Taken literally, the avant-garde refers to the front part of a marching army, the scouts that
first head into unknown territory. As a metaphor, the word has been used from the 19th
century onward to refer to progressive political and artistic movements that considered
themselves to be ahead of their time. The avant-garde is struggling against the old,
heading toward the new. It is radical and controversial, fighting against consensus and
looking for disruption. The avant-garde radicalizes the basic principle of modernity: the
urge toward continual change and development. According to Matei Calinescu (1987), its
very radicality drives it to a conscious quest for crisis: Because the avantgarde attitude
implies the bluntest rejection of such traditional ideas as those of order, intelligibility, or
even success, its protagonists seek for an art that is to become an experience, deliberately
conducted, of failure and crisis. The most characteristic feature of the avant-garde,
therefore, might be the continuous cycling of short-lived movements that emerge and
whither away in rapid succession.
Entries A–F 175
As early as 1962, Renato Poggioli described the avant-garde as characterized by four
moments: activism, antagonism, nihilism, and agonism. The activist moment meant
adventure and dynamism, an urge to action that is not necessarily linked to any positive
goal. The antagonistic character of the avant-garde refers to its combativeness; the avantgarde
is always struggling against something—against tradition, against the public, or
against the establishment. Activism and antagonism are often pursued in such a way that
an avant-garde movement finally overtakes itself in a nihilistic quest, in an uninterrupted
search for purity, ending up by dissolving into nothing. The avant garde is indeed
inclined to sacrifice itself on the altar of progress—a characteristic that Poggioli labels
agonistic.
During the last decades, the term avant-garde has acquired a more precise theoretical
meaning because of the work of Peter Burger (1974). The avant-garde is clearly
distinguished from modernism in that it is confined to a more limited range of ideas and
movements. According to Burger, the avant-garde in the visual arts and literature was
concerned to abolish the autonomy of art as an institution. Its aim was to put an end to the
existence of art as something separate from everyday life—of art, that is, as an
autonomous domain that has no real impact on the social system. The avant-garde, says
Burger, aims for a new life praxis, a praxis that is based on art and that constitutes an
alternative for the existing order. This alternative would no longer organize social life on
the basis of economic rationality and bourgeois conventions. It would rather found itself
on aesthetic sensibilities and on the creative potentialities of each individual.
Avant-gardism has been most prominent in literature and the arts, whereas its use in
the context of architecture was less common. Nevertheless, there has been a tendency to
identify the Modern movement as the avant-garde in architecture. The theoretical finetuning
urged by Burger, however, necessitates a modification of this too-simple
identification. Bürger's work also brought about a growing consensus to distinguish
between the historical avant-garde, chronologically situated before World War II, and the
neo-avant-garde, which is a more recent phenomenon.
The issues and themes around which the Modern movement in architecture
crystallized were surely related to the avant-garde logic of destruction of the old and
construction of the new. The Modern movement was based on a rejection of the
bourgeois culture of philistinism that used pretentious ornament and kitsch and that took
the form of eclecticism (Gusevich, 1987). In its stead, the movement gave precedence to
purity and authenticity. In the 1920s, these themes acquired a distinct political dimension:
The new architecture became associated with the desire for a more socially balanced and
egalitarian form of society in which the ideals of equal rights and emancipation would be
realized. The architectural vanguard, nevertheless, did not become as uncompromising
and as radical as its counterpart in art and literature. Most architects, for example, never
renounced the principle of rationality, even if it stood for a bourgeois value.
Therefore, it might be more productive not to speak of the Modern movement as the
avant-garde but, rather, to distinguish certain avant-garde moments within its discourse,
for the movement was hardly a unified whole; rather, it consisted of widely differing
trends and tendencies. Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co cite tendencies such as De
Stijl in Holland, Productivism and Constructivism in Russia, and the late Expressionist
currents of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and the Novembergruppe in Germany among the
architectural avant-garde. These movements, they argue, were inspired by an intensive
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 176
exchange between visual arts and architecture and a new social reality that was based on
a new, artistic outlook on the world.
