Off the Cuff

What motivated British architects Alison and Peter Smithson to collect ads for American appliances, apparel, and automobiles? What did Jane Jacobs really see in the scrappy street life of Greenwich Village? What was so different, so appealing for Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown about Las Vegas or Levittown? What could a bearded boho bicyclist like Reyner Banham love about a city like Los Angeles?

According to Anthony Fontenot, an architectural historian who teaches at Woodbury University, the answer to all these questions was spontaneity—and a disbelief in the ability of planning or design to conjure it. Throughout Non-Design, he presents parallels from an aesthetics of spontaneity to the mid-twentieth century rejuvenation of ideas of liberty and freedom through the free market. At times, he argues quite convincingly that Banham, Jacobs, et al. found common cause with the neoliberal economic theories of Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and especially Friedrich Hayek. At others, however, his evidence is supportive, at best, of an intellectual echo between economic thinkers and those of design—that they were, perhaps unknowingly, bobbing their heads to the same rhythm.

Fontenot fingers longtime Architectural Review editor/publisher Hubert de Cronin Hastings as the first link in this associative chain. He had embraced modernist urbanism until he witnessed its results in British New Towns of the immediate postwar period. Hastings then wielded his influential monthly to promulgate an unpremeditated, picturesque alternative to the stiff functional planning of the New Towns. But Fontenot might have traced back the search for “spontaneous order” much further, perhaps to the Le Corbusier of the early 1920s, for whom the appeal of the functional shapes taken by ocean liners, airplanes, and automobiles was that they resulted from physical forces like flows of air or water, gravity, or friction rather than an architect’s capricious compositional intent. Interpreted poetically, the stuff of modern industry became the building blocks of an entire visual system as well as a readymade justification. Through Fontenot’s lens, however, it looks as if this means of avoiding the appearance of arbitrariness in the first half of the century met the same need that the market came to serve in its second: that of an alibi.

Though he enthused about a nebulous “new spirit,” in his infamous urban proposals Le Corbusier swerved toward an open embrace, perhaps even fetishization, of authority. For Fontenot’s subjects, the desire for spontaneity was overtly political in the exact opposite sense, a reaction to the perceived authoritarianism of the planners, broadly defined. Planning, these dissenting voices believed, countered individual impulses by imposing order rather than allowing it to emerge through self-motivated choices. Hastings, in advocating for “townscape,” celebrated pre-automobile urban spaces whose irregularity and sense of surprise was the result of centuries of uncoordinated individual initiative. He and his mouthpiece Gordon Cullen worked backward from the qualities of such areas toward a general theory of good urban form, rather than abstractly articulating a set of universal functional principles to be imposed de haut en bas.

This being a book ostensibly about architecture, Fontenot admirably provides a detailed, if quick-moving, study of neoliberalism, providing adequate groundwork for readers to judge the connections articulated across the gulf between economics and design. In particular, Fontenot highlights mass-market synopses of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) published in Reader’s Digest and Look as well as comic-style brochures distributed by General Motors, which served to popularize neoliberal ideas across the Anglophone world long before their ultimate supplanting of Keynesianism as the prevailing economic orthodoxy starting in the 1970s. Indeed, Fontenot’s argument is primarily situated in Britain and the United States, societies that during this period couldn’t be bothered to regulate their most brutish impulses.

Appropriate, then, that the loose bundle of aesthetic tendencies cohered around the term “the New Brutalism” provide Fontenot with his most compelling line of argument. He frames this short-lived, iconoclastic pseudomovement promoted in the pages of the Architectural Review not only as a rejection of the diluted coziness of British modernism in the early 1950s—exemplified by the buildings of the 1951 Festival of Britain—but also as a counter to the stifling influence of centralized planning, which protagonists like the Smithsons and propagandists like Banham associated with the brand of socialism then practiced by the Labour Party. The New Brutalists, who came to form a subset of the broader Independent Group, wanted forms to arise out of everyday life, spontaneously. The Smithsons shared this aim with their artistic collaborators Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson and used the latter’s photographs of the working-class London neighborhood Bethnal Green as illustrations for their polemics. As Fontenot reminds us, the New Brutalists were drawn to things that looked organic, unselfconscious, and carefree, such as the children seen in certain of Henderson’s pictures.

This sounds harmless enough. What could be more wholesome than taking inspiration from children or desiring playfulness rather than stifling propriety? The Smithsons’ brief experience working in the London County Council (LCC) Architects Department, so the story goes, had soured them on bureaucratic approaches to design and, moreover, on socialism, Marxism, and Communism writ large. (Alison Smithson’s pithy explanation that “New Brutalism was a label to throw at the left” serves as a chapter epigraph.) Fontenot claims a correlation between this attitude and Hayek’s advocacy for order without coercion, established through the decentralized, tacit knowledge of individuals. Above all, he argues, the New Brutalists relied on an “ethic of permissiveness” that defied all forms of centralized control. Evidence for this connection is provided by way of Banham’s 1955 article-cum-manifesto in the Architectural Review, in which he characterizes the New Brutalists as a group “lacking a unified or central intent” other than opposing the direct connection between ideology and politics articulated at the LCC and other government agencies. Does this mean they voted Tory? Who can say, but it’s certainly a peculiar historical twist of the broader aesthetic tendency within architecture that their precocious preference for raw, unadorned buildings and “as found” materials birthed—what we today refer to simply as Brutalism—has come to be so strongly associated with the policies of the welfare state and not with neoliberal critiques of them.

