Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and the Market

By Anthony Fontenot

Anthony Fontenot’s staggeringly ambitious book uncovers the surprisingly libertarian heart  of the most influential British and American architectural and urbanist discourses of the postwar period, expressed as a critique of central design and a support of spontaneous order. Non-Design illuminates the unexpected philosophical common ground between enemies of state support, most prominently the economist Friedrich Hayek, and numerous notable postwar architects and urbanists like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Reyner Banham, and Jane Jacobs. These thinkers espoused a distinctive concept of "non-design,"characterized by a rejection of conscious design and an embrace of various phenomenon that emerge without intention or deliberate human guidance. This diffuse and complex body of theories discarded many of the cultural presuppositions of the time, shunning the traditions of modern design in favor of the wisdom, freedom, and self-organizing capacity of the market. Fontenot reveals the little-known commonalities between the aesthetic deregulation sought by ostensibly liberal thinkers and Hayek’s more controversial conception of state power, detailing what this unexplored affinity means for our conceptions of political liberalism. Non-Design thoroughly recasts conventional views of postwar architecture and urbanism, as well as liberal and libertarian philosophies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jul 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226752471

Book preview

Non-Design

Non-Design

Architecture, Liberalism, and the Market

Anthony Fontenot

The University of Chicago Press   Chicago and London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris.

This publication is made possible in part by the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68606-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-75247-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226752471.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fontenot, Anthony, author.

Title: Non-design : architecture, liberalism and the market / Anthony Fontenot.

Other titles: Architecture, liberalism and the market

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020034650 | ISBN 9780226686066 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226752471 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Architecture, Modern—20th century. | Architecture—United States—History—20th century. | City planning—History—20th century. | Design—Philosophy. | Liberalism. | Libertarianism.

Classification: LCC NA680 .F62 2021 | DDC 720.973/0904—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034650

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my mother, for her endless encouragement and for having shown me that with diligence and patience anything is possible

Contents

Introduction

1 : Planned Order versus Spontaneous Order

2 : New Brutalism and the Critique of Socialism: Non-Design and the New Visual Order

3 : The Borax Debates: From Modern Design to Non-Design

4 : Spontaneous City: Jane Jacobs and the Critique of Planned Order

5 : Chaos or Control: Non-Design and the American City

6 : The Indeterminate City

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

One of the most fundamental critiques of design in the twentieth century came from critics outside the discipline in a revolt against central design. The impact on political, economic, and design theory was devastating. At the heart of this effort to overthrow design as a form of control was the phenomenon of non-design, a term that denotes an attitude that is characterized by a suspicion and/or rejection of conscious design while embracing various phenomena that emerge without intention or deliberate human design.¹ Fundamental to the philosophy of non-design is the rejection of any design of a social and economic order made according to a centralized authority. With the revival of liberalism, in the 1940s non-design was well articulated as a critique of collectivism, evident in the theories of the Austrian-school economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich August von Hayek, and espoused by many liberal critics, including the Austria-born philosopher Karl Popper. Hayek’s work on the undesigned nature of social institutions and his theory of spontaneous order, understood as the result of individual action but not of human design, challenged the dominant socialist views about planning and the necessity for a consciously designed social and economic order. These theories were developed into a doctrine that maintained a critical view of any form of rational control of society by a central authority.

Parallel to political and economic debates, in the 1940s Hubert de Cronin Hastings, chief editor and proprietor of the British periodical the Architectural Review, put forth a radical theory of design known as townscape, also based on a revival of liberalism, articulated as a revolt against aesthetic and political tyranny.²

Exploring the philosophy of non-design in British and American design culture, I argue in this book that the attempt to purge central design from architecture and urban planning that emerged in the postwar period took place for many of the same reasons that Mises, Hayek, Popper, and other liberal thinkers gave with respect to their critique of collectivist economic planning. By the 1960s the architectural and urban theories of Jane Jacobs, Ernst Gombrich, Christopher Alexander, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and particularly Reyner Banham, shared many of the concerns of the liberal critique of central design, particularly related to control and order. Although it is rarely noted explicitly, non-design played a significant role in British and American design culture in the postwar period. A key goal of this book is to recover and assess that legacy.

My aim is not to endorse the doctrine of non-design but rather to investigate its relationship with design theory. I have concerned myself less with whether the approaches espoused by liberal theorists are sound, which is to say, with whether they ultimately promote or hinder the formation of a democratic society, than with exploring parallel developments in economic and political theory and in design theory.³ To pursue this inquiry, I employ two basic concepts, non-design and non-plan, that are related yet distinct. Non-design describes both a phenomenon that emerges without intention or deliberate human design and a philosophy that is characterized by a rejection of conscious design. Design is the result of intended action, whereas non-design is the result of unintended action without a specific predetermined outcome that, according to Hayek, nevertheless generates order.⁴ The term non-plan, as conceived in the manifesto by Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price titled Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom (1969), was a call for deregulation and the implementation of a method by which unrestrained market forces define the outcome of the urban order.⁵ These approaches were informed by a liberal attitude that advocates a free and spontaneous social and economic order and is opposed to centralized societies, like those guided by state socialism.⁶ The key philosophy behind non-design and non-plan is the liberal understanding of liberty as a condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible.⁷ Throughout this book we will be concerned with the emergence of this new paradigm and the various forces that ushered in the transition from design to non-design and from planning to non-planning in the postwar period. The task becomes one of exploring the extremes in economic and political discourse, on the one hand, and avant-garde theories of design, on the other. My main argument is that, parallel to well-known political and economic debates, architecture and urban planning also engaged in critiques of central design as a form of control over social and economic life.