The early writings of Swiss historian and critic Sigfried Giedion testify to an
aspiration to abolish architecture as a typology or segregated discipline. In Bauen in Frankreich, Eis en, Eis enbeton (1928; Building in France, Build ing in
Iron, Building in Fer roconcrete), Giedion questions the very idea of an architecture with definitive boundaries, and
his implicit suggestion is that architecture no longer has anything to do with objects. If it
is to survive at all, it must become part of a broader domain in which spatial relations and
concerns are of central importance. Herewith, Giedion formulates as a goal for
architecture that it would break out of the limits imposed on it by tradition and by its
functioning as an institution.
Although Giedion did not develop these potentially subversive considerations in any
radical way in his consecutive work, they were not completely idiosyncratic, either. The
thought that architecture should no longer limit itself to the design of representative
buildings but rather should develop into a more comprehensive discipline that is focusing
on the whole of the environment and that merges with social reality and with life itself
was shared by many prominent modern architects from the 1920s. Avant-garde architects
such as Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ernst May believed that their mission had to
do with the design of all aspects of life, and they aimed at a reconceptualization of the
whole process of building, including construction techniques, housing typologies, and
urbanism. One of the most radical interpretations of such beliefs was to be found in the
work of Walter Benjamin.
Benjamin thought that the destructive gestures of the avantgarde, which aimed at
purification, were necessary to free the way for a revolutionary future. The transparency
and openness of the new architecture pointed for Benjamin to a revolutionary, classless
society based on emancipation and flexibility. He interpreted this architecture as part of
the avant-garde’s attack on bourgeois culture. The new architecture schooled inhabitants
and users to adapt to new social conditions that prefigured the future transparent society.
Benjamin saw architecture as a discipline that was capable of stimulating people to align
their attitudes with those required by the new society to come (Heynen, 1999).
The alignment between modern architecture and politically progressive tendencies was
thus clearly present in the 1920s and the early 1930s, in the self-reflection of its
representatives as well as in the discourse of major critics. This avant-garde position
claimed a new, more open and more socially relevant mission for architecture. It was
Utopian and critical, believing that the new future could be reached only by starting from
scratch. This position, however, did not dominate very long. When HenryRussell
Hitchcock and Philip Johnson introduced modern architecture to the United States, they
presented it as the latest and most topical style, leaving aside any social or political issues
(The Inte rnational Style, 1932). Giedion himself gravitated toward a similar position with his later Space, Time and A rchitecture (1941).
In presenting the space-time concept as a “secret synthesis” that was capable of building
a unity across very different disciplines, Giedion no longer referred to social experiments
or to the revolutionizing aims of the new architecture. Instead, he strove toward the
formulation of a common denominator that could unite rather diverse trends under the
banner of one “modern architecture,” thus formulating a certain orthodoxy that was at
odds with the continuous longing for change characteristic of the avant-garde.
This tendency toward consensus and orthodoxy in modern architecture was only
reinforced in the postwar years, when modern architecture was accepted by many
Entries A–F 177
administrations as the most appropriate answer to the building needs of the
Reconstruction era. Modern architecture thus became institutionalized as part of the
establishment, and consequently, it took its leave from the avant-garde aspirations of the
1920s. It was therefore no coincidence that after World War II a gap opened up between
modern architecture and the avant-garde in the arts. They soon drifted quite apart. The
most vehement criticism that was leveled against modern architecture in the early
postwar years came from movements such as Lettrism and International Situationism
rather than from right-wing conservatives. International Situationism was based on the
program for a “unitary urbanism,” which consisted of a vigorous critique of current
modernist urbanism. Unitary urbanism rejected the utilitarian logic of the consumer
society, aiming instead for the realization of a dynamic city, a city in which freedom and
play would have a central role. By operating collectively, the Situationists aimed to
achieve a creative interpretation of their everyday surroundings, and they created
situations that subverted the normal state of affairs. The Situationists belonged to the neoavant-
garde movements that formed an “avant-garde beyond modernism.” This neoavantgarde
considered itself to be ahead of the masses in its search for the future but took
its distance from the more conciliatory, consensus-oriented mainstream modernism
because it was much more radical and Utopian.
