opening at the ICA on July 6, 1955, it had been installed at the University of Newcastleupon-Tyne.

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103. John McHale elaborated on this phenomenon in a special issue of ARK, the Royal College of Art magazine, on America (November 1956). Cited in Jonathan M. Woodham, Twentieth Century Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 185. 104. For references to the design debates of the period, see Kaufmann’s What Is Modern Design? (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1950) and General Motors, Styling: The Look of Things (1955; Detroit: General Motors Corp., 1958). See also David Gartman, “Harley Earl and the Art and Color Section: The Birth of Styling at General Motors,” Design Issues 10, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 3– 26. 105. This thesis was further developed in “Vehicles of Desire,” Art (September 1, 1955) reprinted in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 3. 106. Banham, “Mendelsohn,” 141. 107. The chronology of Banham’s thoughts on the relationship between modern design and the automobile was established in a series of lectures and articles in 1955: “Borax, or the Thousand Horse-Power Mink” (March 4, 1955); “The Machine Aesthetic,” Architectural Review (April 1955): 224– 28; “Man, Machine and Motion,” Architectural Review 118 (July 1955): 51– 53, 54; introduction to the exhibition catalog Man, Machine and Motion (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: University of Durham, 1955; London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1955); and “Vehicles of Desire,” Art (September 1, 1955). It should be noted that in February 1952, the Architectural Review published a review of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Eight Automobiles (1951) in which, for the first time, “the car was officially considered as a work of art.” 108. Reyner Banham, “Painting and Sculpture of Le Corbusier,” Architectural Review (June 1953): 401– 3. 109. Reyner Banham, “The Machine Aesthetic,” Architectural Review (April 1955), reprinted in Banham, Design by Choice, 45, 44. 110. A decade before, Bruno Zevi’s Verso un’architettura organica (1945) had attempted to rethink the principles of modernism. The English translation, Towards an Organic Architecture, was published in London by Faber & Faber in 1950. 111. The French painter and writer Amédée Ozenfant met the Swiss architect and painter Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) in the spring of 1917. They jointly published the “purist” manifesto Après le cubisme (Paris: Éditions des Commentaires, 1918), which coincided with the first purist exhibition at the Galerie Thomas in Paris in November 1918. Ozenfant and Le Corbusier collaboratively wrote La peinture moderne (Paris: G. Crès, 1925), then Ozenfant published the two-volume L’art (1928), translated by John Rodker as Foundations of Modern Art (New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1931), in which he further expounded the theory of purism. 112. Banham, “Machine Aesthetic,” 45. In On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson disputed Darwin’s theories primarily by rejecting the teleological and universal explanation of the environment. On the role of teleology and design in the work of the Independent Group, see Massey, Independent Group. 113. Banham, “Machine Aesthetic,” 45. The Independent Group was certainly not alone in attacking Le Corbusier. See, e.g., Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov], “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” Internationale Situationniste, no. 1 (October 1953): “His cretinizing influence is immense. A Le Corbusier model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide. He is destroying the last remnants of joy. And of love, passion, freedom.” 114. Reyner Banham, “The Machine Aesthetic,” Architectural Review (April 1955), reprinted in Banham, Design by Choice, 45.

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115. Ivain, 47. Le Corbusier’s comparison was put forth in his Vers une architecture (1923). 116. Banham’s emphasis on the relationship between design and commerce should also be understood in the context of the history of architecture since William Morris, who, in “Art and Socialism” (1884), claimed that the “dominance of commerce [over art] is an evil.” 117. Le Corbusier’s criticism, of course, was written in the early 1920s, during a period when automobile forms were relatively simple and functional, before streamlining was introduced. While Banham correctly points out the contradictions in Le Corbusier’s purism, accusing him of “aesthetic prejudice,” Banham’s criticism is considerably biased by his assumptions about the neutrality of both technology and the market. 118. Banham was referring to British debates of the late 1940s. See Colin Rowe, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa: Palladio and Le Corbusier Compared,” Architectural Review (March 1947), 101– 4; Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1949); Anthony Blunt, “Mannerism in Architecture,” Journal of the RIBA 56, ser. 3, no. 5 (1949). See also Banham, “Machine Aesthetic,” 46. 119. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 106. 120. The embrace of the new forces governing society rests on a series of assumptions concerning the market as an expression of freedom. The hallmark of free-market capitalism was individualism, advertising, and competition, which stood in direct opposition to collectivism, the restraint of commerce and advertising, and a planned economy. 121. Each of Pevsner’s lectures was published the following day, between October 17 and November 28, 1955, in the Times. See Peter Faulkner, “Pevsner’s Morris,” Journal of William Morris Studies 17, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 54. 122. Faulkner. 123. Pevsner, postscript to Farr, Design in British Industry, 312. The eighteenth-century principles that liberal critics, such as Hayek, sought to revive were based on the crucial elements of liberty and spontaneity, not control. Banham would later subvert Pevsner’s argument by claiming that dissonance, without the need for control, has its own particular qualities and order. 124. Pevsner, 313, 314. 125. Pevsner, 319. 126. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science, 152. 127. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 714. 128. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 4, 5. In “1960— Stocktaking of the Impact of Traditions and Technology on Architecture Today,” Architectural Review (February 1960): 93– 100, Banham referred to Robin Boyd, “The Engineering of Excitement,” Architectural Review (November 1958): 98– 103. 129. Edward Bernays, The Engineering of Consent (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 146. 130. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 607. Giedion gave several talks at the ICA in the late 1940s and early 1950s. See Anne Massey, “The Independent Group: Towards a Redefinition,” Burlington Magazine 129, no. 1009 (April 1987): 232– 42. 131. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 9. 132. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” 6. 133. Originally published as Reyner Banham, “Industrial design e arte popolare,”

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Civiltà della Machine 6 (November– December 1955), 12– 15. It was later published under the title “Industrial Design and Popular Art,” Industrial Design (March 1960), and later reprinted as “A Throw-Away Aesthetic,” in Banham, Design by Choice. 134. Banham, “Throw-Away Aesthetic,” 93. 135. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” 4. 136. Banham, 4. 137. Banham, “Throw-Away Aesthetic,” 93. 138. Reyner Banham, “New Look in Cruiserweights,” Ark (Spring 1956), 44, 47. 139. F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September, 1945): 526. 140. Lawrence Alloway, “Personal Statement,” Ark 19 (Spring 1957). 141. Hayek, “Use of Knowledge in Society,” 524, 527, 521. 142. Conference on Industrial Design, A New Profession, 75.

c h AP t er four 1. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). As we saw in chapter 1, spontaneous order plays an important role in the Austrian school. Carl Menger, Friedrich Hayek, and others have used it to describe the market and other forms of social phenomena. Whether Jane Jacobs was directly influenced by Austrian-school theory is unknown. Nonetheless, a large and growing body of literature has argued that their work shares many important points of view that merit investigation. The key aim is to explore parallel developments and similarities. I leave it to others to explore their differences. The American mathematician Warren Weaver was director of natural sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. He wrote a seminal paper titled “Science and Complexity” that was fundamental to Jacobs’s theory of cities as a form of organized complexity. See Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” in The Scientists Speak (New York: Boni & Gaer, 1947), 1– 13; also published in American Scientist, 36 (1948): 536– 44, and in the Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report, 1958 (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1958), 7– 15. 2. See Peter L. Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,” Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 3 (February 2006). In the conclusion to Becoming Jane Jacobs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Peter L. Laurence cited my work “Non-Design and the Non-Planned City” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013) and concluded by reflecting on important similarities and differences concerning anti-utopian and free-market ideas in the work of Jacobs, Hayek, and Karl Popper. On Jacobs and spontaneous order, see Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization, 4, nos. 2 and 3 (2017). 3. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 447. 4. Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” American Scientist 36: 536– 44 (1948). See Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and Rejoinders (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998); Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 5. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 523n10. 6. Mathew Aitchison noted that the townscape campaign began in the 1930s, launched in name in 1949, and continued until the mid-1970s. See Mathew Aitchison, “Ugliness and Outrage: The Australian Townscape,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30, Open, ed. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast, Australia: Sahanz, 2013), 1:407– 17. In the 1930s the Architectural

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Review circulated various, often opposing, views of modernism. See John Betjeman, “The Death of Modernism,” Architectural Review (December 1931). 7. The Editor [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Exterior Furnishings or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscapes,” Architectural Review (January 1944). 8. “The English Planning Tradition and the City” in Architectural Review (June 1945): 164, cited in Erdem Erten, “Shaping ‘The Second Half Century’: The Architectural Review, 1947– 1971” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004), 46. 9. The Editor [Hastings], “Exterior Furnishings or Sharawaggi,” 7. 10. “English Planning Tradition and the City,” 167. 11. “English Planning Tradition and the City,” 167. Hastings’s “functional form” was defined by a “fitness of purpose.” This insight was based on observations made by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder (1784– 1848), the Scottish Liberal author, who argued, “Fitness, or the proper adaptation of means to an end, is the great source of the relative beauty of forms.” Hastings’s article quoted Sir Thomas Dick Lauder in the introduction of Uvedale Price, On The Picturesque: With an Essay on the Origins of Taste, and Much More Original Matter (Edinburgh: Caldwell and Co.; London: Orr and Co., 1842), 44 (emphasis original). This thesis resonated with D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s descriptions of natural formations in On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917). See chapter 2 of this volume. These issues were not unrelated to Hugo Häring’s theory of organic functionalism. See Peter Blundell Jones, Hugo Häring: The Organic versus the Geometric (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 1999). For references to the eighteenth-century view of the organic in architecture, compare the chapters “Organism” and “Mechanism” in Colin Rowe’s The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards a Possible Retrospect (London: Academy Editions, 1994). 12. Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Planning and the Picturesque, ed. Matthew Aitchison (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010). In the introduction, John Macarthur and Matthew Aitchison wrote, “Hastings hired Pevsner to assist him in editing the [the Architectural Review] journal in 1942, and it is likely that Visual Planning was commissioned as the core text of the new [townscape] movement and was to be published as a book by the AR’s parent company, the Architectural Press” (1). 13. Pevsner, Visual Planning, 4. 14. Editor [Hastings], “Exterior Furnishing,” 7. 15. From its inception, townscape was conceived as a visual art of town planning that emphasized the visual perception, and appreciation, of the environment. See John Betjeman, “The Seeing Eye or How to Like Everything,” Architectural Review (November 1939). See also Gordon Cullen’s cover of Architectural Review (December 1949). “Serial vision” was a key concern in Gordon Cullen, Townscape (London: Architectural Press, 1961), as in Cullen’s The Concise Townscape (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), 17. 16. Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (1956; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1986), 181. 17. Ivor de Wolfe [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy Founded on the True Rock of Sir Uvedale Price,” Architectural Review (December 1949). 18. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 357. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (Breslau: Verlag von Eduard Trewendt, 1851), written in 1792 but not published in its entirety until 1851, after von Humboldt’s death in 1835, translated from the German by Joseph Coulthard as The Limits of State Action in 1852 and later retitled The Sphere and Duties of Government (London: John Chapman, 1854). This treatise was hugely influential on John Stuart Mill and his On Liberty (1859). Hayek described Humboldt as “Germany’s greatest philosopher 318 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 3 8 – 1 4 0

of freedom” and, like many other twentieth-century liberals, regarded Mill as a great champion of liberty. 19. In the full quote, Hastings explained, “Anyway we now have the rational canon of French democracy defined as the assumption that liberty by making the individual free to get at the truth, which is one, will end by establishing universal conformity; and on the other hand what for want of a better word I have called the radical canon, of English democracy, based on the belief in individualism per se.” Hastings, “Townscape,” 358. 20. Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos— Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (Stuttgart, 1845), translated by E. C. Otté as Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, vol. 1 (London: Henry G. Bond, 1849). The values of Humboldt’s enlightened humanism, known for “attacking right-wing extremism with his own left-wing radicalism,” has been described in Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (New York: Peter Lang, 2005). 21. Alexander von Humboldt, Reise auf dem Rio Magdalena, durch die Anden und Mexiko, pt. 1, ed. Margot Faak (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1986), 358. 22. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (London: Henry G. Bond, 1849), 1:43. 23. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 433. 24. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 361. 25. Wolfe [Hastings], 362 (original emphasis). 26. Wolfe [Hastings], 354 (my emphasis). 27. With the “Outrage” issue, Tunnard noted, the Review had now turned its attention, in “an indictment no less scathing,” on the English landscape. Christopher Tunnard, “Outrage, Ian Nairn (review),” Journal of American Institute of Planners 23, no. 1 (Winter 1957), 43. On the “Man Made America” issue, see chapter 5 of this book. As Hastings defined the townscape doctrine and method in the 1940s, it was based on the liberal principle of tolerance of radical differences and non- conformity. The view the editors expressed of the unplanned conditions of the existing urban landscape was anything but tolerant, which indicated various, seemingly conflicting strands of thought identified with townscape. 28. Peter L. Laurence, “Jane Jacobs, the Townscape Movement, and the Emergence of Critical Urban Design,” in Alternative Visions of Postwar Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape, ed. John Pendlebury, Erdem Erten, and Peter J. Larkham (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015), 218. 29. Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), 11. Townscape emerged as a collective effort of those affiliated with Hastings, including Nikolaus Pevsner, Thomas Sharp, and Gordon Cullen. As assistant art editor of the Architectural Review between 1946 and 1956, Cullen produced the “Townscape” series before Kenneth Browne and Ian Nairn took over as townscape editors. 30. “Outrage” was published as a book in 1956. For a review of Nairn and townscape, see Lorenza Pavesi, “Ian Nairn, Townscape and the Campaign Against Subtopia,” Focus 10, no. 1. (2013). 31. Ian Nairn, “Outrage,” Architectural Review (June 1955): 368. 32. Christopher Tunnard, “Outrage, Ian Nairn (review),” Journal of American Institute of Planners 23, no. 1 (Winter 1957). 33. “Outrage,” Architectural Review (June 1955); “Counter-Attack,” Architectural Review (December 1956); and Ian Nairn, Counter-Attack against Subtopia (London: Architectural Press, 1957) are some of the few references to English design criticism that were acknowledged. 34. “What City Pattern,” Architectural Forum (September 1956): 103– 37. 319 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 4 0 – 1 4 2

35. Other participants included Edmund Bacon, Lewis Mumford, Hideo Sasaki, Garrett Eckbo, Victor Gruen, and some American mayors. See Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders, eds., Urban Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 36. Compare this view of townscape with the campaign against “visual pollution” advanced by Robin Boyd in The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1960) and Peter Blake in God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). 37. This essay, which was based on her Rockefeller Foundation proposal for The Death and Life of Great American Cities, had been previously published as Jane Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” Fortune, April 1958: 133– 39. See also Editors of Fortune, The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958), 140. 38. Peter L. Laurence, “Jane Jacobs, The Townscape Movement, and the Emergence of Critical Urban Design,” in Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape, ed. John Pendlebury, Erdem Erten, and Peter J. Larkham (London: Routledge, 2015), 216– 26, 222. 39. Laurence, “Jane Jacobs,” 222. The illustrations were assembled in The Exploding Metropolis in a section titled “The Scale of the City” accompanied by a text, presumably by the editors, stating “Mr. Cullen, who likes to draw cities the way people actually see them, from eye level, has done the drawings; Mr. Nairn who did the walking, has written the captions.” in Editors of Fortune, The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958), two pages after 138 (illustration pages are without numbers). 40. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 3. 41. Jacobs, 3 (my emphasis). Compare Jacobs’s notion of the “ordinary” with the “Theory of Ugly and Ordinary” in Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). Venturi acknowledged the influence of Death and Life of Great American Cities on his thinking in the early 1960s. The townscape philosophy is apparent in both books. See Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities.” 42. Compare Jacobs’s interest in the ordinary with the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson’s theory of the “as found” from the early 1950s, which they said “was a new way of seeing the ordinary.” Alison and Peter Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the Found,” in As Found: The Discovery of the Ordinary, ed. Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger (Baden, Germany: Lars Müller, 2001), 40. According to Adrian Forty, in Italy, one of first serious critiques of modernist architecture appeared in the writing of Ernesto Rogers, who critiqued it for its tendency to treat each project as an abstract problem and for its indifference to specific location and context. See Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 132. In 1955, Rogers used the term preexisting conditions (preesistenze ambientali) and argued that the very act of creation must acknowledge “all those forces that are at play in the field of their own actions” while insisting that “the context is the place of these preexistences and anything that did not feel their influence would be vague and indeterminate.” See Ernesto Nathan Rogers, “Preexisting Conditions and Issues of Contemporary Building Practice,” in Architecture Culture 1943– 1968: A Documentary Anthology, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation: Rizzoli, 1993), 202. The notion of context was also central to Robert Venturi, whose MFA thesis at Princeton University in 1950 was titled “Context in Architectural Composition” (see chapter 5 of this book).

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43. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 17– 18. 44. For reference to Hayek’s idea about the “liberal way of planning,” see Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom,” in Reader’s Digest 46, no. 276, April 1945; see also chapter 1 of this volume. 45. For a review of Mises’s activities and influence in America, see Murray N. Rothbard, “The Essential Von Mises,” in Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom: And Sixteen Other Essays and Addresses (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1980). 46. Jacobs remained at Amerika until 1952, when she took a job at Architectural Forum. 47. Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs, 294. As a university student, Jacobs compiled a selection of ideas considered but rejected during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. See Jane Butzner, comp., Constitutional Chaff: Rejected Suggestions of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, with Explanatory Argument (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941). 48. Joanna Szurmak and Pierre Desrochers claim that Hayek was aware of Jacobs’s work, but the latter was not aware of the former’s work. Following their citations, I have not been able to find the evidence. See “Jane Jacobs as Spontaneous Economic Order Methodologist: Part 2: Metaphors and Methods,” in Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization 4, nos. 2– 3 (2017). 49. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 17. The critique of utopia is significant. Compare Karl Popper, Poverty of Historicism (1957) with Colin Rowe’s “The Architecture of Utopia,” Granta (1959), reprinted in Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). 50. Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945): 519– 30. 51. While enrolled at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, Jacobs studied constitutional law. It seems reasonable that she would have been familiar with Hayek’s work, especially given his references to the eighteenth-century liberal doctrines. See Max Allen, ed., Ideas that Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs (Owen Sound, ON: Ginger Press, 1997). 52. Ernest van den Haag, “The Planners and the Planned,” in Central Planning and Neomercantilism, ed. Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1964), 19. Ernest van den Haag was a conservative commentator of social issues whose views (which many considered to be bigoted) were promulgated in journals such as William F. Buckley’s National Review. Hagg’s words reflected, practically verbatim, Hayek’s insight in “The Use of Knowledge” about “who is to do the planning” (520; original emphasis). Likewise, the section headings of his essay, such as “Planning for Economic Freedom,” parroted Mises’s well-known polemical book Planning for Freedom of 1952. Nonetheless, he makes no mention of Hayek or Mises, an omission in the essay that raises intriguing questions concerning a volume of essays that defined central planning as a system of total, authoritarian control, enforced by coercive powers of the state. To what degree these ideas had infiltrated the anti-establishment of the left and the right without its authors being aware of their origins is difficult to determine but nonetheless may help us understand a certain critique evident in many books of the period, including Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. See Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”; Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom: And Sixteen Other Essays and Addresses (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1980). 53. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 22. 54. Jacobs, 14 (my emphasis).

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55. Jacobs, 17. As previous noted, in 1960, in a chapter titled “Housing and Town Planning,” Hayek denounced the movement for town planning, calling out many of its founders by name. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 523n10. A decade before he had already issued a direct critique of the British Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. See F. A. Hayek, review of Charles M. Harr, Land Planning Law in a Free Society: A Study of the British Town and Country Planning Act (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), University of Chicago Law Review 19 (1951– 1952). 56. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 18. 57. Editors of Fortune, Exploding Metropolis, 161. 58. Rowe, “Architecture of Utopia,” 206. 59. It is noteworthy that Jacobs’s account of modern planners followed essentially the same outline put forth by Catherine Bauer in “First Job: Control New City Sprawl,” for the special issue “What City Pattern?” in Architectural Forum (September 1956). See also Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1934). 60. Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line: ‘Mother Jacobs Home Remedies,’” New Yorker (December 1, 1962), 152. 61. Colin Ward, “Jane Jacobs and the Clay Dogs,” Built Environment 8, no. 4 (1982): 229– 31. 62. Ivor de Wolfe [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “A Review of The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Architectural Review (February 1963), 91n. 63. Wolfe [Hastings], 91– 93. 64. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 8. 65. Jacobs, 13 (my emphasis). Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour would promote this idea in Learning from Las Vegas. 66. Jacobs, 13. 67. Simon Sadler, “Open Ends: The Social Visions of the 1960s Non-Planners,” in Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, ed. Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler (Oxford, UK: Architectural Press, 2000), 148. As noted in the introduction and discussed in chapter 6 of this book, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom” (1969), was published in New Society. 68. Paul Barker, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” in Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, ed. Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler (Oxford, UK: Architectural Press, 2000), 2. 69. In many accounts of Jacobs’s work, including Max Allen, ed., Ideas That Matter: The World of Jane Jacobs (Owen Sound, ON: Ginger Press, 1997), Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673– 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Max Page and Timothy Mennel, eds., Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2011), minimal, if any, mention is made of its relationship to the larger European context of postwar criticism of modern architecture and urban planning theory. 70. See chapters 2– 6 in Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities. 71. Lichtenstein and Schregenberger, As Found, 84. 72. Lichtenstein and Schregenberger, 94. 73. See Alison Smithson, ed., Team 10 Primer (Cambridge, MA: Press, 1968). 74. Smithson, 3. 75. The Architectural Review released “Man Made America” (December 1950), to which Donald Haskell replied, followed by Ian Nairn’s “Outrage” (June 1955), both of which were special issues related to the journal’s townscape campaign (see chapter 5

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of this volume). Donald Haskell, “A Reply To: Many Made America A Special Issue of the Architectural Review,” Architectural Forum (April 1951): 158– 59. See also Laurence, “Jane Jacobs.” 76. “What City Pattern?” Architectural Forum (September 1956), included work by Jacobs, Peter Blake, and other editors of the Architectural Forum, in addition to work by Catherine Bauer and Victor Gruen. Douglas Haskell’s concluding editorial, “Architecture for the Next Twenty Years,” referred to “Man Made America.” See Laurence, “Jane Jacobs.” 77. Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “An Alternative to the Garden City Idea” (1954), reprinted in Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories 1952– 1960 and Their Application in a Building Project 1963– 1970 (London: Faber, 1970), 123. 78. Smithson and Smithson, 124. 79. Compare with Jacobs’s assessment of Geddes in Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is significant that the Smithsons seem to take Popper more seriously than others in his notion of trial and error as a process in the development of knowledge such that each generation builds on former ideas rather than the “revolutionary” approach of “cutting ties” and overthrowing those who came before. 80. Smithson and Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, 124 (my emphasis). 81. For a review of key changes that occurred in England in the postwar period, particularly as they relate to Popper, Hayek and Gombrich, see “The Rebirth of Liberalism in Science and Politics, 1943– 1945,” in Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902– 1945, ed. Malachi Haim Hacohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a review of the impact of the philosophy of liberalism on postwar British architecture and criticism, see Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978). 82. Smithson and Smithson, Ordinariness and Light, 136; Smithson and Smithson, “Letter to America,” Architectural Design (March 1958). 83. See Unnamed [Jane Jacobs and Walter McQuade], “Louis Kahn and the Living City,” Architectural Forum 108, no. 3 (March 1958): 118– 19. Already in 1956, Jacobs had used the phrase “the living city” in an editorial, which is suggestive of the biological “unity” associated with townscape as well as the “organic” approach espoused by Frank Lloyd Wright in The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), and it was also used by Archigram in its 1963 Living City exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. 84. Peter Laurence noted that in the 1950s, at Architectural Forum, Jacobs was “immersed in an elite intellectual community of architects and urbanists.” See Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs. 85. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 15:192 (my emphasis). 86. Hayek, 194. Bruce Caldwell noted that The Political Idea of the Rule of Law is “one of the first places in which Hayek moves beyond market phenomena to apply the idea that individual elements, by following rules, may give rise to orders. It is also the first place that the phrase (though not the concept of!) ‘spontaneous order’ appears in Hayek’s work.” Bruce Caldwell, introduction to Hayek, Market and Other Orders, 14. These ideas were fully developed in Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, esp. chap. 10. 87. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 159. 88. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 160. Polanyi was a Hungary-born chemist and philosopher who had corresponded with Hayek since the 1930s. Bruce Caldwell noted in Hayek’s The Market and Other Orders that “Polanyi used the idea of polycentric orders

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in his critique of attempts to plan science, a critique that Hayek endorsed. Polanyi also originated the notion of tacit knowledge, one that fit nicely with Hayek’s own writings about localized, dispersed knowledge” (284– 85n12). The idea of allowing people to interact with each other on their own initiative, without coercion, was an important concept for Alison and Peter Smithson, who presented this idea under the rubric of “identity” with a diagram they labeled “voluntary association/involuntary association” at the CIAM X conference (1956) in Dubrovnik. 89. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 160. 90. Hayek, 161. 91. Hayek, 159. 92. It is noteworthy that the work of Warren Weaver and Peter Medawar played important roles in the theory of design. The same year that Death and Life of Great American Cities was published, Reyner Banham, in “The History of the Immediate Future” (1961), turned to the work of the biologist Peter Medawar to chart a new direction for architecture (see chapter 6 of this volume). It was Weaver who coined the term molecular biology, yet Medawar argued that it had its origin at London’s Davy Faraday Laboratory. See John Meurig Thomas, “Peterhouse, the Royal Society and Molecular Biology,” in Notes and Records, The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 54, no. 3 (2000)): 369– 85. 93. “Economics Prize for Works in Economic Theory and Inter-Disciplinary Research” (press release), October 9, 1974, http:// www.nobelprize.org /nobel _prizes /economic-sciences/laureates/1974/press.html. 94. Mumford, “The Sky Line,” 150. 95. Jeff Riggenbach, “Jane Jacobs: Libertarian Outsider,” Mises Daily, Mises Institute, April 28, 2011, https://mises.org/library/jane-jacobs-libertarian-outsider-0. 96. Hayek, “Use of Knowledge in Society,” 519– 530, 522. 97. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 418. 98. Paul Goldberger, “Uncommon Sense,” American Scholar (September 1, 2006). 99. Michael W. Clune, American Literature and the Free Market, 1945– 2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 59. 100. Clune, 59. 101. Clune, 60. See also Michael W. Clune, “What Was Neoliberalism?” review of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, Los Angeles Review of Books (February 26, 2013): https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-was -neoliberalism/. Clune asserted: “We may very well conclude not that free market ideology has coopted the left, but that resistance to actually existing capitalism now takes a form inassimilable to the political positions of the early postwar period. Perhaps Jane Jacobs is different from Milton Friedman after all. Perhaps there are two visions of the free market, left and right, and we will one day look back on the postwar period as the emergence of a new form of ideological struggle. For now, the scale of the problem is visible only in the distortions it causes in so sober a history as this one.” 102. Compare Jacobs’s ideas about commerce and regulation with those espoused in the manifesto by Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, titled “NonPlan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society, no. 338 (March 20, 1969). 103. See William F. Aspray, “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 7, no. 2 (1985): 117– 40, https://doi.org/10.1109 /MAHC.1985.10018. 104. Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” American Scientist, 36 (1948): 536– 44. In Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), Christopher Alexander offered a summary of the literature on complexity.

