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Urban, Planning and Transport Research
An Open Access Journal
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Denise Scott Brown’s active socioplastics and
urban sociology: from Learning from West End to
Learning from Levittown
Marianna Charitonidou
To cite this article: Marianna Charitonidou (2022) Denise Scott Brown’s active socioplastics and
urban sociology: from Learning from West End to Learning from Levittown, Urban, Planning and
Transport Research, 10:1, 131-158, DOI: 10.1080/21650020.2022.2063939
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21650020.2022.2063939
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.
Published online: 19 May 2022.
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Denise Scott Brown’s active socioplastics and urban
sociology: from Learning from West End to Learning from
Levittown
Marianna Charitonidou
a,b,c
a
Department of Architecture ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;
b
Faculty of Art Theory and History, Athens
School of Fine Arts, Athens, Greece;
c
School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Athens,
Greece
ABSTRACT
The article examines the impact of the study for Levittown of urban
sociologist Herbert Gans on Denise Scott Brown’s thought. It scruti-
nizes Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour’s
‘Remedial Housing for Architects or Learning from Levittown’ con-
ducted in collaboration with their students at Yale University in 1970.
Taking as its starting point Scott Brown’s endeavour to redene
functionalism in ‘Architecture as Patterns and Systems: Learning
from Planning’, and ‘The Redenition of Functionalism’, which were
included in Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time
(2004), the article sheds light on the fact that the intention to shape
a new way of conceiving functionalism was already present in
Learning from Las Vegas, where Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown
and Steven Izenour suggested an understanding of Las Vegas as
pattern of activities. Particular emphasis is placed on Scott Brown’s
understanding of ‘active socioplastics’, and on the impact of advo-
cacy planning and urban sociology on her approach. At the core of
the reections developed in this article is the concept of ‘urban
village’ that Gans uses in US in The Urban Villagers: Group and Class
in the Life of Italian-Americans (1972) to shed light on the socio-
anthropological aspects of inhabiting urban fabric.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 10 March 2022
Accepted 5 April 2022
KEYWORDS
Active socioplastics;
socioplastic praxis; advocacy
planning; urban sociology;
Denise Scott Brown; Herbert
Gans; urban village; socio-
anthropological perspective;
Paul Davidoff; Ludovico
Quaroni; West End in Boston;
Levittown; as found;
sensibility of place; Alison
and Peter Smithson; Robert
Venturi; New Brutalism;
University of Pennsylvania;
social planners; CIAM
Summer School; new
objectivity; city planning;
non-judgemental
perspective; Urban Re-
identification Grid; Louis
Kahn; architectural
pedagogy; urban planning
pedagogy; functionalism;
Steven Izenour
1. Introduction
In 1952, Denise Scott Brown resettled in London to work as an architect, but, eventually,
enrolled at the Architectural Association (AA) (Lee 2017). In 1954, two years after her
arrival at the AA, the Department of Tropical Architecture was formed. This department
was renamed Department of Tropical Studies in 1961. It was led by Otto Koenigsberger and
its core concern was the research on climatically responsive, energy conscious ‘Green
Architecture’.
1
Scott Brown graduated from the AA Diploma and Certificate in Tropical
Architecture in 1956 (Troiani 2005, 133). Before studying in London, she studied at
CONTACT Marianna Charitonidou mchariton@ethz.ch Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, Stefano-Franscini
-Platz 5, CH 8093 Zurich, Switzerland
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH
2022, VOL. 10, NO. 1, 131–158
https://doi.org/10.1080/21650020.2022.2063939
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
Witwatersrand University in South Africa, starting in 1949. During her stay in London, she
was particularly interested in the ‘urbanistic ideas of the New Brutalists’ (Scott Brown 2016;
1990b). Reyner Banham, in his seminal article entitled ‘The New Brutalism’, paid special
attention to the exhibition ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ held at the Institute for Contemporary
Art (ICA) in London in 1953 and curated by Alison and Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson
and Eduardo Paolozzi. Banham described New Brutalist aesthetics ‘as being anti-art, or at
any rate anti-beauty in the classical aesthetic sense of the word’ (Banham 1955, 359;
Charitonidou 2021b). Alison and Peter Smithson instrumentalised the concept of ‘New
Brutalism’ to redefine the conventional understanding of function characterising the
modernist era. In 1955, three years after their entry for the competition for the Golden
Lane project, Alison Smithson defined as follows ‘New Brutalism’:
The New Brutalism is the extension of the original functionalism (Constructivism and the
Esprit Nouveau) in that it is the poetry of the natural order – a seizing on the essence of the
programme, an attitude which is fundamentally anti-academic even in a period when anti-
academic has become academic.
2
Scott Brown has described New Brutalism as ‘a movement of the 1950s and 1960s that
related architecture to social realism’ (Scott Brown 2004a, 109). Scott Brown has men-
tioned regarding the British context when she relocated in London in 1952: ‘I landed in
post-World War II England amidst the look-back-in-anger generation, in a society in
upheaval, where social activism was part of education’ (Scott Brown 2004a, 109).
Scott Brown has remarked that one of the main characteristics of the New Brutalists’
ideology was the intention to shed light on what happened ‘in the streets of poor city
neighborhoods’. According to her, sociologists such as Michael Young and Peter
Willmott (Young & Willmott 1957), who invited ‘planners to understand how people
lived in the East End of London, saying that those who had been bombed out of housing
could not simply be moved to the suburban environment of the new towns’, helped
architects realize how important was the endeavour of understanding the reasons for
which ‘life on the streets was [for low-income citizens] a support system’ (Scott Brown in
Fontenot 2021, 202). Scott Brown has also highlighted that ‘[b]efore Jane Jacobs, Young
and Willmott voiced complaints against the social disruption induced by urban planning’
(Scott Brown in Fontenot 2021, 202).
