Architecture & Television Presentation

1948

1952

1960

1974

1984

1939 Paramount Film

1936

1935

1944

1944

1951

1944

“…television was often figured as the ultimate expression of progress in utopian statements concerning ‘man’s’ ability to conquer and to domesticate space” (Spigel 102)

“Television is a form of ‘going places’ without even the expenditure of movement, to say nothing of money. It is bringing the world to people’s doorsteps.” (ibid.)

1945

1953

TV “will become cheap enough to be, like the country telephone, in every home, so that one can go to the theater without leaving the sitting room”

TV “promised to privatize and domesticate the experience of spectatorship”

“Numerous commentators claimed that television allowed people to travel from their homes while remaining untouched by the actual social contexts to which they imaginatively ventured.”

“In America it was the automobile – in synergistic combination with television – that induced a new type of urbanization: scientific in the extreme and with an unprecedented reliance on wartime engineering structures and practices. The American city began to explode spatially, but only as quilted interlock of increasingly confined and abstract synthetic environments” (Kwinter 509)

“Television of course provided only…a mastered environment oriented simultaneously to merchandising and to entertainment (to mitigate the tedium, monotony, and isolation of suburban life)” (Kwinter 511)

“Television has become the veritable central nervous system of postwar America, transforming nearly every relation of life, work, markets, and culture, while becoming the principle player in the migration of urban existence from a purely material and physical to an increasingly abstract and nervous-based condition” (Kwinter 512)

“It was television that permitted the great postwar tradeoff: it replaced the real multispectral information fluxes of the true city with remotely constituted synthetic ‘feeds,’ allowing one ostensibly to participate simultaneously in the (pseudo-) pastorality of the suburb and in the teeming, information-rich social world made possible by concentration and central markets” (Kwinter 511)

“…neo-suburbanites…secured a position of meaning in the public sphere through their new-found social identities as private land owners” (Spigel 101)

“Not that these happy families have made everyone else happy. If the vinyl-sided split-level and the wood-clad, rabbit-eared floor console were the twin pillars of American happiness in the boom years that followed two decades of depression and war, they also served as the durable scapegoats for America’s soullessness, conformity and anomie: vast wastelands, little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes, all the same.” -- A.O. Scott, “The Medium Is the Mindset,” NYT, 4/9/00

NEW URBANISM

• Walkability

• Connectivity

1. Mixed-use and diversity

2. Mixed housing

3. Quality architecture and urban design

4. Traditional neighborhood structure

5. Increased density

6. Smart transportation

7. Sustainability

8. Quality of life

Seaside, Florida

“The domestic architecture of the [post-War] period was itself a discourse on the complex relationship between public and private space” (Spigel 101)

Walter Gropius, The Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 1925-6

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House, 1951 (Plano, IL)

Mies, Tugendhat House, Brno, Czech Republic, 1930

Richard Neutra, Bond HouseSan Diego, CA, 1960

Richard Neutra, Chuey HouseLA, 1956

Richard Neutra, Maslon HouseRancho Mirage, CA, 1962