Abstract
The automobile has reshaped our conceptions of space and our modes of accessing and penetrating the urban and non-urban territory in multiple ways, revolutionizing how architects perceive the city and contributing significantly to the transformation of the relationship between architecture and the city. Despite the fact that many architects and architectural critics and theorists have been attracted to automobile vision, in the field of history and theory of architecture and urban design, many questions concerning the impact of the automobile on our perception of the city and its territory have not yet been explored in depth. This is surprising when one considers that no other single factor changed the city so drastically during the twentieth century as the pervasive presence of the automobile. The article examines three different cases of architects—John Lautner, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Aldo Rossi—who tried to construct new visual regimes in photography from the car. The main objective is to present how new visual regimes in photography from the car informed in various ways the visual attitudes in their designs of buildings. The interexchange between the ways of capturing the views from the car and the formation of new design methods can explain the necessity to establish a new theoretical framework offering the possibility to historians of architecture and urban design to address in a sharp and concrete way the reciprocal relation between automobile vision and design approaches.
Highlights
Relating the automobile vision with the design approaches This article aims to untie the specificity of car travel as an apparatus or dispositif of perceiving urban and non-urban landscapes, on the one hand, and to explore the relationship between the process of taking photographs from the car and the emergence of new perceptual regimes in the field of architecture and urban design, on the other hand
Despite the fact that the paper focuses on the post-war period, with a special emphasis on the 1970s, to situate historically the role of the car in architects’ thought and practice it is important to bear in mind leisurebased automobile travel was made popular much earlier, as we look at the founding of Michelin guides in France and the parkway system in the United States
Examining three cases of architects that treated the view from the car as a significant means for shaping their design methods, I aim to shed light on the mutual interaction between the view from the car and architectural design strategies. This interexchange between the ways of capturing the views from the car and the formation of new design methods can explain the necessity to establish a new theoretical framework offering the possibility to historians of architecture and urban design to address in a sharp and concrete way the reciprocal relation between automobile vision and design approaches
Summary
Introduction: Relating the automobile vision with the design approaches This article aims to untie the specificity of car travel as an apparatus or dispositif of perceiving urban and non-urban landscapes, on the one hand, and to explore the relationship between the process of taking photographs from the car and the emergence of new perceptual regimes in the field of architecture and urban design, on the other hand.
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