Scott Brown stayed in London for six years, before resettling in Philadelphia in the
United States to study planning at the Department of City Planning at the Graduate School
of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania. An aspect that is of great importance for
understanding the reasons behind her decision to study there is the impact that Alison and
Peter Smithson had on her thought. Peter Smithson encouraged her to go to the University
of Pennsylvania to study planning. Characteristically, Scott Brown has remarked: ‘Peter
Smithson recommended that we apply to the University of Pennsylvania because the
architect Louis I. Kahn taught there’ (Scott Brown 2016; 2021). The fact that Alison and
Peter Smithson had met Louis Kahn in the framework of Team 10 meetings could explain
this. Alison and Peter Smithson were influenced by Kahn’s approach as it becomes evident
in an essay they devoted to his work in 1960 (Smithson & Smithson 1960).
When Scott Brown arrived at the University of Pennsylvania, the Department of City
Planning was significantly influenced by the methods of social sciences. The projects that
were conducted in the framework of the Institute for Urban Studies of the Graduate School
132 M. CHARITONIDOU
of Fine Arts had not many connections with the dominant models during the same period
at the Department of Architecture. An important figure at the time within the context of
Philadelphia, but also beyond it, was Louis Kahn. Kahn had started teaching at Yale
University in 1947. In 1955, he was appointed Professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, and in 1966, he became Cret Professor of Architecture modern ideas.
When Denise Scott Brown arrived at University of Pennsylvania as a student in 1958,
Kahn was teaching there. As Stanislaus von Moos has remarked, ‘Venturi had worked at
Kahn’s office for nine months in 1956–57’ (Von Moos 1999, 15).
Denise Scott Brown, while studying at the University of Pennsylvania, took numerous
social sciences courses. Among them, the courses of Herbert Gans played an important role
for her trajectory. During the same period, she collaborated with a number of social
planners, and was involved in social planning in Philadelphia. Her collaboration with the
circles of social planners should be taken into account when one tries to understand how
the exchanges between architects, urban planners and sociologists determined the forma-
tion of her pedagogical and design approach (Scott Brown 1976). Insightful is her remark
that architects, instead of trying to adopt the perspective of sociologists, should try ‘to look
at the information of sociology from an architectural viewpoint’ (Scott Brown in Cook &
Klotz 1973, 252). An aspect that explains the novelty of Scott Brown’s viewpoint
3
is the fact
that her approach aims to bring together her interest in the non-judgmental viewpoint of
the ‘new objectivity’ of Gans’s understanding of urban sociology and her passion for pop
art aesthetics. Regarding this issue, she has highlighted: ‘I like the fact that the influences
upon us are the pop artist on one side and the sociologist on the other’ (Scott Brown in
Cook & Klotz 1973, 252; Scott Brown 2003). Enlightening regarding how the sociological
perspective meets the pop artist viewpoint are Scott Brown’s following words:
The forms of the pop landscape [. . .] speak to our condition not only aesthetically but on many
levels of necessity, from the social necessity to rehouse the poor without destroying them to the
architectural necessity to produce buildings and environments that others will need and like.
(Scott Brown 1971, 28)
2. Denise Scott Brown at the 1956 CIAM Summer School and the
signicance of planning
Among the aspects that could help us better understand her interest in planning and the
reasons for which she decided to resettle in Philadelphia in order to study planning at the
University of Pennsylvania are her participation to the CIAM Summer School in Venice,
as well as the impact of Italian architect Giuseppe Vaccaro on her thought (Scott Brown
1996). In 1956, Denise and her first husband Robert Scott Brown, who died in 1959 in
a car accident, participated to the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture
Moderne) Summer School in Venice (Charitonidou 2018). During the same period,
Robert Venturi, who would become the second husband of Scott Brown, spent two
years – from 1955 to 1956 – as visiting scholar at the American Academy of Rome.
During his stays in Italy, Venturi developed a friendship with Ernesto N. Rogers and, as
Matino Stierli notes, was confronted with the question building in historically sensitive
urban areas, which was a major issue in the post-war Italian architectural scene (Stierli
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 133
2007). Denise and Robert Scott Brown assisted Vaccaro for his project “for Ina-Casa’s
Ponte Mammal neighbourhood on the northeast side of Rome (Pilat 2016).
Characteristically, she remarks, in ‘Towards an ‘Active Socioplastics’:
Summer School in Venice and some weeks in the architecture oce of Giuseppe Vaccaro in
Rome reinforced our intention, first formulated at the AA, to continue our training in
architecture via the study of city planning. (Scott Brown 2009, 27)
During the 1956 CIAM Summer School, Ludovico Quaroni delivered a keynote lecture
entitled ‘The architect and town planning’ on 14 September 1956 (Scimeni 1956). At the
core of this lecture was the interrogation regarding the ways in which architects could
have social responsibilities. Quaroni argued that key for enhancing architects’ impact on
society is the dissolution of the boundaries between town planning and architecture. He
tried to explain ‘why [. . .] town planning [should] be the architects’ concern’, drawing
a distinction between an understanding of function as object and an understanding of
function as principle. He highlighted: ‘the latest development of the battle for modern art
caused architecture to formulate as an object what is just a principle, namely that the
form must rise from the functionalism’ (Van Bergeijk 2010).
Quaroni’s critique of functionalism could be interpreted as a critique of Le Corbusier’s
categorisation of human actions into ‘dwelling, working, [and] cultivating mind and body’,
and of Le Corbusier’s understanding of the user as ‘machine-man’ and the house as
‘machine à habiter’. Quaroni suggested a reinvention of the concept of function, challen-
ging Le Corbusier’s quantitative and simplistic understanding of function, and blaming
him for neglecting the physical, special, psychological, and moral factors related to func-
tion. He asserted, during the aforementioned lecture: ‘not having fully digested the idea of
function, in the long run, we identified it only with a question of form’. Quaroni also argued
that ‘function cannot be determined by means of mere square or cubic meters, since it is
a compound of physical, special, psychological, moral factors’, and underscored the
importance of understanding ‘architecture as a social function’ (Van Bergeijk 2010).
Quaroni identified Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright as ‘the last specimen of that
generation of architects, the founder of which was perhaps Brunelleschi’, who without
‘having fully digested the idea of function [. . .] identified it only with a question of form’
(Van Bergeijk 2010). He also underlined the importance of the architects’ role in revealing
the connections between the individual and the collective in society. According to Quaroni,
a characteristic of contemporary city was the absence of a homogeneous structure. Quaroni
used the concept of ‘marvellous city’ to refer to this absence of homogeneity in urban
structures. The notion of ‘urban architecture’, which was dominant in the debates con-
cerning architectural and urban epistemology and educational strategies in several schools
of architecture in Italy during the 1960s, was at the core of Quaroni’s thought. What I argue
here is that Scott Brown was influenced by this keynote lecture of Quaroni, particularly as
far as the critique of modernist functionalism and the dissolution of the distinction between
architecture and town planning are concerned.