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105. Friedrich A. Hayek, “Degrees of Explanation,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 6, no. 23 (November 1955): 209– 225. 106. Bruce Caldwell, introduction to Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, 14. 107. Caldwell, 15. 108. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, 15. 109. Caldwell, introduction to Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, 14. 110. Caldwell. See especially chapter 10 in Constitution of Liberty and Hayek’s threevolume Law, Legislation and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 306. 111. Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities,” 56. 112. Jane Jacobs, “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment: A Progress Report,” Architectural Forum 103 (July 1955): 118. This article was not bylined and is formerly unattributed. Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities,” 60n37. 113. Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities,” 56. 114. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 419. 115. Jacobs, 419. 116. Jacobs, 433. 117. Jacobs, 346. 118. Mumford, “The Sky Line,” 174. 119. Mumford, 177. 120. Mumford, 177 (my emphasis). 121. Compare this with Reyner Banham’s notion of the marketing of consumer goods as in tune with the “desires of the consumer.” He believed that the notion of consumer feedback in the design process expressed a truly democratic design method. See the introduction to this volume (“Pop or Market Aesthetics: The Fusion of Art and Commerce”) and chapter 3. 122. Mumford, “The Sky Line,” 178. See chapter 5. See also Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). 123. Mumford, “The Sky Line,” 164. 124. See the chapter “The Kind of Problem a City Is” in Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities. 125. Jacobs, 433. 126. Jacobs, 435. 127. Jacobs, 436. 128. Jacobs, 439. 129. The concept of homeostasis was first used extensively by W. B. Cannon in The Wisdom of the Body (London: n.p., 1932). For a precise definition, see W. Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain, 2nd ed. (New York: n.p., 1960), chap. 5. See also contributions to Marshall Yovits and Scott Cameron, eds., Self- Organizing Systems: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Conference (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). 130. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 132. 131. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 71. 132. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 132. 133. Jacobs, 441. 134. C. Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2009), 9. 135. Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (New York: Home

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University Library, 1911), 61, cited in Friedrich A. Hayek, “‘Conscious’ Direction and the Growth of Reason,” in The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 154. 136. Hayek, “Use of Knowledge in Society.” 137. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science, 167. 138. Hayek, 169. 139. Hayek, 170. 140. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 434. 141. Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science, 226. 142. Hayek, 153. 143. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, 297. 144. Hayek, 298. 145. See Henry Quastler, ed., Homeostatic Mechanisms: Report of Symposium Held June 12 to 14, 1957 (Upton, NY: Biology Dept., Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1958). Contributions included Heinz von Foerster, “Basic Concepts of Homeostasis,” and Warren McCulloch, “The Stability of Biological Systems.” 146. In 1958 the Rockefeller Foundation issued a grant to Jacobs: “New School for Social Research, New York: A Study of the Relation of Function to Design in Large Cities, by Mrs. Jane Jacobs; $10,000,” Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report, 1958 (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1958), 291. 147. See Heinz von Foerster and George W. Zopf Jr., eds., Principles of Self- Organization: Transactions of the University of Illinois Symposium on Self- Organization, Robert Allerton Park, 8 and 9 June, 1961 (New York: Symposium Publications, Pergamon Press, 1962). Pask developed a relationship with architects through the work of Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace project of the 1960s. See Stanley Matthew, From Agit Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog, 2007). 148. Philip Mirowski, “Machine Dreams: Economic Agents as Cyborgs,” in New Economics and Its History, ed. John B. Davis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 13– 40, 16. For a history of the emerging field of cybernetics and complexity science involving Warren Weaver, Herbert Simon, Claude Shannon, Hayek, and others, including the Santa Fe Institute (founded in 1984) and its relationship to economics, see Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 149. Weaver’s coauthor, Claude Shannon, was an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories. 150. Mirowski, “Machine Dreams,” 17. 151. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, 309. Hayek’s breakthrough in studying complex systems occurred in his The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) in which he places economics in the emerging field of complexity science. In developing a new theory of perception, Gombrich credits The Sensory Order for its insights into feedback and the problem related to the “living organism that never ceases probing and testing its environment.” Gombrich’s notion of a feedback loop, as a method of analysis, was further influenced by Popper’s philosophy of science. See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 28– 29. 152. Friedrich A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 22. 153. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, 261. Hayek credited Weaver for this new understanding of complexity. 326 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 6 0 – 1 6 2

154. See John N. Gray, “F. A. Hayek and the Rebirth of Classical Liberalism” (1982), Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/LtrLbrty/gryHRC2 .html. 155. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, 24. 156. The title of Richard L. Meier’s A Communications Theory of Urban Growth (Cambridge, MA: Published for the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University by MIT Press, 1962) appears to have been inspired by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949). 157. Simon’s research ranged across cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science, unified by studies of decision making. Compare Weaver’s work on decision making with Royston Landau’s interest in the subject as it was presented via the work of Karl Popper at the Symposium on Decision-Making at the Architectural Association in London in 1963 (see chapter 6 of this volume). 158. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 88. 159. Venturi, 14. 160. Hayek, The Market and Other Orders, 298. 161. See Stephen Dilley, ed., Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013). 162. Hayek, Market and Other Orders, 26. 163. Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” in Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report, 1958, 7– 15, 14. This summary report was a modified form of a contribution to The Scientists Speak (New York: Boni and Gear, 1947) and was also published in 1948 in American Scientist. Weaver’s description of biological phenomena being “interrelated into an organic whole” (14) is remarkably similar to Hastings’s understanding of the complexity of the built environment, which, as we have seen, compelled him to describe London as an organism. “English Planning Tradition and the City,” 167. 164. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 444. 165. Edgar Anderson, “The City Is a Garden,” Landscape 7, no. 2 (Winter 1957– 1958): 3– 5. 166. Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 455. 167. Ian Nairn edited “Outrage,” a special issue of the Architectural Review (June 1955) that was later released as Outrage (London: Architectural Press,1955) and followed by “Counter-Attack against Subtopia,” also a special issue of the Architectural Review (December 1956) and released as Counter-Attack against Subtopia (London: Architectural Press, 1957). The dismissive view of unplanned suburban sprawl espoused in these publications was influential on Jacobs and is referenced in Death and Life of Great American Cities. 168. Jacobs, 445. 169. Banham et al., “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society, March 20, 1969, 443 (my emphasis). The term vitality would play a key role in the urban debates of the 1960s (see chapters 5 and 6). 170. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (New York: Random House, 1984), 224. Compare this view with that of Hayek. The belief in the self-correcting capacity of the market, increasingly referred to as a myth, has been criticized by numerous scholars and is addressed in detail in the conclusion of this volume. 171. Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 95. 327 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 6 2 – 1 6 5

172. Friedrich. A. Hayek, foreword to Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), xix. 173. Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, and Sixteen Other Essays and Addresses (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1980), 42. 174. Mises, 43 (my emphasis). The issue of who is to do the planning was also central to Hayek, who in The Road to Serfdom, asserted “It is whether it shall be we who decide what is more, and what is less, important for us, or whether this is to be decided by the planner” (126). In fact, he devoted a chapter to the question of who and whom, referring to Lenin and the Russian system: “Who plans whom, who directs and dominates whom, who assigns to other people their station in life, and who is to have his due allotted by others?” (139). Hayek pointed out the irony “to find as prominent an old communist as Max Eastman” rediscovering the truth that “other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market” (136). Hayek was referring to Max Eastman, “Socialism Doesn’t Jibe with Human Nature,” Reader’s Digest (June 1941): 47. Hayek asked who is to do the planning in the Reader’s Digest abridged “The Road to Serfdom” (1945) and in “The Uses of Knowledge in Society” (1945). See also chapter 1 of this volume. 175. Mises, Planning for Freedom, 259. Murray N. Rothbard was an American economist of the Austrian school and editor of Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought. Rothbard coined the term anarcho-capitalism in the 1950s and developed its philosophy that advocates the elimination of centralized states in support of self-ownership, private property, and free markets (see chapter 6 of this book). 176. Henry Hazlitt, an American journalist who wrote about business and economics, was the principal editorial writer on finance and economics for the New York Times before helping create the Foundation for Economic Education, the first think tank for free-market ideas. He was also an original member of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society as well as an editor of the early free-market publication Freeman, whose contributors included Hayek, Mises, and Wilhelm Röpke. He introduced Ayn Rand to Mises. Hazlitt is typically credited with popularizing the Austrian school of economics in the United States. 177. Max Eastman and the editors of Reader’s Digest abridged Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” (see chapter 1 of this book). Benjamin M. Anderson Jr., an American economist of the Austrian school, introduced Hazlitt to the work of Mises. Anderson was the author of Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory Critical and Constructive (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911); The Value of Money (New York: Macmillan, 1917), Effects of the War on Money, Credit and Banking in France and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1919); and, as economist of the Chase National Bank of the City of New York, “Cheap Money, Gold, and Federal Reserve Bank Policy,” Chase Economic Bulletin 4, no. 3 (August 4, 1924), and Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914– 1946 (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1949). Mises and Anderson greatly admired each other’s work. For a review of Anderson’s relationship with the Austrian school, see Donald J. Boudreaux, “An Interview with Henry Hazlitt,” Austrian Economics Newsletter 5, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 1– 4, 6. Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1981, Ronald Reagan acknowledged the “intellectual leaders” Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and others, who “shaped so much of our thoughts.” See Reagan, “Remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference Dinner,” Reagan Library, March 20, 1981, https://www.reaganlibrary .gov/research/speeches/32081b. 178. See chapter 6 of this volume. See Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: PublicAffairs,

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2007). According to Peter Marshall, “In its moderate form, right libertarianism embraces laissez-faire liberals like Robert Nozick who call for a minimal State, and in its extreme form, anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman who entirely repudiate the role of the State and look to the market as a means of ensuring social order.” Peter H. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 565. 179. David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 4. 180. Mises, Planning for Freedom, 47. 181. Following Jacobs’s death on April 25, 2006, the libertarian author Jeff Riggenbach reflected on the history of libertarian literature and noted that too few had properly acknowledged her contribution. The exceptions included Pierre Desrochers, “The Death and Life of a Reluctant Urban Icon,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 21, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 115– 36, a review of Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006); and Thomas Schmidt, “Ludwig von Mises, Meet Your Leibniz,” LewRockwell.com (blog), May 4, 2010. Jeff Riggenbach, “Jane Jacobs: Libertarian Outsider,” Mises Daily, April 28, 2011, https://mises.org/library/jane-jacobs-libertarian-outsider-0. Likewise, Madsen Pirie, president of the UK Adam Smith Institute (a UK neoliberal think tank), noted that Jacob’s vision “is very much in line with the skepticism of planners and planning that libertarians and neoliberals exhibit. Such communities were certainly the product of human action, but not of human design.” Madsen Pirie, “Jane Jacobs and How Cities Work,” April 25, 2019, https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/jane-jacobs -and-how-cities-work. Peter Laurence noted that Jacobs “rejected the libertarian ideology” and argued, keenly, that “Jacobs was less dogmatic.” Hayek and Popper were less dogmatic than Mises. Peter L. Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 295. 182. Murray Rothbard, editor of Libertarian Forum, praised The Economy of Cities and promoted it as “Recommended Reading” in the February 15, 1970, edition. Jacobs’s oeuvre is replete with the notion of urbanism as free-market economics, thriving independently of government and planning: “Cities are open ended types of economies”; they are “organisms known as economies,” guided by “automatic self-correction.” Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (New York: Random House, 1984), 224, 7, 224. She also wrote: “I used to think of government . . . as the major force at work in the civilizing process. Now I’m inclined to think of government as being essentially barbaric . . . but don’t get me wrong. We need it. So now I see government as being incapable, on its own, of civilizing even itself.” Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), 214. And: “Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market labors . . . automatically and tirelessly where it isn’t forestalled.” Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 113. The more one explores the work, the more difficult it becomes to know where to end the comparison with the Austrian school, and why. 183. For an early critique of planning, as noted in the introduction, see Mises’s 1920 seminal essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” translated and published in Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibility of Socialism, ed. F. A Hayek (London: G. Routledge, 1935), and Planning for Freedom. 184. Robert Goodman, After the Planners (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 108, 103. 185. See Thomas J. Campanella, “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” in Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, ed. Max Page and Timothy Mennel (Chicago:

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American Planning Association, 2011). In The Nature of Economies (New York: Modern Library, 2000), at a time when others were beginning to recognize the limits of the nonplanning paradigm, Jacobs continued to argue that markets create “self-organized order out of volatile, uncoordinated, confusing, conglomerations of countless different enterprises and individuals . . . and their own interests” (106). 186. Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,” Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 3 (February 2006): 56. 187. According to Gert-Jan Hospers, “She did not like ideologies at all.” Gert-Jan Hospers, “Jane Jacobs in Dutch Cities and Towns: Metropolitan Romance in Provincial Reality,” in Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, ed. Max Page and Timothy Mennel (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2011), 90.

c h AP t er f i ve 1. The debates following World War II were, in many ways, a restaging of similar issues concerning the haphazard physical growth of American cities that stimulated demands in the late nineteenth century for systematic physical reorganization and social reform that helped shape the City Beautiful movement and modern planning. 2. John L. Hancock, “Planners in the Changing American City, 1900– 1940,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 33 (September 1967): 291. 3. Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 47– 48. These views were embraced by wealthy industrialists and made popular by Herbert Spencer (1820– 1903), the prominent classical liberal political theorist whose well-known expression “survival of the fittest” was used to naturalize inequality. 4. See Lewis Mumford’s The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1944) and The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938). Mumford acknowledged his gratitude to the “stimulus” of Patrick Geddes. Mumford was particularly taken by Geddes’s essays expressing an organic view of society. See also Frank G. Novak Jr., ed., Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: The Correspondence (London: Routledge, 1995). 5. Citations are taken from the captions to illustrations titled “Dream and Nightmare” and “Drama of Disintegration,” in The Condition of Man, following p. 374. 6. Novak, Jr., ed. Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes. 7. The editors of this issue were J. M. Richards, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ian McCallum, Osbert Lancaster, and Hubert de Cronin Hastings. Assistant editor Gordon Cullen wrote the seminal book Townscape (London: Architectural Press, 1961); assistant editor Marcus Whiffen wrote the classic American Architecture since 1780: Guide to the Styles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). 8. Recent research has noted the significant role of late nineteenth-century American liberalism in the work of Henry James. See Emily Coit, “Henry James’s Dramas of Cultivation: Liberalism and Democracy in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima,” Henry James Review 36, no. 2 (2015): 177– 98. See Om Prakash Grewal, Henry James and the Ideology of Culture: A Critical Study of The Bostonians, the Princess Casamassima and the Tragic Muse (Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1990), which defines James’s sensibility as conservative liberalism. 9. Henry James, The American Scene (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907), 109. 10. “Man Made America: A Special Number of the Architectural Review for December 1950,” Architectural Review (December 1950): 361. The laissez-faire urban landscape, particularly popular commercial centers of attraction, routinely inspired scorn from

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modern critics. By the late 1950s, a new generation of critics challenged this view. As noted in the introduction of this volume, in 1959 Lawrence Alloway argued that “it was absurd to print a photograph of Piccadilly Circus and caption it ‘Architectural Squalor’ as Ernő Goldfinger and E. J. Carter did” in County of London Plan (London: Penguin Books, 1945). See Lawrence Alloway, “City Notes,” Architectural Design (January 1959): 34. 11. “Man Made America,” 341. The term form-will was used repeatedly by the editors in the introduction and by Christopher Tunnard, in “Scene”: “Perhaps Americans can develop what Dudok calls ‘form-will,’ perhaps not” (350). Willem Dudok (1884– 1974) was a Dutch architect known for design— especially Hilversum Town Hall (1931)— not theory. In fact, the architectural historian Hans Ibelings noted that Dudok “produced no architectural theory.” The term may be related to Alois Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen, or “will-to-art.” For Ernst Gombrich, “The ‘will-to-form,’ the Kunstwollen, becomes a ghost in the machine, driving the wheels of artistic developments according to ‘inexorable laws’” (19). Informed by Popper’s critique of historicism, Gombrich explained, “I have discussed elsewhere why this reliance of art history on mythological explanations seems so dangerous to me” (20). See Hans Ibelings, review of Willem Marinus Dudok Architect-Stedebouwkundige, 1884-1974, by Herman van Bergeijk, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56 (1997): 521– 22, 521; E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 19, 20. 12. Introduction to “Man Made America,” 343. 13. Christopher Tunnard was the author of The City of Man (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), American Skyline (with Henry Hope Reed; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), and coauthor with Boris Pushkarev of Man-Made America: Chaos or Control: An Inquiry into Selected Problems of Design in the Urbanized Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), which won the National Book Award in 1964. 14. See Christopher Tunnard, “Scene,” in “Man Made America,” 345. 15. Henry James, quoted in Tunnard, “Scene,” 345. 16. Tunnard, 347. 17. Tunnard, 359. 18. Douglas Haskell, “A Reply to Man Made America: A Special Number of the Architectural Review,” Architectural Forum 94 (April 1951): 158– 59 (my emphasis). 19. See Douglas Haskell, “Architecture and Popular Taste,” Architectural Forum 109 (August 1958): 105– 9. 20. Ian Douglas Nairn became assistant editor of production at the Architectural Review in July 1954, when he was only twenty-four years old. See Ian Nairn, Britain’s Changing Towns (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1967); Steve Parnell, “AR’s and AD’s Post-War Editorial Policies: The Making of Modern Architecture in Britain,” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 5; Gillian Darley and David McKie, Ian Nairn: Words in Place (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves Publications, 2013). 21. Reflecting on the near “instant fame” that Nairn achieved even beyond architecture circles, Gillian Darley and David McKie noted that, “within days of publication, the Duke of Edinburgh had mentioned the word Subtopia in a speech and the BBC showed growing interest in the topic, as did several members of the House of Commons.” Gillian Darley and David McKie, Ian Nairn: Words in Place (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves Publications, 2013). 22. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). 23. For an account of The Organization Man and its relationship to architecture in the

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postwar period, see Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 24. Editors of Fortune, The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (New York: Doubleday, 1958). Several of the book’s essays had previously appeared in the magazine’s pages. The book garnered prominent reviews in publications such as the New York Times (October 5, 1958) and the Greenwich Village socialist journal the Monthly Review (April 1959): 476– 86. 25. Editors of Fortune, Exploding Metropolis, viii. 26. Editors of Fortune, ix. 27. Editors of Fortune, x. 28. Editors of Fortune, x. 29. This distinction was important in the context of the late 1960s, when the counterculture’s attack was directed at modern design. It was during this period that the “unplanned” metropolis, with all its suburban developments and non-design roadside environments, was held up as exemplary by architects and critics such as Venturi, Scott Brown, Moore, and Banham. See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (especially pt. 1) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Penguin Books, 1971); Charles Moore, “Plug It in Ramses, and See If It Lights Up, Because We Aren’t Going to Keep It Unless It Works,” Perspecta 11 (1967). 30. See Editors of Fortune, Exploding Metropolis; Gordon Cullen and Ian Nairn, “Outrage,” Architectural Review (June 1955): 363– 454; “Counter-Attack,” Architectural Review (June 1957): 404– 7, 451– 52. 31. New York Times, September 4, 1958. 32. See the review by S. D. Clark, in American Sociological Review 33, no. 3 (June 1968): 477– 78. 33. See Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961). 34. See Reminiscences of Jean Gottmann: Oral History, 1987 (interviewed by David Hammack) in the Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University. Gottmann’s previous work on American cities included L’Amerique (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1949); “La ville américaine,” Geographia 48 (1955): 9– 14; “Megalopolis, or the Urbanization of the Northeastern Seaboard,” EG 33, no. 3 (1957): 189– 200; “Megalopolis: The Super- City” (interview), Challenge 5: 54– 59. On Gottmann’s extensive publications, see Patrick H. Armstrong and Geoffrey Martin, eds., Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 25 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). 35. See Reminiscences of Jean Gottmann. 36. Gottmann, Megalopolis, 7. 37. See Henry-Russell Hitchcock, The Rise to World Prominence of American Architecture, Vol. 1, Voice of America Forum Lectures (Washington, DC: US Information Agency, 1961). 38. Gottmann, Megalopolis, 15. 39. Gottmann, 56. 40. Boris Sergeevich Pushkarev was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929 to Russian parents. He emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s. In 1960 he was hired as an instructor at the Yale School of Architecture. It was during his time at Yale that he collaborated with his boss Christopher Tunnard on Man-Made America. While he wrote half of the book, his most important contribution was the chapter “The Paved Ribbon: The

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Esthetic of Freeway Design.” In 1961 he began working in New York for the Regional Plan Association and remained there for decades. He is the author of Urban Space for Pedestrians: A Report of the Regional Plan Association (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975), Public Transportation and Land Use Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), and Urban Rail in America: An Exploration of Criteria for Fixed- Guideway Transit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 41. Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 3. 42. Tunnard and Pushkarev, 443. 43. Tunnard and Pushkarev, 443. 44. Tunnard and Pushkarev, 444. 45. Tunnard and Pushkarev, x. 46. Tunnard and Pushkarev, 448. 47. The influence of townscape was extensive. See Gordon Cullen, Townscape (New York: Reinhold, 1961); Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne, Australia: F. W. Cheshire, 1960); Ivor de Wolfe [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], The Italian Townscape (London: Architectural Press, 1963), Donald Gazzard, ed., Australian Outrage: The Decay of a Visual Environment (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1966); Thomas Sharp, Town and Townscape (London: Murray, 1968); Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape (London: Architectural Press, 1971), translated into several languages and reprinted over a dozen times, making it one of the most popular books on design theory in the twentieth century. 48. Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Planning and the Picturesque, ed. Mathew Aitchison (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 15. 49. Pevsner, 15. 50. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975), 51. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing, 2012), 267, 8. 52. Boyd, 7. See also Donald Gazzard, ed., Australian Outrage: The Decay of a Visual Environment (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1966). 53. Compare this with Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), in which he inverted Peter Blake’s argument in God’s Own Junkyard and claimed support for the urban conditions of many images in the book. Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston). 54. Blake, God’s Own Junkyard, 7. 55. Blake, 8. 56. Blake, 12. 57. Blake, 8. Compare to Reyner Banham’s “Unrecognized American Architecture: The Missing Motel,” Landscape 15, no. 2 (1965– 1966): 4– 6. 58. Reyner Banham, “Mediated Environments or: You Can’t Build That Here,” in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, ed. Christopher W. E. Bigsby (London: Elek, 1975), 78. Banham argued that “with only rare exceptions, the influence of US architecture on European architecture through normal channels of architectural influence, has been virtually non-existent— but that the influence of certain American scenes or environments, as transmitted through the media of the popular arts, has been extensive, little understood and usually misapplied” (78). It is in this context that he discussed Las Vegas as a mediated environment in various publications. 59. Reyner Banham, “Kandy Kulture Kikerone,” New Society (August 19, 1965): 25. 60. Banham, “Mediated Environments,” 79.