The Economic and Political Critique of Central Design

The 1920s and 1930s were marked by the decline of liberalism and the rise of totalitarianism. In the midst of the economic and social crisis of the Great Depression, as many nations turned to strongmen to address their ills, the well-known American journalist Walter Lippmann published An Inquiry into the Principles of a Good Society (1937), in which he denounced fascism and communism. These two extremes were grouped together because both implied coercive direction by a single-party dictatorship and an endangered liberal economy. Reflecting on history, Lippmann contrasted the legacy of liberalism and Adam Smith with that of collectivism and Karl Marx and found the latter to be driven by a compulsive rational desire to control social processes. In contrast to collectivist efforts to design a new society, Lippmann maintained that democracy relies on the formless power of the mass of the population, best managed through social control by law rather than by command. To those invested in designs of the future, Lippmann arrived at a devastating conclusion: The modern economy requires freedom from arbitrariness through equal laws. But it cannot be planned. No new social order can be designed. The agenda of liberal reforms is long, but there is no general plan of a new society. All plans of a new society are a rationalization of the absolute will. They are the subjective beginnings of fanaticism and tyranny.⁸ The modern economy, he continued, is world-wide, formless, vast, complicated, and, owing to technological progress, in constant change.⁹ Referring to those who try to stabilize it, whether by protective laws and monopolistic schemes or when the revolutionist makes blueprints of a world composed of planned national economies ‘coordinated’ by a world planning authority, Lippmann asserted, neither takes any more account of reality than if he were studying landscape architecture with a view to making a formal garden out of the Brazilian jungle.¹⁰ The claim that this formless entity cannot be designed—and indeed, according to liberals, should never even be attempted to be designed—is a central concern of this book.

Lippmann acknowledged that the greater the society [is], the higher and more variable the standards of life, the more diversified the energies of its people for invention, enterprise, and adaptation, the more certain it is that the social order cannot be planned ex cathedra or governed by administrative command.¹¹ He argued, The collectivist planners are not talking about the human race but about some other breed conceived in their dreams. As if to address the visionary architects and urban planners of the period, Lippmann argued: The Good Society has no architectural design. There are no blueprints.¹² To an entire generation of socialist avant-garde artists, architects, and intellectuals committed to progressive schemes of the future, specifically Le Corbusier, who held the benevolent despot Louis XIV in great esteem,¹³ Lippmann warned that the supreme architect, who begins as a visionary, becomes a fanatic, and ends as a despot. For no one can be the supreme architect of society without employing a supreme despot to execute the design.¹⁴ Restating his claim, Lippman wrote, There is no plan of the future: there is, on the contrary, the conviction that the future must have the shape that human energies, purged in so far as possible of arbitrariness, will give it.¹⁵ He warned, There is no mold in which human life is to be shaped. Indeed, to expect the blueprint of such a mold is a mode of thinking against which the liberal temper is a constant protest.¹⁶ The liberal principle that informs the resistance to any attempt to design society by central command drives the philosophy of non-design. The liberal attitude fiercely rejects any effort to mold and shape society according to the dictates of an authority. Whether employed in political, economic, or design discourse, this critique has shaped the history of twentieth-century architecture and urban planning theory to a significant degree.

Lippmann acknowledged the work of the Austrian-school economists Mises and Hayek, whose critique of planned economy has brought a new understanding of the whole problem of collectivism.¹⁷ Since 1920, a formidable literature, Lippmann wrote, had developed in Europe, particularly Mises’s Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen (1920).¹⁸ Chief among books in English was Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibility of Socialism (1935), a collection of essays edited by Hayek that featured Mises’s seminal essay Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, which presented a devastating critique of the entire ethos of socialist economic calculation in a planned economy, triggering the decades-long economic calculation debate.¹⁹

Inspired by a translation of Lippmann’s book, the French philosopher Louis Rougier organized the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, an international gathering in Paris on August 26–30, 1938.²⁰ The group studied The Good Society in detail and sought to construct a new liberalism as a rejection of collectivism, socialism, and the old laissez-faire liberalism.²¹ The main idea was to resist collectivist central planning because, as Mises and Hayek argued, it would lead only to economic chaos and the destruction of human liberty. The gathering included Lippmann along with many European intellectuals, such as Raymond Aron and Michael Polanyi, as well as Austrian-school advocates, including Hayek, Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow, and Alfred Schütz, and it resulted in the birth of an international organization, Centre International d’Études pour la Rénovation du Libéralisme, or International Center of Studies for the Renovation of Liberalism.

