ATDTDA (12): The Chicago School

[Paul Nightingale]

David, I think we might be talking about different things here, although I
accept what you say about new architecture; and now you point it out I think
my expression might have been clumsy, certainly my use of the word dream,
with all the ambiguities that attach to it. The way I read it, Dally is
looking at the cityscape and seeing the way the city has grown in the recent
past, as represented by the juxtaposition of old and new (as opposed to, for
want of a better phrase, 'fake-old'). This is a feature of any city, then
and now (unless of course you raze it to the ground and start again). What
led me to my reading is that the text then juxtaposes this image, "the
conglomeration of architectural styles", to her memory of "the Midway
pavilions, that mixture of all the world's peoples", ie the ideological
construction of progress/civilisation, what by mid-century would become
modernisation theory, a cold-war successor to the turn-of-the-century
manifest destiny. Modernist culture was ambivalent about urbanism, and this
ambivalence is discussed in AtD, eg the view from Scarsdale Vibe's window
(332). We have different readings here of both modernism and "conglomeration
of ... styles" (and, to me, your subject heading, Chicago School, of course
references an early sociological attempt to study city life). I'm no
architect, but I do know that modernist design has a specific meaning that
doesn't fit what I wrote, so apologies for any apoplexy caused.