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61. Banham, “Kandy Kulture Kikerone” (my emphasis). 62. Banham, “Unrecognized American Architecture,” 4. As we have seen in chapter 4, within these debates Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell played a pivotal role not only in his defense of “Man Made America” but also in several key articles affirming the validity of popular environments and the unplanned city. See [Douglas Haskell], “Googie Architecture,” House and Home 1 (February 1952): 86– 88; Douglas Haskell, “Architecture and Popular Taste,” Architectural Forum 109 (August 1958): 104– 9; Douglas Haskell, “Jazz in Architecture: It Makes More Fun and Better Sense,” Architectural Forum 113, no. 3 (September 1960): 110– 15. See also Morris Lapidus, “The Architecture of Emotion” JAIA, 36 (November 1961): 55– 58. 63. See Alison Smithson, ed., Team 10 Primer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 67. 64. Dominique Berninger, a France-born American architect, served as president of Architectural Research Group throughout its short existence from 1932 to 1935. Berninger was the designer of a number of notable projects including the French Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair of 1939. 65. See Peter Shedd Reed, “Toward Form: Louis I. Kahn’s Urban Designs for Philadelphia, 1939– 1962” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1989). Reed points out that in 1962 Kahn stated that while he was a member of the Architectural Research Group he “began to really study Le Corbusier.” Referring to Kahn, Vincent Scully wrote: “Le Corbusier’s books were especially important to him, and later he was to recall that experience. ‘I came to live in a beautiful city called Le Corbusier.’” Vincent Scully Jr., Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Braziller, 1962), 15. In 1940 Kahn began working with Oscar Stonorov and George Howe on housing projects in Pennsylvania. Oscar Stonorov, a German modernist architect and historian, emigrated to the United States in 1929. A formal architectural office partnership between Stonorov and Louis Kahn began in February 1942 and ended in March 1947. Stonorov researched and coedited with Willy Boesiger Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret: Oeuvre complète 1910– 1929 (1929; Zurich: Dr. H. Girsberger & Cie., 1930). This was the first of the definitive eight-volume set of the complete works of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, completed in 1969. Kahn would have had access to volumes 1 and 4. See Willy Boesiger, ed., Le Corbusier: Complete Works (Oeuvre complète) in Eight Volumes, 11th ed. (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser Verlag, 1995). 66. Le Corbusier, “A Man = A Dwelling; Dwelling = A City,” in Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 142. 67. Le Corbusier, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization (New York: Orion, 1967), 79, 80. 68. Le Corbusier, The Four Routes (London: Dennis Dobson Publishers, 1947), 86– 87. As a concept, the relationship between space and water informed the work of Kahn, Colin Rowe, and Charles Moore. 69. Louis Kahn, “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia,” Perspecta 2 (1953): 10– 27. The extract here reproduces the original text’s layout. 70. Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 121. 71. Kahn, “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia.” 72. Unnamed [Jane Jacobs and Walter McQuade], “Louis Kahn and the Living City,” Architectural Forum (March 1958), 115. 73. Unnamed [Jacobs and McQuade], 116. 74. Kahn, my emphasis. It is noteworthy that Kahn uses biological analogies of growth to describe the nature of a place and its activities. 75. Unnamed [Jacobs and McQuade], “Louis Kahn and the Living City,” 115. 76. Robert A. M. Stern, New Directions in American Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 13. 334 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 8 5 – 1 8 8

77. Kahn’s approach shared certain fundamental ideas with townscape insofar as that doctrine attempted to teach planners to “love, or try to love” the spontaneous unplanned aspects of the city that modern planners typically dismissed. Ivor de Wolfe [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy Founded on the True Rock of Sir Uvedale Price,” Architectural Review (December 1949): 361. 78. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 361. 79. Louis Kahn, “Form and Design,” from the Voice of America Forum Lectures, reprinted in Vincent Scully Jr, Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Braziller, 1962), 121. 80. Louis Kahn, “The Nature of Nature,” Journal of Architectural Education 16 (Autumn 1961): 95– 97. This idea undoubtedly informed Jacobs’s concept of “cross-use” (see chapter 4 of this volume). 81. See Alison Smithson, ed., Team 10 Primer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). 82. In 1957 Moore received a PhD in architecture from Princeton University, where he studied with Jean Labatut, a French architect trained at the École des Beaux-Arts; the Milanese architect Enrico Peressutti; and Louis Kahn. On the topic of water and architecture, see Charles Moore, “The Architecture of Water,” Canadian Architect 4, no. 11 (November 1959): 40– 45; Charles Moore, Water and Architecture (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994). 83. Kevin Keim, ed., You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 19. Charles Moore’s Water and Architecture (New York: Abrams, 1994) was based on his dissertation. 84. Charles W. Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” Perspecta 10 (1965), 58. 85. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (London: G. Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1932), 176. 86. Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” 58. 87. Moore, 58. 88. Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses, 132. 89. Moore, “Plug It In, Rameses,” 38. 90. Moore, “You Have to Pay for Public Life,” 59. This same year, Ed Ruscha selfpublished Some Los Angeles Apartments (Los Angeles: E. Ruscha, 1965), which also paid close attention to the dispersed postwar urban conditions and the new architecture typologies emerging in Los Angeles. 91. The analogy of space as water was evident in the work of Colin Rowe, who studied at Yale in 1951– 1952, when Kahn was there. In “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal” (written in 1955– 1956), Rowe and Robert Slutzky wrote: “We look in vain for ‘loosening up’ in the Palace of the League of Nations. There is no evidence there of any desire to obliterate sharp distinction. Le Corbusier’s planes are like knives for the apportionate slicing of space.” They noted: “If we could attribute to space the quality of water, then his building is like a dam by means of which space is contained, embanked, tunneled, sluiced, and finally spilled into the informal gardens alongside the lake. While by contrast, the Bauhaus, insulated in a sea of amorphic outline, is like a reef gently lapped by a placid tide” (my emphasis). Cited in Sebastien Marot, “Extrapolating Transparency,” in L’architettura come testo e la figura di Colin Rowe, ed. Mauro Marzo (Venice: IUAV-Marsilio, 2010), 124. 92. Moore, “You Have to Pay for Public Life,” 59. 93. Ian Nairn, The American Landscape: A Critical View (New York: Random House, 1965), 28. 94. See Eve Blau, Architecture or Revolution: Charles Moore and Yale in the Late 1960s (New Haven, CT: Yale School of Architecture, 2001). 95. Blau. 335 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 1 8 8 – 1 9 3

96. Moore, “Plug It In, Rameses,” 40 (my emphasis). 97. Moore, 43. 98. Charles Moore, “Learning from Adam’s House,” Architectural Record 154, no. 2 (August 1973): 43. 99. Moore, 43. Compare this liberal endorsement of tolerance of differences by Moore with that of Hastings in his townscape manifesto of 1949 (see chapters 4 and 6 of this volume). 100. Charles Moore, “Architecture and Fairy Tales,” previously unpublished lecture delivered as the John William Lawrence Memorial Lecture, Tulane University, 1975, published in Keim, You Have to Pay for the Public Life, 239– 78, 242. 101. Moore, “Plug It In, Rameses,” 42; Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 361. 102. Venturi furthered his studies as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome from 1954 to 1956. Moore’s MFA thesis was an urban design proposal for Monterey, California, exploring the compositional unification of historical adobe structures. 103. See David B. Brownlee, “Form and Content,” in Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates: Architecture, Urbanism, Design, ed. David B. Brownlee et al. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), 3– 90. 104. Jean Labatut was director of graduate studies in architecture at Princeton University from 1928 to 1967. He founded the Bureau of Urban Research, consulting on campus development of several other educational institutions and designing architectural projects around the world. See Keim, You Have to Pay for the Public Life, xii. 105. Donald Drew Egbert (1902– 1973), an American architectural historian and medievalist, joined Princeton as an instructor in 1929, was promoted to associate professor in 1944, and was appointed Butler Professor of the History of Architecture in 1968. He was the author of several books, including Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons, eds., Socialism and American Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), Socialism and American Art in the Light of European Utopianism, Marxism, and Anarchism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe (New York: Knopf, 1970), and The Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture, ed. David Van Zanten (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 106. Robert Venturi, “Donald Drew Egbert— A Tribute,” in Donald Drew Egbert, The Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture, ed. David Van Zanten (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), xiii. 107. Venturi, xiv. Compare this with Denise Scott Brown’s notion of the Beaux-Arts in “Forum: The Beaux-Arts Exhibition,” edited by William Ellis, commentaries presented at the “Beaux-Arts Exhibition” forum held at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies on January 22, 1976, on the occasion of the exhibition The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 29, 1975– January 4, 1976. This was published in K. Michael Hays, ed., Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture, 1973– 1984 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 677– 78. 108. Venturi, “Donald Drew Egbert” xiv. 109. Venturi, xiv. 110. Stonorov and Boesiger, Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret. 111. Louis I. Kahn, “Talk at the Conclusion of the Otterlo Congress” (1959), in Louis Kahn: Essential Texts, ed. Robert Twombly (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 40. See also Venturi’s comments (submitted in writing) on the Beaux-Arts exhibition in Hays, Oppositions Reader, 683. 112. These ideas appear to be related to D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth

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and Form (1917) and may help explain why many young architects, including many associated with Team 10, were so deeply impressed with Kahn’s philosophy of architecture. 113. Kahn, “Talk at the Conclusion of the Otterlo Congress,” 40. 114. Kahn, 40. 115. Denise Scott Brown, “Between Three Stools: A Personal View of Urban Design Pedagogy,” in Urban Concepts (London: Academy; New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 15. 116. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 117. Vincent Scully, introduction to Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 9. 118. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 16. 119. Stern, New Directions in American Architecture, 50. 120. Paul Rudolph, “Paul Rudolph: For Perspecta,” Perspecta 7 (1961): 51. 121. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 17. 122. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 104. 123. The Editor [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscape,” Architectural Review (January 1944): 6. 124. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 104. 125. Venturi, 104. 126. See Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Venturi argued that “Louis Kahn designed the Salk Center . . . as an eloquent composition that is spatially and symbolically incomplete, with its two richly rhythmical buildings . . . [which] define a powerful axis that is open at each end and that constitutes thereby a significant gesture within an American landscape. The composition of this common space . . . is perceptually, physically, poignantly American as it frames the sea and the land where the old western frontier ends and the new eastern frontier begins” (82). 127. While at UCLA in the mid-1960s Scott Brown worked on the book manuscript “Determinants of Urban Form.” Denise Scott Brown, “Between Three Stools: A Personal View of Urban Design Pedagogy,” in Andreas Papadakis, ed., “Urban Concepts: Architectural Design Profile 83,” special issue, Architecture Design 60, nos. 1– 2 (1990): 18. 128. Denise Scott Brown, “The Art in Waste” (lecture for the Distorsiones Urbanas, or Urban Distortions) course, Basurama06, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, May 4, 2006), https:// www.basurama.org /b06_distorsiones _urbanas _scott _brown _e.htm (my emphasis). Compare this analysis with that of Rudofsky in Architecture without Architects; he turned to vernacular environments to demonstrate the “close relationship formed between people and their environment.” Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964). 129. Theo Crosby, Alison Smithson, and Peter Smithson, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Design (January 1955): 1. 130. Scott Brown, “Art in Waste.” 131. Denise Scott Brown, “Towards an Active Socioplastics,” in Having Words (London: Architectural Association, 2009), 25. The essay was originally written in 2007. It was subsequently published in Democracy, Inequality, and Political Participation in American Life, ed. Merlin Chowkwanyun and Randa Serhan (Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2011). 132. Scott Brown, “Art in Waste” (my emphasis). The Smithsons’ approach to studying the relationship between people and their environment included not only British working-class neighborhoods but also that of various indigenous peoples, including

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the Dyak of Borneo and their “long houses.” See Mark Crinson, “From the Rainforest to the Streets,” in Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past— Rebellions for the Future, ed. Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion Von Osten (London: Black Dog, 2010). Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, in Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories, 1952– 1960, and Their Application in a Building Project, 1963– 1970 (London: Faber, 1970), bring together an extraordinary spectrum of modern and premodern phenomena to study the feedback relationship between people and their environment. 133. Scott Brown, “Towards an Active Socioplastics,” 25. Compare this is and ought distinction with the approach put forth by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and the authors of “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom.” Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society, no. 338 (March 20, 1969). See Paul Barker, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” in NonPlan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, ed. Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000), 2 and chap. 6. 134. Scott Brown, “Towards an Active Socioplastics,” 27. See also Scott Brown, “Art in Waste.” 135. Denise Scott Brown, in an interview with Stephanie Salomon and Steve Kroeter, “Still Learning from Denise Scott Brown, 45 Years of Learning from Las Vegas,” Designers & Books (blog), January 7, 2014. 136. Scott Brown, “Between Three Stools,” in Urban Concepts, 9. 137. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). The authors of the research had played an integral part in the building of the welfare state in Britain between 1945 and 1951. Judith Henderson (née Judith Stephen) was the first wife of the artist and photographer Nigel Henderson. 138. Denise Scott Brown, “The Rise and Fall of Community Architecture,” in Andreas Papadakis, ed., “Urban Concepts: Architectural Design Profile 83,” special issue, Architecture Design 60, nos. 1– 2 (1990): 32. 139. In 1947, Le Corbusier, André Wogenscky, Vladimir Bodiansky, and Marcel Py founded ATBAT (Atelier des Bâtisseurs) to produce the design and constructions for the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France. In 1949, ATBAT-Afrique, a branch based in Casablanca and directed by Georges Candillis, Shadrach Woods, and Henry Pilot, established a method of studying bidonvilles, or informal settlements, to understand the “ordinary” ways their occupants lived, in order to design housing that could respond to their needs. See Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928– 1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion Von Osten, eds., Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future (London: Black Dog, 2010). 140. Scott Brown, “Rise and Fall of Community Architecture,” 32. 141. See Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler, eds., Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (Oxford, UK: Architectural Press, 2000). 142. Excerpt taken from the caption accompanying a photograph of Venturi and Scott Brown driving in Las Vegas, at http://www.vsba.com/projects/index.html. Reflecting on her first trip to Las Vegas, Scott Brown reported, “A chic new Strip hotel, The Dunes, gave me faculty rates— eight dollars a night. Reporting this in a letter to colleagues, I joked, ‘Could Las Vegas be educational?’” See Salomon and Kroeter, “Still Learning from Denise Scott Brown.” Reyner Banham’s first trip to Los Angeles was in 1965 to participate in a symposium hosted by the Urban Design Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. 143. Salomon and Kroeter, “Still Learning from Denise Scott Brown.”

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144. Robert Venturi, “A Justification for a Pop Architecture,” Arts and Architecture (April 1965): 22. 145. Gordon Cullen, Townscape (New York: Reinhold Pub., 1961), 150. 146. Cullen, 85. See Nice Time (1957), a documentary film by Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta, which won the Experimental Film prize at the film festival in Venice and gained much critical acclaim. 147. Compare the idea of urban communication in “messages” with Melvin Webber’s notion of the city as a communication system in “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm” in Explorations into Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). 148. Scott Brown, “Between Three Stools,” 16. 149. Scott Brown. 150. Scott Brown, “Towards an Active Socioplastics.” 151. Scott Brown, “Rise and Fall of Community Architecture,” 33. 152. Scott Brown, 33. 153. Vincent Scully, “America’s Architectural Nightmare: The Motorized Megalopolis,” Zodiac 17 (1967): 163, originally published in Holiday (March 1966), 94– 95, 142– 43. 154. Scully, 165. Following the “Learning from Las Vegas” studio, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi taught the studio Remedial Housing for Architects in spring 1970 at Yale; this is the so-called Learning from Levittown studio. Although Vincent Scully had once been supportive of their work, he completely dismissed their study of suburbia and, along with Robert Stern, walked out of the studio reviews. During an interview with Venturi and Scott Brown, I was informed that Herbert Gans’s research on Levittown was crucial to their study of suburbs. 155. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas,” Architectural Forum (March 1968). See chapter 3 of this volume. 156. Venturi and Scott Brown, 37. This line was also used in the opening of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). 157. The bibliography in the “Learning from Las Vegas” course description for fall 1968 includes Edward Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Royal Road Test, Some Los Angeles Apartments, and Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles. 158. David Bourdon, “Ruscha as Publisher [or All Booked Up],” ARTnews (April 1972), 34, cited in Sylvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2004), 144. 159. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 13. 160. Michael Golec, “‘Doing It Deadpan’: Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas,” in Aron Vinegar and Michael J. Golec, eds., “Instruction and Provocation, or Relearning from Las Vegas,” special issue, Visible Language 37, no. 3 (2003): 272. See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). While based on mapping contemporary postwar conditions, Lynch’s work attempted to find new strategies for design capable of both addressing the image and scale of the new city. 161. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, “On Ducks and Decoration,” Architecture Canada (October 1968): 48. In the bibliography in the 1977 edition of Learning from Las Vegas, the title of this essay was “Pop Architecture.” 162. Reyner Banham, “Mediated Environments,” in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby (London: Elek, 1975), 80.

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163. Banham, 80. 164. Banham, 80. 165. The studio was known by various titles, including “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas: A Studio Research Problem” and “Learning from Las Vegas, or the Great Proletarian Cultural Locomotive.” 166. Core tenants of this approach can be traced back to the townscape campaign promoted by the Architectural Review editors, specifically Hastings’s article (published as Ivor de Wolfe), “Townscape” (see chapter 4 in this volume). 167. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 354. 168. Venturi and Scott Brown, “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots,” 37. 169. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 354. 170. Wolfe [Hastings], 361. 171. Wolfe [Hastings], 360. 172. Wolfe [Hastings], 359. 173. Banham, “Mediated Environments,” 78. 174. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 118, 119. 175. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, 150. On the messianic role of the architect, see Norris Kelly Smith, On Art and Architecture in the Modern World: A Collection of Essays (Watkins Glen, NY: American Life Foundation; Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1971). 176. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 150. 177. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, xii. 178. Scott Brown, “Rise and Fall of Community Architecture,” 34. 179. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 14. 180. F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 163. 181. William C. Mitchell, review of F. A Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, American Political Science Review 62, no. 3 (September 1968), 968– 69. 182. Venturi and Scott Brown, “Significance for A&P Parking Lots,” 37. Compare this attitude toward commercial architecture with Reyner Banham, “Towards a Pop Architecture,” Architectural Review (July 1962). 183. Banham, “Mediated Environments,” 78. 184. Banham, 78. It is noteworthy that Banham used the term undesigned, as Hayek routinely did, as opposed to non-design, which many critics used. See, e.g., Diana Agrest, “Design versus Non-Design,” Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976). It is also worth noting that Banham contrasted Las Vegas with Manhattan, a topic that Rem Koolhaas would take up in Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 185. Banham, “Mediated Environments,” 79. The study was authored by Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society (March 20, 1969) (see also chapter 6 of this volume). 186. F. A. Hayek, “The Results of Human Action but Not of Human Design,” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 187. Ada Louise Huxtable, “The Case for Chaos,” New York Times, January 26, 1969. In March 1961 Progressive Architecture published the proceedings of a symposium titled “The State of Architecture,” in which its editors concluded it was “the period of chaoticism.” See Thomas H. Creighton, “The Sixties: A P/A Symposium on the State of Architecture,” published in Progressive Architecture in two parts, the first in March 1961 and the second in April 1961. Huxtable was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture

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and Art in America from 1950 to 1963; she would have been familiar with “the period of chaoticism” issues. 188. Huxtable, “Case for Chaos.” 189. Huxtable. 190. Huxtable.

c h AP t er s i x 1. As previously noted, for an account of Hayek’s impact on planning debates, see Nigel Taylor, Urban Planning Theory since 1945 (London: Sage, 1998); Gordon E. Cherry, Town Planning in Britain since 1900: The Rise and Fall of the Planning Ideal (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). 2. See Reyner Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945– 1965,” in Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. John Summerson (London: Allen Lane, 1968). 3. See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957; New York: Harper and Row, 1964). Popper argued, like Hayek, that “fascist” and “communist” ideologies had in common a centralized organization of totalitarian control of over economic and social life, resulting in a “closed society.” 4. Popper, 91. 5. Friedrich A. von Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1938). As Popper noted, the “observation that it is impossible to have the knowledge needed for planning ‘concentrated in a single head’ is due to Hayek.” Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957; rpt., New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 90n1. 6. Popper, Poverty of Historicism, 83. 7. Popper referenced Hayek throughout Poverty of Historicism. Concerning the use of the phrase “piecemeal engineering,” although Popper acknowledged Hayek’s disapproval, writing “it has been objected by Professor Hayek that the typical engineering job involves the centralization of all relevant knowledge in a single head” (64n1), he nonetheless persisted with the use of the term engineering in reference to social and institutional reform. 8. Popper, Poverty of Historicism, 65n1. 9. Popper. 10. Popper, 73. 11. Popper’s influence extended far beyond England. Paul Karl Feyerabend, an Austria-born philosopher of science, was a great supporter of his work and invited Popper to Berkeley in the early 1960s. See Matteo Collodel’s comments in the “HOPOS 2010” symposium summary “The Early Feyerabend: Between Wittgenstein and Popper,” Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. 12. While Popper’s influence on science and philosophy in England during the postwar period is well documented, the impact of his work on design theory is less so. Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985) makes no reference to Popper or Gombrich. Other key works— K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673– 1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008)— make

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few references to Popper and practically none to Gombrich. Reference to Friedrich A. Hayek appears in none of these histories. 13. John Summerson, Heavenly Mansions, and Other Essays on Architecture (London: Cresset Press, 1949), 218. 14. Alvar Aalto, “The Architectural Struggle” (1957), reprinted as “The RIBA Discourse: ‘The Architectural Struggle,” in Sketches: Alvar Aalto, ed. Göran Schildt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 144– 48. 15. Popper’s notes for The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism (1982) date from 1956– 1957, indicating that by 1957 his concept of indeterminism was well established, as evident in The Poverty of Historicism. On the “collapse of CIAM,” see Peter Smithson, “Planning Today,” Architectural Design (June 1957). 16. John Summerson, “The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture,” RIBA Journal (June 1957): 307– 10. Summerson, one of the foremost British architectural historians of the twentieth century, authored numerous books, including Architecture in Britain: 1530– 1830 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1953), The Classical Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963), and The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986). He served as curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum from 1945 to 1984. 17. Summerson, “Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture,” 309. László MoholyNagy was greatly influenced by the work of the Austro-Hungarian botanist Raoul Francé, a founder of the discipline of biotechnique and author of Die Pflanze als Erfinder (Stuttgart: Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde, 1920) and Die Technischen Leistungen der Pflanzen (Leipzig: Veit & Cie., 1919). See László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture; With Abstract of an Artist (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1938; rpt., Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005). Moholy observed: “The constructive application of these elements, in particular the spiral (screw), has led to solutions amazing in their relationship with earlier (baroque) aesthetic principles.” Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist (New York: George Wittenborn, 1947), 46. On Moholy-Nagy and biocentrism, see Oliver A. I. Botar, “The Roots of László Moholy-Nagy’s Biocentric Constructivism,” in Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, ed. Eduardo Kac (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 18. The space-time theory of movement is also central to the townscape doctrine, which was developed in the 1940s during a period when Giedion spent time in London. For a critique of Marxism and rationalism in architecture and design theory, see Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). In his conclusion, Giedion discussed the significance of biology and the need to establish dynamic equilibrium in the human organism. Moholy-Nagy’s conception of biology as space-time unity had a great influence on Giedion, and the men were close friends. See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). For other references to the biological in the work of Moholy-Nagy, see Peder Anker, “The Bauhaus of Nature,” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 2 (April 2005): 229– 51. 19. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960; New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978), 319. The notion of biological unity was evident in Hastings’s “Townscape” essay of 1949 (358) and, as we will see, also informed Venturi and Scott Brown’s, as well as Banham’s, understanding of the unplanned built environment. 20. László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, Bauhaus Bücher 14 (Munich: A. Langen Verlag, 1929); Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 319. 21. Reyner Banham, “The History of the Immediate Future,” RIBA Journal (May 1961):

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252– 69, 256. As a title, this phrase has become a touchstone among architectural historians in publications such as Nigel Whiteley’s Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) and Anthony Vidler’s Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 22. Peter Medawar, a Brazil-born British biologist, advanced the science of immunology and was professor of zoology at the University of Birmingham (1947– 1951) and University College London (1951– 1962). His research in biology and immunology was well known in England, as were his numerous publications, including his postscript to Ruth D’Arcy Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson: The Scholar-Naturalist, 1860– 1948 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). In addition to Growth and Form, the interest in science and biology among artists and architects in postwar England was documented in Lancelot Law White, ed., Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art (London: Lund Humphries, 1951). Laurent Stalder argued that Banham’s claim to a contemporary image for the artistic and architectural production in the mid-1950s must be understood as the expression of a major conceptual shift in architectural theory, “one that was profoundly influenced by scientific literature of the postwar period (Law Whyte, Waddington, Medawar, etc.).” See Laurent Stalder, “‘New Brutalism’, ‘Topology’ and ‘Image’: Some Remarks on the Architectural Debates in England around 1950,” Journal of Architecture 13, no. 3 (June 2008). As we saw in chapter 4, it is noteworthy that scientists played key roles in revitalizing design theory. As Jane Jacobs turned to the work of Warren Weaver, during the same period Banham turned to Medawar. 23. Banham, “The History of the Immediate Future,” 257. 24. Peter Medawar, “The Future of Man,” BBC Reith Lectures, the sixth and last lecture in a series also titled The Future of Man (1959). See Peter Medawar, The Future of Man (New York: Mentor Books, 1961), 84. 25. Popper, Poverty of Historicism, 10. 26. Medawar, Future of Man, 93. According to Medawar, Alfred J. Lotka invented the word exosomatic to refer to “instruments which, though not parts of the body, are nevertheless functionally integrated into ourselves” (92). Karl Popper used it to explain cultural phenomena: “Like tools, they are organs evolving outside our skins. They are exosomatic artifacts.” Karl Popper, “A Pluralist Approach to the Philosophy of History” in Roads to Freedom: Essays in Honor of Friedrich A. von Hayek, ed. Erich Streissler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 185. See also Peter Medawar, Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Medawar is widely considered Karl Popper’s best-known disciple in science. It should be noted that, along with other leading biologists and social scientists in Britain, Medawar subscribed to eugenics (Future of Man, 95). 27. Banham’s view of evolution and industrial products, especially the automobile, was made evident in his critique of Le Corbusier’s understanding of Darwin’s law of natural selection. See chapter 3. 28. Peter Collins, “Biological Analogy,” Architectural Review (December 1959): 306. 29. Compare this to Jane Jacobs (see chapter 4). 30. See Lawrence Alloway, “City Notes,” Architectural Design (January 1959), reprinted in Richard Kalina, ed., Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic (London: Routledge, 2006). 31. Reyner Banham, “City as Scrambled Egg,” Cambridge Opinion, no. 17 (1959), 18– 24, 19. 32. See the section titled “Pop or Market Aesthetics: The Fusion of Art and Commerce” in the introduction to this volume. 33. Reyner Banham, “Sant’Elia,” Architectural Review (May 1955), reprinted in Penny

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Sparke, ed., Design by Choice (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 28. This is the very thesis on Los Angeles that Banham would assert in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Penguin Press, 1971) some fifteen years later. 34. Reyner Banham, “Sant’Elia,” 28. This passage aptly describes a photomontage by Moholy-Nagy titled “Traffic at Different Levels: San Diego, Calif,” in Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 169. Peter Blake, Le Corbusier: Architecture and Form (1960; Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), 18. 35. Blake, Le Corbusier. 36. Summerson, “The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture,” 310. 37. Reyner Banham, “Stocktaking,” Architectural Review (February 1960): 100. 38. Banham, “Stocktaking,” 100. Banham was referring to Patrick Geddes’s notion of conurbation and the debates in the Architectural Review concerning “subtopia.” On these debates, see Ian Nairn’s Outrage (London: Architectural Press, 1955) and Counter-Attack against Subtopia (London: Architectural Press, 1957). 39. Banham, “City as Scrambled Egg,” 18. 40. Banham, 18. 41. Banham, “Stocktaking,” 100. 42. Reyner Banham, “Design by Choice,” in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 73. 43. Cedric Price’s response to Victor Gruen, in “Approaches to Urban Revitalization in the United States,” Architectural Association Journal (December 1962): 191. 44. Stanley Mathews wrote, “To [Henri] Bergson and to Price, life processes are essentially creative, not aimed at a particular goal or telos but at an unceasing source of novelty without ultimate objective.” See Stanley Mathews, “The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture: Cedric Price and the Practices of Indeterminacy,” Journal of Architectural Education 59, no. 3 (February 2006): 39– 48. This view was articulated in Bergson’s dissertation, published as Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. R. L. Pogson (London G. Allen & Co., 1910), and in Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920). Price expressed this repeatedly in his writings, particularly in “Life Conditioning,” Architectural Design (October 1966): 483– 94. Mathews explained, “Although Price never directly referred to Bergson either in his writings or in his conversation . . . since Price thought of architecture in terms of events in time rather than objects in space, and embraced indeterminacy as a core design principle, Bergson’s theories of duration and time provide a valuable tool for understanding Price’s work.” Stanley Mathews, “The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture,” 42. 45. Peter Smithson’s response to Victor Gruen, “Approaches to Urban Revitalization in the United States,” Architectural Association Journal (December 1962): 193. 46. On the interest in growth versus design among members of the Independent Group and new brutalism as related to morphological development, non-teleology, and indeterminacy in the work of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), see chapter 2. 47. Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 44. 48. See Banham, “Le Corbusier.” 49. Patrick Abercrombie was head of civic design at Liverpool University School of Architecture, editor of the Town Planning Review, and professor of town planning at University College London. He is best known for County of London Plan (1943) and Greater London Plan (1944). For a review of Geddes’s influence on Abercrombie, see

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Helen Elizabeth Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner (New York: Routledge, 1990). 50. See Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1928). 51. Royston Landau was long associated with the Architectural Association, graduating from it in 1954, teaching there from 1960 to 1967, heading the graduate school in the early 1970s, and acting as course director until 1993. His publications include New Directions in British Architecture (New York: G. Braziller, 1968). He also guest edited a number of issues, including “Despite Popular Demand . . . AD Is Thinking about Architecture and Planning,” a special issue of Architectural Design (September 1969). During the same period as the symposium Landau organized, a similar symposium was held in the United States. See Herbert A. Simon, “A Framework for Decision Making,” in Proceedings of a Symposium on Decision Theory, 1– 9, 22– 28 (Athens: Division of Research, College of Business Administration, Ohio University, 1963). Simon is also the author of “The Architecture of Complexity,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106 (December 12, 1963), 467– 82. 52. William Bartley taught philosophy at Stanford University. He studied under Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, where he completed his PhD in 1962. Parts of his dissertation, “Limits of Rationality: A Critical Study of Some Logical Problems of Contemporary Pragmatism and Related Movements,” were subsequently published as The Retreat to Commitment (New York: Knopf, 1962) in the same year. He is the editor of Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (London: Routledge, 1988). 53. D. N. Holbrook Smith, “Decision Making,” Architects’ Journal (February 27, 1963): 432. 54. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 4th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). On the release of the first British edition, second impression in 1947, Bertrand Russell hailed the book as a “masterly criticism of the . . . enemies of democracy, ancient and modern.” Concerning the insights of its author, Russell wrote: “His attack on Plato, while unorthodox, is in my opinion thoroughly justified. . . . His analysis of Hegel is deadly. . . . Marx . . . is dissected with equal acumen.” He asserted that it was a “vigorous and profound defence of democracy.” In A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 1, Separate Publications, 1896– 1990, ed. Kenneth Blackwell, Harry Ruja, Sheila Turcon (London: Routledge, 2003), 443. The implications of Popper’s critique became an important reference for British intellectuals and architects in the 1960, especially Stanford Anderson, Royston Landau, Colin Rowe, and Banham. For an account of Karl Popper’s theories of openness and indeterminism, see William Warren Bartley, ed., The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism (London: Hutchinson, 1982); Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations; The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1962). 55. Royston Landau to Karl Popper, March 15, 1965, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Sir Karl Popper Collection, box 383, folder 17. 56. Landau to Popper. 57. Given Popper and Hayek’s close friendship and the vital exchange of ideas in their work, this acknowledgment is significant in establishing the influence of Hayek’s ideas on design and urban planning debates in the 1960s. 58. Karl R. Popper, “On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance,” Proceedings of the British Academy 46 (1960), 39– 71, 42, reprinted in Popper, Conjectures and Refutations. 59. Popper, Poverty of Historicism, 10. 60. Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Beauty of Old Towns,” Arena: the Architectural Association Journal (April 1965): 293 (my emphasis), paper presented at the Architectural Association at the Context for Decision Making Symposium, Spring 1963.