While these efforts were largely stymied during the war, in 1947 they were revived by Hayek with the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, which put forth a new philosophy to challenge the views of collectivist state socialism associated with Marxist or Keynesian social and economic planning that was widespread throughout the developed nations.²² Its members included social theorists, economists (including Hayek, Mises, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Frank Knight), philosophers (including Karl Popper and the American libertarian economist and philosopher Murray Rothbard), and historians (including the Austria-born art historian Ernst Gombrich). The association was formed to facilitate an exchange of ideas between scholars from various disciplines and points of view and to establish a more liberal approach to society in the hope of strengthening the principles and practice of a free society and to study the workings, virtues, and defects of market-oriented economic systems. The mission of the organization was to promote economic and political liberalism, and key among its objectives was the right of each individual to plan his own life.²³ This view reflected the position of Lippmann, who had insisted that in a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.²⁴ These efforts helped to formulate new ideas and circulate the philosophy of liberalism and the critique of collectivist planning among multiple disciplines.

The Liberal Critique of the Welfare State

In 1942, the Labour Party of Great Britain released The Old World and the New Society, in which the party outlined its plan for social and economic reconstruction. Asserting Labour’s vision of a socialist planned order, the pamphlet boldly outlined its plans for a planned democracy, declaring that a planned society must replace the old competitive system. Given that an unplanned society is unable to maintain a reasonable standard of life for a large number of its citizens, the Labour Party argued that there must be no return to the unplanned competitive world of the inter-War years. . . . The basis of our Democracy must be planned production for community use. The effects of an unplanned economic order were responsible, they argued, for everything from poverty to fascism. Harold Laski, who would serve as chairman of the British Labour Party in 1945–1946, promoting a resolution (later passed) in a speech delivered at the Party Conference on May 26, 1942, noted, Nationalization of the essential instruments of production before the war ends, the maintenance of control over production and distribution after the war—this is the spearhead of this resolution.²⁵ Voices of opposition to this grand socialist vision were deemed anti-planners and anti-controllers, meant to be derogatory, describing those who resisted socialist polices of nationalization of major industries and utilities along with the required concentration of state power though central planning.²⁶

As the growing enthusiasm for planning increased throughout the 1940s, the liberal philosophy grew more pronounced in its critique of centralized state planning. In 1944 Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, in which he accused the planned order of socialists as an unnecessary, and perilous, form of centralized control over social and economic life. He warned British intellectuals that, regardless of good intentions, they were on an extremely dangerous path that would only undermine efforts to achieve economic and political freedom. Hayek argued that whoever controls all economic activity controls the means of all our ends. He continued, Democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who now wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects.²⁷ Referring to the alleged inevitability of planning, Hayek wrote, The main question is where this movement will lead us.²⁸ He argued that socialism was responsible for having persuaded liberal-minded people to submit once more to that regimentation of economic life that they had overthrown because, in the words of Adam Smith, it put governments in such a position that ‘to support themselves they are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.’²⁹ The solution was to reject collectivism and economic planning in favor of a free and competitive market. For Hayek, one of the main arguments in favor of competition is that it dispenses with the need for ‘conscious social control’ and that it gives the individuals a chance to decide whether the prospects of a particular occupation are sufficient to compensate for the disadvantages and risks connected with it."³⁰

The British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century, particularly Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Hayek maintained, have given us an interpretation of the growth of civilization that is still the indispensable foundation of the argument for liberty. They find the origin of institutions, not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful.³¹ Building on this insight, Hayek understood society and the market to be undesigned phenomena that were created by everyone yet designed by no one. For Hayek, the invisible hand was the crucial mechanism that enabled spontaneously grown institutions, such as language, law, morals, and conventions that anticipated modern scientific approaches and from which the liberals might have profited, to function and develop, arguing that the market order has evolved by a process of cumulative growth, without specific direction or intention, that is the result of human action but not of human design.³² Liberalism, Hayek maintained, built up a social theory which made the undesigned results of individual action its central object, and in particular provided a comprehensive theory of the spontaneous order of the market.³³ In contrast to what he perceived as an obsession with design and planning of social order, whether it was Hegel or Marx, whether it was socialism in its more radical form or merely ‘organization’ or ‘planning’ of a less radical kind, Hayek was concerned because he believed that at its core was an issue of control.³⁴ In contrast to the oppressive legacy of coercion and the state, Hayek’s notion of liberty was based on the idea of order without commands. One of Hayek’s major contributions was to theorize spontaneous order, a formless entity allowed to evolve without the interference of an outside force, and to promote it as an ideal social and economic order.³⁵