Ludovico Quaroni’s aforementioned keynote lecture and his critique of Le Corbusier
and the functionalism of modernist architecture and urbanism constituted an early
encounter of Scott Brown with an analysis of the risks that a rigid understanding of the
concept of function in architecture and urban planning entails, on the one hand, and the
drawbacks of separating the practice of architecture and the practice of urban planning,
134 M. CHARITONIDOU
on the other hand. Quaroni, eleven years later, in La torre di Babele, ‘Quaroni argues that
“the modern city is really ugly” and that the neglected lesson of historic cities is the well-
integrated synthesis of function, technology and aesthetics’ (Charitonidou 2022a; 2022b;
2020, 231; Quaroni 1967). Despite the commonalities between some aspects of Quaroni’s
critical view of modernist functionalism and Scott Brown’s deferred judgment, Quaroni’s
analysis of ‘the tension between the historic and the modern city’, and his choice to relate
‘the historic city’s beauty to its “clear design . . . and structure” [and the ugliness of] [. . .]
the modern city [to the fact that it is] [. . .] “chaotic”’ (Charitonidou 2022a; 2022b; 2020,
231; Quaroni 1967; Chowkwanyun 2014) differs a lot from Scott Brown’s posture, who
seems to desire to understand the logic behind the complexity and patterns characteris-
ing the post-war urban and suburban fabric.
3. Advocacy planning movement and the critiques of urban renewal
To grasp the specificity of the context of Philadelphia during the late 1950s, we should
bear in mind the urban renewal efforts and the critiques of the advocacy planning
movement. Scott Brown has commented on advocacy planners’ critique of urban renewal
program, highlighting that it ‘derived from the problem that urban renewal had become
“human removal”’ (Scott Brown 2009, 32; Charitonidou 2021c; Lung-Amam et al., 2015).
She has also underscored that the main argument of advocacy planners was that
architects and urban planners’ ‘leadership had diverted urban renewal from
a community support to a socially coercive boondoggle’ (Scott Brown 2009, 33; Pacchi
2018). In parallel, during this period, several universities in the United States launched
programs in city planning or urban design. Among them is Harvard University that
initiated its program on urban design two years before Scott Brown’s arrival in the United
States.
The pedagogical approaches at the Department of City Planning at the University of
Pennsylvania when Scott Brown resettled there was influenced by social sciences and New
Left critiques. The activities and publications of Jane Jacobs are also of great significance for
understanding the social aspects of the ideas of Scott Brown during those years. Among the
texts of Jacobs that had an important impact on Scott Brown’s thought is Jane Jacobs’s
articles entitled ‘The City’s Threat to Open Land’, ‘Redevelopment Today’, and ‘What is
a City?’ published in Architectural Forum in 1958, that is to say the same year in which Scott
Brown resettled in Philadelphia (Jacobs 1958a; 1958b; 1958c; Klemek, 2014; 2009). Scott
Brown remarked concerning the context in Philadelphia in the 1950s and its relationship to
what would later be called New Left:
Here, long before it was visible in other places, was the elation that comes with the discovery
and definition of a problem: poverty. The continued existence of poor people in America was
a real discovery for students and faculty in the late 1950s. The social planning movement
engulfed Penn’s planning department. (Scott Brown 1984a; Klemek 2011, 184)
In the early 1960s, one of the most important advocacy planners, Paul Davidoff, also
taught at the City Planning Department of the University of Pennsylvania between 1958
and 1965. Davidoff was among the protagonists of Advocacy Planning movement in the
United States. In his seminal article entitled ‘Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning’
published in 1965, remarked that ‘[p]lanners should be able to engage in the political
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 135
process as advocates of the interests both of government and of such other groups,
organizations, or individuals who are concerned with proposing policies for the future
development of the community” (Davidoff 1965, 332).
David A. Crane, who was Scott Brown’s student advisor at the University of
Pennsylvania, also had an important impact on her, especially as far as the strategies
employed in studio teaching are concerned (Scott Brown 2016; Crane 1960a; 1960b). As
Clément Orillard reminds us, Crane collaborated with Kevin Lynch for the preparation
of the maps and diagrams included in The Image of the City (Lynch 1964; Orillard, 2009,
297). During the period Crane mentored Scott Brown, he worked on a conference
focusing on urban design criticism.
4
In. 1959, Scott Brown started working as Crane’s
teaching assistant (Orillard 2009, 297).
During the period that Scott Brown studied at the Department of City Planning of the
University of Pennsylvania there was a tension between the pedagogical methods of
social planners and studio-based teaching strategies. This tension is described by Scott
Brown as ‘the physical/non-physical debate’ (Scott Brown 2015, 80; Scott Brown 1965).
Gans used the expression ‘fallacy of physical determinism’ (Gans 1968; 2002) to refer to
the tendency of urban planners to believe that ‘place shapes people’s behavior’ (Arefi &
Triantafillou 2005, 76).
4. The impact of Herbert Gans’s socio-anthropological perspective on
Denise Scott Brown’s approach
The University of Pennsylvania was one of the universities that hired sociologists to teach
at their planning departments. An important figure that taught there when Scott Brown
arrived was urban sociologist Herbert Gans, who is mentioned in Paul Davidoff’s seminal
article ‘Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning’ (Davidoff 1965). Between 1953 and 1971,
Gans was affiliated with the Institute of Urban Studies of the University of Pennsylvania,
the Center for Urban Education, and the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies
(Rao 2012). Along with Davidoff, he played an important role in the emergence of the
advocacy planning movement in the United States. Scott Brown was particularly inter-
ested in Gans’s ‘new objectivity’, which aimed to relate ‘social life, popular culture and
planning’ (Scott Brown 2009; 2003, 29).
