God's own junkyard: The planned deterioration of America's landscape

by Peter Blake

WITH PHOTOS; A CONCERN WITH THE ENVIRONMENT. A PICTORIAL LESSON

Genres: Architecture

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1964

Reviews

[Hannah]

“…It has been theoretically possible, for the past forty or fifty years anyway, to build great cities in this country and elsewhere possible in technological as well as intellectual terms…architects have known, more or less, how to solve the ghastly traffic problems that have strangled or are about to strangle most United States cities how to separate pedestrian from automobile traffic; how to relate expressway traffic to local traffic; how to relate mass transport to individual-automobile transport; and how, finally, to relate the terminals of these various systems to one another and to the various structures within the city.
All this has been known…none of it has been translated into reality. Why?
The reason is, quite simply, that just about the only factor that determines the shape of the American city today is unregulated private profit: profit from speculation with land, profit from manipulating land and buildings, and profit from the actual construction and subsequent lease or sale of buildings.”

[Thomas]

I tracked this down after seeing it referenced in the footnotes of Learning from Las Vegas. The text itself is quite polemical (as opposed to rational), which makes it less than persuasive despite my strong agreement with Blake's sentiments.

It features many photographs of 1960s era US roadsides that would be of interest to anyone interested in material culture studies.

[Barry · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Planned deterioration of America's Landscape