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61. Gombrich, 293. Popper outlined his ideas of “piecemeal engineering” in Poverty of Historicism. 62. Popper’s work has informed art and architectural criticism in multiple ways, evident in Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960); Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); Christopher Alexander, “A City Is Not a Tree” (pts. 1– 2), Architectural Forum 122, nos. 1– 2 (April– May 1965): 58– 62 and 58– 61; Royston Landau, New Directions in British Architecture (New York: G. Braziller, 1968); Royston Landau, ed., “Thinking about Architecture and Planning- A Question of Ways and Means,” special issue, Architectural Design (September 1969); Reyner Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945– 1965” in Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. John Summerson (London: Allen Lane, 1968); Charles Jencks, Architecture 2000 (London: Studio Vista, 1971); Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism (New York: Doubleday, 1972); Alexander Tzonis, Towards a Non Oppressive Environment (New York: G. Braziller, 1972); Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973); Reyner Banham, “The Open City and Its Enemies,” The Listener (September 23, 1976); Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977); David Watkin, Morality and Architecture (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1977); Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978); Ignasi de Sola-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, trans. Graham Thompson, ed. Sarah Whiting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Albert Pope, Ladders (Houston, TX: Rice School of Architecture; New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); and Richard J. Williams, The Anxious City: English Urbanism in the Late Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2004). 63. Gombrich, “Beauty of Old Towns,” 295. This notion of a “conservative aesthetics” of slow and unplanned growth was a key concern for Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in their development of a “collage city.” See Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978). 64. Rowe and Koetter, 295. 65. Rowe and Koetter, 295. 66. Gombrich, “Beauty of Old Towns,” 297. As did Alloway, Gombrich used the curious word unplannable. 67. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 153. 68. Hayek, 154. 69. Gombrich,“ Beauty of Old Towns,” 296. 70. Aby Warburg’s research was concerned with the primitive and archaic features of the unconscious in society. See Aby M. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970). 71. In contrast to a Marxist view of history, Gombrich rendered the historical city as part of nature while distinguishing the deliberately “planned” from the slow growth of the “unplanned.” Aspects of this polemic are evident in the work of Jacobs and Banham. 72. This paper was presented in spring 1963 and published in 1965. It is unclear whether the lecture text was rewritten or if the footnote to Christopher Alexander’s book of 1964 was added for publication. See Christopher Alexander, “The Synthesis of Form: Some Notes on a Theory” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1962) and Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). Alexander was born in Vienna

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and raised in England. At Trinity College, he earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master’s degree in mathematics. He obtained the first PhD in architecture at Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the first Gold Medal for Research by the American Institute of Architects. He worked at MIT in transportation theory and in computer science while also working at Harvard in cognition and cognitive studies. 73. For a critique, see Raymond Studer, “Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form,” Architectural Association Journal (March 1965): 260– 62, which concludes, “Some designers, clinging to traditional attitudes, will lack the humility and vision to see the power of these ideas; while others, consumed with scientism or an overzealous quest for ‘certainty,’ will, no doubt, over-estimate and misunderstand the nature of these tools.” Raymond Studer, “Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form,” Architectural Association Journal (March 1965): 62. By the mid-1960s the term scientism had apparently become a commonplace in architectural and design discourse, illustrating to a certain extent the widespread circulation of ideas that can be traced back to Hayek, perhaps via Popper. For an account of scientism, see “Scientism and the Study of Society,” in Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science. 74. Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, 15. 75. Reflections on the “unselfconscious process” in modern architectural discourse go back at least to the 1920s. In Bauen in Frankreich, bauen in Eisen, bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928), translated by J. Duncan Berry as Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro- Concrete (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), referring to anonymity and subconscious processes, Giedion claimed that “construction in the nineteenth century plays the role of the subconscious” (87). He was interested in a notion of construction that “challenges the old prejudice that art and construction may be neatly divided, by presenting art as ‘unintentional’ and ‘purposeless,’ and construction alone as ‘purposeful.’” See also Sybil Moholy Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (New York: Horizon Press, 1957). 76. Aldo van Eyck, “Architecture of the Dogon,” Architectural Forum (September 1961): 116– 21, 186. 77. See Aldo van Eyck, “Some Comments on a Significant Detour,” in Meaning in Architecture, ed. Charles Jencks and George Baird (New York: G. Braziller, 1969), 213n8. 78. Alexander, “A City Is Not a Tree” (pts. 1– 2). 79. See Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “Scale of Association Diagram,” which indicated a range of activity from “involuntary association” to “voluntary association,” presented at CIAM X, Dubrovnik (1956), in Team 10: 1953– 81: In Search of a Utopia of the Present, ed. Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel (Rotterdam, Netherlands: NAi, 2005). Compare the view of a “self-initiated” community in the work of Alison and Peter Smithson with that of Webber in “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm” (1964) and Alexander’s view of a self-initiated community. 80. Cited in Lynn Jamieson and Roona Simpson, Living Alone: Globalization, Identity and Belonging (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 153. 81. Alexander, “A City Is Not a Tree” (pt. 1), 58. 82. Alexander, 58. 83. Alexander, 58 (my emphasis). Compare this with Colin Rowe’s and Stanford Anderson’s view of tradition in debates with Reyner Banham. Also, Ernst Gombrich was greatly interested in the role of tradition in the arts. See, for example, “The Necessity of Tradition,” in which he discussed the process of innovation and refinement. E. H. Gombrich, Tributes: Interpreters of our Cultural Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

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84. The English translation of Sitte’s book appeared in 1945, and its ideas were explored by Richard Llewelyn-Davies, known for his planning of new towns, and John Weeks, who in 1957 redesigned the core of the old village of Rushbrooke. As if to acknowledge symbolic quality of the piecemeal and slow growth of old towns, the work was carried out in three phases, the second of which was completed in 1959. Its primary influence was taken from the non-design world of its surrounding context, and it has been widely acclaimed as an attempt to merge the modern architectural aesthetic with the essence of an “indigenous” country village. This path of design research dominated Alexander’s work for years, as in Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language (1968; New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); and Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Some of these approaches also resonated with Peter and Alison Smithson’s Upper Lawn Pavilion (1961), where the tensions between modern design and non-design, or what they called the “as found,” were set in equipoise. 85. Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form 32. 86. Compare this to Jane Jacobs’s understanding of organized complexity. Alexander referred to the work of Austrian theorists, including Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, and Heinz von Foerster (particularly his 1957 essay “Basic Concepts of Homeostasis”), who was influenced by all the former along with mathematician Hans Hahn. See Stefano Franchi, Guven Guzeldere, and Eric Minch, “Interview with Heinz Von Foerster,” Stanford Humanities Review 4, no. 2 (1995): 288– 307. Warren Weaver, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, Herbert Simon, and Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela pioneered a philosophy of cybernetics, or the study of feedback, that has penetrated deep into architectural theory. Weaver and Shannon coauthored The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), which influenced countless thinkers in different disciplines, including Jane Jacobs, who launched the theory of cities as a form of organized complexity, which in turn influenced Robert Venturi and others. In Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Pub., 1980), Maturana and Varela put forth the controversial theory of autopoiesis, an attempt to explain the organization of living systems. The concept of autopoiesis informs the central thesis of Patrik Schumacher’s magnum opus The Autopoiesis of Architecture, 2 vols. (Chichester: Wiley, 2011– 2012). 87. Alexander, “A City Is Not a Tree” (pt. 1), 58. 88. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). These ideas continue to inform the literature, such as The Origins of Order: Self- Organization and Complexity in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) by Stuart Kauffman, who concluded: “In coevolution, organisms adapt under natural selection via a metadynamics where each organism myopically alters the structure of its fitness landscape and the extent to which that landscape is deformed by the adaptive moves of other organisms, such that, as if by an invisible hand, the entire ecosystem coevolves to a poised state at the edge of chaos” (261). Kauffman’s hypothesis, as a review of the book noted, was reminiscent of a “description of self-interested (myopic) individuals interacting in a free market.” Reilly Jones, “Human-Directed Evolution” (review of Origins of Order) in Extropy 136, no. 2 (1994). 89. Stanford Anderson, “Architecture and Tradition That Isn’t, ‘Trad, Dad,’” Architectural Association Journal 80, no. 892 (May 1965): 325– 31, reprinted in Marcus Whiffen, ed., The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), and in Italian by Bruno Zevi as “Polemica con Reyner Banham: Architettura e tradizione vera,” L’architettura 10, no. 12 (April 1965): 828– 31. 348 | n o t e s t o PA g e 2 2 9

90. On 1927 as a critical year in the development of modern architecture, see Summerson, Heavenly Mansions, and Other Essays on Architecture, 218. 91. Reyner Banham, “Propositions,” Architectural Review (June 1960): 388. The analogy of the surf-ride in architectural discourse has persisted and was utilized by Rem Koolhaas, for example, in numerous publications. Commenting on the skyscrapers of Manhattan, in Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), Koolhaas wrote, “This architecture relates to the forces of the Groszstadt like a surfer to the waves.” At least since the 1960s the wave served as an analogy for the vitality of the unrestrained forces of capitalism and modernization; it may also serve to establish a parallel between natural and man-made forces while obscuring the principles at work in certain deeply “unnatural” ideological structures. 92. Stanford Anderson, “CASE and MIT: Engagement,” in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the “Techno-Social” Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta (Cambridge, MA: SA+Press, Department of Architecture, MIT, 2013), 583. 93. Hayes, Architecture Theory since 1968, 90. During this period, Peter Eisenman taught at Cambridge, too; after returning to America, in 1965 he brought to Princeton University Anthony Vidler and Kenneth Frampton. 94. The term millenarian relates to a belief in the coming of a major transformation of society. In Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957; New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), which Rowe claimed was an important source for Collage City (1978), the author explored the devastating role this belief played in the Crusades and the Holocaust. In the chapter “Millenary Folly: The Failure of an Eschatology,” Norris Kelly Smith explored this idea as a critique of historicism (in the Popperian sense) and modern architecture. See Norris Kelly Smith, On Art and Architecture in the Modern World (Victoria, BC: American Life Foundation for University of Victoria, 1971). Rowe credited Smith as one of the few “willing to talk about the eschatology of Le Corbusier” (49) and cited him in his chapter “Iconography,” yet curiously not in “Eschatology,” in The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards a Possible Retrospect (London: Academy Editions, 1994). 95. Millenarian predictions can be found throughout history— for example, in 1789 Rétif de la Bretonne published the play L’an 2000 (The Year 2000), and in 1971 Charles Jencks published Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods (London: Studio Vista, 1971). See Georg G. Iggers, The Cult of Authority: The Political Philosophy of the Saint-Simonians (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1958). 96. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 49. 97. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Principles of a Liberal Social Order,” delivered at the Tokyo meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, September, 1966. Friedrich A. von Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 1967), 166. 98. Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (New York: Horizon Press, 1957). See also Hilde Heynen, “Anonymous Architecture as Counterimage: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s Perspective on American Vernacular,” Journal of Architecture 13, no. 4 (2008); Aldo van Eyck, “Architecture of Dogon,” Architectural Forum (September 1961). 99. See Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965). 100. Peter Cook, “Control and Choice” (1968), reprinted in Peter Cook, Archigram (London: Studio Vista, 1972). 101. See Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), especially the chapter “Beyond Architecture: Indeterminacy, Systems, and the Dissolution of Buildings.” 349 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 2 3 0 – 2 3 2

102. References to “living city” can be found in Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (1958), and in “Louis Kahn and the Living City,” Architectural Forum 108 (March 1958). Forum memos suggest that Peter Blake was the primary author and Walter McQuade and Jane Jacobs, contributors. The article celebrated Kahn’s idea that “if you give the city the right and capability to live, the living city will inevitably solve its own problems . . . planning serves only to initiate life, not dominate it.” See Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs, 170. 103. Simon Sadler, Archigram, 69. 104. Sadler, 72. 105. Hadas A. Steiner, Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation (2009), 33. Archigram’s embrace of the market aligned their work closer to laissez-faire anarchism and right-libertarian philosophies than left-wing collectivist anarchism. 106. See Stanford Anderson, “‘The New Object,’ or ‘The Bongo Bowl Esthetic’” (1967). 107. Reyner Banham, “A Clip- On Architecture,” Design Quarterly, no. 63 (1965): 30. During this period Design Quarterly published work by other British writers associated with the Independent Group, such as John McHale’s “Towards the Future” (1968), an expanded version of an essay published in Architectural Design. 108. Banham, “A Clip- On Architecture.” Banham introduced the clip-on concept in his 1960 “Stocktaking” essay. The first articles on Archigram appeared in architectural journals in 1965, including “Projects from Archigram,” Aujourd’hui, art et architecture, no. 50 (July 1965); “The History of Clip- On,” Architectural Forum 123, no. 4 (November 1965); Priscilla Chapman, “The Plug-In City,” Ekistics 20, no. 120 (November 1965); “Archigram Group, London: A Chronological Survey,” Architectural Design 35 (November 1965); “The Archigram Men,” Architects’ Journal 142, no. 20 (November 17, 1965). Also “Amazing Archigram: A Supplement” appeared in Perspecta 11 (1967): 131– 54. 109. Banham, “A Clip- On Architecture,” 4. 110. Banham, 7. The term action painting, closely associated with abstract expressionism, was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 and signaled a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of New York School painters and critics. 111. See Roy Ascott, “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision,” in Cybernetica: Journal of the International Association for Cybernetics (Namur) 9, no. 4 (1966) and 10, no. 1 (1967); Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); Tomás Maldonado, Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology (1970; New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 112. Richard Meier, A Communications Theory of Urban Growth (Cambridge, MA: Published for the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University by MIT Press, 1962), 1. 113. It is noteworthy that similar concerns dominated the Independent Group of which John Weeks was affiliated. Weeks worked with two groups for the This Is Tomorrow (1956) exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. 114. Banham, “A Clip- On Architecture” 10. 115. Reyner Banham, Problemas de historia ambiental (Córdoba, Argentina: Instituto Interuniversitario de Historia de la Arquitectura, 1969), 75 (my translation). Banham had been invited to Argentina by the architectural historian Marina Waisman, who went on to cofound the Inter-University Institute of Architecture History, a vital center that invited prominent specialists to give seminars, including Umberto Eco, Vincent Scully, Fernando Chueca Goitia, Giulio Carlo Argan, Joshua Taylor, and Reyner Banham. 116. Banham, “A Clip- On Architecture,” 15. 117. Landau, New Directions in British Architecture, 74. 118. Landau, 76.

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119. Cedric Price and Paul Barker, “The Potteries Thinkbelt,” New Society (June 1966): 14– 17, 14. 120. Landau, 77. 121. Karl R. Popper, “On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance,” Proceedings of the British Academy 46 (1960), 39– 71, reprinted in Popper, Conjectures and Refutations. 122. Landau, New Directions in British Architecture, 12. Following this passage, Landau cited F. A. Hayek, “The Dilemma of Specialization,” Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), to advance his argument. 123. Landau, New Directions in British Architecture, 76. 124. Banham, Problemas de historia ambiental, 75. 125. Todd Gannon, Reyner Banham: The Paradoxes of High Tech (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017), 63. 126. Reyner Banham, “The Great Gizmo,” in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 112. 127. Banham, 113. 128. Banham, 117. Banham was fascinated by Frank Lloyd Wright’s rejection of urban density and his aversion to New York City expressed in The Disappearing City (1932) and other publications. Banham often referred to Wright’s expression “Watch the little gas station, it is the true agent of decentralization,” including in “The Great Gizmo”; an interview with Michael McNay, “Profession: Enfant Terrible,” The Guardian, Manchester, England (October 26, 1968), 7; and Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society (March 20, 1969). 129. Wright’s disdain for the compact city was well established already in The Disappearing City (1932). His “ideal of freedom” was associated with the archaic “original instinct of the adventurer” in the open landscape. Wright admired “He who lived by his freedom and his prowess beneath the stars rather than he who lived by his obedience and labor in the shadow of the wall.” (p. 6) 130. Reyner Banham, “The Missing Motel,” Landscape 15 (1965), 4, reprinted from Listener (August 5, 1965). 131. Banham, “Vehicles of Desire,” in A Critic Writes, 5, 6. See also chapter 3. 132. Banham, “Missing Motel,” 6. 133. Ada Louise Huxtable, “The Case for Chaos,” New York Times, January 26, 1969. 134. Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965; New York: Bantam Books, 1999), xviii. 135. Melvin M. Webber was professor of city and regional planning at University of California, Berkeley, from 1956 to 1990. From the time of his appointment, he was, the university reported, “the principal force and intellect that elevated the department to its current status among the top programs in the United States and the world.” In 1970, Webber became director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, which he developed into a leading research organization in his field. For an account of Webber’s influence on England and the design of the new town of Milton Keynes, see David C. Goodman and Colin Chant, eds., European Cities and Technology: Industrial to Post-Industrial Cities (London: Routledge, 1999). 136. See Melvin Webber, “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity,” in Cities and Space: The Future Use of Urban Land, ed. Lowdon Wingo Jr. (Baltimore: Published for Resources for the Future by the Johns Hopkins Press, 1963); Melvin M. Webber, “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm,” Explorations into Urban Structure, ed. Melvin M. Webber (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). 137. Webber, “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm,” 79. The essays

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published in Explorations into Urban Structure were presented in a symposium featuring members of the city- and regional-planning faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, along with John W. Dyckman and William L. C. Wheaton of the city-planning faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. 138. Webber, 80. 139. Webber, 80. 140. Melvin M. Webber and Frederick C. Collignon, “Ideas that Drove DCPR [Department of City and Regional Planning],” Berkeley Planning Journal 12 (1998): 1– 19. This article provides invaluable insight into the fundamental ideas that were circulating in the 1960s in California. It may also illustrate the extent to which Hayek’s ideas about planning had become commonplace. 141. Webber and Collignon, “Ideas that Drove DCPR,” 4. 142. Peter Geoffrey Hall taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the London School of Economics before being appointed professor of geography and head of department at the University of Reading in 1968. 143. Peter Hall, “Melvin M. Webber: Maker and Breaker of Planning Paradigms,” Access (Winter 2006– 2007): 22. 144. Peter Hall, “The Patterns of Cities to Come,” New Society (March 10, 1966), 8. 145. Hall, 8. 146. Hall, 10. 147. Richard Llewellyn-Davies, the designer of Milton Keynes, was a British architect and professor at University College London from 1960 to 1969, and professor of urban planning and head of the School of Environmental Studies from 1970 to 1975. 148. Melvin Webber, “Planning in an Environment of Change: Part I: Beyond the Industrial Age,” Town Planning Review 39, no. 3 (October 1968): 179– 95; “Planning in an Environment of Change: Part II: Permissive Planning,” Town Planning Review 39, no. 4 (January 1969), 277– 95. 149. Hall, “Melvin M. Webber,” 22. 150. See P. R. Haywood, “Plangloss: A Critique of Permissive Planning,” Town Planning Review 40 (October 1969): 231– 62. 151. See Denise Scott Brown, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 3 (1969). 152. Richard Crossman was a prominent socialist intellectual, editor of the New Statesman, and one of the Labour Party’s leading Zionists and anti-communists. 153. Herbert Gans, “Planning for People, Not Buildings,” Environment and Planning, 1 (1969), 33– 46. Mark Clapson, A Social History of Milton Keynes: Middle England/Edge City (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 39. 154. Colin Chant and David Goodman, eds., The European Cities and Technology Reader: Industrial to Post-Industrial City (London: Routledge, 1999), 287. 155. Chant and Goodman, 159. 156. Richard Llewelyn-Davies, “Town Design,” Town Planning Review 37, no. 3 (October 1966): 159. 157. Llewelyn-Davies, 164. 158. Llewelyn-Davies, 164. 159. Richard Llewelyn Davies, “Changing Goals in Design: The Milton Keynes Example,” in New Towns: The British Experience, ed. Hazel Evans (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1972), 110. 160. Hall, “Melvin M. Webber,” 22. 161. Hall, 23.

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162. Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” New Society (March 20, 1969), 435. New Society was a “leftist” social science magazine. During this period Price was involved in several town-planning projects in the United States, including Atom and Detroit Think Grid. See “Cedric Price Interview,” interviews conducted at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, November 11 and 13, 1996, by Howard Shubert and Cammie McAtee), Canadian Centre for Architecture Archives, Montreal. 163. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 435. The question of method was fundamental to Hayek’s critique of planning. See Hayek, Counter-Revolution of Science. 164. Banham et al., 436. 165. Banham et al., 436. 166. Banham et al., 442. 167. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 11. 168. Paul Barker, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism, ed. Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler (Oxford, UK: Architectural Press, 2000), 2. 169. Reyner Banham, “Encounter with Sunset Boulevard,” Listener, August 22, 1968, 236. 170. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 436. 171. Banham et al., 436 172. Barker, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” 2. 173. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 435. In 1945 Hayek had made related observations, claiming that it was “a curious fact that the people who claim the title of planner in the first instance never think their own proposal through to the end, and as I have learned by bitter experience they resent nothing more than when somebody else goes a step further and just follows their argument to their logical conclusions and tries to depict what the consequences of their plans will be.” See F. A. Hayek, “Address before the Economic Club of Detroit,” Detroit (April 23, 1945), Hoover Institution Archives, Friedrich von Hayek, box 106, folder ID 8. 174. Barker, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” 4. 175. Barker, 4. 176. Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). 177. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 436. 178. See Labour Party, The Old World and the New Society. 179. Reyner Banham, “People’s Palaces,” New Statesman (August 7, 1964), 191. 180. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 435. 181. Banham et al., 436. See Frederick Albert Gutheim, “Frank Lloyd Wright: Prophet of Decentralization,” Free America, 5 (April 1941), 8– 10. 182. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 436. 183. Banham et al., 438. 184. Banham et al., 438. 185. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 442. 186. See Reyner Banham, “Towards a Pop Architecture,” Architectural Review (July 1962) and the section in the introduction to this volume “Pop or Market Aesthetics: The Fusion of Art and Commerce.” 187. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 443. 188. Banham et al., 443.