Scott Brown’s interest in the concept of ‘objectivity’ goes back to her years at the AA,
as it becomes evident in her following words: ‘The belief that architecture could save the
world through objectivity and a brave use of technology was shared by many young
architects at the AA’ (Scott Brown 2009, 27). During her studies at the AA, Scott Brown
had as student advisor German Jewish architect and urban planner Arthur Korn, who
was then member of the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) group, which was
active between 1933 and 1957 (Mumford 2002, 168). Scott Brown has associated her
interest in the concept of ‘active socioplastics’ with the impact that Korn’s ideas had on
her. Regarding Arthur Korn’s impact on Scott Brown’s approach, one should bring to
mind Korn’s book entitled History Builds the Town, in which special attention is paid to
the fact that ‘[t]here has been in history an infinite variety of towns differing in function,
structure and components’ (Korn 1953; Kurgan 2020). At the core of Korn’s analysis is
the idea that the different forms of towns encountered in different societies are related to
the economic and political structures of these societies.
136 M. CHARITONIDOU
While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Brown followed the courses of
Gans, who was the first awardee of a PhD Degree from the Department of City Planning
(Birch 2011, 24; Scott Brown & Venturi 2004). Gans, before joining the Department of
City Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, was at the University of Chicago.
Important for Gans’s approach was the work of Martin Meyerson and John Dyckmen
(Klemek 2011, 56). Among Gans’s books that influenced Scott Brown’s approach is US in
The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (Gans 1962), in
which the author examined the everyday life of the inhabitants in Boston’s West End,
a slum cleared area. The aforementioned book constituted a critique of the urban renewal
strategies in the West End in Boston. It was based on an eight-months in situ research
conducted during a period preceding the demolition of this area. More specifically, Gans
remarked regarding his study of Italian Americans in Boston’s West End: ‘The West End
was not really a slum, and although many of its inhabitants did have problems, these did
not stem from the neighborhood’ (Gans 1962). (Figure 1)
Gans placed particular emphasis on the special characteristics of the environment and the
community in Boston’s West End, analysing the impact of urban renewal, gentrification and
displacement on existing communities (Mueller & Dooling 2011). Characteristically, he
remarks, in US in The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans,
that ‘[n]ot all city neighborhoods are urban villages’ (Gans 1962, 16). Reading Gans’s book,
Figure 1. Photograph of the West End by Herbert Gans, ca. 1957. Credits: Herbert Gans papers, 1944–
2004, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 137
one realizes that he intended to shed light on the socio-anthropological meaning of the
concept of ‘urban village’. More specifically, he defined ‘urban village’ as a ‘city low-rent
neighborhood typically one in which European immigrants – and more recently Negro and
Puerto Rican – try to adapt their nonurban institutions and culture to the urban milieu’ (Gans
1962, 4).
5. Learning from Levittown Studio: towards a socio-anthropological
perspective
In the photographs that Scott Brown took in South Street West of Broad Street in Philadelphia,
one can discern the impact of Gans’s approach on her perspective (Figure 2). Another seminal
book by Gans that influenced significantly Scott Brown’s approach is The Levittowners: Ways
of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (Gans 1966; 1967). Three years after the
publication of the latter, in 1970, Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown
coordinated the study entitled ‘Remedial Housing for Architects or Learning from Levittown’,
which was held in collaboration with their students at Yale University (Figure 3, Figure 4). In
the themes addressed in the framework of the course entitled ‘Learning from Levittown
Studio’ that Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour taught during the fall
semester in 1970, we can easily discern the influence of Herbert Gans’s work. This influence
was particularly present in the interest of Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, Denise Scott Brown
and their students in depicting the iconographical and symbolic values of suburbia, on the one
hand, and in their choice to attach importance to the socio-anthropological dimension of the
perception of architecture and the city. In the framework of the aforementioned course,
special emphasis was placed on the analysis of the following aspects concerning the profile of
the citizens of Levittown: their family organization, their education, their ambitions and
values, their attitudes, their habits concerning leisure, their ways of inhabiting their houses,
their habits concerning occupation, their social contacts, their media, their possessions, their
orbits of mobility, and their central investments.
Figure 2. Photograph taken at South Street in Philadelphia by Denise Scott Brown. Credits: Venturi,
Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
138 M. CHARITONIDOU
Figure 3. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Levittown Studio,
Fall 1970. Life Styles Expressed in the House. Credits: Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural
Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
Figure 4. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Levittown Studio, Fall
1970. Styling. Sprawl, Space & Imagery. Scanned from photo reproduction. Credits: Venturi, Scott
Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 139
Of great interest is the way in which Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, Denise Scott Brown
and their students in categorized the groups of citizens in the posters produced in the
framework of the Learning from Levittown Studio. These groups were the following: (a)
a first group concerning low income-black matriarchal families with 7 years of education,
which were occupied mainly as workers and unemployed and corresponded to approxi-
mately 7% of the population of New Haven, (b) a second group concerning low income-
Italian origin-urban families with 8 years of education, which were occupied mainly as
operatives and laborers and corresponded to approximately 10% of New Haven (c) a third
group concerning suburban-working class families with 8–11 years of education, which were
occupied mainly as operatives and laborers and corresponded to approximately 10% of the
population of New Haven, (d) a fourth group concerning suburban-low-middle class families
with High School and 2 years College education, which were occupied mainly as craftsmen,
salesmen and clerical and laborers and corresponded to approximately 35% of the population
of New Haven, and (e) a fifth group concerning upper-middle class families with 4 years
College education, which were occupied mainly in business and corresponded to approxi-
mately 20% of the population of New Haven
5
(Figure 5).
Looking closely at the posters produced in the framework of the Learning from
Levittown Studio, one distinguishes the emergence of new means of communication or
new signs that reveal a shift concerning the social and aesthetic parameters of
Figure 5. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Levittown Studio, Fall
1970. House style by income category in New Haven, CT. Photos and markers on poster board. Credits:
Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
140 M. CHARITONIDOU
architectural and urban perception. Despite the fact that the emergence of these new
media is more usually related in the existing scholarship on Denise Scott Brown and
Robert Venturi to their study of Las Vegas and their seminal Learning from Las Vegas
(Scott Brown et al. 1972), for which they also collaborated with Steven Izenour, one could
argue that they were at the core of their visual analysis of Levittown as well. Many of the
posters that were produced during the Learning from Levittown Studio were included in
‘Learning from Pop’, which was published in Casabellà in 1971 (Scott Brown 1971; 1984;
Charitonidou 2021b; 2021d; 2021e). In this article, Scott Brown criticised Le Corbusier’s
approach, juxtaposing it to the strategies of analysing the ways in which the inhabitants of
Levittown shape their environment. According to her, architects should take into account
‘what people do to buildings’ (Scott Brown 1984b, 27; 1971).