Indicating the extent to which these ideas represented the opposite of what socialist intellectuals believed at the time, Hayek wrote: According to the views now dominant, the question is no longer how we can make the best use of the spontaneous forces found in a free society. We have in effect undertaken to dispense with these forces and to replace them by collective and ‘conscious’ direction. He concluded that the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man.³⁶ From the doctrines of Saint-Simon, the first of the modern planners, to that of Marx, the fundamental problem of the collectivist approach, Hayek believed, had persisted into the present.³⁷ Consequently, Hayek denounced the passion for central planning associated with H. G. Wells, Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes, and Lewis Mumford, among others, as not only naïve but also counterproductive to the formation of a society based on social and economic liberty.³⁸ This period witnessed a rise in critiques of the scientific objectivism of Marxism and Soviet-style planning of economic and social life, which were explosive cultural and political issues. Hayek’s critique of socialist planning called into question many cherished beliefs, such as the notion that a planned society is a free society, a view challenged by many liberal critics. Following the collapse of German liberalism, in Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944), Mises argued that dictatorship and violent oppression of dissenters were not peculiar features of Nazism but the Soviet mode of government, and as such advocated all over the world by the numerous friends of present-day Russia.³⁹ Both Hayek and Mises argued that central design by a small elite group, whether implemented by the political left (communism) or the right (fascism), was inherently undemocratic, if not totalitarian. As an alternative, they believed that the market functioned as a neutral mechanism and provided an appropriate means by which a democratic society could be achieved through the decentralization of information and wealth. These fundamental ideas helped establish the Austrian-school critics as the world’s most formidable opponents of Marxism and socialism and leading exponents of liberal ideology.⁴⁰ They urged that it was crucial to understand the vital role that spontaneity played in the evolution of a dynamic undesigned order that included the market, social institutions, and culture.

For Mises, Hayek, Michael Polanyi, and other liberal thinkers, a democratic society was a spontaneous society. Polanyi wrote: When order is achieved among human beings by allowing them to interact with each other on their own initiative—subject only to laws which uniformly apply to all of them—we have a system of spontaneous order in society. We may then say that the efforts of these individuals are co-ordinated by exercising their individual initiative and that this self co-ordination justifies their liberty on public grounds.⁴¹ The example that best epitomized spontaneous order, the prototype of order established by an invisible hand, was the free market. While largely distinguishing liberals from socialists, these economic and political concerns had their counterpart in design debates. For modern design theorists such as Sigfried Giedion, the unrestrained forces of the market not only resulted in crass commercialism but also produced a state of affairs in which design was controlled by the dictatorship of the market. Given that many socialists believed that a good society was defined by a well-planned collective community based on social welfare, the very concept of democracy, and its relationship to design, was at stake.

With the help of Hayek and Gombrich, Karl Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), in which he put forth a critique of totalitarianism in defense of freedom, individualism, democracy, and an open society. A common feature in the work of Mises, Hayek, and Popper was their attempt to analyze the roots of totalitarianism. Accusing Plato, Hegel, and Marx of relying on historicism to support their political concepts, Popper announced, ‘Scientific’ Marxism is dead.⁴² He advocated a philosophy that was diametrically opposed to all those modern Platonic dreams of brave new worlds in which the growth of reason would be controlled or ‘planned’ by some superior reason.⁴³ This liberal critique coalesced into a new philosophy that challenged the views of social and economic planning associated with state socialism and informed some of the most incisive critiques directed at socialist and Marxist views of culture, including modern urban planning and design. Though seldom discussed in relation to architectural discourse, the philosophy of non-design manifested itself as a critique of central design in economic, political, and design theory from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Liberalism and Design: Architectural Debates of the 1940s

The 1940s proved a period of great change in attitude toward design. The London periodical the Architectural Review developed a multifaceted campaign that came to be known as townscape, based on a revival of the eighteenth-century philosophy of the picturesque, that sought to challenge architects, planners, and politicians view of design. Townscape was spearheaded by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, who in 1944 published Exterior Furnishing or Sharawaggi: The Art of Making Urban Landscape, in which he claimed the eighteenth-century radical English notion of liberty as the central thesis of the townscape doctrine.⁴⁴ This polemic was informed not only by the opposing values behind English liberty and French tyranny but also by the relationship between design and coercion: Can democratic opinion which is by its nature diffuse be brought round to the saving grace of a Bauhaus style without the application of force? Hastings asked. To advance his case, Hastings contrasted the English Empire of free men, who devised the free forms of the picturesque, with the totalitarian French with their insistence on slavish symmetry.⁴⁵ Equally informed by eighteenth-century radical political and aesthetic theory, the picturesque offensive, Hastings asserted, was a revolt against that old bore Plato, a protest against merely ideal Beauty.⁴⁶ Explaining the urgent meaning of the picturesque, or townscape, for contemporary debates, Hastings wrote, According to the present thesis the full implications of the modern movement with all its baffling ambiguities can only be brought out by reference to the eighteenth century in which, and not the nineteenth, were set up those basic contradictions which form the stuff of the modern dilemma.⁴⁷ Informed by radical Whig principles of the eighteenth century, Hastings appears to share certain affinities with the liberal thinkers of the day.⁴⁸