With other of Fontenot’s subjects, motivation came perhaps less from any innate ideological aversion to planning than a visceral revulsion to new planned environments. Jane Jacobs typifies this. While Fontenot has uncovered no direct social connection between Jacobs and her Greenwich Village neighbors like von Mises and Ayn Rand, he substantively links her belief that a city’s self-organizing capacity emerges from innumerable individual plans with their radical brand of libertarianism. Jacobs reacted harshly to totalizing ensembles like Stuyvesant Town, preferring the messy vitality of mature urban settings. Like Hastings and Cullen, she worked backward from the latter toward a set of clear guidelines for future planners. The importance of looking at the existing context with open eyes rather than with preconceived principles in mind is a consistent theme among the figures discussed in Fontenot’s whirlwind fifth chapter, especially among those who studied American cities that seemed to present a thrilling sense of trial-and-error dynamism lacking in the initial phases of British New Towns like Stevenage, Harlow, and Runcorn. The best-known practitioners of this nonjudgmental approach were Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, whose Learning from Las Vegas (1972), in Fontenot’s judgment, derived not only from pop artist Ed Ruscha but also gadfly journalist Tom Wolfe. Too little attention is paid to the BBC broadcaster Ian Nairn, whose unorthodox but insightful book The American Landscape: A Critical View (1965) might have offered a, well, critical counterpoint to other texts Fontenot analyzes. Nairn’s aversion to the “subtopia” he encountered in hastily planned suburban and exurban developments is mentioned, as is a short-lived collaboration with Jacobs, but one could get the impression that British observers were more likely than not to be seduced by American cities, whereas that wasn’t quite the case. Nairn found the US equal parts invigorating and enervating, writing that although the country struck the observer as “a great big heap of artifacts,” it was “the most varied and exciting heap that the world has ever seen, dumped down in the most monotonous and dreary way that the world has ever seen.”

Admirably, landscape architect Christopher Tunnard’s 1950 special issue of Architectural Review devoted to “Man-made America,” and the identically titled 1961 book he authored with Boris Pushkarev (who later became an expert on regional transit infrastructure), are recovered from the dustbin as pivotal studies of actually existing suburbanization, even if Fontenot positions them as elitist precursors to the more populist attitude taken up by subsequent commentaries. Contrary to other figures in Non-Design, Tunnard and Pushkarev concluded—says Fontenot—that both planning and regulation were unquestionably necessary. Not all their readers agreed; many turned instead to contemporaneous works like Peter Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard (1964) that reveled in the putative pleasures of non-designed environments and amplified the wider backlash against the hardened orthodoxies of modern architecture.

Essential to this backlash, for many, was an adoption of automobility. Two of Fontenot’s chapters touch on this sea change in the scale and scope of urban experience. The first centers on automotive styling as illustrative of the feedback loop whereby consumer desire informs design. He notes that by the 1960s, townscape ideals like “serial vision”—the belief that viewers are best able to appreciate urban space while in motion, which some thought was enhanced and not impaired by the speed of a car—had become keystones of mainstream urbanist thought. Moreover, according to the later Los Angeles–loving Banham, automobile infrastructure lubricated the kinds of individual decision-making essential to free-market liberalism. Believing in such stories, Fontenot argues, requires a selective ignorance of the role of planning or centralized control—frictionless urban mobility (as well as the planned obsolescence of makes and model years) was indirectly supported by national economic policy, infrastructure investment, and lending practices. This judicious jibe at Banham serves to point up that what both he and Hayek called “undesigned” markets rely just as much or sometimes even more on government action as planned economies; put differently, the market greatly advantages those who already hold power and resources, with “trickle-down” patterns amounting to little more than a potent myth.

The culmination of Fontenot’s narrative of neoliberal counter-modernism is the vogue-ish late 1960s manifesto Non-Plan. This pamphlet argues for the removal of land-use regulations almost entirely, stripping all those regulations that its authors—urban geographer Peter Hall, New Society editor Paul Barker, Banham, and the architect Cedric Price—categorize as “positive.” Whereas negative regulations forbade certain uses or building forms from urban areas entirely to maintain basic safety and efficiency, peskier positive regulations imposed aesthetic choices rather than allowing people the freedom to decide. This is where Fontenot’s declared stance as a historian—analyzing without necessarily endorsing the positions of his subjects—becomes most bothersome. To call for an end to regulation no doubt still has some edgelord appeal. While it’s unlikely Fontenot’s readership will hold this view, why not simply declare that this is a bad idea?

In an all-too-short concluding chapter, cursory summaries of Rem Koolhaas’s wry attempts to hybridize planning with non-planning and political theorist William E. Connolly’s reclamation of bottom-up processes for the left gesture toward the prevalence of critiques of neoliberalism today. But Non-Design left me wanting more analysis on the material impact these ideas had once neoliberal policies were enacted and once their proponents became power players in planning and design regimes—a desire that can fortunately be satiated by Kenny Cupers, Helena Mattsson, and Catharina Gabrielsson’s edited collection Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present (2020). Like Fontenot but with greater fidelity to concrete events, the authors featured in this book highlight ideological continuities concealed behind the apparent diversity of late twentieth-century architecture.

Nevertheless, the methods of intellectual history—close reading and comparative analysis of textual sources—have allowed Fontenot to highlight stunningly clear overlaps with theories of free market economics. In the end, Non-Design is a useful appraisal of the slippery ideas that permitted seemingly radical figures of the recent past to slide further and further rightward while clinging to their nonconformist bona fides. Fontenot leaves readers not only with a new perspective on this lineage, but with a potent question: “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 from the right?” Future scholars and designers alike will have to wrestle with this realization.