Scott Brown’s concern about the cultural dimension of the quotidian life of the inhabitants
of Levittown was also present in ‘Learning from Lutyens: Reply to Alison and Peter Smithson’,
which was originally published in 1969 in the RIBA Journal (Scott Brown and Venturi 1969;
1984a). In this article, which constituted a reply to two articles published in the same journal
by Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson respectively, (A. Smithson 1969; P. Smithson 1969),
Scott Brown posed the following question, which echoes Gans’s socio-anthropological view:
Are architect still so condescending about the “dreams” of the occupants of Levittown, and
cavalier about the complex social and economic, as well as symbolic, bases of residential
sprawl? (Scott Brown & Venturi 1969; 1984a, 20).
There is a thought-provoking graphic similarity between the poster produced in the
framework of Learning from Levittown studio and Alison and Peter Smithson’s repre-
sentation in the case of the ‘Urban Re-identification Grid’ shown at the 9
th
CIAM held in
Aix-en-Provence in France in 1953 (Figure 6; Charitonidou 2019), and the grille
‘Housing Appropriate to the Valley Section’ (Figure 7; Charitonidou 2020; 2020, 124),
which was presented at the 10
th
CIAM held in Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia in 1956, that is to
say the same year that the CIAM Summer School mentioned above took place in Venice.
The ‘Urban Re-identification Grid’ constitutes a turning point regarding the conception of
the inhabitants and the ‘humanization’ of functionalism during the post-war era .The critique
of modernist functionalism, which is at the core of Scott Brown’s thought, was also at the heart
of the debates of Team 10, which is also known as Team X or Team Ten and refers to the group
of architects and urban planners, as well as other figures concerned about architecture and
urbanism. At the centre of Team 10 was the intention to challenge certain rigid ideas of the
CIAM. Team 10 emerged in July 1953 during the 9
th
CIAM. Its creation should be understood
in relation to the intention ‘to “re-humanise” architecture’ (Charitonidou 2019, 73) and
urbanism. The Doorn Manifesto or ‘Statement on Habitat’ is considered to be the founding
document of Team 10. It was named after the city in which it was formulated and ‘signed in
January 1954 by the architects Peter Smithson, John Voelcker, Jaap Bakema, Aldo van Eyck
and Sandy van Ginkel and the social economist Hans Hovens-Greve’ (Charitonidou 2019).
The main objectives of the Doorn Manifesto was ‘[t]he rediscovery of the “human” and the
intensification of interest in proportions’, and the establishment of design strategies aiming to
‘to produce towns in which “vital human associations” [would be] [. . .] expressed’’
(Charitonidou 2019, 73). It was in this manifesto that ‘Team 10 presented their “Scale of
Association”, which was a kind of re-interpretation of Patrick Geddes’ Valley Section’
(Figure 8; Charitonidou 2019, 73).
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 141
The concern about reinventing the way architectural and urban artefacts are inhabited is
reflected in the theme of the ninth CIAM held in 1953 in Aix- en-Provence in France, which
was the ‘Grid of Living’. Through their ‘Urban Re-identification Grid’, Alison and Peter
Smithson expressed their ideas concerning the transformation conception of the user in
architecture during the post-war years, criticising the reductive of understanding urban reality
during the modernist era (Charitonidou 2020d). Such a critique is also very present in Scott
Brown’s work and, more particularly in the posters produced during the Learning from
Levittown Studio in collaboration with Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and their students.
The ‘Urban Re-identification Grid’ was organized around the concepts of ‘house’, ‘street’,
‘relationship’, ‘district’, and ‘city’, which were important for the visual argumentation of
Learning from Levittown Studio as well. Among the visual components included in the
‘Urban Re-identification Grid’ were a photograph of Chisendale Road by Nigel Henderson
(1951), who was along with Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi,
Lawrence Alloway, William Turnbull, John McHale, and Reyner Banham member of the
Figure 6. Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Re-identification Grid, presented at the 9
th
CIAM in
Aix-en-Provence in 1953. Credits: Smithson Family Collection.
Figure 7. Alison and Peter Smithson, CIAM grille entitled ‘Housing Appropriate to The Valley Section’
presented at the 10
th
CIAM. Credits: Smithson Family Collection.
142 M. CHARITONIDOU
Independent Group (Robbins 1990; Charitonidou 2021b; 2021d, 2021e), as well as a ‘diagram
showing the network of housing and streets in the air and their collage for the competition for
the Golden Lane Housing project (1952)’ (Charitonidou 2020, 34).
In the grille entitled ‘Housing Appropriate to the Valley Section’, Alison and Peter
Smithson included a photograph taken in the Island of Poros in Greece accompanied by
the following remark: ‘Poros: Identical unit used throughout (other Island villages have their
own unit) give an identity of coherence – like red apples on a tree’ (Figure 9; Charitonidou
2020, 122). Three years, in 1959, during the last CIAM held in Otterlo in the Netherlands,
Peter Smithson, in his presentation, paid special attention to the open-ended morphologies
he encountered during his travels in Greek coastal villages, placing particular emphasis on
‘the relationship between the aggregation of Greek villages and the social and cultural patterns
of quotidian life of their inhabitants’ (Charitonidou 2020, 122). This concern about associat-
ing the social and cultural patterns of quotidian life of their inhabitants with the architectural
and urban morphologies has certain affinities with the study of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott
Brown, Steven Izenour, and their students in Levittown.
Figure 8. Valley Section Diagram as included in Doorn Manifesto for CIAM meeting in Doorn, January 1954.
Credits: Het Nieuwe Instituut Collections and Archive, Rotterdam, CIAM Congresses and Team 10 Meetings.