Within the field of architecture, there were also groups, such as Archizoom,
Archigram, and Superstudio that moved beyond modernist ideas and could be called neoavant-
garde. It is less clear, however, what the meanings of the terms “avant-garde” and
“neo-avant-garde” have become in the most recent decades. On the one hand, there is a
clear rejection of the avant-garde logic of destruction of the old and Utopian construction
of the new. It is stated that this logic is based on an ideology of progress, which has since
been proven to be false; that it gave rise to an elitist hermeticism that rendered its ideals
completely inaccessible to a general public; and that its supposedly radical innovations
and inventions nevertheless lend themselves all too well to appropriation by the culture
industry. This widely spread criticism would lead one to think that the avant-garde is
dead—a claim that has been made repeatedly. On the other hand, in the 1980s and the
’90s, the notion of a contemporary neo-avantgarde has resurged in the work of Peter
Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and others. It seems clear, however, that this use of the term
neo-avant-garde is based on a perception of their position within a discursive field and that its
application has nothing to do with how they, contentwise, think about architecture. The
avant-garde and its significance for 20th-century architecture rests, then, with the
constant obliteration of boundaries between the arts and architecture, image and text, and
the meanings of old and new.
AUTOMOBILE
At the close of the millennium, many local and national politicians admitted what many
architectural critics and planners had noted for years: the landscape of post-World War II
America had been planned around automobiles more than around people. Reflecting the
nation’s great enthusiasm for automobility, the 20th-century landscape integrated this
transportation infrastructure and allowed it a defining influence. In some ways, this
dominance snuck up on many Americans; yet such change is more attributable to blinded
free choice than to naïveté: the 20th-century American lived under the spell of the open
road.
Although the United States seized the invention, the automobile was first developed in
Europe in the 1890s. French manufacturers marketed the first successful automobile in
1894. Inconvenience from a lack of roads and infrastructure as well as a dependence on
transportation technologies such as trolleys precluded Americans from rapidly accepting
the new “horseless carriage.” The manufacturing and marketing efforts of Henry Ford
and others changed this attitude by 1913, when there was one motor vehicle to every
eight Americans. Mass production made sure that by the 1920s, the car had become no
longer a luxury but a necessity of American middle-class life. The landscape, however,
had been designed around other modes of transport, including an urban scene dependent
on foot travel. Cars enabled an independence never before possible, if they were
supported with the necessary service structure. Massive architectural shifts were
necessary to make way for the automobile, as architects and planners reconfigured urban
street forms or designed new building types to accommodate the automobile. Congested
streets forced motorists to park and store their automobiles in a new building, the parking
garage. Early garages included mechanical systems and elevators to carry cars into tall
skyscraperlike garages. Smaller garages affiliated with hotels or commercial districts
proliferated. After World War II, motorists could select garages with attendants or, more
commonly by the 1970s and after, they could use self-park garages. By the 1990s,
architects were designing tall garages for hundreds of cars. With retail storefronts at the
pedestrian level, many urban garages were designed to blend in with neighboring
buildings and styles.
Although the motorcar was the quintessential private instrument, its owners had to
operate it over public spaces. Who would pay for these public thoroughfares? After a
period of acclimation, Americans viewed highway building as a form of social and
economic therapy. They justified public financing for such projects on the theory that
roadway improvements would pay for themselves by increasing property-tax revenues
along the route. At this time, asphalt, macadam, and concrete were each used on different
roadways.
By the 1920s, the congested streets of urban areas pressed road building into other
areas. Most urban regions soon proposed express streets without stoplights or
intersections. These aesthetically conceived roadways, normally following the natural
topography of the land, soon took the name “parkways.” Long Island and Westchester
County, New York, used parkways with bridges and tunnels to separate these express
routes from local cross traffic. The Bronx River Parkway (1906), for instance, follows a
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 170
river park and forest; it also is the first roadway to be declared a national historic site. In
addition to pleasure driving, such roads stimulated automobile commuting.
The Federal Road Act of 1916 offered funds to states that organized highway
departments, designating 200,000 miles of road as primary and thus eligible for federal
funds. More important, ensuing legislation also created a Bureau of Public Roads to plan
a highway network to connect all cities of 50,000 or more inhabitants. Some states
adopted gasoline taxes to help finance the new roads. By 1925 the value of highway
construction projects exceeded $1 billion. Expansion continued through the Great
Depression, with road building becoming integral to city and town development.
Robert Moses of New York defined this new role as road builder and social planner.
