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

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.