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 143
6. South street in Philadelphia and a careful regard for people and existing
architecture
In ‘The Positive Functions of Poverty’, Herbert Gans, drawing upon Merton’s conception of
function, analysed the ‘functions of poverty’ (Gans 1972, 276; 1974). He identified ‘functions
for groups and aggregates’, including ‘interest groups, socioeconomic classes, and other
population aggregates, for example, those with shared values or similar statuses’ (Gans
1972, 276). Scott Brown and Venturi remarked in a text describing their study for South
Street in Philadelphia:
A rehabilitation of South Street, starting with what is there now rather than with utopian,
non-refundable dreams and architectural monuments, with careful regard for people (resi-
dents and merchants) and existing architecture, would be a means for economic regeneration
of the whole community, of much more than the street itself.
6
In the aforementioned description of South Street in Philadelphia by Scott Brown and
Venturi, one can discern their care about respecting the choices of inhabitants concerning
the way space is experienced and transformed according to their cultural characteristics. To
grasp the context of the South Street in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, one should bear in mind
the activities of the so-called ‘Citizens’ Committee to Preserve and Develop the Crosstown
Community’ (CCPDCC), which was established in 1968 by African-American housing
activist Alice Lipscomb, community leader George Dukes, and lawyer Robert Sugarman,
and advocated that the viable characteristics of the street should be preserved.
Figure 9. Alison and Peter Smithson, photograph of Poros Island in Greece showing the aggregation
of units. Detail of CIAM grille entitled ‘Housing Appropriate to The Valley Section’ presented at the 10
th
CIAM. Credits: Smithson Family Collection.
144 M. CHARITONIDOU
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were invited by the CCPDCC to show in
a visual why an ensemble of features of the street were valuable and should not be neglected.
At the core of the activities of the CCPCCC was the critique of the so-called ‘Crosstown
Expressway’, which had been approved to be sponsored by the Federal government.
According to Sebastian Haumann, ‘[t]he intention of the collaboration was to develop an
alternative plan for the “Corridor” to fend off the City’s intrusive proposals effectively’
(Haumann 2009, 40). Scott Brown has noted, in Urban Concepts, regarding their study in
South Street in Philadelphia: ‘One of the reasons they accepted us was that we had a concern
in common. Bob Venturi, apart from being an architect, was a fruit merchant. He had
inherited his father’s business on South Street’. (Scott Brown 1990, 35)
7. The patterns of mapped data as signs of life
Denise Scott Brown first visited Las Vegas in 1965, during a trip to Los Angeles, where she was
teaching at Berkeley for a short period. Scott Brown has remarked that their main objective in
the case of their study on Las Vegas was to analyse ‘symbols in space’ (Scott Brown in
Rattenburry & Hardigham 2007, 81). In order to conduct their analysis of ‘symbols in
space’, they chose to examine ‘the shapes, sizes and locations and symbolic content of signs
to learn how people in cars would react to [them]’ (Scott Brown in Rattenburry & Hardigham
2007, 81). They decided to focus on Las Vegas because they considered it representative of the
new type of urban form related to the intensified use of the car. In other words, for them, Las
Vegas was representative of ‘the emerging automobile city’. In this sense, Las Vegas was
chosen because, in their opinion, it constituted an ‘archetype’ automobile city, to borrow Scott
Brown’s own expression. Perceiving Las Vegas as an ‘archetype’ automobile city went hand in
hand with believing that investigating closely how drivers react when confronted with
‘symbols in space’ would also help them better understand the automobile vision characteriz-
ing other cities that are closely connected to the car such as Los Angeles (Figure 10). Regarding
his issue, Scott Brown has underscored: ‘we examined the archetype, but our aim was to
understand, from it, the automobile city – to understand the Los Angeles of that time’ (Scott
Brown in Rattenburry & Hardigham 2007, 81; Charitonidou 2021a).
Figure 10. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. First edition,
1972. Credits: Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 145
Figure 11. Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown, architects and planners, signs of life:
symbols in the American city Renwick Gallery, Washington D.C., 1974–1976. Exhibit panel ‘Gas Stations’.
Credits: venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The architectural archives, University of Pennsylvania.
146 M. CHARITONIDOU
Figure 12. Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown, Architects and Planners, Signs of Life:
Symbols in the American City Renwick Gallery, Washington D.C., 1974–1976. Exhibit panel ‘Building as
sign’. Credits: Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 147
Scott Brown has remarked that ‘[i]n planning school, [she] [. . .] learned to understand
complex urban orders by mapping urban systems and studying their patterns’. She has always
considered mapping as an important tool in architecture, and urbanism. More specifically, she
seems to believe that ‘patterns of mapped data [can] help us to discover an order emerging
from within – from what appears to be the chaos of the city – and to avoid imposing an
artificial order from without’. She understands mapping as a mechanism serving to reveal
‘what “ought to be” from what “is”’ (Scott Brown 2016). Scott Brown taught the so-called
‘Form, Forces and Functions Studio’ at the University of Pennsylvania. This studio placed
particular emphasis on the interactions between urban activity, settlement patterns, topogra-
phy, and transportation, and on the of activity intensity patterns. It was centred on urban
design, and on the economic and social forces charactering urban design (Scott Brown 1990).
This studio was a point of departure for developing a systematic planning approach.
Another interesting case is the exhibit panel ‘Gas Stations’ concerning the theme
‘Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City’, which was among the outcomes of a study
that Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and John Rauch conducted between 1974 and
1976 b. This panel was displayed at Renwick Gallery in Washington D.C. from
26 February through 31 October 1976 (Figure 11). In this exhibit panel, Venturi, Scott
Brown and Rauch juxtaposed different typologies of Gas stations. The exhibition
included the exhibit panels ‘Building as sign’ (Figure 12) and ‘Themes & ideals of the
American Suburb’ as well (Figure 13). In the latter, one can read:
Figure 13. Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown, Architects and Planners, Signs of Life:
Symbols in the American City Renwick Gallery, Washington D.C., 1974–1976. Exhibit panel ‘Themes &
ideals of the American Suburb’. Credits: Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives,
University of Pennsylvania.