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189. Banham et al., 443. 190. Banham et al., 442. 191. See Friedrich A. von Hayek and Allison Dunham, review of Charles M. Haar, Land Planning Law in a Free Society: A Study of the British Town and Country Planning Act, The University of Chicago Law Review 19, no. 3 (Spring 1952). For Hayek’s views on town planning, see The Constitution of Liberty, particularly the chapter “Housing and Town Planning.” 192. See Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (New York: Blackwell, 1988), especially the chapter “Planning and the Academy: Philadelphia, Manchester, California, Paris, 1955–1987.” In an interview with Hall, Peter Hetherington wrote: “One of his regrets is that planning became such a pejorative term during the Thatcher governments that the discipline was ground down over 20 years to the extent that there is now a shortage of professionals. ‘Training plummeted and the profession became beleaguered, overloaded and overworked,’ he says.” Peter Hetherington, “Urbane Legend,” The Guardian, June 20, 2007. 193. Ben Franks, “New Right/New Left: An Alternative Experiment in Freedom,” in Hughes and Sadler, Non-Plan, 36. 194. Franks, “New Right/New Left,” 32. 195. The philosophy espoused by Ludwig von Mises and Hayek helped usher in freemarket libertarianism, on the left and the right, as numerous publications disseminated their vision of “liberty” including New Individualist Review, Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, edited by Murray N. Rothbard, as well as Libertarian Forum, a market anarchist journal, also edited by Rothbard. Relationships between marketoriented right libertarians, or anarcho-capitalists, and the New Left thrived in the 1960s, laying the foundation for left-wing market anarchism and free-market socialism. 196. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 442. 197. Sadler, “Open Ends,” 145. 198. Sadler, 145. 199. Barker, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” 6. Critical of the Conservative Party because of its public spending and its failure to implement free-market policies, Sherman cofounded the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974. In addition, he was a consultant to the Western Goals Institute, a far-right group in Britain. 200. Banham et al., “Non-Plan,” 442. 201. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 37. 202. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962) sold more than four hundred thousand copies in its first eighteen years and more than half a million since 1962. 203. The “fear of capitalism” as a form of pervasive commercial culture was expressed in countless publications of the left. Critics routinely criticized consumerism and media manipulation in the 1950s. See Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay Co., 1957). 204. Reyner Banham, “Cycles of the Price-Mechanism,” AA Files, no. 8 (Spring 1985): 104. 205. Cedric Price, “Non-Plan,” Architectural Design (May 1969), 269. Price further developed the non-plan idea in “Expediency,” Architectural Design (September 1969). 206. Royston Landau, “Thinking about Architecture and Planning: A Question of Ways and Means,” Architectural Design (September 1969), 478. The issue contained essays by many notable figures, including Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos (chair at the London School of Economics and influential philosopher of science and mathematics), Warren Broady, Cedric Price, Gordon Pask, Lancelot Law Whyte, Warren Chalk, David Green, Nicholas Negroponte, and Stafford Anderson. 354 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 2 4 9 – 2 5 1

207. The interest in cybernetics was widespread among designers in England. For an account of the relationship between Cedric Price and cyberneticist Gordon Pask, see Stanley Mathew, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog, 2007). References to cybernetics can also be found in “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom.” On cybernetics and mass media, see Lawrence Alloway, “The Arts and the Mass Media,” Architectural Design (February 1958). 208. Following Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings (1947), which outlined how information feedback was central to the creation of machines capable of responding to their environments, cybernetics helped conceptualize the mechanism behind an evolving and dynamic environment. Wiener’s model attempted to parallel the natural world in which an organism’s development and survival was dependent on a dynamic and symbiotic feedback loop linking the organism to its environment. In the catalog to the 1968 Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, referring to the design of the façade of John Weeks’s Northwich Park, we learn: “The visible structure has its appearance determined wholly as a result of a computer-oriented program” and “the designers of the building did not intervene.” This fundamental idea was not unlike that expressed by members of the Independent Group, particularly Banham, who argued that a dynamic feedback loop existed between the “desires of the consumer” and the design of industrial products, such as automobiles. See Cybernetic Serendipity (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1968), 69, cited in Jonathan Hughes “The Indeterminate Building,” in Hughes and Sadler, Non-Plan, 98. 209. Landau, “Thinking about Architecture and Planning,” 478. 210. Landau, 478. 211. Philip Castle, a British airbrush artist, was best known for designing posters for the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange and for Paul McCartney’s Wings tour, among others. 212. Karl R. Popper, “Of Clocks and Clouds,” Architectural Design (September 1969): 491. This essay was an excerpt from the Arthur Holly Compton Memorial Lecture “Of Clocks and Clouds: An Approach to the Problem of Rationality and the Freedom of Man” presented at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, in 1965. It was subsequently published in Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972) and as “Clocks and Clouds” in Karl R. Popper, The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism (1982). 213. Popper, 491. 214. Landau, “Thinking about Architecture and Planning,” 479. 215. See Frederick A. von Hayek, Rules and Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), part of the Law, Legislation and Liberty series. 216. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” in The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Karl R. Popper, ed. M. Bunge (New York: Free Press, 1964), 336. Hayek’s essay, originally completed in December 1961 and then updated for the 1964 publication, was also published in Friedrich A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) and in Michael Martin and Lee C. McIntyre, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). See also Bruce Caldwell, “Popper and Hayek,” in Karl Popper, a Centenary Assessment, vol. 1, Life and Times, and Values in a World of Facts, ed. Ian Jarvie, Karl Milford, and David Miller (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 217. Landau, “Thinking about Architecture and Planning,” 479. 218. Chris Abel, “Urban Chaos or Self- Organization,” Architectural Design 39 (September 1969): 501. 219. Abel, 501. 355 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 2 5 1 – 2 5 5

220. Landau, “Thinking about Architecture and Planning,” 480. 221. Abel, “Urban Chaos or Self- Organization,” 502. 222. Abel, 502. 223. Compare this to the view espoused by Jane Jacobs (see chapter 4 of this volume). 224. These essays were published as Reyner Banham, “Encounter on Sunset Boulevard,” Listener (August 22, 1968): 235– 36; “Roadscape with Rusting Rails,” Listener (August 29, 1968): 267– 68; “Beverly Hills, Too, Is a Ghetto,” Listener (September 5, 1968): 296– 98; “The Art of Doing Your Thing,” Listener (September 12, 1968): 330– 331. Banham first visited Los Angeles in 1965 to participate in a symposium organized by the Urban Design Department at the University of California. His presentation was subsequently published as “Frank Lloyd Wright as Environmentalist,” Arts and Architecture (September 1966). 225. Banham, “Encounter with Sunset Boulevard,” 235. 226. Banham, 235. 227. Julian Cooper, director, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (BBC, 1972), transcript by author. 228. Banham, “Beverly Hills, Too, Is a Ghetto,” 296 229. Banham, 296. 230. Banham, 296. 231. Banham, 296. 232. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape.” 233. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 358. 234. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 36. 235. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 358. 236. In Gordon Cullen’s Townscape (1961) and The Concise Townscape (1961), and Ivor de Wolfe’s [Hastings] The Italian Townscape (1963), no mention is made of the radical theory of liberalism. In The Alternative Society: Software for the Nineteen-Eighties (London: David & Charles, 1980), Hastings espouses the liberal critique on topics such as the socialist society, the crisis of communism, bottom-up strategy, and the distribution economy while paying tribute to Humboldt, that “philosophical anarchist,” and citing Walter Lippmann and Hayek, particularly his Individualism and Economic Order as well as Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. 237. Cullen, Concise Townscape, 133. 238. Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), 48. 239. Reyner Banham, “Roadscape with Rusting Rails,” Listener (August 29, 1968): 268. 240. Banham, “Encounter,” 236. 241. Hastings, “Townscape,” 358 242. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Penguin Press, 1971), 124; Reyner Banham, “The Art of Doing Your Thing,” Listener (September 12, 1968): 330– 31, 330. 243. Banham, “Encounter,” 236. 244. The postwar period witnessed the publication of biographies of the leading anarchist thinkers, including Kropotkin, Godwin, Proudhon, and Bakunin, and spurred the renewed interest in libertarianism in the 1960s. See George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1962). 245. Liberal Innovator (eventually named Innovator) was edited by Tom Marshall and circulated from 1964 to 1969. Exploring themes from science fiction, sexual liberty to van nomadism (living in a vehicle), it defined its audience as “the libertarian, the

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truly radical rightist, [who] seeks complete freedom to live his life for his own sake— complete freedom from initiated violence or threat of violence by government bodies. In this respect, the libertarian is an extremist and properly so. A political ‘moderate’ is one who entertains the notion that a little slavery is a good thing!” Ric Villanueva, “A Positive Program for Responsible Extremists,” Liberal Innovator (July 1964): 1– 21, cited in Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 326. Doherty noted that Kerry Thornley, in his youth, worshiped Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos, and, while working with Marshall to edit Innovator, was “hanging around with ultra-right anticommie quasirevolutionaries the Minutemen” (329). Advocates of unrestrained capitalism have often mined the work of Hayek, Mises, Friedman, and others for ideas that suited their needs. 246. Murray N. Rothbard, “Liberty and the New Left,” Left and Right 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1965): 65. Rothbard was referring to Paul Goodman’s People or Personnel: Decentralization and the Mixed System (New York: Random House, 1965). 247. Banham, Los Angeles, 22. The townscape doctrine encouraged one to see the planned and non-planned aspects of the city as one unified totality. 248. While historically the historian’s biased “discriminative approach” toward the built environment, acknowledging only “architects who commemorated power and wealth . . . without a word about the houses of lesser people,” may have once been the norm, “but today,” Rudofsky argued, such “self-imposed limitation appears absurd.” See Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), preface. 249. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 361. 250. Wolfe [Hastings], 360. 251. Wolfe [Hastings], 361. 252. See Alan Powers, “Townscape as a Model of Organized Complexity,” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 5 (2012): 621– 42. Powers argued that Hastings’s townscape theory anticipated Jacobs in making a connection between complexity theory and urban planning. The idea of complex order, informed by complexity theory, cybernetics, and systems thinking, is a key concept linking the work of Hayek, Hastings, Jacobs, Venturi, and Banham. See chapter 4 of this volume. 253. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 360. 254. Wolfe [Hastings], 361. 255. Banham, Los Angeles, 139. 256. Banham, 23. 257. Banham, 5. 258. Banham, 23. 259. Reyner Banham, “Freewheeling the L.A. Way,” The Guardian, November 4, 1968. 260. Banham, 24. 261. At the core of the townscape doctrine was the notion of the city as a “living organism.” See “Townscape Manifesto,” Nikolaus Pevsner, Visual Planning and the Picturesque, 180. The notion of a city as a living organism was also central to Louis Kahn and to Jane Jacobs who, with Walter McQuade, made that unequivocally clear in “Louis Kahn and the Living City” in Architectural Forum (March 1958). 262. Banham, Los Angeles, 25 (my emphasis). Beyond the sun, various sources of social and political change affected political attitudes in the postwar period. In the 1950s there was a drastic shift from a socialist conception of architecture and urban planning, shared by many California designers, including R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, and Garrett Eckbo, among others, to a “non-socialist” view of culture,

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championed by key figures such as John Entenza and various institutions. This move was supported by powerful interest groups that helped usher in an era of free-market economics, individualism, and the single-family house. 263. Wolfe [Hastings], “Townscape,” 360. 264. Banham, Los Angeles, 24. 265. Denise Scott Brown, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners (May 1969). 266. Banham, “Encounter,” 236. 267. Banham, Los Angeles, 138. 268. See “Hayek’s Rules of Order,” https://fee.org/articles/hayeks-rules-of-order/. 269. Banham, Los Angeles, 237. 270. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), 5. 271. Banham, Los Angeles, 237. On the “mechanical fallacy,” see Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914). 272. Anthony Vidler, introduction to Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), xxx. 273. Banham, Los Angeles, 141. 274. Banham, 237. 275. Banham, 137. 276. Banham, 139. 277. David Gebhard and Harriette von Breton, Los Angeles in the Thirties, 1931– 1941 (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1989), 17. 278. Gebhard and von Breton, 137. Banham, in Los Angeles, stated: “Planning in Los Angeles? In the world’s eyes this is a self-cancelling concept.” But he then equivocated: “This has always been a planned city” (137) and referred briefly to Ord’s survey map of 1849. More significantly, he ignored the city’s extensive twentieth-century planning (137). 279. Gebhard and von Breton, Los Angeles in the Thirties, 17. Referring to Frank Lloyd Wright, they noted that Southern California “came remarkably close to mirroring his belief in the auto and the horizontal, decentralized planning of his Broad Acre City” (17). 280. For example, Banham makes scant reference to the extraordinary planning efforts of the prewar decades, such as the work of city planner Simon Eisner. Eisner was a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Telesis Environmental Group, an association that promoted comprehensive planning. He coauthored the 1943 Freeways for the Region; introduced comprehensive planning to numerous local governments; founded the planning curriculum at University of Southern California; and in 1950 coauthored, with Arthur B. Gallion, The Urban Pattern: City Planning and Design. Banham also ignored the radical culture of communism and socialism in Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century, an omission later explored by Ralph E. Shaffer, “Communism in California, 1919– 1924: ‘Orders from Moscow’ or Independent Western Radicalism?,” Science & Society 34, no. 4 (Winter 1970): 412– 29; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); and others. 281. See Reyner Banham, “Myths, Meanings, and Forms of Twentieth Century Architecture,” lecture delivered at Southern California Institute of Architecture (March 26, 1976), SCI-Arc Digital Lecture Archive. 282. Reyner Banham, quoted in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), xv. Although Banham may have changed his mind over time about various topics, including the idea of the picturesque,

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the one thing he apparently never changed his mind about was planning and the free market. 283. Friedrich Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom,” Reader’s Digest 46, no. 276 (April 1945): 3.

conc Lus i on 1. The rehabilitation of planning may have begun with the rise of the Congress for the New Urbanism, officially founded in 1993. While generally very conservative in formal expression, described as a “traditionalist sort of CIAM,” the movement sought to challenge the principles of CIAM while reclaiming planning as a key aspect of its campaign. Barry Bergdoll, introduction to Andres Lepik, Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 9. By the late 1990s, radically different movements had begun to emerge, with a significant shift in the discipline from a non- design paradigm toward a renewed interest in design and planning as a means of effecting positive change. At the Bioneers conference in 2000, William McDonough made the case for a return to planning. Bruce Mau’s proactive “we will” stance toward design was articulated in proclamations such as “We will enable . . . We will build . . . We will make . . .” and “We will design evolution”— all featured in his manifesto Massive Change (London: Phaidon, 2004). David C. Sloane’s Planning Los Angeles (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2012) outlined a new approach to planning that challenged the myth of Los Angeles as an unplanned city. 2. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 9. 3. Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928– 1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 64. 4. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), xii. 5. Walter Gropius, “Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar,” reprinted in Programs and Manifestos on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 49. 6. Hilton Kramer, “At the Bauhaus: The Fate of Art in ‘The Cathedral of Socialism,’” New Criterion 12 (March 1994). 7. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1968), 22. 8. Ivor de Wolfe [Hubert de Cronin Hastings], “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy Founded on the True Rock of Sir Uvedale Price,” Architectural Review (1949): 354– 62. 9. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978), 10. 10. Banham, 9. 11. See Tom Verebes, ed., Masterplanning the Adaptive City: Computational Urbanism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2013). 12. Rem Koolhaas, “Ville Nouvelle Melun-Sénart,” in S, M, L, XL, ed. Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Mau and OMA, and Jennifer Sigler (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 974. 13. Rem Koolhaas, “What Ever Happened to Urbanism?,” in S,M,L,XL, 965. 14. William McDonough, “Re-Inventing Design,” address at the Bioneers conference, October 20, 2000. 15. Bruce Mau with Jennifer Leonard and the Institute without Boundaries, Massive Change (London: Phaidon, 2004).

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16. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 17. Ben Franks, “New Right/New Left: An Alternative Experiment in Freedom,” in Non-Plan, 43. 18. William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self- Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 7. 19. Connolly, 25. 20. Connolly, 74. 21. Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994). Following the fall of the Soviet Union, some have argued that decentralized alternatives to the Soviet model of Marxist socialism are culturally, politically, and economically feasible. See David L. Prychitko, Markets, Planning and Democracy: Essays after the Collapse of Communism (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2002). More recently critics of the left have argued, “The inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our greatest mistake.” Chris Hedges, “Why I Am a Socialist,” TruthDig, December 29, 2008, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081229_why_i _am _a _socialist. 22. “US Does Not Have Capitalism Now,” CNBC, March 17, 2010, https://www.cnbc .com/id/34921639. 23. Andrew Clark and Jull Treanor, “Greenspan— I Was Wrong about the Economy. Sort Of,” The Guardian, October 24, 2008. When Alan Greenspan was sworn in as chairman of President Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers in September 1974, he invited three people to the ceremony: his mother, and Ayn Rand and her husband. See Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2019). 24. George Soros, The Crash of 2008 and What It Means (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), vii. 25. Much of contemporary architecture theory associated with parametricism is predicated on a philosophy of self-regulation and self-organization. See, e.g., Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, 2 vols. (Chichester: Wiley, 2011–2012), as well as Patrik Schumacher, “The Historical Pertinence of Parametricism and the Prospect of a Free Market Urban Order,” in The Politics of Parametricism, Digital Technologies in Architecture, ed. Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). See also Tom Verebes, ed., Masterplanning the Adaptive City: Computational Urbanism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2013), particularly Verebes’s chapter “The Death of Masterplanning in the Age of Indeterminacy” and Patrik Schumacher’s “Free-Market Urbanism: Urbanism beyond Planning.” 26. Anthony Fontenot, “Gregory Ain and Cooperative Housing in a Time of Major Crisis,” in Making a Case, 306090 Books, vol. 14, ed. Emily Abruzzo, Gerald Bodziak, and Jonathan D. Solomon (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). 27. Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, “Billionaire Bonanza: Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us,” Institute for Policy Studies, October 17, 2017, https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads /2017/11/BILLIONAIRE-BONANZA-2017-FinalV.pdf. 28. The focus has shifted from a belief in the ability of the free market to solve problems to how governments can best solve problems. Increasingly, economists have been studying the “growing concentration of wealth, the costs of climate change, the concentration of important markets, the stagnation of income for the working class, and changing patterns of social mobility.” See John Cassidy, “The New Economics: Data, Inequality, and Politics,” New Yorker, October 22, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news /our-columnists/the-new-economics-data-inequality-and-politics. 360 | n o t e s t o PA g e s 2 7 1 – 2 7 3

29. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker, “Capitalism Redefined,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 31 (Winter 2014). 30. Nick Hanauer, “The Dirty Secret of Capitalism— And a New Way Forward,” TED Talks, September 13, 2019, https://www.ted.com/talks/nick _hanauer_the_dirty_secret _of_capitalism_and_a_new_way_forward?language=en. 31. Nick Hanauer, “Capitalism Redefined,” remarks to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, October 16, 2018.

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Index

Aalto, Alvar, 12, 107, 215 Abel, Chris: “Urban Chaos or SelfOrganization,” 255– 56 Abercrombie, Patrick, 290n27; The Preservation of Rural England, 222 active socioplastics, 202– 4, 209 Adams, Hervey: Art and Everyman: A Brief Analysis of the Part Played by Art in Our Daily Lives, 49 Adler, Alfred, 27 Adorno, Theodor, 36, 115– 16 advertising: American, overlaid imagery of in 1954, 95; American industrial design and, 101; competition and, 133– 34; control of in the Town and Country Planning Act, 248; industrial design and, convergence of, 131; social symbolism and, 124 Agrest, Diana: “Design versus NonDesign,” 22, 277n1 Ain, Gregory, 357n262 Aitchison, Matthew, 317n6, 318n12 Alberti, Leon Battista, 63 Alexander, Christopher: “A City Is Not a Tree,” 18, 227– 28, 243; concerns of the liberal critique of central design shared by, 1; on natural and artificial cities, distinction between, 227– 29; Notes on the Synthesis of Form, 226 Alloway, Lawrence: on American cities, 12, 217; on artists as consumers, 14; on the fine art/pop art continuum of the Independent Group, 92; Growth and Form exhibition, 77– 79, 236; ICA debates organized by, 122– 23; “image,” use of the term, 78; on mass consumption/

democracy as alternative to the hierarchy of cultural values of the elite, 126; on mass media as essential part of social communication system, 134; on Paolozzi’s artworks, 94; Pollock, admiration for the images of, 91 Amendola, Giovanni, 312n63 American cities: Alloway on, 12, 217; automobile-oriented urbanism of, conflicting attitudes on, 205; Banham on, 217, 219; deformation and automatic processes in, 169– 70; design vs. non-design debates over, 20– 21; East to West Coast, shifting focus from, 185; Kahn, Louis, and the fluid and amorphous city, 186– 89; man-made America: chaos or control?, 19– 20, 181– 85; man-made America: critique of, 171– 74; man-made America: defense of, 174– 77; Moore, Charles, and water, movement, and place, 189– 96; post– World War II expansion of, 169; Scott Brown, Denise, and urban mapping, active socioplastics, and the determinants of urban form, 201– 8; townscape and, persistence of, 208– 11; unplanned explosion of suburbanization, 177– 81; Venturi, Robert, and context, complexity, and the existing landscape, 196– 201 American industrial design: commerce and advertising in post– World War II age, 101– 6, 268; criticisms of, 113– 15 (see also borax; jazz; streamlining); European modern design and, contrasting philosophies of, 105– 6. See also design; industrial design(ers)

Anderson, Benjamin, 166 Anderson, Edgar: “The City Is a Garden,” 164 Anderson, Stanford, 18, 222; “Architecture and Tradition That Isn’t ‘Trad, Dad,’” 229– 30 anti-planning: spontaneous order and, 237; Webber’s theory of non-place and, 240 Appel, Karel, 80 Appelbaum, Binyamin, 282n58 Archigram: Amazing Archigram 4, 233; Living City exhibition, 232, 323n83; logic of consumer goods in a free market, embrace of, 232– 33; the market celebrated in the work of, 155; organicism in the work of, 165; Plug-In City, 233 Architectural Design: “An Alternative to the Garden City Idea” (Smithson and Smithson), 150; “Despite Popular Demand” (Landau, ed.), 251– 56; “Letter to America” (Smithson and Smithson), 151; “2000+” (McHale), 230 Architectural Forum: Architectural Review and, dynamic dialogue between the editors of, 150; “A City Is Not a Tree” (Alexander), 18, 227– 28; “Louis Kahn and the Living City,” 151, 350n102; “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas” (Scott Brown and Venturi), 205– 6; “What City Pattern?,” 142, 150 Architectural Research Group, 186 Architectural Review: Architectural Forum and, dynamic dialogue between the editors of, 150; “Architecture after 1960: Propositions” (Banham), 230; “Architecture after 1960: Stocktaking” (Banham), 219– 20, 229; “Architecture after 1960: The Gap-Town Planning” (Banham), 219; “Borax, or the ChromiumPlated Calf” (Kaufmann), 108– 10; campaign for the English picturesque tradition as a contribution to modernism, 129; “Cluster City— A New Shape for the Community” (Smithson and Smithson), 150; “COID: Progress Report: Industrial Design 1951,” 51– 52; “Counter-attack against Subtopia” (Nairn), 142, 177, 182; “The English Planning Tradition and the City,” 138;

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“Exterior Furnishings or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscapes” (Hastings), 8, 44, 138; “good taste” is lacking in American culture, opinion of editors that, 113; “Man Made America” (special issue), 141, 171– 76; “Mendelsohn” (Banham), 117– 20; Morris used to exemplify new empiricism, 68; new empiricism/new humanism, promotion (invention) of, 10, 61, 65; oppositional voices allowed to be published in, 69; “Outrage” (Nairn), 141– 42, 177, 182; Pevsner on “firm aesthetic guidance” lacking in England, 115; Pevsner’s appointment as assistant editor, 111; townscape, campaign for, 8, 44– 45, 138 architectural theory: expressionist, 120– 22; fundamental shift in, chaos and, 212– 13; inhabitants, advances based on a greater understanding of, 95– 96; modern (see modern architecture; modern design); movement and, Kahn’s conception of, 188; new empiricism, 10, 54, 63, 65, 68; new humanism, 10, 43, 57, 61, 63– 65, 81; non-design (see non-design); picturesque (see picturesque); planned and unplanned models of, 23; socialist realism, 10, 65, 68– 69; Swedish modernism, 61, 64; toward a new paradigm, 271– 74; townscape (see townscape); water and, 185– 89 architecture/architects: art/artists and, differences in approach between, 203– 4; Banham’s dismissal as model of design, 130; commercial vernacular, difficulty in acknowledging the validity of, 211; debates of the 1940s and 1950s, 8– 9, 63– 69; indeterminate and clip-on, 232– 39; modern (see modern architecture); monumental, 190; pop art and, 15– 16; product design and, link between, 120; traditionalists-vs.technologists dispute, 219, 229– 32; “urban blight,” support for plans to combat, 39 Arendt, Hannah, 10 Aron, Raymond, 4 Arp, Hans, 108 art brut, 11, 58, 81 art history: art brut as a challenge to

traditional, 58; Gombrich’s approach to, 54, 72, 75– 78; new, 75– 77 “as found” aesthetic/”object found” philosophy: “cult of ugliness” and the lack of objectivity of, 88; inspiration and technology, as a method of bridging the gap between, 91; the market and, 90; reusing images from previous work as employment of, 96; the Smithsons’ creation of, 84– 85; spontaneous order and, 88– 91 Ashby, Ross, 161 Asplund, Gunnar, 64 ATBAT (Atelier des Bàtisseurs), 338n139 ATBAT-Afrique, 95, 338n138 Athens Charter, 39, 268 Attlee, Clement, 247, 297n12 Austrian school of economics: central planning, denunciation of, 143– 46; collectivism, arguments against, 43; emergence in the United States, 137; equilibrium achieved by the market, belief in, 256; influence on Jacobs, question of, 317n1; spontaneous order, theory of, 7, 136– 37 (see also spontaneous order). See also Hayek, Friedrich August von; Mises, Ludwig von automobiles/automobile industry: consumer choice and, 233; freedom of action, associated with, 241; symbolic role of, individuals moving through the urban scene and the, 261 Ayer, A. J., 70 Banham, Reyner: Anderson’s criticism of scientific determinism of, 229– 30; Archigram and, 232– 33; Archigram and Price, reservations regarding, 237– 38; “Architecture after 1960: Propositions,” 230; “Architecture after 1960: Stocktaking,” 219– 20, 229; “Architecture after 1960: The Gap-Town Planning,” 219; “The Art of Doing Your Thing,” 258; “Borax, or the Thousand Horse-Power Mink,” 125; borax and the rethinking of modern design, 13, 101, 117– 22, 127; borax as popular art, conception of, 125– 27, 135; on the “businesslike methods of the Smithsons,” 100; catalog essay for Man, Machine and Motion exhibition, 217; “chaos of the

