The Uncharted Kahn: The Visuality of Planning and Promotion in the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

The examination of a Louis Kahn diagram illuminates the visual sources and strategies that architects used in the 1940s to communicate the obscure language of urban planning to the public. The larger set of issues concerns the visual culture of modern bureaucracy and the ways in which consumer culture, urban planning, and public relations dovetailed in an age of experts, and did so by harnessing modernist art and graphic techniques. Kahn's diagram opens up the possible links between the Vienna Circle philosopher Otto Neurath, New Deal literature, abstraction in art, and the social mission of the Modern Movement in architecture.