Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and The Market by Anthony Fontenot. University of Chicago Press, 376 pp., $54.
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…