Through his work in the greater New York City area (1928–60), Moses created a model
for a metropolis that included and even emphasized the automobile as opposed to mass
transportation. This was a dramatic change in the motivation of design. Historian Clay
McShane (1994) writes, “In their headlong search for modernity through mobility,
American urbanites made a decision to destroy the living environments of nineteenthcentury
neighborhoods by converting their gathering places into traffic jams, their
playgrounds into motorways, and their shopping places into elongated parking lots.”
Outside of cities in the United States, major efforts were underway to knit
the nation together on a larger scale. In the 1910s, motorists and
commercial forces joined in the good-roads movement to establish early
national highways, such as the Lincoln Highway and the Dixie Highway.
Route 66, stretching southwest from Chicago through Illinois, Missouri,
Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, ending
at Los Angeles, was to become the most celebrated interstate roadway.
While the road supplied an exodus for many Dust Bowl sufferers in the
1930s, Route 66 became even more important as a symbol. “Get your
kicks on Route 66” echoed through many musical moments as well as in
minutes of personal longing. For Americans, “America’s Main Street”
opened up westward and ushered in a period of comfortable cruising in
American automobiles. Probably more than any other roadway, Route 66
allowed the automobile to become a means for expressing the American
tradition of independence and freedom. Planners, designers, and
entrepreneurs sought methods to stimulate and take advantage of this new
American passion.
Aerial view of a housing development in Levittown, New York
Drivers through the 1930s often slept in roadside yards, so developers soon took
advantage of this opportunity by devising the roadside camp or motel. Independently
owned tourist camps graduated from tents to cabins, which were often called “motor
courts.” After World War II, the form became a motel, in which all the rooms were tied
together in one structure. Still independently owned, by 1956 there were 70,000 motels
nationwide. Best Western and Holiday Inn soon used ideas of prefabrication to create
chains of motels throughout the United States. Holiday Inn defined this new part of the
automobile landscape by emphasizing uniformity so that travelers felt as if they were in a
familiar environment no matter where they traveled.
The automobile landscape, of course, needed to effectively incorporate its essential
raw material: petroleum. The gas station, which originally existed as little more than a
roadside shack, mirrors the evolution of the automobile-related architecture in general.
By the 1920s, filling stations had integrated garages and service facilities. These facilities
were privately owned and uniquely constructed. By the mid-1930s, oil giants, such as
Shell and Texaco, developed a range of prototype gas stations that would re-create the
site as a showroom for tires, motor oil, or other services. The architectural style clearly
derived from the International Style, with a sleek, white appearance. While carefully
dressed attendants were a vital part of the experience at many service stations, George
Urich introduced the United States’ first self-service gas station in California in 1947. By
the 1990s, this form had been further streamlined to include convenience stores and the
opportunity to pay at the pump. The gas station experience would steadily become less
personalized.
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 172
As automobiles became more familiar in everyday Americans’ lives, planners and
developers formalized refueling stations for the human drivers as well. Food stands
informally provided refreshment during these early days, but soon restaurants were
developed that utilized marketing strategies from the motel and petroleum industries.
Diners and family restaurants sought prime locations along frequently traveled roads;
however, these forms did not alter dining patterns significantly. White Castle (1921)
combined the food stand with the restaurant to create a restaurant that could be put almost
anywhere. Drive-in restaurants would evolve around the idea of quick service, often
allowing drivers to remain in their automobile. Fast food as a concept, of course, derives
specifically from Ray Kroc and the McDonald’s concept that he marketed out of
California (1952). Clearly the idea of providing service to automobile drivers had created
an entire offshoot of the restaurant industry.
Whereas most roadside building types evolved gradually, the drive-in theater was
deliberately invented. Richard M.Hollingshead Jr., of New Jersey, believed that
entertainment needed to incorporate the automobile. Hollingshead patented the first
drive-in in 1933, but the invention would not proliferate until the 1950s. Viewing outdoor
films in one’s car has become a symbol of the culture of consumption that overtook the
American middle class during the postwar era. Of course, it also established the
automobile as a portable, private oasis where youth could express their sexuality as well
as experiment with drugs and alcohol.