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market,” fascination with, 11, 13; “City as Scrambled Egg,” 217, 219– 20; “A Clip- On Architecture,” 233– 35, 238; commercial consumer products as pop art, argument for, 205, 207; critical scrutiny eluded by, 266; “Cycles of the Price-Mechanism,” 251; “debased” outlook toward American culture, persistence of, 185; decentralized cities in the United States, support for, 12– 13; democratic design process, interest in, 14; design and the logic of the market, borax and, 126– 27, 131– 35; design and the logic of the market, pop art and, 14– 16; diffuse city, vision of, 238– 39; “emotional-engineering-by-publicconsent,” concept of, 131, 239; “endless architecture,” clip-on/plug-in as, 233– 34; errors by/biases of, 264– 65, 316n117; false historicism, historians of the modern design movement accused of, 73– 74; forced obsolescence, acceptance/embrace of, 132; free-market capitalism, faith in, 135, 265; Giedion, criticism of, 77; “The Great Gizmo,” 236; Growth and Form exhibition, 77– 79, 236; Hayek and, parallel philosophies of, 265; “The History of the Immediate Future” 216– 17; Huxtable’s reference to, 212; “image,” on the usefulness of the word, 78; Independent Group, member of, 84; indeterminacy, interest in/argument for, 234– 38, 263; indeterminate philosophy of urban planning and design theory, articulation of, 221; Las Vegas, “undesigned formlessness” of, 211; Las Vegas in England, reason for the impossibility of, 211; Le Corbusier, criticism of, 127– 29, 219– 21; liberal critique of central design and the architectural/urban theories of, parallels between, 2; libertarian values behind non-interventionist approach of, 264; on Los Angeles, 245, 256– 65; Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 20, 213, 259, 261– 63; “Machine Aesthetic,” 127– 29, 313n73; Marxism, critique of, 54; Marxism and psychoanalysis, assessment of, 73; mass consumption/democracy as alternative to the hierarchy of cultural

Banham, Reyner (continued) values of the elite, 126; “Mendelsohn,” 117– 20, 123, 313n73; “The Missing Motel,” 239; mobility and indeterminacy in clip-on architecture, 234– 35; modern design, new brutalism and, 54– 58, 62– 63, 69; modern design, shift in criticism of, 13, 127– 29; on Moholy-Nagy, 215– 16; “Myths, Meanings, and Forms of Twentieth Century Architecture,” 265; the new art history, new brutalism and, 75; the new biology, architecture and, 216– 17; “The New Brutalism,” 10, 55, 73– 74, 78, 83, 96; new brutalism, brutality in, 81; new brutalism, three main characteristics of, 88; “New Brutalism Manifesto,” 70; new sensibility in art, new brutalism and, 80– 81; nondesign strategies, support for, 20– 21; “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom” (with Barker, Hall, and Price), 2, 21, 243– 51, 258; “On Abstract Theory,” 120; Parallel of Life and Art: Indication of a New Visual Order exhibition, commentary on, 94– 95; permissiveness in the use of habitat, transformation of modern design principles and, 96; the picturesque, rejection of, 258; Problemas de historia ambiental, 237; on the quarrel between “soft” and “hard” modernists, 65– 69; radical liberal ideas associated with non-plan, 258; “Revenge of the Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945– 1965,” 73; “Sant’Elia,” 313n73; Second Industrial Age, revolution in control mechanisms leading to, 268– 69; signs, fascination with, 260; Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 215– 16; “Toward a Pop Architecture,” 15; University College, London, doctoral degree pursued at, 70; urbanism of Las Vegas, characterization of, 209; “Vehicles of Desire,” 130– 32; on Venturi and Scott Brown’s work on Las Vegas, 207; “vitality” as a key word used by, 193; Webber’s impact on, 241; Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, review of, 185; working-class background claimed by, 201 Barker, Paul, 148; “Non-Plan: An

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Experiment in Freedom” (with Banham, Hall, and Price), 2, 21, 243– 51 Barr, Alfred H., 313n76 Bartley, William, 222 Baudelaire, Charles, 41 Baudot, Anatole de, 60 Bauer, Catherine, 143, 147 Bauhaus theory/the Bauhaus: “as found” approach distinguishing the Independent Group from, 88; Banham and, 13, 122, 221, 268; Gropius’s vision of, 267; Hastings’s denunciation of, 200; picturesque, need to accept, 139 Bawerk, Eugen Böhm von, 289n15 BBC: Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, 261 beauty: design as the essence of, 129; the picturesque and, distinction between, 208 Beer, Stafford, 161 Bel Geddes, Norman: Mendelsohn, meeting of, 122; on streamlining, 101– 2; streamlining, as part of first generation to incorporate, 106 Bergdoll, Barry, 359n1 Bergson, Henri: constitutive power of perception, Berkeley’s theory of immaterialism and, 306n160; determining the content of a negative idea, difficulty of, 23, 309n210; Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Two Sources of Morality and Religion), 302n100, 303n109; disorder as absence of order, need to analyze, 309n210; “image” as a concept in the British debates on aesthetics informed by, 78, 306n160; Popper influenced by, 302n100, 303n109; Price and, 344n44; Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour informed by the theories of, 19– 20 Berkeley, George, 306n160 Berlin, Isaiah: “Freedom and Its Betrayal,” 11; The Hedgehog and the Fox, 11, 23; “Historical Inevitability,” 72; historicism, aversion to, 70; lectures by, 70, 72; negative and positive liberty, conceptions of, 23, 287n142 Bernays, Edward: The Engineering of Consent, 131; Propaganda, 131 Berninger, Dominique, 186 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 161– 62

Beveridge, William, 28, 55 Black, Misha, 110 Blair, Tony, 270 Blake, Peter: design needed to control the “exploding metropolis,” belief in, 20; God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape, 19, 183– 84; Le Corbusier, esteem for, 219; “Louis Kahn and the Living City,” 350n102; Venturi’s criticism of, 200 Blau, Eve, 193 Blunt, Anthony, 301n78 Bodiansky, Vladimir, 95, 338n139 Boesiger, Willy, 197 bogus streamlining, 101, 113. See also borax borax: appearance of the term, 101, 117; Banham’s rethinking of modern design and, 117– 22; at the center of Banham’s theory of design, 129; criticism of/opposition to, 101, 103, 113– 16; in Europe, 101; forced obsolescence and, 103; ICA debates and, 122– 27; jazz style and, 113, 116; the market and, 131– 35; non-design, as an expression of, 134– 35; as popular art, 125– 27; streamlining and, 101 (see also streamlining) Borromini, Francesco, 197 Boudreau, James, 107 Bourdon, David, 206 Boyd, Robin: The Australian Ugliness, 183 Brandon-Jones, J., 67 Bretonne, Rétif de la, 349n95 Brewster, Kingman, 193 Britain: anti-sprawl urban policies in, 222; organicism in postwar design theory, 165; planning in the 1940s, popularity of, 28– 29; suburbs in, attack on, 177; Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, 51– 53, 247– 49. See also England brutalism, 10, 282n61. See also new brutalism built environment: American attitudes toward, 169; biased approach of historians toward, 357n248; British, 142; consumer choice and, 233; decentralized as alternative to European modern design, 211– 12; “diffuse city,” unplanned and the theory of, 217; evolutionary process, as part of, 217, 232; living organism, understood as, 217; new

367 | i n d e x

brutalism and, 78, 96, 100; non-design and, 16, 85, 100, 231, 239; non-designed, order in, 212; non-planning and, 270; planned and unplanned aspects of, 9, 206, 208– 9, 259; planned and unplanned parts of cities as, 20; planning of, 267; seen in new ways, 78; social processes, slow growth shaped by, 224– 26; Town and Country Planning Act and, 51; townscape and, 259; two models of, 227, 232; two overlapping systems, as the product of, 253; unplanned, Jacobs and, 143; unplanned/ undesigned aspects of, conflicting attitudes toward, 182, 200, 208; workingclass people and “ordinary” culture in, 203. See also American cities; cities Burckhardt, Jakob, 77 Burke, Edmund, 10, 45 Burri, Alberto, 81 Cage, John, 12 Caldwell, Bruce, 155, 163, 323– 24n88, 323n86 Calkins, Earnest Elmo, 105 Campbell, Kenneth, 301n78 Candillis, Georges, 338n139 Carnap, Rudolph, 27 Carnegie, Andrew, 169 Carter, E. J., 12 Carter, Peter, 64– 65 Casson, Hugh, 57, 66 Castle, Philip, 252, 355n211 central design: and authoritarianism/ totalitarianism, 7, 40; condemnation of the products of, 20; Council of Industrial Design established to provide, 111 (See also Council of Industrial Design); deficiency of the model of, 272; Hayek’s critique of, 25 (see also Hayek, Friedrich August von); Jacobs’s critique of, 17, 145 (see also Jacobs, Jane); liberal critique of/revolt against, 1– 8, 117, 137, 267– 68 (see also Hayek, Friedrich August von; Mises, Ludwig von; Popper, Karl); non-design as critique of, 24 (see also non-design); townscape as critique of, 19 (see also townscape). See also design; planning centralization: Beveridge report call for, 55; of knowledge, Hayek’s critique of,

centralization (continued) 134; in Los Angeles, lack of, 241; in a new economic framework, 273. See also decentralization central planning: all planning as, 21– 22; concentration of state power required for, 5, 36; design “contaminated” by, 85; discontent with across (and outside) the political spectrum, 145, 147, 168; enthusiasm for, 40, 47, 61 (see also Le Corbusier; Mumford, Lewis; Pevsner, Nikolaus); impossibility of, argument for, 36– 38; liberal denunciations/ critiques of, 6, 40, 42, 59, 143– 44, 214 (see also Hayek, Friedrich August von; Mises, Ludwig von; Popper, Karl); Marxism and, 54; non-planning paradigm emergent in opposition to, 148, 248, 250 (see also non-planning); political and economic consequences of, 4, 29, 31– 32, 38– 39, 321n52; of science, forgotten demand for, 279n26 Centre for Environmental Studies, 242 Centre International d’Études pour la Rénovation du Libéralisme (International Center of Studies for the Renovation of Liberalism), 4 chaos: fundamental shift in architectural theory and, 212– 13; older and younger generation perspectives on, 157– 58; of the unplanned city, architectural debates regarding, 262 Cherry, Bridget, 129 Chicago school of economics, 137, 292n64 Churchill, Winston, 10, 56– 57, 302n102 CIAM. See Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne cities: American (see American cities); anti-sprawl urban policies in Britain, 222; “cluster city” as a suburban typology, 150; complexities of, slow organic growth and, 224– 26; as complex living systems, 161– 63; diffuse, 238– 39, 249; Jacobs’s vision of, 146; Kahn’s conception of, 188– 89; low-density development (suburban sprawl) as the crisis of contemporary, 177; market urbanism and public life, attempts to balance, 269– 70; megalopolis as alternative to, 181; as a “natural” phenomenon, 226– 29; non-architect-designed environment of, 16– 21; non-place and 368 | i n d e x

the understanding of, 239– 41; nonplanning and, 239; organicism and traditional, 222– 32; as organisms, 254; planned and unplanned, Mumford’s critique of Jacobs’s position regarding, 156– 57; “plan” of modern design and “engineering type of mind” applied to, 39– 41 (see also Le Corbusier); post-city age, realities of, 242; postwar urban planning theory, Banham’s critique of, 219– 21; as processes, 159– 60; selforganizing, 251– 56; spontaneous order, conceptualized as, 212, 237; urban blight, planning to combat, 39. See also built environment; urban landscape Clark, Kenneth, 284n96 Cleeve Barr, A. W., 64, 66 Clinton, Bill, 270 Clune, Michael W., 154, 324n101 Cohn, Norman: The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, 349n94 collectivism/socialism: the Bauhaus and, 267; borax opposed to, 133 (see also borax); disinterest of contemporary radicals in, 210; Festival of Britain and, 57; golden age of, 267; individualism vs., 222, 232; liberalism/the market contrasted with, 3, 25, 166, 278n6, 316n120 (see also liberals/liberalism; market, the); moral hazard and, 272; new brutalism as a critique of, 70– 73 (see also new brutalism); non-design as a critique of, 1– 2 (see also nondesign); Pevsner’s support for, 46– 47, 61– 62, 129; planning and, 58, 247 (see also planning); positive liberty and, 23; post– World War II decline of, 9– 10; rejection/critiques of, 4– 8, 25– 29, 32, 43, 62, 70– 72, 166, 268, 279n22 (see also Hayek, Friedrich August von; Mises, Ludwig von; Popper, Karl); social development in the direction of, 28– 29, 31, 45– 46, 165; social engineering and, 59; spontaneous order vs., 245 (see also spontaneous order); Swedish, 10, 64; tyranny/totalitarianism as the result of, 25– 26, 38 (see also totalitarian[ism]); of William Morris, 65 (see also Morris, William) Collignon, Frederick C., 240

Collins, Peter, 217– 18, 226 Colquhoun, Alan, 64– 66 commerce. See market, the; sales communists/communism: British architects committed to, 57, 63– 64, 66– 69, 301n78– 79; Eastman, renounced by, 32; fascism, lumped together with, 2– 3, 7, 10, 39, 214, 341n3; Marxism and, critiques of, 70 (see also collectivism/ socialism); new brutalism vs., 57– 58, 63, 69; scientific utopianism of, 10; socialist realism and, 69 (see also socialist realism); Soviet, 63, 69, 301n81; William Morris revival and, 68– 69 Compagnie de l’Art Brut, 81 complexity: cybernetics and, 161– 62, 255; organized, 17, 137, 152, 155– 56, 160– 61; spontaneous order and, 155– 58; theory of, impact on Jacobs of, 136; unconscious rules in complex systems, 162– 63 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM): Athens Charter, 39, 268; demise of modern design and, 43, 215; “The Functional City” and the Soviet Union’s “The Socialist City,” intertwined relationship of, 267; high modernism, revolt against, 11; influence of, shift over time in, 12; Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS Group) as English wing of, 29; new brutalist opinion of, 97; promotion of agenda in the United States, first effort at, 39; Smithsons’ attack on the modernist principles of, 149; Team 10’s attack on the modernist principles of, 12, 150– 51 Congress for the New Urbanism, 359n1 Connolly, William E.: The Fragility of Things: Self- Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism, 271– 72 control: in art and culture, question of, 12; beyond conscious, art theory and, 85– 91; evasion of by borax, 113, 127; good design and, 115– 17, 130; need for in design/absence of in American industrial design, 112– 15; “total design” comes to mean “total control,” argument that, 209; totalitarian, 10, 25, 341n3 (see also totalitarian[ism]); urbanization in America as beyond, 181 369 | i n d e x

conurbation: “horrors” of, 183; massive, 181; motorized, 13, 16, 217; planned, 242 Cook, Peter, 232 Costa, Lucio, 13, 221 Coulon, René, 233 Council of Industrial Design: borax and, 116; as central control agency for design standards, 47, 112, 116; establishment of, 9, 111– 12; regulation of “jazz in design” by, call for, 115 Council of Visual Education, 47– 51 Cox, Oliver, 64– 68 Crosby, Theo, 95 Crossman, Richard, 242 cubism, 120, 267 Cullen, Gordon: aesthetic principle of townscape, explanation of, 141; The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It, illustrations for, 178, 180; Haskell and Jacobs, impact on, 142; Jacobs, collaboration with, 136; “Man Made America,” contributions to, 172; “Outrage,” illustrations for, 177; Townscape, 258; urban communication, collaboration with Scott Brown on, 204 cybernetics, 161– 62, 348n86 Dalton, Hugh, 111 Darley, Gillian, 331n21 Darwin, Charles, 43, 80, 221 decentralization: filling station/gas station as the agent of (Wright), 248, 351n128; free-market economy and, shift toward, 268; of information and wealth, 7; of knowledge, Hayek’s call for, 134; libertarian vision of the market as, 259– 60; in a new economic framework, 273; pop/market urbanism and, 16; post– World War II period marked by a shift toward, 268; of power, 210; thinking about, The Road to Serfdom and, 32; unplanned environments and, 13; urban, freedom of choice and, 248; A Walking City and radical, 236. See also centralization design: alternative philosophies of, 105– 6; American industrial designers vs. European modern designers, 101– 8; as an attitude everyone should have, Moholy-Nagy’s claim of, 135; authoritative attitudes toward, 112; Banham’s

design (continued) theory of based on economics, 129; beauty as the essence of, 129; central (see central design); as a “contaminated” term, 85; debates, the revival of liberalism in, 43– 46; development of in the twentieth century (see under modern design); economic and political critique of central, 2– 5; “emotionalengineering-by-public-consent,” concept of, 131; Hayek’s resistance to the word, 90; history-based method of, 196 (see also Venturi, Robert); importance of in mid-1940s Britain, 56; increased awareness of the post– World War II impact of liberalism and free market ideology on theories of, 269; Los Angeles existing outside the influence of, 261; Popper and Gombrich’s impact on, 214 (see also Gombrich, Ernst; Popper, Karl); reform in Britain and, 51; subjective vs. objective criteria for, 114; teleology and a new understanding of, 80; “total design” comes to mean “total control,” argument that, 209; totalitarian control and, Banham on, 221; toward a new paradigm, 271– 74; of the world, shifting focus and the new awareness of, 271. See also American industrial design; European modern design; industrial design(ers); modern design; non-design Design Research Unit, 110– 11 Desrochers, Pierre, 321n48 De Stijl, 267, 314n88 Deutscher, Isaac, 72 d’Harnoncourt, René, 110 Dick Lauder, Sir Thomas, 318n11 diffusion: aesthetic of, non-planning and, 242; Banham’s idea of, 236; freedom, association with, 273; of Freud’s ideas, 73 disorder: Bergson on, 309n210; as the consequence of not having a plan, 39; “cult of ugliness” and, 88; Expressionist, 122; an ideal of, 9; Los Angeles and, 258; order vs., 211; as an order we cannot see, 20; the planner’s mind and, 137; Pollock’s paintings as examples of, 91; as something to avoid, 39, 157, 170, 191; support for/supporters of, 11, 63, 100; theorizing, 94 370 | i n d e x

Doherty, Brian, 357n245 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 41 Drexler, Arthur: Modern Architecture USA exhibition, 239 Dreyfuss, Henry, 106 Dubuffet, Jean, 58, 80– 81 Dudok, Willem, 331n11 Dunan, Charles, 80 Dyckman, John W., 352n137 Eames, Charles, 110, 190 Eames, Ray, 110 Eastman, Max, 32, 143, 166, 328n174 Ebenstein, Alan, 294n87 Eckbo, Garrett, 357n262 Egbert, Donald Drew, 196– 97 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 85– 89, 94; “The Hidden Order of Art,” 18– 19 Eibink, A., 120 Eisner, Simon, 358n280 Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Manifesto (with Marx), 267 England: architectural generations, clash between and within the postwar, 57– 59, 64– 69; battle between communist and non-communist architects, 64– 69; good/modern design in, efforts to institutionalize, 110– 12; industrial art in, arguments for control over and maintenance of modern design in, 112– 15; Las Vegas in, the possibility of, 211; London, the “British character” of picturesque embedded in, 138– 39; modern design after World War II, 61– 63; new brutalism as a non-Marxist design movement in (see new brutalism); picturesque tradition in (see picturesque); post– World War II conflict between social reform/modern design and individual liberty/non-design, 46– 51. See also Britain Entenza, John, 358n262 environment, the: crisis of and the need for a new model of design, 274; impact of non-planning on, 270– 71 Erten, Erdem, 281n44 European modern design: American commercial model of design as alternative to, 210– 11; American industrial design and, contrasting philosophies of, 105– 6; central control, association with, 14; socialist and anti-free-market

foundations of, 101. See also design; modern design Evans, Walker, 172 evolution: borax styling and, 129, 133; British traditions/virtues and Hayek’s view of, 44, 90; of cities, Jacobs’s view of, 163; of cities, the market and, 53, 230, 239; Darwin’s theory of, 163, 221; of a design process, 197; the invisible hand and, 255; of social institutions, Popper’s understanding of, 215; of social institutions as organisms, 215– 16; of social processes, Hayek’s view of, 44– 45; spontaneity and, 7, 232, 255, 261 (see also spontaneous order); of technology, 219; Thompson’s critique of, 79, 221; traditional cities and, Gombrich’s view of, 226, 232; traditional cities and, Le Corbusier’s view of, 40; two kinds of, 216– 17; urban, 53, 221, 239– 40, 255, 261 expressionism, 117– 22 Farr, Michael: borax, criticism of, 114; Design in British Industries: A Mid- Century Survey, 112– 14; editor of Design, appointment as, 112 fascism: capitalism/unplanned economic order as responsible for, 5, 28; central design by the right as, 7; Gentile/ Mussolini and, 312n63; Lippmann’s denunciation of, 2– 3; planning/socialism, as a consequence of, 29, 34; in post– World War I Vienna, 7; totalitarianism, as a variant of, 39 (see also totalitarian[ism]). See also Nazism Ferguson, Adam, 44 Festival of Britain, 10, 57, 62, 77, 116 Feyerabend, Paul Karl, 341n11 Fiedler, Leslie, 15, 125 Finer, Herman: Road to Reaction, 288n9 Flexner, Abraham, 180 Florence, Philip Sargant, 111 Foerster, Heinz von, 161, 348n86 Ford Foundation, 242 Forshaw, John Henry, 290n27 Forsskal, Petrus, 218 Forty, Adrian, 320n42 Frampton, Kenneth, 22 Francé, Raoul, 342n17 Franks, Ben, 249– 50, 271 free market. See market, the 371 | i n d e x

Freud, Sigmund, 27, 73 Friedman, Milton: Capitalism and Freedom, 250– 51; as Chicago school economic theorist, 137; Mont Pelerin Society, member of, 4, 39 Fuller, Buckminster, 230, 259 futurism, 118– 20, 122 Games, Stephen, 305n141 Gans, Herbert: The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community, 178, 203, 246– 47, 339n154; “Planning for People, Not Buildings,” 242 garden city ideas/movement: critique of the legacy of, 177; founding of, 143; Jacobs’s dismissal of, 143, 145– 46, 158 Gasset, José Ortega y: The Revolt of the Masses, 19, 190 Gebhard, David, 264– 65 Geddes, Patrick: Hayek’s dismissal of, 6, 17, 53, 137; on “horrors” of conurbation, 183; Jacobs’s indictment of, 143; Mumford’s gratitude for stimulus by, 330n4; observational technique pioneered by, 150; relationship between urban form and social order as fundamental for, 170 General Motors, Thought Starter series, 34 Gentile, Giovanni, 312n63 Georgiadis, Sokratis, 41 Giedion, Sigfried: Architecture, You and Me, 77; Banham, agreement and disagreement with, 56, 77; biological/ organic unity as a space-time continuum, understanding of, 215; borax, opposition to, 101, 103; criticism, subjected to scathing, 266; decentralized/ unplanned cities, horror at, 220; design needed to control the “exploding metropolis,” belief in, 20; dictatorship of the market, condemnation of, 7, 56, 135; expressionist architecture, dismissal of, 120, 122; history, conception of, 76– 77; industrialization and the “new” architecture, relationship of, 41; Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History, 41– 43, 77, 101– 5, 130, 290n31; Moholy-Nagy’s conception of space-time unity as influential for, 342n18; “On the Illusion

Giedion, Sigfried (continued) of Progress,” 42; redesign of objects to stimulate emotional sales, 131; Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 76– 77, 120, 196; on streamlining, 103 Gill, Alison, 81. See also Smithson, Alison; Smithson, Alison and Peter Goebbels, Joseph, 47 Goldberger, Paul, 153 Goldfinger, Ernő, 12 Golec, Michael, 206 Gombrich, Ernst: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 75; art history, approach to, 72; on Bartley’s presentation, 222; “The Beauty of Old Towns,” 224– 26; concerns of the liberal critique of central design shared by, 1; conservative aesthetics, hypothesis of, 225– 26; Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser (A Little History of the World), 76; feedback loop, notion of, 326n151; historicism, rejection of, 70, 72, 285n113, 331n11; Marxism, critique of, 54, 70; “Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form,” 77– 78; Mont Pelerin Society, member of, 4; new art history, development of, 75– 76; Popper and, 7, 71– 72, 75– 76; style, conception of, 79; urbanism, theory of, 18; the “willto-form,” artistic development and, 331n11 Goodman, Paul: People or Personnel: Decentralization and the Mixed System, 259 Goodman, Robert, 168; After the Planners, 22 Goodrich, Lloyd, 171 Goodway, David, 166 Gottmann, Jean: Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, 173, 178, 180– 81 Gray, Milner, 111 Great Recession, 272 Greenspan, Alan, 272, 360n23 Gregory-Jones, David, 301n78 Gropius, Walter, 69, 196, 266– 67 Gruen, Victor, 221 Hacohen, Malachi Haim, 74 Halévy, Léon, 40 Hall, Peter: London 2000, 241; “Non-Plan: 372 | i n d e x

