ATDTDA (12): The Chicago School

[David Morris]

On 7/5/07, Paul Nightingale <isreading at btinternet.com> wrote:
> David, I think we might be talking about different things here, although I accept what you say about new architecture;

Right, and what you say below (up to the point where I jump in again)
makes sense, and is why I started out saying semantics might be the
fault here.

> 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

OK, stop right there.  This is only partly true, but didn't develop
until much later, especially in the urban design proposals of the 30's
which envisioned clean new cities which consisted of pristine glass
towers occupying wide open garden spaces connected by elevated
highways.  This vision was to some degree realized by the building of
Brasilia.  But the development of modernist design aesthetics, which
got a big boost in Chicago skyscraper development, especially the
clean-lined ornamentation-averse styles  (later called The
International Style - a moniker envisioning a single modern universal
style) had  really nothing to do with the later garden-city vision.
  David Morris