In response to the two prevailing political models of the period, US capitalism and the managerial and authoritarian socialism of the Soviet Union, Hastings called for a pluralistic democracy that could safeguard the welfare of every individual. The radical philosophy of Uvedale Price, a key protagonist of the eighteenth-century picturesque debate who was fond of associating good government with good landscape, was revived to address the ills of the postwar world and to combat the obsession with control in modern design. Inspired by Price’s free plans that suits all free governments and exclude only despotism, Hastings explored the relationship between freedom and free forms, with the aim of achieving a type of design without coercion. In contrast to French garden design, his answer was the picturesque, a radical, anarchic, entropic disorderly ideal and a tremendous event in the long apprenticeship of democracy.⁴⁹

In 1949 Hastings published Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy founded on the true rock of Sir Uvedale Price, which outlined townscape’s liberalism in urban planning as a radical approach that called for the acceptance of everything, from Victorian and popular culture to modernism. Hastings implored architects and town planners to love, or to try to love all things, including those that were beyond their control, from Spec. Builders’ Venetian to the neon sign of the flower shop. Of the picturesque, Hastings wrote: It is a democratic art. It can give satisfaction to all tastes.⁵⁰ When Hastings asserted that the townscape philosophy exhorts the visual planner—particularly the English visual planner—to preoccupy himself with the vast field of anonymous design and unacknowledged path which still lies entirely outside the terms of reference of official town-planning routine, he initiated an entirely new approach.⁵¹ By acknowledging both the planned and the unplanned parts of the city as the complete built environment, informed by a liberal attitude that accepted radical differences, Hastings set in motion a doctrine that would have a profound, if often misunderstood and seldom acknowledged, effect on the evolution of design theory of the second half of the twentieth century.⁵²

During this period, the liberal view of spontaneous order stood in stark contrast to the dominant views of the socialist planned order. For the English art historian Herbert Read, a champion of modernism in Britain, the importance of design was that, particularly in the context of the upheaval and devastation of the war, it could help introduce order into a chaotic civilization.⁵³ In 1944, in the context of wartime planning, the Council of Industrial Design was initiated as an effort to establish central state control over various aspects of design, a move that many modern architects and theorists supported. For example, the German émigré art historian and architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, like many other socialists, maintained unwavering support for social reform and centralized state planning, which was viewed as being in opposition to liberalism, spontaneous order, and free-market economics.

The Decline of Socialism and the Rise of a Non-Marxist Approach

What emerged after World War II was nothing short of the collapse of humanity. National Socialism was revealed as barbaric, made grotesquely evident by the horrifying images of emaciated dead bodies in prison camps, followed by reports, in excruciating detail, of the mechanization of death executed by the cold, rational logic of a totalitarian European government. No one escaped; everyone was thrown into a world of chaos. Progress and doom are two sides of the same coin, said Hannah Arendt.⁵⁴ Mises and Hayek argued that central control by the government over private property and the economic system is what distinguished any type of socialist state, Nazi or communist, from a liberal economy. They argued that the scientific utopianism of Soviet communism, with its promise of a world of equality, and the Neuordnung (new order) were both based on a one-party totalitarian dictatorship. For many, the moral disaster of the Nazi experiment only reinforced the eighteenth-century liberal notion of the hazard of any experiment that Edmund Burke had continually warned about. The revival of liberalism offered one of the most sustained critiques of centralized power and totalitarianism. The need to distance oneself from overt rationalism, which modern architecture had long been identified with, became increasingly pronounced.⁵⁵

Following the momentous Labour Party victory in 1945, in which the socialists vowed to deliver the brave new world of the welfare state, in 1951 England witnessed the return of Winston Churchill as prime minister and the Festival of Britain, a hybrid scheme composed of modernist buildings and picturesque planning, conceived by the vanguard of British socialist architects of the period. Described by Churchill as little more than three-dimensional Socialist propaganda, the Festival of Britain was dismissed by the young as a debased and irrelevant approach to design. In the 1940s, London modern architects were largely socialist. This was the context in which the new humanism was conceived and conveyed on July 6, 1944, in the Architects’ Journal, as a reaction against the principles of functionalist and rationalist modern architecture.⁵⁶ Inspired by the Swedish attempt to humanize design, the Architectural Review’s editors introduced of a new attitude toward architecture and planning in Britain that was referred to as the the new empiricism.⁵⁷ While emphasizing certain aspects of socialist realism, the official style in Moscow, the new empiricists tried to accommodate popular taste in architecture, designed to soften the harshness of modern architecture with people’s detailing that used traditional materials, such as bricks and wood, as part of the political transformation of Britain toward Swedish-type socialism in the postwar years.⁵⁸ As Toni del Renzio explained, for many in the Independent Group, Marxism had little to offer anymore.⁵⁹ Throughout Europe, he continued, the various Communist Parties which were closely associated with aesthetic notions hardly progressed from what was seen by us as discredited social realism.⁶⁰ This non-Marxist approach informed the revolt of the young. By the early 1950s, the reassessment of the principles of modern design gained momentum among a new generation of architects and critics associated with the movement of brutalism.⁶¹ The first target of the brutalists was the architecture of the Festival of Britain and the early new towns, chronicled in the manifesto The New Brutalism (1955) by Reyner Banham, whose attack was directed at both the international style and new empiricism.⁶²