An Experiment in Freedom” (with Barker, Banham, and Price), 2, 21, 243– 51; private sector insignificance assumed by the Town and Country Planning Act, 249; Webber and, 241– 42 Hall, Stuart, 300n57 Hamilton, Richard: Growth and Form exhibition, 77– 79, 92, 236; Independent Group, member of, 84; Man, Machine and Motion exhibition, 217; new brutalism and, 66 Hanauer, Nick, 273 Hancock, John L., 169 Häring, Hugo, 318n11 Harris, Max, 183 Haskell, Douglas, 141– 42, 174– 77, 334n62 Hastings, Hubert de Cronin: The Alternative Society: Software for the NineteenEighties, 356n236; English liberty and French tyranny, contrast of, 138; “Exterior Furnishings or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscapes,” 8, 44, 138; The Italian Townscape (as Ivor de Wolfe), 258, 356n236; Jacobs’s book, review of, 147– 48; picturesque movement, promotion of, 44– 45; picturesque offensive, meaning of, 261; radical liberalism/individualism in townscape and non-design, 258– 60; the radical planner, surrealist picture produced by, 195– 96; “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy Founded on the True Rock of Sir Uvedale Price,” 9, 139– 40, 257– 58; townscape, promotion of, 1, 8– 9, 45, 138– 41, 200, 208, 257– 58, 268; unity (of designed and non-designed parts of the city) as higher organization, idea of, 259– 60 Hauser, Arnold, 285n113 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 138, 243 Hayek, Friedrich August von: “abuse of reason” project, 42, 59; “Analogy Symposium” organized by, 162; arrival at the University of Chicago, 137; biological analogies, use of, 159, 164; British people, distinctive virtues of, 90; Burke, admiration of, 45; central control/collectivism/design/planning, critique of, 5– 7, 17, 25– 26, 28– 31, 38– 39, 59– 60, 70, 100, 130, 137, 145, 160, 209; centralization of knowledge, critique

of, 134; Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibility of Socialism, edited by, 4; common knowledge of the consumer, 36, 38; The Constitution of Liberty, 53, 152, 155– 56, 245, 288n4; counterculture groups, impact on, 210; The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, 59, 144, 155, 160; cybernetics and market processes, relationship of, 161– 62; “Degrees of Explanation,” 155; “design,” resistance to the word, 90; engineer/ planner, concerns regarding the single mind of, 40– 41, 59– 60; equilibrium achieved by the market, belief in, 256; evolutionary epistemology of, 163; evolution of civilization, philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment and, 44; historicism, rejection of, 70, 72, 74; “The Historicism of the Scientistic Approach,” 74; homeostasis, understanding the free market based on, 158; humility required by governance in the face of complexity, 262; “Individualism: True and False,” 38– 39; individualism, two types of, 45; Individualism and Economic Order, 144; individual liberty as key component in the philosophy of, 210; informal aesthetic as a basis for attacking planned order, 81; intellectual background of, 27; Jacobs and, similarity of core principles of, 148– 49, 152– 53; Land Planning Law in a Free Society: A Study of the British Town and Country Planning Act (Haar), review of, 51– 52; the left’s lack of effective response to, 272; “Liberal Way of Planning, The,” 21– 22; liberty and organization, relationship of, 250; Lippmann’s acknowledgement of, 4; markets, characteristics of, 30, 135, 251, 254– 55; Mises’s influence on, 27, 165; Mont Pelerin Society, member of, 4, 39; multidisciplinary abilities of, 161; non-design articulated as a critique of collectivism by, 1, 29– 30; non-planners and, shared positions of, 250; organic/piecemeal approach promoted by, 209; Pevsner and, 46– 47, 62; on planners, 353n173; planning, question of who is to do the, 248, 328n174; The Political Idea of the Rule of Law, 155; Popper, support 373 | i n d e x

for, 7; pricing as communication in the market/mechanism of the market, 132– 33; “The Religion of the Engineers: Enfantin and the Saint-Simonians,” 40– 41; “The Results of Human Action but Not of Human Design,” 212; The Road to Serfdom, 5– 6, 25, 28, 39, 47, 56, 70– 71, 144, 250, 268; The Road to Serfdom, popularized renditions of, 32– 35; The Road to Serfdom, reception of, 31– 32; Saint-Simon, critique of, 6, 160; scientism, objection to, 60; “Scientism and the Study of Society,” 59; The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology, 326n151; social development, historical direction of, 45– 46, 100; social order from individual action without design, need for theoretical explanation of, 25; spontaneous order and the philosophy of non-design, argument for, 1– 2, 6– 7, 13, 19, 23, 25, 30, 36– 38, 43, 70, 72, 89– 90, 93– 94, 137, 139, 145, 151– 52, 159, 210, 225– 26, 228, 240, 245; the state, limited obligations of, 99; the state as a means of central control/planning, opposition to, 10, 116– 17; Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, 210, 255; teleology, denunciation of, 221; “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” 17, 152, 162, 255; town planning, critique of, 51– 53; “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” 36, 89, 134, 145, 153; Walter Lippmann Colloquium, attendance at, 4; Weaver’s influence on, 155, 162 Haywood, P. R., 242 Hazlitt, Henry, 166 Heckscher, August, 200 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 6– 7, 11, 70 Hénard, Eugène, 188 Henderson, Judith, 203 Henderson, Nigel: Growth and Form exhibition, role in inspiring, 78; new brutalism and, 66; Parallel of Life and Art: Indication of a New Visual Order exhibition, 92– 95; “Patio and Pavilion” entry to This Is Tomorrow exhibition, 92, 95– 96, 98– 99; photographs of life in the streets, 11, 149, 298n23 Herbener, Jeffrey M., 283n82 Herron, Ron: Life and Art: Indication of a

Herron, Ron (continued) New Visual Order exhibition, commentary on, 92; A Walking City, proposal for, 235– 36 Herwitz, Daniel, 283n74 Hessen, Robert, 166 Hetherington, Peter, 354n192 Higgott, Andrew, 29 historicism: false, Banham’s conception of, 73– 74; Gombrich’s rejection of, 70, 72, 285n113, 331n11; Hayek’s rejection of, 70, 72, 74; Kahn’s attempt to distinguish his ideas from, 198; meanings of, 71, 305n140– 41; Pevsner’s, 76, 305n140– 41; Plato, Marx, and Hegel associated with, 7– 8, 71, 73; Popper’s rejection of, 18, 70– 75, 78, 214; postmodern, 266, 269 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 172, 197, 313n76 homeostasis, 158 Hoppe, Hans-Herman, 283n82 Hospers, Gert-Jan, 330n187 Howard, Ebenezer, 143, 145– 46, 148, 158 Howe, George, 334n65 Howell, William, 64– 65 Hudnut, Joseph, 106– 7 Humboldt, Alexander von, 140 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 140 Hume, David, 6, 215 Hunstanton School, 91 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 212 Ibelings, Hans, 331n11 Independent Group: advertisements, interest in, 131, 134; America as an inspiration for, 129; “as found” aesthetic important to, 85, 88; “chaos of the market,” fascination with, 13; commercial consumer products as pop art, argument for, 205; critique of class in their reassessment of culture, role of, 201; debates at the ICA organized by, 122– 27; ethics of permissiveness and inclusion as principle aesthetic for, 94; Festival of Britain, contribution to, 77; free-market capitalism, embrace of, 99; Growth and Form exhibition, 77– 79, 92, 236; Institute of Contemporary Art, connection with, 54; modern design, criticism of, 146; “Non Art Not Now,” 23; non-control as a design 374 | i n d e x

methodology, 87; origins of, 83– 84; Parallel of Life and Art: Indication of a New Visual Order exhibition, 92– 95; “Patio and Pavilion” entry to This Is Tomorrow exhibition, 92, 95– 96, 98– 99; relationship between design and rational order, reconsideration of, 11– 12; teleological explanations, rejection of, 80, 221 indeterminacy: clip-on architecture and, 232– 39; non-design and, 214; organicism, the traditional city and, 222– 32; the self-organizing city and, 251 individualism: the inhabitant, shift of concern in architectural theory to, 95; of Southern California, 190. See also liberals/liberalism; libertarianism industrial design(ers): alternative conceptions of, the market and, 105– 6; as communication-in-formation, 132; influence of, concerns about, 103, 105; sales and, concerns regarding, 108– 10 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA): Growth and Form exhibition at, 77– 79, 236; as Independent Group meeting place, 84; Parallel of Life and Art: Indication of a New Visual Order exhibition, 92– 95 international style, 54 invisible hand, 25– 26, 38, 162, 255. See also spontaneous order Ivain, Gilles (Ivan Chtcheglov), 315n113 Izenour, Steven: design studio (with Venturi and Scott Brown), 208; Learning from Las Vegas (with Venturi and Scott Brown), 20, 194, 209, 213, 261 Jacobs, Jane: Archigram galvanized by, 232; Austrian school influence on, question of, 317n1; Austrian school liberalism and, 144– 46, 148, 152– 54; Banham’s dismissal of, 264; biological analogies, use of, 156, 159, 164– 65; cities, understanding of, 149, 156– 61, 163– 64, 167, 357n261; commerce and free choice, concern with the amalgamation of, 154– 55; Constitutional Chaff, 144; critical scrutiny eluded by, 266; critique of city planning, liberal principles and, 143– 49; The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 17, 22, 136– 37, 142– 43, 147, 152– 54, 156, 162, 164, 167– 68, 178, 185, 208, 248– 49; “Downtown

Is for People,” 142, 146, 156, 178; The Economy of Cities, 167; evolutionary epistemology of, 163; government, opinion of, 329n182; homeostasis, understanding of cities as organisms based on, 158; influence of, 168, 205; on Kahn’s approach, 188; liberal critique of central design and the architectural/ urban theories of, parallels between, 1; libertarianism and, 167– 68; “Louis Kahn and the Living City” (with McQuade), 350n102, 357n261; many variables “interrelated into an organic whole,” cities as, 140; Nairn and Cullen, impact of, 142; organic/piecemeal approach promoted by, 209; organized complexity/spontaneous order, conception of, 17, 151– 53, 156, 158, 160– 61, 229; planning, critique of, 136– 37, 167, 221; post– World War II developments in urban planning theory, lack of acknowledgement of, 149– 51; Rockefeller Foundation grant received by, 161; role of streets and sidewalks in cities, 149; townscape approach, partial appropriation of, 208; vital city life, view of, 227; “vitality” as a key word used by, 193; Weaver, influence of, 17, 156, 158 James, Henry: The American Scene, 171, 173 jazz: perils of, 115– 16; Pevsner’s understanding of, 115; rejection of, advocacy of modern design and, 113; streamlining/borax and, 108, 113, 115 Jencks, Charles, 266, 349n95 Johnson, Philip, 197, 313n76 Jones, David Gregory, 67 Kahn, Albert, 15 Kahn, Louis: conception of the American city, flows and complexity in, 185– 89; context and form, conceptions of, 197– 98; Le Corbusier, impact of, 186; Moore, impact on, 189, 192, 197– 98, 335n82; Team 10 and the Smithsons on the work of, 151; “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia,” 186– 88; Venturi, impact on, 189, 197– 98 Kallmann, Gerhard, 172, 219 Kauffman, Stuart: The Origins of Order: Self- Organization and Complexity in Evolution, 348n88 375 | i n d e x

Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr.: borax, opposition to, 101; “Borax, or the ChromiumPlated Calf,” 108– 10; borax and modern design, edgy relationship of, 117; “Industrial Design, a New Profession” conference, participation at, 106, 108 Kawazoe, Noboru, 96 Keynes, John Maynard, 31, 290n34 Khrushchev, Nikita, 63 Kirzner, Israel, 166 Kite, Stephen, 64 Kitnick, Alex, 94 Knight, Frank, 4 Koestler, Arthur, 71 Koetter, Fred: Anderson, meeting of, 230; Collage City (with Rowe), 23, 279n14; total design and total non-design as equally total, 277n1 Koolhaas, Rem: market urbanism and public life, attempts to balance, 269– 70; surf-ride, analogy of used by, 349n91; “What Ever Happened to Urbanism?,” 270 Korn, Arthur, 202, 290n26 Kropotkin, Peter: Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, 294n95 Kuntz, Paul Grimley, 18 Labatut, Jean, 196, 335n82 Labour Party (UK): freedom and “planned order,” vision of, 247; Labour Party Election Manifesto (1945), 56, 268; The Old World and the New Society, 5, 28, 247; welfare state and “planned order,” vision of, 55, 59 Landau, Royston: “Context for Decision Making” symposium organized by, 222– 23; “Despite Popular Demand,” editor of, 251– 56; New Directions in British Architecture, 237 Lasdun, Denys, 91 Laski, Harold, 5 Las Vegas Beautification Committee, 209 Laurence, Peter, 144, 156, 329n181 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret): ATBAT (Atelier des Bàtisseurs), founding of, 338n139; Banham’s criticism of, 127– 30, 219– 21; criticism, subjected to scathing, 266; “The Engineer’s Aesthetic and Architecture,” 60; The Four Routes, 186; garden city ideas, adoption of, 143;

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) (continued) “hard” modernists and, 65; Hastings’ review of Jacobs’s book, mentioned in, 148; Jacobs’s critique of, 145– 46, 158; Kahn, influence on, 186; Lippmann’s warning regarding, 3; Modulor, 219; Ozenfant and, collaboration of, 315n111; purism of, Banham’s argument distinguished from, 122; the Smithsons’ critique of, 150; Unité d’Habitation project in Marseille, 64– 65, 338n139; Urbanisme, 188; urban theory, influence on, 39– 40; Venturi and Scott Brown distinguished from the position of, 206; La Ville Radieuse: Eléments d’une doctrine d’urbanisme pour l’équipment de la civilisation machiniste (The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to Be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization), 39– 40; water and patterns of movement, study of, 186 Lefebvre, Henri, 81, 291n47 Léger, Fernand: “Nine Points on Monumentality,” 43 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 303n104 L’ésprit nouveau, 122 Lewis, Whitfield, 66 liberals/liberalism: central authority, critique of, 1; central design, critique of, 137; in the design debates of the 1940s, 8– 9, 43– 46; design theory and, twenty-first-century awareness of the relationship between, 269; equilibrium achieved by the market, belief in, 256; the individual defended by, 71; liberty, understanding of, 2; neoliberalism, 270, 272– 73; non-planning and, 250; philosophy of non-design and, parallels between, 1– 2; regulating power of the state, key target of, 117; townscape and, 8– 9, 257– 58; welfare state, critique of, 5– 8. See also Hayek, Friedrich August von libertarianism: of Archigram, 232– 33; Banham and, 264; extreme left and extreme right, distinguishing between, 166– 67; Jacobs and, 167– 68; in Los Angeles, 257, 264, 286n132; Mises and, 166; nomadism and Herron’s A Walking City, 236; postwar, classical liberalism 376 | i n d e x

and, 257– 58; Rothbard and the rise of, 258– 59; transformation of modern design principles and, 96. See also individualism Liggio, Leonard, 166 Lippmann, Walter: free society with social control through laws rather than commands, work on conceiving, 38; An Inquiry into the Principles of a Good Society, 2– 5, 24; market assumptions of, questioning of, 273 Liu, Henry, 203 living city: Archigram exhibition on, 232; Jacobs’s conception of, 151, 165, 323n83; Kahn’s conception of, 188, 350n102; notion of, 357n261; Wright’s organic approach espoused in The Living City, 323n83 Llewelyn-Davies, Richard, 241– 43, 348n84 local knowledge, 153 Loewy, Raymond, 106, 122 Löfgren, Lars, 161 London County Council (LCC): divisions/ confrontations between the architects in the Housing Division, 64, 66– 67, 69 Loos, Adolf, 27 Los Angeles: Alloway on, 12; Banham, aspects ignored by, 358n280; Banham’s embrace of, 20– 21, 213, 245, 256– 65; Brown in, 203– 4; car-based urbanism of, 169, 205, 241; emphasis on function over form, exemplar of, 241; as indeterminate form, 256– 65; international architectural debates, at the center of, 22, 169; libertarianism of, 257, 264, 286n132; low-density development/urban sprawl, criticism of, 177, 205; lowdensity development/urban sprawl, support for, 18; Moore on the vitality of, 190, 193; non-plan phenomenon of, 245; Ruscha’s photo books of, 205– 6, 335n90; shift in focus of architects/ urbanists to, 185; as unplanned/ unplannable, 12, 20– 21, 169, 358n278; Webber’s embrace of, 241– 42 Lotka, Alfred J., 343n26 Louis XIV (king of France), 3, 40 Ludekens, Fred, 32 Lurçat, André, 108 Lynch, Kevin: control, debate on, 12; The Image of the City, 183, 339n160 Lynn, Jack, 235

Macarthur, John, 318n12 Macfarlane Burnet, Frank, 216 Mandeville, Bernard, 6 Mannheim, Karl, 60 market, the: as an as-found functioning system, 90; borax and, 105, 131– 35; concerns about, the stock market crash of 1929 and, 28; cultural life and, 154; cybernetics and, 162; dictatorship of vs. anti-dictatorial system, clashing visions of, 135; embrace of by new brutalism and the Independent Group, 99; equilibrium, ability to maintain, 254; freedom provided by, young architects’ and critics’ belief in, 210, 213; Hayek’s vision of the, 26, 89; ideology of and design theory, twenty-firstcentury awareness of, 269; imperfect self-regulating mechanism, as one type of, 272; industrial design and, 105– 6; the invisible hand that regulates, 25– 26, 162; misguided myths of the, 272– 73; the non-plan and, 248– 51; nonplanning in cities and, 239; personal freedom equated with, 245; political freedom as synonymous with market freedom, assumption of, 251; spontaneous order resulting from (see spontaneous order); standards of design and, Banham’s linkage of, 126– 27, 130– 31; as a value-free/neutral mechanism, belief in, 13– 14, 30, 134, 145. See also sales Marschak, Jacob, 31 Marshall, Peter, 329n178 Marshall, Tom, 356n245 Martin, Leslie, 64 Marx, Karl: Banham’s assessment of, 73; belief in progress behind scientific solutions of, 42; The Communist Manifesto (with Engels), 267; criticism/ rejection of, 6– 8, 70; history of rationalism and progress, place in the, 43; legacy of, 3; Morris influenced by, 15 Mason, George, 138 Massey, Anne, 11, 61, 80, 221 mass media, 124– 25 Mathews, Stanley, 344n44 Maturana, Humberto, 348n86 Mau, Bruce, 271 Maxwell, Robert, 66 May, Ernst, 290n26 McConnell, Philip, 106– 7 377 | i n d e x

McCulloch, Warren, 155, 161 McDonough, William, 270– 71 McHale, John: “2000+,” 230; The Future of the Future, 230; Growth and Form exhibition, 77– 79, 236; Independent Group, member of, 84; Independent Group seminars convened by, 122– 23; interactive design work of, 14 McKie, David, 331n21 McLuhan, Marshall, 124 McQuade, Walter: on Kahn’s dynamic approach, 188; “Louis Kahn and the Living City” (with Jacobs), 350n102, 357n261 Medawar, Peter, 216– 17, 221, 226 megalopolis, 181 Meier, Richard H.: A Communications Theory of Urban Growth, 162 Mellon, Paul, 178 Mendelsohn, Erich: Banham’s fascination with the work of, 117– 22; Einsteinturm (Einstein Tower), 120– 22; Pevsner on streamlining and, 117; Schocken Department Store, 122, 124; visit to the United States, 122 Menger, Carl, 27, 289n15 Menin, Sarah, 64 Merchandise Mart (Chicago): Museum of Modern Art, collaboration with, 110 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 197 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 200, 206 Mill, John Stuart, 318– 19n18 Milton Keynes project, 242– 43, 246 Milyutin, Nikolay Alexandrovich, 290n26 Mirowski, Philip, 161 Mises, Ludwig von: arrival at New York University, 137; common man as consumer, the market and, 36– 37; democracy, understanding of, 42– 43; “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” 4; free-market libertarianism of, 144, 259; Hayek, influence on, 27, 165; Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 13, 144, 165; intellectual impact of, 165– 67; Jacobs and, similarity of core principles of, 148– 49; Liberalismus, 165; Lippmann’s acknowledgement of, 4; Mont Pelerin Society, member of, 4; non-design articulated as a critique of collectivism by, 1; Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, 7; Planned Chaos,

Mises, Ludwig von (continued) 13, 42– 43; Planning for Freedom, 144, 165– 66; Privatseminars held by, 27; production decisions by compulsion or the market, question of, 15; socialism, challenge to the basic tenets of, 10, 27, 43; Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, 165; on spontaneous order, the free market and democratic society as, 7, 13; Walter Lippmann Colloquium, attendance at, 4 Mitchell, William C., 210 Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS Group), Plan for London, 29 modern architecture: Banham’s critique of, 127– 28; Egbert’s perspective on, 196– 97; existing environment, commitment to change rather than enhance, 208; Kahn’s study of, 186; Le Corbusier as a pioneer of (see Le Corbusier); non-design as a critique of, 184 (see also non-design); “pompous formalist patterns” of anti-city, 178; purism/ puritanism of, 113; the Smithsons’ critique of, 149; Team 10’s critique of, 150; Venturi’s critique of, 199– 201 modern design: archaic environments and the crises of, 230– 32; contested conceptions of, sequence of, 54; control over principles of, arguments for, 112– 15; demise of, beginnings of, 43; development of in the twentieth century, three periods of, 266– 69, 272; discontent with, mechanization and, 41– 43; in England, efforts to institutionalize, 110– 12; in England after World War II, 61– 63; “Good Design” exhibitions of home furnishings, 110; international style, 54; new brutalism (see new brutalism); new empiricism, 54; non-design and the free market vs. the state and, 46– 51; radical alteration of, 212; radical liberal/libertarian ideas and the transformation of, 96; rethinking of by Banham, borax and, 117– 22. See also design; European modern design modernism: Crosby’s description of the state of disrepair of, 95; “soft” as a new model for, 65 Moholy-Nagy, László: artificial

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obsolescence in America, 125; Banham on, 215– 16; biological/organic principle applied to design, 215; borax and streamlining, opposition to, 101– 3; “Constructivism and the Proletariat,” 284n88; design as an attitude everyone should have, 135; “Dynamic of the Metropolis,” 215; Francé, influence of, 342n17; “Industrial Design, a New Profession” conference, participation at, 106– 7; space-time unity, conception of, 342n18; Vision in Motion, 101– 3; Von Material zu Architektur, 216 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl: Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture, 16, 230 Molella, Arthur, 77 Mont Pelerin Society, 4– 5, 39 Moore, Charles: critical scrutiny eluded by, 266; “Doctrine of Immaculate Collision,” 195; Kahn’s ideas, impact of, 189, 192, 197– 98; liberal critique of central design and the architectural/ urban theories of, parallels between, 1; “place” as equivalent to Venturi’s “context,” 197; “Plug It In, Rameses, and See If It Lights Up. Because We Aren’t Going to Keep It Unless It Works,” 193– 95; townscape and non-design strategies, argument for, 20; “vitality” as a key word used by, 193; water, movement, and place, 189– 96; works built by nonarchitects, fascination with, 21, 193, 260; “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” 19, 190– 92 Morison, Stanley, 67 Morris, W. F.: The Future Citizen and His Surroundings: Evidence to Sir Cyril Norwood’s Committee on Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools, 49– 50 Morris, William: “Art and Socialism,” 15; Pevsner’s fascination with, 46; social philosophy of art of, 267; “soft” modernists and revival of, 65, 68– 69 Mumford, Eric, 68 Mumford, Lewis: The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, 178; The Condition of Man, 157, 170; conscious planning as the objective, 267; design needed to control the “exploding metropolis,” belief in,

20; “drama of disintegration” in American cities, 169– 70, 184; garden city ideas, adoption of, 143; Geddes, gratitude for stimulus of, 330n4; Hayek concerned about the influence of scientific planning in the work of, 59; Hayek’s dismissal of, 7, 17, 53, 137; Jacobs’s critique, reaction to, 147, 156– 57; mind and form, the city and the relationship of, 263; on the popularity of Jacobs’s book, 152 Museum of Modern Art (New York): American industrial designers vs. European modern designers at “Industrial Design, a New Profession” conference, 106– 8; Architecture without Architects exhibition, 226; as central control agency for design standards, 112; Merchandise Mart, collaboration with, 110; Modern Architecture USA exhibition, 239 Mussolini, Benito, 312n63 Nairn, Ian: The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It, illustrations for, 178, 180; Haskell and Jacobs, impact on, 142; Jacobs, collaboration with, 136; “subtopia,” condemnation of, 141, 177, 193 Napoleon III (emperor of France), 243 National Resources Planning Board, 240 Nazism: catastrophe/horrors in Germany from, 59, 85; central control by government as characteristic of, 10; centralized state planning in Germany under, 28; democracy as the opposite of, 43; dictatorship and repression of dissenters as characteristics of the Soviets rather than, 7; socialism, as a consequence of, 28– 29. See also fascism; totalitarian(ism) neoliberalism, 270, 272– 73 Neurath, Otto, 6, 27, 59 Neutra, Richard, 357n262 new art history, 75– 77 new brutalism: aesthetics of, 80– 81; “asfound” aesthetic important to, 85; brutality in, 81; “cult of ugliness” and, 208; ethics of permissiveness and inclusion as principle aesthetic for, 94;

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exhibitions as exemplars of, 91– 95; first target of, 10; formative years of, 54– 59, 66; free-market capitalism, embrace of, 99; “image” as a central concept in the philosophy of, 78; main characteristics outlined by Banham, 88; Marxist aesthetic, rejection of, 63– 70; modernism, distinguished from, 58; the new art history and, 75; the new critique and, 73– 75; the new ethic of, 95– 100; new humanism and, clash between, 63; non-control as a design methodology, 87– 88; political nature of, 57– 58; principles of, 11; working class/popular culture embraced by, 201– 2. See also Banham, Reyner new empiricism, 10, 54, 63, 65, 68 new humanism, 10, 43, 57, 61, 63– 65, 81 “new towns,” 112 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41 non-design: in archaic environments, 231– 32; artwork and, 85– 91; borax as an expression of, 134– 35; chaos of the American scene and, 239; common knowledge and, 36– 38; complex order associated with, 19– 20 (see also spontaneous order); control, absence of, 21– 22; design, as a fundamental critique of, 1, 8; equilibrium achieved by “biological systems,” belief in, 256; Haskell’s support of, 176; in Hayek’s argument, 26, 30– 31; ideological meaning in, 23; indeterminacy and, 214; liberal critique of collectivism and, parallels between, 1– 4; market forces and, experimentation with, 249; modern design and the state vs. the free market and, 46– 51; Moore’s analysis of Los Angeles and interest in, 193; non-planning paradigm and, 2, 22, 137; recognition of, 22– 23; townscape and, 137– 42; urbanism and American cities in the 1960s, significance for, 16– 21; urbanism in Las Vegas as example of, 207; urbanization of American cities as, criticism and praise for, 181– 85 (see also American cities); vitality and the spontaneity of, 193; younger generation embrace of, 210– 12. See also Banham, Reyner; Jacobs, Jane; Moore, Charles; Scott Brown, Denise; Venturi, Robert

non-Marxism: Banham’s use of the term, 58; design movement, 54; new brutalism and, 10, 57– 58; theorists, 81 (see also Hayek, Friedrich August von; Popper, Karl); younger generation at the London County Council as, 57 non-place, 239– 41 non-planning: emergence of, 148, 268; freedom and, 155, 242– 51; free-market capitalism, embrace of, 251; impact on the environment over time of, beginning to understand the, 270– 71, 274; Las Vegas as the epitome of, 211; libertarian ideas and, 137; market urbanism and public life, attempts to balance, 269– 70; non-design, as the logical conclusion of, 22; non-design and, difference between, 137; permissiveness and, 242; unplanned cities and, 239; utopian thinking and the “real world,” adoption of core distinction between, 148 “object found” philosophy. See “as found” aesthetic/“object found” philosophy obsolescence: criticism of, 103, 125– 26; forced, 103; Plug-In City and “capsule houses” based on, 233; Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt and, 237 (see also Price, Cedric); promotion of by non-planners, 250; as a vital aspect of contemporary mass culture, 126, 132 Office for Metropolitan Architecture, 269 O’Hara, Frank, 154 Oliman, Wallace O., 110 Olmstead, Frederick Law, 17, 53, 137 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 180– 81 organized complexity: Banham’s defense of, 262; Jacobs’s conception of, 151– 53, 156, 158, 160– 61; Weaver’s conception of, 137, 152, 155– 56, 163 Orwell, George, 71 Ozenfant, Amédée, 128, 315n111 Palladio, Andrea, 63 Paolozzi, Eduardo: Alloway on the artworks of, 94; ceiling paper for Ove Arup and Partners, 87, 89; Head (2), 88; Independent Group, member of, 84; Independent Group seminars presented by, 123; new brutalism and, 66; Parallel of

