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Avigail Sachs

The Tennessee Valley Authority was the largest single agency created under the auspices of the New Deal legislation. Until 1933, when the project was initiated, the Tennessee Valley was known romantically as "a region of untapped potential" and, less romantically, as one of the most impoverished and isolated areas of the country. The TVA was responsible for three large-scale environmental projects–the river, land, and power machines–but the project also had social, even utopian, goals. In service to the latter, the TVA put together a cadre of regional planners, architects, and landscape architects that Avigail Sachs calls the "atelier TVA." These professionals contributed to the design of the system of multipurpose dams, arranged visitor centers and scenic routes, built housing and communities (although both were segregated), and instigated a regional recreation industry. In addition to its planning and design history audience, this volume will be of interest to environmental historians and historians of the Progressive Era.

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

University of Virginia Press

Midcentury

The Garden in the Machine: Planning and Democracy in the Tennessee Valley Authority

Christine Madrid French

The inimitable, haunting films of Alfred Hitchcock took place in settings, both exterior and interior, that deeply impacted our experiences of his most unforgettable works. From the enclosed spaces of Rope and Rear Window to the wide-open expanses of North by Northwest, the physical worlds inhabited by desperate characters are a crucial element in our perception of the Hitchcockian universe. As Christine Madrid French reveals in this original and indispensable book, Hitchcock’s relation to the built world was informed by an intense engagement with location and architectural form—in an era marked by modernism’s advance—fueled by some of the most creative midcentury designers in film.

Hitchcock saw elements of the built world not just as scenic devices but as interactive areas to frame narrative exchanges. In his films, building forms also serve a sentient purpose—to capture and convey feelings, sensations, and moments that generate an emotive response from the viewer. Visualizing the contemporary built landscape allowed the director to illuminate Americans’ everyday experiences as well as their own uncertain relationship with their environment and with each other.

French shares several untold stories, such as the real-life suicide outside the Hotel Empire in Vertigo (which foreshadowed uncannily that film’s tragic finale), and takes us to the actual buildings that served as the inspiration for Psycho’s infamous Bates Motel. Her analysis of North by Northwest uncovers the Frank Lloyd Wright underpinnings for Robert Boyle’s design of the modernist house from the film’s celebrated Mount Rushmore sequence and ingeniously establishes the Vandamm House as the prototype of the cinematic trope of the villain’s lair. She also shows how the widespread unemployment of the 1930s resulted in a surge of gifted architects transplanting their careers into the film industry. These practitioners created sets that drew from contemporary design schools of thought and referenced real structures, both modern and historic. The Architecture of Suspense is the first book to document how these great architectural minds found expression in Hitchcock’s films and how the director used their talents and his own unique vision to create an enduring and evocative cinematic world.

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

The Architecture of Suspense: The Built World in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

Helen L. Horowitz

J. B. Jackson transformed forever how Americans understand their landscape, a concept he defined as land shaped by human presence. In the first major biography of the greatest pioneer in landscape studies, Helen Horowitz shares with us a man who focused on what he regarded as the essential American landscape, the everyday places of the countryside and city, exploring them as texts that reveal important truths about society and culture, present and past. In Jackson’s words, landscape is "history made visible."

After a varied life of traveling, writing, sketching, ranch labor, and significant service in army intelligence in World War II, Jackson moved to New Mexico and single-handedly created the magazine Landscape. As it grew under his direction throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Landscape attracted a wide range of contributors. Jackson became a man in demand as a lecturer and, beginning in the late 1960s, he established the field of landscape studies at Berkeley, Harvard, and elsewhere, mentoring many who later became important architects, planners, and scholars. Horowitz brings this singular person to life, revealing how Jackson changed our perception of the landscape and, through friendship as well as his writings, profoundly influenced the lives of many, including her own.

Traces of J. B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America

Gabrielle Esperdy

Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an "automobile utopia." In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the earliest days of the auto industry to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Paying particular attention to developments after World War II, Esperdy creates a narrative that extends from U.S. Routes 1 and 66 to the Las Vegas Strip to California freeways, with stops at gas stations, diners, main drags, shopping centers, and parking lots along the way.

While it addresses the development of auto-oriented landscapes and infrastructures, American Autopia is not a conventional history, offering instead an exploration of the wide-ranging evolution of car-centric territories and drive-in typologies, looking at how they were scrutinized by diverse cultural observers in the middle of the twentieth century.

Drawing on work published in the popular and professional press, and generously illustrated with evocative images, the book shows how figures as diverse as designer Victor Gruen, geographer Jean Gottmann, theorist Denise Scott Brown, critic J.B. Jackson, and historian Reyner Banham constructed "autopia" as a place and an idea. The result is an intellectual history and interpretive roadmap to the United States of the Automobile.

American Autopia: An Intellectual History of the American Roadside at Midcentury

Andrea Vesentini

Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls—these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postwar years, examining their design, use, and representation. By drawing on a wealth of examples ranging from the built environment to popular culture and film, Andrea Vesentini shows how suburban interiors were devised as a continuous cultural landscape of interconnected and self-sufficient escape capsules. The relocation of most everyday practices into indoor spaces has often been overlooked by suburban historiography; Indoor America uncovers this latent history and contrasts it with the dominant reading of suburbanization as pursuit of open space. Americans did not just flee the city by getting out of it—they did so also by getting inside.

Vesentini chronicles this inner-directed flight by describing three separate stages. The encapsulation of the automobile fostered the nuclear segregation of the family from the social fabric and served as a blueprint for all other interiors. Introverted design increasingly turned the focus of the house inward. Finally, through interiorization, the exterior was incorporated into the all-encompassing interior landscape of enclosed malls and projects for indoor cities. In a journey that features tailfin cars and World’s Fair model homes, Richard Neutra’s glass walls and sitcom picture windows, Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center and the Minnesota Experimental City, Indoor America takes the reader into the heart and viscera of America’s urban sprawl.

Indoor America: The Interior Landscape of Postwar Suburbia

Much of twentieth-century design was animated by the creative tension of its essential duality: is design an art or a science? In the postwar era, American architects sought to calibrate architectural practice to evolving scientific knowledge about humans and environments, thus elevating the discipline’s stature and enmeshing their work in a progressive restructuring of society. This political and scientific effort was called "environmental design," a term expanded in the 1960s to include ecological and liberal ideas. In her expansive new study, Avigail Sachs examines the theoretical scaffolding and practical legacy of this professional effort.

Inspired by Lewis Mumford’s 1932 challenge enjoining architects to go beyond visual experimentation and create complete human environments, Environmental Design details the rise of modernist ideas in the architectural disciplines within the novel context of sociopolitical rather than aesthetic responsibilities. Unlike today’s "starchitects," environmental designers saw themselves as orchestrators of decision making more than auteurs of form and style. Viewing architectural practice as rooted in Progressive Era politics and the democratic process rather than the European avant-garde, Sachs plots how these social concepts spread via influential architecture schools. This rich examination of pedagogy and practice is a map to both the history of environmental design and the contemporary consequences of architecture understood as a pressing social concern.

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