In his 1952 series of lectures Freedom and Its Betrayal, the Russia-born liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, author of Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939), focused on six formative anti-liberal thinkers, including Hegel and Saint-Simon.⁶³ When Berlin’s eloquent elucidation of pluralism and liberalism, and their virtues, was broadcast on BBC Radio’s Third Programme, it created a wild sensation. This was followed by The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (1953), one of Berlin’s most popular publications, in which he established two types of intellectual and artistic personalities: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.⁶⁴ While the hedgehog was associated with those who relate everything to a single central vision and planning the life of society, the fox referred to "those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way . . . related by no moral or aesthetic principle.⁶⁵ We learn that the world of the hedgehog, undoubtedly the villain in this tale, is centripetal, and that of the fox is centrifugal, their thought is scattered or diffused."⁶⁶ As we shall see, these intellectual concerns were extended to inform design debates.

Just as liberal critics challenged scientific Marxism and rationalist, purposive planning, arguing in support of a system that embraced free and spontaneous social processes, the postwar period witnessed a new non-rationalist attitude in art and culture. In the United States, Jackson Pollock’s action paintings demonstrated how spontaneity could be incorporated into the process of making art, while in Europe, the interest in unconscious forces found expression in art brut and art informel, explored by Michel Tapié in Un art autre (1952). These ideas informed the principles of new brutalism, which sought to challenge the ethics and aesthetics associated with socialist design.⁶⁷

The relationship between design and rational order was reconsidered by a range of architects and thinkers, including the Independent Group members, particularly Alison and Peter Smithson, evident in their fascination with the messy vitality of street life documented in the photographs of Nigel Henderson.⁶⁸ The non-design critique informed some of the edgier design discourse and practice of the period, such as the Smithsons’ interest in a random or scattered aesthetic and Banham’s fascination with the chaos of the market. As Anne Massey noted, the Independent Group’s new understanding of design emphasized the history of science and technology and gloried in the disorder of human existence.⁶⁹ The Smithsons developed a new design philosophy based on a valuation of materials for their inherent qualities as found, unmolested by design. This approach informed their 1953 revolt at the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) meeting in Aix-en-Provence against philosophies of high modernism. The disorder of daily life became the subject of new debates and experiments in art and architecture. The Independent Group’s attempt to theorize disorder found expression in a chaotic new visual order of common daily life explored in exhibitions such as Parallel of Life and Art (1953) and the Patio and Pavilion section of This Is Tomorrow (1956). Many designers and critics interested in non-design were often preoccupied with the removal of limits and the resultant unrestrained, unformed, and diffuse aesthetic.⁷⁰ The Independent Group’s interest in the relationship between design, the market, advertisement, and consumer products as a more open-ended design method is revealing.

If the philosophy of CIAM dominated urban debates from the congress’s founding in 1928 to World War II, by the mid-1950s signs of its collapse were beginning to emerge. In 1957, just as Popper announced the end of utopian engineering and the Smithsons and other members of Team 10 proclaimed the end of CIAM, Alvar Aalto affirmed that the architectural revolution was still alive and warned that, like all revolutions, it starts with enthusiasm and it stops with some sort of dictatorship.⁷¹ Terms such as dictatorship increasingly gained currency within the design disciplines as a critique of rationalist control.⁷² These issues were explored as they related to everything from the design of objects and building to new attitudes toward the city and modern urban planning.

During this period, the question of central control permeated deep into many aspects of art and culture. For example, in 1954 during the seminar Urban Form, the American composer-artist John Cage asserted, I think it would be better to give up the idea of control and merely enjoy the absence of control, to which the urban planner Kevin Lynch responded, You believe, then, that the person should be trained to enjoy what is there, rather than attempt to control the environment. Cage responded, What would be the intention of an imposed order?⁷³ In 1958 Cage developed a diagram to illustrate a specific strategy that he was exploring in his work, which was accompanied by two phrases: consciously controlled and unconsciously allowed to be.⁷⁴

Similarly, in 1958 the British art critic Lawrence Alloway, a member of the Independent Group, visited several cities in the United States, and while he acknowledged the architect-controlled places, such as Rockefeller Center, it was the vast and complex decentralized cities such as Los Angeles that, he believed, constituted the real city of the time. Such an environment, Alloway concluded, seems to be unplannable in popular terms.⁷⁵ While recognizing that the mass arts contribute to the real environment of cities in an important way, Alloway also wrote, It is absurd to print a photograph of Piccadilly Circus and caption it ‘Architectural Squalor’ as Ernő Goldfinger and E. J. Carter did.⁷⁶ Alloway believed that such dense displays of small bright packages, along with radio, music, and cinema, offered vital connections with the real environment. Reflecting on the growing appreciation of pop architecture, Alloway argued that popular art in the city is a function of the whole city and not only of its architects.⁷⁷ These spontaneous popular environments gained significance as symbols of a non-imposed order as designers grappled with issues related to design and control.

