Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- 1 Art criticism, 1951–1952
- 2 The ICA in the early 1950s
- 3 The Independent Group: aesthetic problems
- 4 The Independent Group: popular culture
- 5 Art criticism, 1953–1955
- 6 Alloway and abstraction
- 7 Alloway and figurative art
- 8 This Is Tomorrow, 1956
- 9 Information Theory
- 10 Group 12 and Information Theory
- 11 Science fiction
- 12 The cultural continuum model
- 13 Writings about the movies
- 14 Graphics and advertising
- 15 Design
- 16 Architecture and the city
- 17 Channel flows
- 18 Art autre
- 19 The human image
- 20 Modern Art in the United States, 1956
- 21 Action Painting
- 22 First trip to the USA
- 23 The New American Painting, 1958
- 24 Alloway and Greenberg
- 25 Cold wars
- 26 British art and the USA: The Middle Generation
- 27 A younger generation and the avant-garde
- 28 Hard Edge
- 29 Place and the avant–garde, 1959
- 30 Situation and its legacy
- 31 The emergence of Pop art
- 32 Alloway's departure
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
16 - Architecture and the city
from Section B - Continuum, 1952–1961
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Plates
- Acknowledgements
- Section A Introduction
- Section B Continuum, 1952–1961
- 1 Art criticism, 1951–1952
- 2 The ICA in the early 1950s
- 3 The Independent Group: aesthetic problems
- 4 The Independent Group: popular culture
- 5 Art criticism, 1953–1955
- 6 Alloway and abstraction
- 7 Alloway and figurative art
- 8 This Is Tomorrow, 1956
- 9 Information Theory
- 10 Group 12 and Information Theory
- 11 Science fiction
- 12 The cultural continuum model
- 13 Writings about the movies
- 14 Graphics and advertising
- 15 Design
- 16 Architecture and the city
- 17 Channel flows
- 18 Art autre
- 19 The human image
- 20 Modern Art in the United States, 1956
- 21 Action Painting
- 22 First trip to the USA
- 23 The New American Painting, 1958
- 24 Alloway and Greenberg
- 25 Cold wars
- 26 British art and the USA: The Middle Generation
- 27 A younger generation and the avant-garde
- 28 Hard Edge
- 29 Place and the avant–garde, 1959
- 30 Situation and its legacy
- 31 The emergence of Pop art
- 32 Alloway's departure
- Section C Abundance, 1961–1971
- Section D Alternatives, 1971–1988
- Section E Summary and Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Platesection
Summary
Alloway wrote a handful of articles on architecture and the city between the mid-1950s and his departure for the USA in 1961. They are more successful than most of his design articles because they do not reduce the discipline just to the level of symbols, but engage with use and experience, so that art merges with life. Architecture as symbol still plays its part. In the USA, Eero Saarinen's Technical Center for General Motors was “a potent symbol of American enterprise and technology,” and the Tennessee Valley Authority's dam building “symbolizes the optimistic technocracy of New Deal America as a characteristic expression of man's domination of nature.” Symbols were acceptable but monuments less so. For example, in 1959, Alloway terms Le Corbusier a “genius” because “As an architect of beautiful once-only buildings, of unique structures, he is, as everybody says, great.” But when an architect like Le Corbusier designs a whole city, then the city resembles one person's “grand desire rather than the fulfilment of accurate data.” Le Corbusier is typical of the “dictatorial” type of architect who places
formal and aesthetic decisions above human values (Mies van der Rohe is another fantastic and awesome example). Towns are the result of many people's work, but Le Corbusier would deny non-architects the right to make decisions about the visible form of cities. This, of course, postulates instantly an incredible impoverishment of the city as a spectacle… [T]he design of cities must be measured by our experiences of real cities as data, and not just be high-level abstractions about the city of the future and the way we “should” live.
Reference to the city as a “spectacle” suggests a knowledge of the work of the Situationists International, formed in 1957, who sought “the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality.” Alloway would have known of Situationism thorough international networks at the ICA and artists such as Asger Jorn and, in particular, the English contributor Ralph Rumney who had produced his Psychogeographic maps of Venice in 1957.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Art and PluralismLawrence Alloway’s Cultural Criticism, pp. 86 - 90Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012