148 M. CHARITONIDOU
Although the pluralism of American society is reected in suburbia’s residential symbolism,
some ideals and aspirations are almost universal. These are widely expressed in most suburban
(and urban) housing, for example, a longing for the rural life or for things “natural” and
a nostalgia for an earlier, simpler time. Also, some pressures behind the drive to suburbia, for
example, economic forces and developments in household appliances and leisure equipment,
bear universally upon suburbanites and are reected in their houses, as well as in the
developers’ advertising and the mass media.
7
8. Towards a conclusion: looking sociology from an architectural viewpoint
The intention to shape new ways of conceiving functionalism were present in Learning from
Las Vegas, where Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour promoted an
understanding of ‘Las Vegas as a Pattern of Activities’, arguing that a ‘city is a set of intertwined
activities that form a pattern on the land’, as well as that ‘Las Vegas Strip is not a chaotic sprawl
but as set of activities whose pattern [. . .] depends on the technology of movement and
communication and the economic value of land’ (Scott Brown et al. 1972, 76.). Telling is the
question that Scott Brown addresses, in ‘The Redefinition of Functionalism’: ‘How “func-
tional” is it to plan for the first users [. . .] and not give thought to how it may adapt to
generations of users in the unforeseeable future?’ (Scott Brown 2004b).
Scott Brown’s fascination with Gans’s ‘new objectivity’ goes hand in hand with her
interest in non-judgemental perspective. Regarding this, she has noted: ‘But we don’t say
we don’t judge. We say we defer judgment. In deferring it, we let more data into the
judgment, we make the judgment more sensitive’ (Scott Brown in Cook & Klotz 1973,
254). This process of deferring judgment is related to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott
Brown and Steven Izenour’s strategies of combining social and aesthetic parameters
while choosing to focus on certain aspects of Las Vegas Strip. Scott Brown’s following
remark is enlightening concerning this: ‘Why do we accept certain aspects of the strip
and not other aspects? The basis of that judgment is partly social, partly aesthetic’(Scott
Brown in Cook & Klotz 1973, 254).
Denise Scott Brown’s way of interpreting architectural and urban forms was informed
by both urban sociology and pop art. This explains why she believed that being in the
middle can help you to learn from both. Her intention to reconcile these two perspec-
tives – that informed by sociology and that informed by pop art – made her develop
a critique not only vis-à-vis ‘the architects who say there’s nothing we can learn from the
sociologist’, but also vis-à-vis ‘the sociologists [arguing] that [. . .] architects [should] [. . .]
extend [their] [. . .] conceptual framework’ (Scott Brown in Cook & Klotz 1973, 252;
Horowitz 2012) in order to be able to grasp the specificities of urban sociology. Scott
Brown has noted concerning the ways in which the tools and strategies of architects are
useful for reshaping the perspective of the sociologists: ‘I say we will have to extend their
framework as well, since they have neither the tools nor the outlook to take it into our
field themselves’ (Scott Brown in Cook & Klotz 1973, 252).
To better grasp Scott Brown’s conception of ‘active socioplastics’, it would be useful to
relate it to how Alison and Peter Smithson understood this concept given that she relates
it to their design strategies (Boyer 2017; Stierli 2010). For the Smithsons, ‘active socio-
plastics’ referred to ‘the relationship between the built form and social practice’
(Avermaete 2008, 114). They drew upon Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 149
anthropological perspective when they coined the term (Moran 2012; Young & Willmott
1957). In 1953, Young founded the Institute of Community Studies in 1953. Scott Brown
remarks, in ‘Towards an “Active Socioplastics”’ regarding Alison and Peter Smithson’s
interpretation of ‘active socioplastics’:
They used the term socioplastics to suggest tying together the social and the physical, creating
physical containers for the social at dierent scales. The term active referred to the life of people
on the streets and discovering means of learning about it - achieving vitality and allowing for
change (Scott Brown 2009; 2015)
The concept of ‘active socioplastics’ could also be related to the concepts of ‘as found’ and
‘sensibility of place’ in Alison and Peter Smithson’s thought (Charitonidou 2021b; 2021d,
2021e). According to Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, the concept of
the ‘[a]s found [refers to] [. . .] the tendency to engage with what is there, to recognize the
existing, to follow its traces with interest’ (Lichtenstein & Schregenberger 2001, 8;
Charitonidou 2021b, 15). An aspect of the ‘as found’ that could be related to Scott
Brown’s view of urban reality its association with the ‘directness, immediacy, rawness,
and material presence’, and its ‘concern with the here and now’ (Lichtenstein &
Schregenberger 2001, 9, 15). We could relate ‘[t]he interest of the Smithsons in the
new social patterns and social needs that emerge thanks to the intensified presence of the
car in quotidian life [. . .] to their understanding of the concept of sensibility’ of place
(Charitonidou 2021b, 14). Alison Smithson related the ‘as found’ to ‘the new sensibility
resulting from the moving view of landscape’ (Smithson 1983, 47; 2001). The shared
interest of Alison and Peter Smithson and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in the
view from the car and in how automobile vision affects how urban and suburban
landscapes are perceived, and their concern about how automobile vision pushes archi-
tects and urban planners to invent new visual tools to represent the perception of urban,
and their design ideas should be interpreted in relation to the attention they paid to
‘active socioplastics’, the ‘as found’, ‘sensibility of place’, and to the articulation between
the social patterns of inhabitants and their material expression in the urban and suburban
fabric (Figure 14, Figure 15, Figure 16, Figure 17, Figure 18).
Denise Scott Brown, in ‘Towards an ‘Active Socioplastics’, uses the expression ‘socio-
plastic praxis’ to refer to the strategy of aligning ‘analysis and synthesis by mapping the
patterns of relevant systems, [and] [. . .] abstracting key variables and overlaying them to
create further patterns’ (Scott Brown 2015, 91). Her belief that an attentive analysis of
existing patterns can help us shape effective methods for creating, through architectural
design and urban planning, patterns able to take into account the social and cultural
aspects of communities has certain affinities with Herbert Gans’s perspective, which paid
special attention to popular culture, everyday landscape, and existing social patterns.
Gans’s teaching helped Scott Brown refine her understanding of functionalism in archi-
tecture and urban planning, and challenge the modernist conception of functionalism.