In 1959 Banham came out in support of the radical forms of decentralized cities emerging in the United States, arguing that they constituted vital centers of popular aggregation resulting from the diffuse, well-mechanised culture of motorized conurbation.⁷⁸ These unplanned environments were hailed as a new model of decentralization. Questioning whether a single designer could be responsible for an entire city or even arbitrate over the whole design process, in 1960 Peter Smithson concluded that centralized design control does not work.⁷⁹ Referring to Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Plan (1960), Smithson insisted, it is above all, centralized, absolutist, authoritarian.⁸⁰ As plans by architects were contrasted with popular spontaneous urban formations, which were routinely denigrated by urban planners, in 1961 Banham emphasized that there were multiple solutions for dealing with the complexities of the contemporary city, but the one we have so far is the relatively desperate solution of handing over responsibility to the will of a dictator—Le Corbusier at Chandigarh, Lucio Costa at Brasilia—and we are entitled to ask whether this is an adequate solution for our most pressing problem in design.⁸¹ The characterization of planners as dictators and authoritarian would only become more common. If in the early 1960s Banham still believed that it was conceivable to renounce the autocratic dominance of Bauhaus theory without losing control of the over-all design, then by the late 1960s his criticism increasingly distanced itself from the need for control. From the authority of modern design to regulations imposed by the welfare state, Banham consistently challenged the power of exclusive institutions.

The Neutrality of the Market

For Mises, Hayek, Polanyi, and other liberals, the free market epitomized a spontaneous order insofar as it was not consciously designed by anyone for any specific purpose; rather, they believed, it resulted from a process of trial and error that freely evolved over generations. Following the publication of Planned Chaos (1947), Mises released his imposing magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949), which enlightened a generation on the connection between value-free economics and liberal politics.⁸² Just as liberal theorists assumed that the market functioned as a neutral or value-free mechanism, without the need for central control and allowing individuals to pursue their own interest free of coercion by government and other forms of authority, designers began to investigate the relationship between design and the chaos of the market, an important topic for the Independent Group, especially Banham. Parallel to the development of liberal economic theories of the period, Banham’s embrace of the American commercial logic of free-market economics had a profound effect on his criticism and played a crucial role in shifting debates on modern design. By the mid-1950s, Banham argued that the history of automotive design demonstrated an extraordinary continuum of emotional-engineering-by-public-consent.⁸³ Consequently, Banham embraced the American commercial logic of product design and its fine-tuned engagement with the market, a phenomenon referred to as borax, which he believed offered a more democratic give and take.⁸⁴

The neutrality of the market was said to allow consumers to make choices that were incorporated into the design process. In design, the idea of spectators as consumers developed in the work of Lawrence Alloway. Referring to the interactive design work of John McHale, in 1955 Alloway explained that the artist keeps control from a distance on the construction because he did the initial work, but, after that, all the effective decisions are made by the spectator.⁸⁵ Along with the idea that the spectator, or consumer, was as an active agent in the design process came the idea that design work needed to embody a certain neutrality to allow for (cybernetic) feedback, adjustment, and engagement.⁸⁶ Similar ideas informed designers in their search for a value-free approach to design. The call for more anonymous or neutral methods of design, which sought to challenge design as a form of control, became increasingly pronounced in the 1960s. As the European model of design became associated with central control, Banham looked to more anonymous methods of design, which he found in the typical American model of commercial industrial design, responsible for everything from automobiles to appliances, and created by teams of anonymous designers in close contact with the desires of the public. In an effort to define a more democratic design process, Banham encouraged designers to experiment with the development of a permissive architecture, claiming that there was no need for elaborate controls, nor for hidden persuaders.⁸⁷ Banham repeatedly articulated his interest in "almost value-free buildings, an interest he shared with Cedric Price and others.⁸⁸ Price believed that what the world needed for maximum freedom was a well-serviced anonymity.⁸⁹ Informed by a philosophy of enabling," Price’s Fun Palace (1961–1965) was an extraordinary example of indeterminacy in architectural form, allowing its components to be reconfigured according to the desires of its occupants, thus empowering ordinary citizens to become active participants in the design process.

Pop or Market Aesthetics: The Fusion of Art and Commerce

The liberal economists and Banham shared a theoretical interest in the way a free-market economy functioned and its role in advancing a democratic society. While reflecting on the history of design and questioning whether flashy and vulgar are quite the terms of abuse they used to be, in 1963 Banham articulated his philosophy of the market and its relationship to design: Flashy a lot of this stuff has to be because its economic life depends on its impact on the public eye at a very competitive point of sale; vulgar it has to be because it is designed for the vulgus, the common crowd (including you and me) who are the final arbiters of everything in the pure theory of democracy. Banham concluded that if you want Pop design to be tasteful and beautiful instead of flashy and vulgar, you must envisage a drastic and illiberal reconstruction of society.⁹⁰ This liberal vision of society evolved in a social and political context in which liberty and democracy were characterized as a state free of coercion and constraint. In such as state, who decides what should be made and how it should be designed? Some agency must determine what should be produced, said Mises, who argued that if it is not the consumers by means of demand and supply on the market, it must be the government by compulsion.⁹¹ In contrast to modern design authorities, Banham believed that the commercial model of design, with its anonymous teams of designers, consultants, and market analysts, and informed by consumer feedback, resulted in a more open-ended aesthetic and consequently could be a universal model of design.