Most of these developments redefined the local landscape while creating few national
thoroughfares. President Dwight D. Eisenhower changed this in the 1950s. In 1920 he
had led troops across the American road system in a military call for new roads. Then he
had witnessed the spectacle of Hitler’s Autobahn firsthand. When he became president,
he worked with automobile manufacturers and others to devise a 1956 plan to connect
America’s future to the automobile. The interstate highway system was the most
expensive public works project in human history. The public rationale for this hefty
project revolved around fear of nuclear war: such roadways would assist in exiting urban
centers in the event of such a calamity. The emphasis, however, was clearly economic
expansion. At the cost of many older urban neighborhoods—often occupied by minority
groups—the huge wave of concrete was unrolled that linked all the major cities of the
nation.
With the national future clearly tied to cars, planners began perfecting ways of further
integrating the automobile into American domestic life. Initially, these tactics were quite
literal. In the early 20th century, many homes of wealthy Americans soon required the
ability to store vehicles. Most often, these homes had carriage houses or stables that could
be converted. Soon, of course, architects devised an appendage to the home and gave it
the French name “garage.” From this early point, housing in the United States closely
followed the integration of the automobile and roads into American life.
Upper- and middle-class Americans had begun moving to suburban areas in the late
1800s. The first suburban developments, such as Llewellyn Park, New Jersey (1856),
followed train lines or the corridors of other early mass transit. The automobile allowed
access to vast areas between and beyond these corridors. Suddenly, the suburban
hinterland around every city compounded. As early as 1940, about 13 million people
lived in communities beyond the reach of public transportation. Because of these
changes, suburbs could be planned for less wealthy Americans.
Entries A–F 173
Modeled after the original Gustav Stickley homes or similar designs from Ladies Home J ournal and other
popular magazines, middle-class suburbs appealed to working- and middle-class
Americans. The bungalow became one of the most popular designs in the nation. The
construction halt of the Great Depression set the stage for more recent ideas and designs,
including the ranch house. The basic features of the ranch house—its simple, informal,
one-story structure; its low-pitched eaves; and its large expanse of glass that included
“picture” windows—were fused in the public mind with the easygoing lifestyle identified
with the Southwest and West Coast.
Planners used home styles such as these to develop one site after another with the
automobile linking each one to the outside world. The world of Levittown (the first of
which was constructed in 1947) involved a complete dependence on automobile travel.
This shift to suburban living became a hallmark of the late 20th century, with over half
the nation residing in suburbs by the 1990s. The planning system that supported this
residential world, however, involved much more than roads. The services necessary to
support outlying, suburban communities also needed to be integrated by planners.
Instead of the Main Street prototype, the automobile suburbs demanded a new form.
Initially, planners such as Jesse Clyde Nichols devised shopping areas, such as Kansas
City’s Country Club District (1922), that appeared a hybrid of previous forms. In Lake
Forest, Illinois, Howard Van Doren Shaw designed Market Square (1916), perhaps the
first shopping center planned to address the automobile. Soon, however, the “strip” had
evolved as the commercial corridor of the future. These sites quickly became part of
suburban development in order to provide basic services close to home. A shopper rarely
arrived without an automobile; therefore, the car needed to be part of the design program.
The most obvious architectural development for speed was signage: integrated into the
overall site plan would be towering neon aberrations that identified services. In addition,
parking lots and drive-through windows suggest the integral role of transportation in this
new commerce.
These developments culminated in the shopping mall, which quickly became a
necessary portion of strip planning. By the 1970s, developers’ initiatives clearly included
regional economic development for a newly evolving service and retail world.
Incorporating suburbs into such development plans, designs for these pseudocommunities
were held together by the automobile. The marketplace for this culture quickly became
the shopping mall. Strip malls, which open onto roadways and parking lots, were
installed near residential areas as suburbs extended further from the city center.
Developers then perfected the self-sustained, enclosed shopping mall, which became the
symbol of a culture of conspicuous consumption that many Americans have criticized
since its first appearance. Try as they might, developers could never re-create the culture
of local communities in these new artificial environments.