Characteristically, Scott Brown has underscored: ‘Gans rocked our ideas of functional-
ism’ (Scott Brown 2009, 30). Among the main references of Gans concerning his critique
of functionalism was the work of American sociologist Robert K. Merton (Merton 1949).
At the core of Merton’s approach was the critique of the assumptions on which func-
tionalism in anthropology was based (Loy & Booth 2004). Scott Brown’s intention to
challenge the conventional understanding of modernist functionalism should be
150 M. CHARITONIDOU
Figure 15. Page from photo album, 1973–1976. Top left: Picnic at Scaceber, Autumn 1973. Middle
panorama, Six Mile, January/February 1974. Bottom: trees. Photographs by Alison and Peter Smithson.
Credits: Smithson Family Collection.
Figure 16. Robert Venturi, John Rauch and Denise Scott Brown, Architects and Planners.
California City General Plan California City, California 1970–1971, not implemented. SK-9, 20
Mule Team Parkway, Windshield View Design sketch by Robert Venturi, 17 July 1970. Marker on
paper. Credits: Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of
Pennsylvania Architectural Archives.
152 M. CHARITONIDOU
interpreted in relation to her endeavour to address architecture and urban planning
adopting an inter-disciplinary perspective based on the exchanges between anthropology,
urban sociology, architecture and planning.
Notes
1. Otto Koenigsberger ‘Tropical Planning Problems’, Paper presented at the Conference on
Tropical Architecture, Otto Koenigsberger Archive, AA Archives, 1953.
2. Alison Smithson, ‘New Brutalism’, first page of the two-page unpublished typescript dated
7 March 1955. The Alison and Peter Smithson Archive, Special Collections, Frances Loeb
Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.
3. A short essay on Denise Scott Brown’s non-judgmental viewpoint authored by me is to be
included in a forthcoming anthology on Denise Scott Brown, edited by Frida Grahn, which is to
be published in Birkhäuser's Bauwelt Fundamente series later this year (Charitonidou 2022c).
4. David Crane, ‘A working paper for the University of Pennsylvania Conference on Urban
Design Criticism’, 4 September 1958, 12. Rockefeller Foundation Archive 1.2/200/457/3904.
Figure 17. Detail from Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las
Vegas Studio, Fall 1968. Word map, Las Vegas Strip, 1968. Credits: Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The
Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
Figure 18. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour Learning from Las Vegas Studio,
Fall 1968. Word map, Las Vegas Strip 1968. Credits: Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural
Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
URBAN, PLANNING AND TRANSPORT RESEARCH 153
5. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Levittown Studio, Fall
1970. House style by income category in New Haven, CT. Photos and markers on poster board.
Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
6. Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, text written for South Street in Philadelphia. Venturi,
Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
7. Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown, Architects and Planners, Signs of Life:
Symbols in the American City Renwick Gallery, Washington D.C., 1974–1976. Exhibit panel
‘Themes & ideals of the American Suburb’. Venturi, Scott Brown Collection, The
Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Smitshon Family collection for authorizing me to use Figures 6, 7, 9, 13, 14.
Moreover, I am grateful to the Architectural Archives of University of Pennsylvania for their authorisa-
tion to use Figures 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12. I am also thankful to Het Nieuwe Instituut for authorising me to
use Figure 8, and to Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library for authorising me to use
Figure 1. The reflections developed in this article are related to the postdoctoral project “The Travelling
Architect’s Eye: Photography and the Automobile Vision” that I conducted at the Department of
Architecture of ETH Zurich, the seminar “The City Represented: The View from the Car as a New
Perceptual Regime” that I taught at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich, and the exhibition
“The View from the Car: Autopia as a New Perceptual Regime” that I curated at the Department of
Architecture of ETH Zurich. I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Tom Avermaete for our insightful
exchanges in the framework of the aforementioned postdoctoral project and Fredi Fischli and Niels
Olsen for our great collaboration for the preparation of the aforementioned exhibition. Finally, I am
grateful to the anonymous reviewers of their insightful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Dr. Ing. Marianna Charitonidou is architect Engineer, Urban Planner, and historian & theorist
of architecture and urbanism. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Art Theory and
History of Athens School of Fine arts, where she is conducting the postdoctoral research project
“Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti’s Post-war Reconstruction Agendas in Greece
and in Italy: Centralising and Decentralising Political Apparatus”. She conducted the postdoc-
toral project “The Travelling Architect’s Eye: Photography and the Automobile Vision”, and the
the postdoctoral project “Architecture between Nature and Archaeology: A Transnational and
Altermodern Investigation of the Image of Greece” at the School of Architecture of the National
Technical University of Athens. Moreover, she curated the exhibition “The View from the Car:
Autopia as a New Perceptual Regime” at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich (https://
viewfromcarexhibition.gta.arch.ethz.ch). In September 2018 she was awarded a Doctoral Degree
all’unanimità from the National Technical University of Athens for her PhD dissertation “The
Relationship between Interpretation and Elaboration of Architectural Form: Investigating the
Mutations of Architecture’s Scope” (jury: Jean-Louis Cohen, Bernard Tschumi, George
Parmenidis, Pippo Ciorra, Constantinos Moraitis, Kostas Tsiambaos, Panayotis Tournikiotis),
which she is currently editing into two books. In her PhD dissertation she examined the
mutations of the modes of representation in contemporary architecture in relation to the
transformation of the status of the addressee of architecture. Apart from her PhD Degree, she
also holds an MPhil Degree in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (Inter-
Departmental Postgraduate Program “Design, Space, Culture”) from the School of
154 M. CHARITONIDOU
Architectural Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (2013) (MPhil
Dissertation Project: “From Semiology to Deconstruction: Metaphysics and Subject”), an MSc
Degree in Sustainable Environmental Design from the Architectural Association in London
(2011), and a Master Degree in Architectural Engineering from the Department of Architectural
Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2010). She has more than 80 scientific
publications focused on architecture and urban planning, and has taught in various schools in
Europe – especially in Zurich, Paris and Greece. She is a licensed architect engineer since 2010
and the founder and principal of THINK THROUGH DESIGN architectural and urban design
studio. Website: https://charitonidou.com Email: m.charitonidou@icloud.com
ORCID
Marianna Charitonidou http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1083-4861
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