| In the period between the late 1930s and the late 1960s, architects and planners often employed examples of cities, either from preindustrial periods or from parts of the world not touched by industrialization. Cited either as formal models or as metaphorical images, these archaic examples pointed to methods for remedying any number of urban ills, from visual chaos to social alienation. Through photographic images and, to a lesser extent, drawings, such archaic and preindustrial cities circulated through a complex series of urbanistic discourses, the same images often serving very different rhetorical purposes in different contexts. The dissertation is divided into four chapters, each of which investigates a distinct theme and episode in this history of urban design theory. Each is bounded by a somewhat different temporal, intellectual, and social context, yet each also has points of overlap and interaction with the others. Each chapter traces a different, interdisciplinary line of sources, both visual and discursive, through which urban designers and theorists critiqued post-war cities and imagined ideal alternatives. This dissertation makes a contribution to the scholarship on post-war urbanism and urban design theory. By examining images of the archaic city as part of the history of architectural modernism, this dissertation problematizes the historiographic divide between modern and post-modern urbanism, tracing instead a more complex sequence of ruptures and continuities that span the turbulent decades between 1938 and 1970. It contends that the figure of the archaic city, conceived both metaphorically and visually, structured the content of modernist discourses across a wide range of ideological positions, while also organizing urbanistic responses to modernity. It elucidates the aesthetic and intellectual genealogy of urban design, in both theory and practice, as its authors produced contemporary meanings from ancient urban forms. By examining representations of archaic cities as they had come to be interpreted through an array of sources, this project charts a powerful network of imagery and rhetoric that continues to inform contemporary city building. |