Critics such as Jane Jacobs and James Kunstler identified an intrinsic bias on the
American landscape in the 1970s. Kunstler writes, “Americans have been living carcentered
lives for so long that the collective memory of what used to make a landscape or
a townscape or even a suburb humanly rewarding has nearly been erased.” The 1990s
closed with the unfolding of the new politics of urban sprawl. “I’ve come to the
conclusion,” explained Vice President Al Gore on the campaign trail in 1999, “that what
we really are faced with here is a systematic change from a pattern of uncontrolled sprawl
toward a brand new path that makes quality of life the goal of all our urban, suburban,
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 174
and farmland policies.” During the 20th century, planners and designers gave Americans
what they wanted: a life and landscape married to the automobile. A divorce will require
an entirely revised architectural program.
architectural critics and planners had noted for years: the landscape of post-World War II
America had been planned around automobiles more than around people. Reflecting the
nation’s great enthusiasm for automobility, the 20th-century landscape integrated this
transportation infrastructure and allowed it a defining influence. In some ways, this
dominance snuck up on many Americans; yet such change is more attributable to blinded
free choice than to naïveté: the 20th-century American lived under the spell of the open
road.
Although the United States seized the invention, the automobile was first developed in
Europe in the 1890s. French manufacturers marketed the first successful automobile in
1894. Inconvenience from a lack of roads and infrastructure as well as a dependence on
transportation technologies such as trolleys precluded Americans from rapidly accepting
the new “horseless carriage.” The manufacturing and marketing efforts of Henry Ford
and others changed this attitude by 1913, when there was one motor vehicle to every
eight Americans. Mass production made sure that by the 1920s, the car had become no
longer a luxury but a necessity of American middle-class life. The landscape, however,
had been designed around other modes of transport, including an urban scene dependent
on foot travel. Cars enabled an independence never before possible, if they were
supported with the necessary service structure. Massive architectural shifts were
necessary to make way for the automobile, as architects and planners reconfigured urban
street forms or designed new building types to accommodate the automobile. Congested
streets forced motorists to park and store their automobiles in a new building, the parking
garage. Early garages included mechanical systems and elevators to carry cars into tall
skyscraperlike garages. Smaller garages affiliated with hotels or commercial districts
proliferated. After World War II, motorists could select garages with attendants or, more
commonly by the 1970s and after, they could use self-park garages. By the 1990s,
architects were designing tall garages for hundreds of cars. With retail storefronts at the
pedestrian level, many urban garages were designed to blend in with neighboring
buildings and styles.
Although the motorcar was the quintessential private instrument, its owners had to
operate it over public spaces. Who would pay for these public thoroughfares? After a
period of acclimation, Americans viewed highway building as a form of social and
economic therapy. They justified public financing for such projects on the theory that
roadway improvements would pay for themselves by increasing property-tax revenues
along the route. At this time, asphalt, macadam, and concrete were each used on different
roadways.
By the 1920s, the congested streets of urban areas pressed road building into other
areas. Most urban regions soon proposed express streets without stoplights or
intersections. These aesthetically conceived roadways, normally following the natural
topography of the land, soon took the name “parkways.” Long Island and Westchester
County, New York, used parkways with bridges and tunnels to separate these express
routes from local cross traffic. The Bronx River Parkway (1906), for instance, follows a
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 170
river park and forest; it also is the first roadway to be declared a national historic site. In
addition to pleasure driving, such roads stimulated automobile commuting.
The Federal Road Act of 1916 offered funds to states that organized highway
departments, designating 200,000 miles of road as primary and thus eligible for federal
funds. More important, ensuing legislation also created a Bureau of Public Roads to plan
a highway network to connect all cities of 50,000 or more inhabitants. Some states
adopted gasoline taxes to help finance the new roads. By 1925 the value of highway
construction projects exceeded $1 billion. Expansion continued through the Great
Depression, with road building becoming integral to city and town development.
Robert Moses of New York defined this new role as road builder and social planner.
Through his work in the greater New York City area (1928–60), Moses created a model
for a metropolis that included and even emphasized the automobile as opposed to mass
transportation. This was a dramatic change in the motivation of design. Historian Clay
McShane (1994) writes, “In their headlong search for modernity through mobility,
American urbanites made a decision to destroy the living environments of nineteenthcentury
neighborhoods by converting their gathering places into traffic jams, their
playgrounds into motorways, and their shopping places into elongated parking lots.”
