“In 1947, Lewis Mumford published a remarkable essay titled simply “Social Effects.” In it, he presented four scenarios of possible social futures in the atomic age. The first three result in nuclear war; yet the fourth scenario, in which war never comes, is actually the most chilling of all, for it describes a world in which the preparation, anticipation, and adjustments necessary for atomic war have completely destroyed the civilized impulse. Cities are abandoned, and populations are dispersed first into linear cities and then underground… Enforced underground habitation inevitably results in psychological dysfunction, and people resort widely to sexual promiscuity, drugs, and senseless violence. In the end, a world that has for decades known a nuclear-enforced “peace” is destroyed by anarchy and disease.
It does not take too great an intuitive leap to recognize much of Mumford’s prediction in our own dysfunctional society today, replete as it is with epidemics of drug use, divorce, and suicide;…and the horrifying recurrence of insanely pointless mass murders in public places. While many point to a loss of religious faith and engage in political wars over “family values,” one must consider that there may be another, darker source behind at least some of these ills in the form of a decades-old nuclear threat.
While it is, of course, difficult to establish a causal relationship between the nuclear arms race and current social crises, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton has written that the sense of doom and futurelessness engendered by the arms race has brought on “cultural disarray” in our society. As well, this futurelessness threatens not only our biological continuity as individuals and as a species but has also made us only too aware that nothing we make or do may survive, thus “eliminating the substrate of what we call culture…
[This suggests] that there may be a subconscious awareness of futurelessness incorporated into much of the postwar built form itself.”
via Sprawl as Strategy: City Planners Face the Bomb by Michael Quinn Dudley
Suburban Growth, Character, & Change
From the section on “Cold War, Disaster Scenarios, and the Fear Factor.”
The solution was decentralization and urban dispersal (Borden, 1969). Forms of limited dispersal did occur such as, remote locations for bomb production, placement of war contracts in small towns, creation of new satellite cities, increased highway construction, and control of inner-city building – policies that are in effect to date (Monson, 1950/51). Urban studies such as Norbert Wiener’s 1950 plan for radial “life belts” envisioned transportation lines and essential services, separated from downtowns by safety zones of agricultural or empty space as protection from nuclear fallout. Cities were seen as the communications node or nerve center. “The metropolis of classical modernity, the centered city of immediately recognizable and recognized spaces,” came to an end with the decentralized geography of highways and suburban sprawl (Edward Dimendberg,City of Fear) . In 1958, Lewis Mumford criticized the effects of highway construction at the time by likening it to having “the same result upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb (From Farish, 2003).”
via
“1. It aims to destroy
2. It isolates its members from the world
3. It claims special knowledge and morality
4. It demands strict obedience
5. It applies brainwashing
6. It replaces one’s world view
7. It has an auto-referential philosophy
8. It creates its own language, incomprehensible to outsiders”
via
This is a widely held definition of what constitutes a cult. It applies to many things: some religions, consumerism, and even modern architecture, as the author of these rules argues. The essence of a cult is the worship of a promise of unrealistic returns, reinforced by a system of petty instant gratification. In religion, this usually means the promise of an incredible afterlife, in consumerism it usually means the promise of a perfect present life, and in architecture it means the promise of creative genius. Realistically, the afterlife is unproven, perfection is unattainable, and it takes decades to learn how to actually build buildings.
Anti-architecture and deconstruction
By Nikos Angelos Salingaros, Christopher Alexander
Fascinated upon reading excerpts from the chapter about modern architecture as a cult. I don’t know if this guy is a nut or a genius but I love this so far, especially the zingers about zaha & gehry.
"A machine that makes the land pay."
~ Cass Gilbert, describing the skyscraper.
Jackson Lears - The American Way of Debt
“The equation of debt and decline assumes that once upon a time Americans lived within their means and saved for what they bought. This is fantasy: there never was a golden age of thrift. Debt has always played an important role in Americans’ lives — not merely as a means of instant gratification but also as a strategy for survival and a tool for economic advance.”