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Life and Art: Indication of a New Visual Order exhibition, 92– 95; “Patio and Pavilion” entry to This Is Tomorrow exhibition, 92, 95– 96, 98– 99; Welded Aluminum Structure, 86– 87; working process of, 86– 87 Pask, Gordon, 161 Patten, Ray, 107– 8 Peressutti, Enrico, 335n82 Petro, Sylvester J., 166 Pevsner, Nikolaus: Academies of Art, Past and Present, 47; assistant editor of Architectural Review, appointment as, 111; Banham as a student of, 54; “beauty” as the essence of design, 129; borax, opposition to, 101, 114; on the connection between Saint’Elia and Mendelsohn, 119; criticism, subjected to scathing, 266; eighteenth-century English philosophy and design aesthetics, expounding on the virtues of, 45; “The Englishness of English Art,” 55; English picturesque aesthetic, control over dissonance in design by, 129– 30; English picturesque aesthetic, interest in reviving, 61– 62; An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England, 51, 111– 12; expressionist architecture, dismissal of, 122; Hayek and, similarities and differences in the philosophies of, 62; historicism of, 76; modern design, argument for control over and maintenance of traditional fundamental principles, 112– 16; modern design, shift in approach to, 61– 62; modern design and the socialist reform movement, efforts to advance, 9, 46– 47, 49, 111; new art history, development of, 75; objective standards of design, belief in, 114; opposition of the Independent Group to, 84; An Outline of European Architecture, 76; “The Picturesque in Architecture,” 139; the picturesque in British planning history, place of, 139; Pioneers of Modern Design (Pioneers of the Modern Movement), 61, 63, 76, 117, 267; socialism’s role in shaping modern design, affirmation of, 267; socialist aesthetic, tracing the history of, 69; streamlining, origin of, 117; Visual Planning, 139; Visual Pleasures from Everyday Things: An

Attempt to Establish Criteria by Which the Aesthetic Qualities of Design Can Be Judged, 47– 49; William Morris Society, founder of, 67 Picasso, Pablo, 170 picturesque: Banham’s rejection of, 258; beauty and, distinction between, 208; “British character” expressed in, 138; new approach to planning and, 8– 9, 137– 40, 182– 83 (see also townscape); Pevsner’s research on and interest in, 61– 62; rethinking modern design/town planning via a resurrection of, 44– 45; “soft” modernists and, 65 piecemeal growth/engineering: Popper’s conception/method of, 17, 148, 209, 214– 16, 224– 25, 341n7; slow growth of old towns as, 348n84 Pilot, Henry, 338n139 Pirie, Madsen, 329n181 planned order: artificial cities as, concept of, 228; disorder as the opposite of, 94 (see also disorder); fiction of the city as, 151; of the Labour Party, 55, 69; Morris’s belief in, 49– 51; socialist/ collectivist, 5, 9, 81, 137; spontaneous order vs., 25– 26, 33– 34, 37, 53, 168, 209 (see also non-plan; spontaneous order); unplanned mechanized environment of man-made America vs., 219. See also central design; planning planning: anti-sprawl urban policies in, 222; beyond conscious, art theory and, 85– 91; central (see central planning); CIAM’s principles of town planning, attacks on, 149– 50; to combat urban blight, support for, 39; environmental impacts and, 271; freedom vs., 240– 41; Jacobs’s critique of, 136– 37, 143– 49 (see also Jacobs, Jane); land use in threedimensional terms, Kahn’s vision of, 188; Le Corbusier’s promotion of, 39– 40; market urbanism and public life, attempts to balance, 269– 70; Milton Keynes project, 242– 43, 246; misuse of the word, 248; new approach to, picturesque and, 137– 39; non-planning as alternative to (see non-planning); permissive, 239– 42; planners as dictators, characterization of, 13; political and economic, Labour Party promotion of,

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5; political critiques of (see Hayek, Friedrich August von; Mises, Ludwig von; Popper, Karl); popularity of the word in 1940s Britain, 29; socialism’s golden age and, 267; town planning in Britain, Hayek’s critique of, 51– 53; townscape (see townscape); as a visual art, townscape and, 141. See also anti-planning Plato, 7 Polanyi, Karl: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 288n9 Polanyi, Michael: cooperation through ordinary exchange, view of, 153; movement for the planning of science, emergence in the late 1930s of, 279– 80n26; “polycentric order,” “The Span of Central Direction,” 37– 38; spontaneous formations as, 152; spontaneous order, the free market as, 13, 37– 38; spontaneous order, unplanned social and economic relations as, 137; spontaneous society, democratic society as a, 7; tacit knowledge, originating the notion of, 38; Walter Lippmann Colloquium, attendance at, 4 Pollock, Jackson: Independent Group, admired by members of, 90– 91; new brutalism and, 80; Parallel of Life and Art: Indication of a New Visual Order exhibition, work included in, 92; spontaneity in the process of making art, demonstration of, 11; at work, photo of, 86 Pope, Alexander, 65, 139 Popper, Karl: attack on utopian planning, 12, 147; attack on utopian planning echoed by Jacobs, 17, 145; Bartley recommended by, 222; Bergson, influenced by, 302n100, 303n109; biological analogies, use of, 164; British art history, influence on, 75– 76; Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 222; design theory, influence on, 222– 24; epistemology of, 91, 163, 216; exosomatic, use of the term, 343n26; Gombrich and, 71– 72, 75– 76; Hayek and, 27, 42, 71– 72; historicism, rejection of, 18, 70– 75, 78, 214; informal aesthetic as a basis for attacking planned order, 81; lectures by, 71; Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific

Popper, Karl (continued) Discovery), 42, 71; Marxism, critique of, 54, 70; method of, 18, 74; Mont Pelerin Society, member of, 4; moral futurism among architects, 230; non-design articulated as a critique of collectivism by, 1; non-planners and the legacy of, 250; “Of Clocks and Clouds,” 253– 54; “On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance,” 222– 23, 237; The Open Society and Its Enemies, 7– 8, 42, 70– 71, 222, 268; organic/piecemeal approach promoted by, 209; piecemeal engineering as method/strategy of, 17, 148, 209, 214– 16, 224– 25, 341n7; portrait of in “Cosmorama,” 253– 54; “The Poverty of Historicism” (article), 71, 74; The Poverty of Historicism (book), 72, 214– 15, 285n113; Rowe, introduction to, 230; social engineering, definition of, 215; teleology, denunciation of, 221; “What Is Dialectic?,” 74 popular art: borax as, 125– 27; definition of, 125; design of mass-produced products and, ICA debates focused on, 123– 27; question of control in, 12 Powell, Philip, 64 Powers, Alan, 357n252 Price, Cedric: Archigram and, 232; Fun Palace, 14, 233, 237; indeterminate philosophy of urban planning and design theory, articulation of, 221; non-plan, desirable effects of, 251; “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom” (with Barker, Hall, and Banham), 2, 21, 243– 51; Potteries Thinkbelt, 237; town-planning projects in the United States, involvement in, 353n162; unplanned urban evolution, call for, 221 Price, Sir Uvedale, 8– 9, 44, 62, 140, 208; “Essay on the Picturesque,” 281n49 Prinzhorn, Hans, 81– 82 product engineering, public relations strategies and, 131 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 42 Pulos, Arthur J., 311n34 purism, Banham’s attack on Le Corbusier’s theory of, 128– 29 Pushkarev, Boris: Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? An Inquiry into Selected Problems of Design in the Urbanized Landscape, 181– 82; non-design in 382 | i n d e x

the American built environment, account of, 277n1 Py, Marcel, 338n139 Raico, Ralph, 166, 278n6 Rand, Ayn, 144, 166, 360n23 Rapaport, Anatol, 161 rationalism: critique of, 59– 60; downplaying of, 69; empiricism, contrasted with, 281n44; reverence for, 60 Read, Herbert: design, importance of, 9, 47, 49, 56; Design Research Unit, formation of, 110; opposition of the Independent Group to, 84; The Philosophy of Modern Art, 80; Popper’s The Open Society, assistance in publication of, 71; retrogression in design since 1932, claim of, 112; socialist and anarchist, self-identification as, 301n78; socialist leadership, concerns raised after two years of, 56; universality of general principles of the 1930s, argument for, 113 Read, Leonard, 166 Reagan, Ronald, 328n177 Reed, Peter Shedd, 334n65 Reilly, Charles: Architecture as Communal Art, 49 Reisman, George, 166 Renzio, Toni del, 10, 84, 123 Reynolds, Joshua, 62 Richards, J. M.: on Britain’s enlightened town planning laws, 51; The Castles on the Ground, 61; Giedion, influence of, 77; popular vernacular for architecture, need for, 68; “Towards a Rational Aesthetic,” 61 Riegl, Alois, 331n11 Riggenbach, Jeff, 167, 329n181 Rodia, Simon, 258, 260 Rogers, Ernesto, 320n42 Rohde, Peggy Ann, 108 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 272 Röpke, Wilhelm, 4 Rosenberg, Harold, 350n110 Rothbard, Murray N.: Jacobs, praise for, 167, 329n182; libertarianism of, anarcho-capitalism and, 259; on Mises’s influence among American libertarians, 166; Mont Pelerin Society, member of, 4 Rougier, Louis, 4

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 45, 258 Rowe, Colin: Anderson, meeting of, 230; “The Architecture of Utopia,” 147; Collage City (with Koetter), 23, 279n14; Koetter and, question on the future/ past issue, 230; non-design philosophy and the work of, 18; total design and total non-design as equally total, 277n1; “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal” (with Slutzky), 335n91 Rudofsky, Bernard: Architecture without Architects, 16, 231– 32, 259, 357n248; “Industrial Design, a New Profession” conference, participation at, 106 Rudolph, Paul, 110, 199 Ruscha, Ed: Some Los Angeles Apartments, 335n90; Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, 205– 7 Ruskin, John, 267 Russell, Bertrand, 71, 227, 240, 345n54 Rüstow, Alexander, 4, 279n21 Saarinen, Eero, 197, 233 Saarinen, Eliel: The City: Its Growth, Its Decay, Its Future, 39 Sadler, Simon, 165, 250 Saierno, Joseph T., 283n82 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de, 6, 11, 26, 40– 43, 160 Sakier, George, 106– 8 sales: emotion-based, borax and, 131– 35; industrial design and, critique of, 108– 10. See also market, the Sant’Elia, Antonio, 119, 219 Saxl, Fritz, 75, 305n136 Schein, Ionel, 233 Schindler, R. M., 357n262 Schlick, Moritz, 27 Schramm, Wilbur, 125 Schumacher, Patrik: The Autopoiesis of Architecture, 348n86 Schütz, Alfred, 4 scientism, 60 Scott Brown, Denise: “architecture of bright lights and big signs,” 18; commercial vernacular, need for architects to accept the lessons of, 16, 211; critical scrutiny eluded by, 266; design studio (with Venturi and Izenour), 208; Huxtable’s reference to, 212; Independent Group and new movements in America, connection between, 16; 383 | i n d e x

influences on, 202– 3; interdisciplinary attitude toward design of, 190; Las Vegas, first visit to, 185, 203; Las Vegas, study of, 259; Learning from Las Vegas (with Venturi and Izenour), 20, 194, 209, 213, 261; liberal critique of central design and the architectural/ urban theories of, parallels between, 1– 2; “The Meaningful City,” 203; nondesign strategies, support for, 20– 21; “Pop Architecture” (with Venturi), 206– 7; “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” 261– 62; Remedial Housing for Architects studio, 339n154; socioplastics, interest in, 202– 4, 209; “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas” (with Venturi), 205– 6; spec houses, support of, 260; townscape, impact of, 208; urban mapping, active socioplastics, and the determinants of urban form, 201– 8; Venturi, collaboration with, 198, 201, 203– 11; Venturi, marriage to, 204; “vitality” as a key word used by, 193; working-class life/culture, design and, 202; working-class life/culture, nondesign and, 209– 10 Scully, Vincent: “America’s Architectural Nightmare: The Motorized Megalopolis,” 205; automobile as destroyer of American cities, 20; Kahn, Le Corbusier’s importance to, 334n65; on the work of Scott Brown and Venturi, 198, 339n154 self-organization: biological analogies and, 269; the city and, 251– 56; the invisible hand and, 348n88 (see also invisible hand); the market as a form of, 273 (see also market, the); a more sober/realistic account of, 271– 73; spontaneous order and, 229 (see also spontaneous order); “Symposium on Principles of Self- Organization,” 161; “Urban Chaos or Self- Organization” (Abel), 255– 56 Sennholz, Hans, 166 Sert, Josep Lluís: Can Our Cities Survive: An ABC of Urban Problems, Their Analysis, Their Solutions, 39; “Nine Points on Monumentality,” 43 Shankland, Graeme, 67 Shannon, Claude, 155, 161, 348n86 Sherman, Alfred, 250

Simon, Herbert A.: “The Architecture of Complexity,” 162; cybernetics, pioneering a philosophy of, 348n86 Sitte, Camillo, 139; Der städtbau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, 229 Slutzky, Robert: “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal” (with Rowe), 335n91 Smith, Adam: classical liberalism based on the economics of, 258; Hayek’s quotation of, 6; the invisible hand, 25– 26, 162; legacy of, 3, 6; liberal plan, notion of, 287n134 Smith, Ivor, 235 Smith, Norris Kelly, 349n94 Smithson, Alison, 54 Smithson, Alison and Peter: “An Alternative to the Garden City Idea,” 150; “as found” aesthetic developed by, 84– 85, 93; ceiling paper for Ove Arup and Partners, design of, 87; “Cluster City— A New Shape for the Community,” 150; design/working process of, 88, 90; end of CIAM, proclamation of, 12; The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture, 300n67; House of the Future, 233; Housing Division of the London County Council, positions at, 64; Independent Group, members of, 83– 84; Kahn invited to speak at the Otterlo Congress, 197; Kahn’s ideas as inspiration for, 189; “Letter to America,” 151; in the London circle of architects vital to new brutalism, 66; London County Council, work at the, 81, 83; meeting and marriage of, 81; modernist dogma, concept of urban reidentification as an attack on, 149; Morocco low-cost housing project, on the place of the inhabitant in, 95; Ordinariness and Light: Urban Theories 1952– 1960 and Their Application in a Building Project 1963– 1970, 97; Parallel of Life and Art: Indication of a New Visual Order exhibition, 92– 95; “Patio and Pavilion” entry to This Is Tomorrow exhibition, 92, 95– 96, 98– 99; photo of, 84; planning, critique of, 137; politics equated with socialism, and liberalism considered apolitical by, 308n194; Pollock, admiration for the paintings of, 90– 91; problem of the 1950s in art or architecture, 94; relationship between design and rational 384 | i n d e x

order, reconsideration of, 11; shift from design to non-design by, 85; socioplastics, interest in, 202– 4; Upper Lawn Pavilion, 348n84; “voluntary association,” community based on, 227; workingclass culture, new brutalism and, 201– 2 Smithson, Peter, 13, 96, 123, 221 socialism. See collectivism/socialism socialist realism, 10, 65, 68– 69 Soros, George, 272 Spencer, Herbert, 330n3 spontaneous order: in archaic environments, 231– 32; artificial cities, as missing from, 229; as a “biological” phenomena, 254; in cities, 212, 237; complexity and, 155– 58; design aesthetics/”as found” approach and, 85– 91; everyday life in Los Angeles as, 190; framework of, the state as providing, 99; free market, association with, 248– 49; Hayek’s conception of, 1– 2, 6– 7, 13, 19, 23, 25– 26, 30, 36– 38, 43, 70, 72, 89– 90, 93– 94, 137, 139, 145, 151– 52, 159, 210, 225– 26, 228, 240, 245; the invisible hand and, 25– 26, 38, 162; Jacobs’s conception of, 151– 53; Jacobs’s critique of modern planning, role in, 136– 37; of Las Vegas, 209; logic of, key to understanding the, 95; natural ecology of the city as, 262; non-hierarchical view of society and, 93; non-planning and, 244– 45, 248– 49; Polanyi’s conception of, 7, 13, 37– 38, 137; pop consumer culture and, 207; self-organizing systems and, 255– 56; of the spontaneous city, 229; Webber’s theory of non-place and, 240 Stalder, Laurent, 343n22 Stalin, Joseph, 63, 293n78 state, the: framework for spontaneous order, role of providing, 99; the welfare state (see welfare state) Stein, Clarence, 143 Steinberg, Saul, 172 Sterling, James, 66 Stern, Robert, 188, 199, 339n154 Stigler, George, 4, 39 Stiglitz, Joseph, 272 Stirling, James, 64 Stonorov, Oscar, 197, 334n65 streamlining/streamline styling: American industrial designers’ employment

of, 126– 27; Bel Geddes on, 101– 2; bogus, borax as, 101, 113 (see also borax); criticisms of, 103, 108, 111, 113; Independent Group’s interest in, 126; as the outcome of the twentieth century, 115; Pevsner on Mendelsohn and, 117; popular aesthetic of, 101, 103– 4 Studer, Raymond, 347n73 Summerson, John, 202– 3, 215, 219 Swedish empiricism, 64 Swedish modernism, 61, 64, 80 Szurmak, Joanna, 321n48 Tange, Kenzo: Tokyo Plan, 13 Tapié, Michel, 11, 81 Taylor, Basil, 73, 304n120 Teague, Walter Dorwin, 106 Team 10: attack on the modernist principles of CIAM, 150– 51; children, fascination with the “untainted” spontaneous world of, 298n23; “death of CIAM,” announcement of, 12, 147; Kahn’s ideas as inspiration for, 189 Terras, Victor, 302n89 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth: On Growth and Form, 78– 80, 221, 226, 315n112 Thornley, Kerry, 357n245 totalitarian(ism): central design as, 7; collectivism/planning/socialism leads to, 26, 29, 31, 34, 38– 39, 168; critiques of, 7, 10, 42, 54, 71, 75, 115– 16, 215 (see also Hayek, Friedrich August von; Mises, Ludwig von; Popper, Karl); definition of, 312n63; democratic spontaneous order contrasted with, 33; design and, relationship of, 221; the French as, 8, 44, 138; historicism and, 70; Plato was not, 72; public discussion of, 70– 71; rise of, 2, 39, 47, 74; Saint-Simon and the origin of, 42; townscape as a challenge to, 257. See also fascism; Nazism Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, 51– 53, 247– 49 town planning: Hayek’s critique of, 51– 53. See also cities; urban landscape townscape: American planners of the mid-1960s, dominance of debates among, 183; Architectural Review campaign promoting, 8, 44– 45, 138; debates over American cities, informing of, 19– 20, 173; Jacobs, impact on, 136, 141; 385 | i n d e x

Kahn’s ideas about the redesign of cities and, 188; liberalism and, 8– 9, 257– 60; liberty and complexity recognized in, 140; modern picturesque, argument for, 8– 9, 182– 83; motion/”serial vision” as an essential element of, 261; nondesign and, 137– 42, 259; persistence of, 208– 12; as a radical theory of design, 1, 257– 60; space-time theory of movement as central to, 342n18; town planners, not architects, as way to approach, 260; uncovering the pattern of reality as a core principle behind, 150. See also Hastings, Hubert de Cronin Tungare, Amit, 40 Tunnard, Christopher: on Architectural Review editorial castigating man-made America, 141; design needed to control the “exploding metropolis,” belief in, 20; form-will, use of the term, 331n11; “Man Made America,” 171– 76; ManMade America: Chaos or Control? An Inquiry into Selected Problems of Design in the Urbanized Landscape, 181– 82; nondesign in the American built environment, account of, 277n1 Turnbull, William, 66 undesigned: borax and, 127; complex social processes that are, 240; economic freedom and, 30– 31, 45; evolutionary social phenomena as the result of institutions that are, 215; formlessness, Banham’s enthusiasm for, 211; Hayek’s understanding of society and the market as, 1, 6; liberalism and, 46; nature of society as, 1, 160; piecemeal engineering and, 214; the Smithsons’ interest in the, 85; spontaneity and, 7, 226 (see also spontaneous order); the world as, 266 unplannable/unplannable city, 12, 140, 217, 225, 346n66 Unwin, Raymond, 143 urban landscape: American cities (see American cities); complexity in, townscape and, 140– 41. See also built environment; cities van den Haag, Ernest, 145 van der Wijdeveld, Theo, 313n81 Van Doren, Harold, 105

van Eyck, Aldo: “Architecture of Dogon,” 16, 226, 230; CIAM and modern design, question regarding, 43; designs for urban playgrounds by, 298n23; “leaf-tree, house-city” concept, 226– 27 Varela, Francisco, 348n86 Venturi, Robert: California, move to, 185; commercial vernacular, need for architects to accept the lessons of, 16, 211; Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 19, 162– 63, 194, 198– 99, 205, 207; context, complexity, and the existing landscape, 196– 201; critical scrutiny eluded by, 266; design studio (with Izenour and Scott Brown), 208; Huxtable’s reference to, 212; “A Justification for a Pop Architecture,” 203; on Kahn’s design of the Salk Center, 337n126; Kahn’s ideas, impact of, 189, 197– 98; Las Vegas, first trip to, 204; Las Vegas, study of, 259; Learning from Las Vegas (with Scott Brown and Izenour), 20, 194, 209, 213, 261; liberal critique of central design and the architectural/ urban theories of, parallels between, 1; non-design strategies, support for, 20– 21; “Pop Architecture” (with Scott Brown), 206– 7; Remedial Housing for Architects studio, 339n154; Scott Brown, collaboration with, 198, 201, 203– 11; Scott Brown, marriage to, 204; “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas” (with Scott Brown), 205– 6; spec houses, support of, 260; townscape, impact of, 208; “vitality” as a key word used by, 193; working-class life/culture, non-design and, 209– 10 Vidler, Anthony, 78 Vienna, post– World War I, 27 Vienna Circle, 27 Villanueva, Ric: “A Positive Program for Responsible Extremists,” 357n245 Ville Nouvelle Melun-Sénart (Parisian suburb), 269– 70 Von Breton, Harriette, 264– 65 von Neumann, John, 155 Wagner, Otto, 27 Waisman, Marina, 350n115 Walpole, Horace, 44 Warburg, Aby, 75, 226 386 | i n d e x

Ward, Colin, 147 Weald, C. G., 65 Weaver, Henry Grady: editor of the Thought Starter series, 34; The Mainspring of Human Progress, 36 Weaver, Warren: complexity, theory of, 17, 136 (see also complexity); cybernetics, pioneering a philosophy of, 348n86; Hayek, impact on, 155, 162; history of scientific thought, three stages of development in, 156; Jacobs, impact on, 156, 158; The Mathematical Theory of Communication (with Shannon), 161; “organized complexity,” notion of, 137, 152, 155– 56, 163; “Science and Complexity,” 155– 56, 161; Simon, impact on, 162 Webb, Philip, 67, 69 Webber, Melvin: diffuse urban formations/low-density development, support for, 18; Hall and, 241– 42; Milton Keynes project, contribution to, 242– 43; non-design strategies to support spontaneity in unplanned cities, argument for, 20; non-place, theory of, 239– 42; “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity,” 239; planning, contention regarding, 246; “Planning in an Environment of Change,” 242; “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm,” 227, 239; view of the city, processes and action in, 159 Weeks, John: “Indeterminate Architecture,” 236; Norwich Park, design of the facade of, 355n208; Rushbrooke, redesign of the core of, 348n84; Washington New Town, interim plan for, 241– 42 Weisman, Winston, 172 welfare state: early phases of the British, 28– 29; Hayek’s opposition to, 116– 17; Labour Party and, 55– 56; liberal critique of, 5– 8; modern design and, 116 Wells, H. G., 6, 59 Wheaton, William L. C., 352n137 Whitechapel Art Gallery: “Patio and Pavilion” entry to This Is Tomorrow exhibition, 92, 95– 96, 98– 99 Whitehead, Alfred North, 159 Whitman, Walt, 176 Whyte, William H.: Archigram galvanized by, 232; The Exploding Metropolis:

A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (editor), 177– 79; The Organization Man, 177 Wiener, Norbert: complexity, research on, 155; Cybernetics, 162; The Human Use of Human Beings, 285n108 Wieser, Friedrich von, 289n15 William Morris Society, 67 Williams-Ellis, Clough, 49; England and the Octopus, 222 Willis, Kirk, 70 Willmott, Peter, 203 Wilson, Colin St. John, 64– 66 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 291n47 Wittkower, Rudolf, 75; Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 63, 219 Wogenseky, André, 338n139 Wolfe, Ivor de. See Hastings, Hubert de Cronin Wolfe, Tom: cultural inversion, strategy of, 191, 193; The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 185,

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194, 205; unplanned world of western American cities, argument regarding, 18; work of “non-designers” in Las Vegas, celebration of, 239 Wolfflin, Heinrich, 77 Woods, Shadrach, 338n139 Wright, Frank Lloyd: Broadacre City and the rejection of urban density by, 238– 39, 358n279; decentralization, filling/gas stations as the agent of, 248, 351n128; Disappearing City, 351n128– 29; Hanna-Honeycomb House designed by, 191; The Living City, 323n83; Marin County drive-in civic center designed by, 192; Mendelsohn, meeting of, 122 Wright, Henry, 143 Young, Michael, 203– 4 Zevi, Bruno, 307n164, 315n110 Zhdanov, Andrei Alexandrovich, 69, 293n78