Outside of cities in the United States, major efforts were underway to knit
the nation together on a larger scale. In the 1910s, motorists and
commercial forces joined in the good-roads movement to establish early
national highways, such as the Lincoln Highway and the Dixie Highway.
Route 66, stretching southwest from Chicago through Illinois, Missouri,
Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, ending
at Los Angeles, was to become the most celebrated interstate roadway.
While the road supplied an exodus for many Dust Bowl sufferers in the
1930s, Route 66 became even more important as a symbol. “Get your
kicks on Route 66” echoed through many musical moments as well as in
minutes of personal longing. For Americans, “America’s Main Street”
opened up westward and ushered in a period of comfortable cruising in
American automobiles. Probably more than any other roadway, Route 66
allowed the automobile to become a means for expressing the American
tradition of independence and freedom. Planners, designers, and
entrepreneurs sought methods to stimulate and take advantage of this new
American passion.
Aerial view of a housing development in Levittown, New York
Drivers through the 1930s often slept in roadside yards, so developers soon took
advantage of this opportunity by devising the roadside camp or motel. Independently
owned tourist camps graduated from tents to cabins, which were often called “motor
courts.” After World War II, the form became a motel, in which all the rooms were tied
together in one structure. Still independently owned, by 1956 there were 70,000 motels
nationwide. Best Western and Holiday Inn soon used ideas of prefabrication to create
chains of motels throughout the United States. Holiday Inn defined this new part of the
automobile landscape by emphasizing uniformity so that travelers felt as if they were in a
familiar environment no matter where they traveled.
The automobile landscape, of course, needed to effectively incorporate its essential
raw material: petroleum. The gas station, which originally existed as little more than a
roadside shack, mirrors the evolution of the automobile-related architecture in general.
By the 1920s, filling stations had integrated garages and service facilities. These facilities
were privately owned and uniquely constructed. By the mid-1930s, oil giants, such as
Shell and Texaco, developed a range of prototype gas stations that would re-create the
site as a showroom for tires, motor oil, or other services. The architectural style clearly
derived from the International Style, with a sleek, white appearance. While carefully
dressed attendants were a vital part of the experience at many service stations, George
Urich introduced the United States’ first self-service gas station in California in 1947. By
the 1990s, this form had been further streamlined to include convenience stores and the
opportunity to pay at the pump. The gas station experience would steadily become less
personalized.
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 172
As automobiles became more familiar in everyday Americans’ lives, planners and
developers formalized refueling stations for the human drivers as well. Food stands
informally provided refreshment during these early days, but soon restaurants were
developed that utilized marketing strategies from the motel and petroleum industries.
Diners and family restaurants sought prime locations along frequently traveled roads;
however, these forms did not alter dining patterns significantly. White Castle (1921)
combined the food stand with the restaurant to create a restaurant that could be put almost
anywhere. Drive-in restaurants would evolve around the idea of quick service, often
allowing drivers to remain in their automobile. Fast food as a concept, of course, derives
specifically from Ray Kroc and the McDonald’s concept that he marketed out of
California (1952). Clearly the idea of providing service to automobile drivers had created
an entire offshoot of the restaurant industry.
Whereas most roadside building types evolved gradually, the drive-in theater was
deliberately invented. Richard M.Hollingshead Jr., of New Jersey, believed that
entertainment needed to incorporate the automobile. Hollingshead patented the first
drive-in in 1933, but the invention would not proliferate until the 1950s. Viewing outdoor
films in one’s car has become a symbol of the culture of consumption that overtook the
American middle class during the postwar era. Of course, it also established the
automobile as a portable, private oasis where youth could express their sexuality as well
as experiment with drugs and alcohol.
Most of these developments redefined the local landscape while creating few national
thoroughfares. President Dwight D. Eisenhower changed this in the 1950s. In 1920 he
had led troops across the American road system in a military call for new roads. Then he
had witnessed the spectacle of Hitler’s Autobahn firsthand. When he became president,
he worked with automobile manufacturers and others to devise a 1956 plan to connect
America’s future to the automobile. The interstate highway system was the most
expensive public works project in human history. The public rationale for this hefty
project revolved around fear of nuclear war: such roadways would assist in exiting urban
centers in the event of such a calamity. The emphasis, however, was clearly economic
expansion. At the cost of many older urban neighborhoods—often occupied by minority
groups—the huge wave of concrete was unrolled that linked all the major cities of the
nation.
With the national future clearly tied to cars, planners began perfecting ways of further
integrating the automobile into American domestic life. Initially, these tactics were quite
literal. In the early 20th century, many homes of wealthy Americans soon required the
ability to store vehicles. Most often, these homes had carriage houses or stables that could
be converted. Soon, of course, architects devised an appendage to the home and gave it
the French name “garage.” From this early point, housing in the United States closely
followed the integration of the automobile and roads into American life.
Upper- and middle-class Americans had begun moving to suburban areas in the late
1800s. The first suburban developments, such as Llewellyn Park, New Jersey (1856),
followed train lines or the corridors of other early mass transit. The automobile allowed
access to vast areas between and beyond these corridors. Suddenly, the suburban
hinterland around every city compounded. As early as 1940, about 13 million people
lived in communities beyond the reach of public transportation. Because of these
changes, suburbs could be planned for less wealthy Americans.
Entries A–F 173
Modeled after the original Gustav Stickley homes or similar designs from Ladies Home J ournal and other
popular magazines, middle-class suburbs appealed to working- and middle-class
Americans. The bungalow became one of the most popular designs in the nation. The
construction halt of the Great Depression set the stage for more recent ideas and designs,
including the ranch house. The basic features of the ranch house—its simple, informal,
one-story structure; its low-pitched eaves; and its large expanse of glass that included
“picture” windows—were fused in the public mind with the easygoing lifestyle identified
with the Southwest and West Coast.
Planners used home styles such as these to develop one site after another with the
automobile linking each one to the outside world. The world of Levittown (the first of
which was constructed in 1947) involved a complete dependence on automobile travel.
This shift to suburban living became a hallmark of the late 20th century, with over half
the nation residing in suburbs by the 1990s. The planning system that supported this
residential world, however, involved much more than roads. The services necessary to
support outlying, suburban communities also needed to be integrated by planners.
Instead of the Main Street prototype, the automobile suburbs demanded a new form.
Initially, planners such as Jesse Clyde Nichols devised shopping areas, such as Kansas
City’s Country Club District (1922), that appeared a hybrid of previous forms. In Lake
Forest, Illinois, Howard Van Doren Shaw designed Market Square (1916), perhaps the
first shopping center planned to address the automobile. Soon, however, the “strip” had
evolved as the commercial corridor of the future. These sites quickly became part of
suburban development in order to provide basic services close to home. A shopper rarely
arrived without an automobile; therefore, the car needed to be part of the design program.
The most obvious architectural development for speed was signage: integrated into the
overall site plan would be towering neon aberrations that identified services. In addition,
parking lots and drive-through windows suggest the integral role of transportation in this
new commerce.
These developments culminated in the shopping mall, which quickly became a
necessary portion of strip planning. By the 1970s, developers’ initiatives clearly included
regional economic development for a newly evolving service and retail world.
Incorporating suburbs into such development plans, designs for these pseudocommunities
were held together by the automobile. The marketplace for this culture quickly became
the shopping mall. Strip malls, which open onto roadways and parking lots, were
installed near residential areas as suburbs extended further from the city center.
Developers then perfected the self-sustained, enclosed shopping mall, which became the
symbol of a culture of conspicuous consumption that many Americans have criticized
since its first appearance. Try as they might, developers could never re-create the culture
of local communities in these new artificial environments.
Critics such as Jane Jacobs and James Kunstler identified an intrinsic bias on the
American landscape in the 1970s. Kunstler writes, “Americans have been living carcentered
lives for so long that the collective memory of what used to make a landscape or
a townscape or even a suburb humanly rewarding has nearly been erased.” The 1990s
closed with the unfolding of the new politics of urban sprawl. “I’ve come to the
conclusion,” explained Vice President Al Gore on the campaign trail in 1999, “that what
we really are faced with here is a systematic change from a pattern of uncontrolled sprawl
toward a brand new path that makes quality of life the goal of all our urban, suburban,
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 174
and farmland policies.” During the 20th century, planners and designers gave Americans
what they wanted: a life and landscape married to the automobile. A divorce will require
an entirely revised architectural program.
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