Few design critics have devoted themselves more fully to investigating the relationship between design and the market than Banham. In the Independent Group discussions of the early 1950s he explored the idea of consumer products in a free market as a form of popular art. Through extensive analysis of commercial design products, packaging, and advertisement, Banham developed a concept of pop, initially borrowed from Leslie Fiedler, that was synonymous with American popular consumer products.⁹² For him, commercial industrial products and advertising were not the inspiration for design but served as its ideal.⁹³ Banham believed that the design methodology responsible for producing cigarette packages, automobiles, comics, and other mass-produced items functioned perfectly well as found. For Banham pop art was distinguished from earlier vernacular arts by the professionalism and expertise of its practitioners (i.e. rock-’n’-roll singers, TV stars, etc.).⁹⁴ The American commercial model was pop, and he made that emphatically clear in Toward a Pop Architecture (1962), in which he challenged a history of art and social reform. Banham rejected the cordon-sanitaire between architecture and Pop Art, arguing that it represents a very deep-seated desire, as old as the reformist sentiments of the Pioneers of Modern Architecture, that the profession should not be contaminated by commercialism, that architecture should remain a humane ‘consultant’ service to humanity, not styling in the interest of sales promotion.⁹⁵

This criticism was undoubtedly aimed at the foundational theories of design established in the late nineteenth century. In Art and Socialism (1884), William Morris—influenced by Karl Marx—maintained that the supremacy of Commerce over art is an evil, and a very serious one. He questioned whether competition in the market was the only form that commerce could take and sought to cure the evils that exist in the relations between Art and Commerce. Challenging this view, Banham acknowledged the work of Albert Kahn, Henry Ford’s architect, and other commercial architects who had been excluded from the history of modern design. By observing the world of commerce, he learned that architecture can become involved in Pop Art at its own level and according to the same set of Madison Avenue rules. He believed that architecture can serve as a selling point for some desirable standardized product that is too complex or too expensive to be dispensed from slot machines. Thus, architecture can be a part of the pop world by becoming a desirable standardized product—though it would have to take over current advertising and marketing techniques, instead of methods that still smacked of the transfer of fiefs from one vassal to another. Because buildings are still too heavy to be sent to supermarkets, the consumer instead must be mobile and locally numerous, and these more modern merchandizing techniques can only be employed in heavily motorized conurbations.⁹⁶ For those who argued against architecture as package and commodity, Banham insisted that commerce is normal.

These ideas established an important foundation for new ways of thinking about art, commerce, and the city in the 1960s. Banham’s ideas provided the basis for thinking about a pop or market urbanism, which celebrated decentralization and the free market, sought a new alliance between art and commerce, and distinguished Banham from other critics of the left. Whether as a result of Banham’s radical move toward pop as a pure expression of the market or not, tensions emerged in the British scene, and in 1964, Banham wrote that the Smithsons and Eduardo Paolozzi and people like that, have been calling rather necrophilic revivalist meetings of the Independent Group to try and clear their names of being responsible for the present Pop Art movement in England.⁹⁷ Banham continued to champion market-based democratic design. From objects of mass production to cities, the non-design philosophy of the market was central to Banham’s most controversial theories of design.

The Non-Architect-Designed Environment

Denise Scott Brown noted that many of the principal ideas of the Independent Group informed new movements in America. An important connection between new brutalism, Team 10, and the American scene of the 1960s was that they all promoted an aesthetic that could respond to the vitality of the non-architect-designed environment.⁹⁸ During this period, the interest in non-design developed into a more coherent body of theory, although it was associated with a wide range of phenomena, including vernacular environments, such as those featured in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy’s Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (1957), spontaneous towns, favelas, and other types of self-organized built environments that fascinated Team 10 members, documented in Aldo van Eyck’s Architecture of Dogon (1961),⁹⁹ as well as Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects (1964). Architects who accept the wisdom of primitive vernacular architecture, wrote Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, do not easily acknowledge the validity of the commercial vernacular,¹⁰⁰ which they endorsed. Architects were fascinated by environments created without architects because they appeared to elude central control while containing some vital element that was missing from the architect-controlled environment. These two areas of interest, vernacular environments, on the one hand, and commerce and the free market, on the other, both of which embodied spontaneous order, distinguished many of the avant-garde architects of the 1960s from their modern predecessors and gave rise to new concepts of the built environment.

In 1960 Hayek pointed out the naïve understanding of economics behind most urban planning, arguing that the control of land use and other such measures was largely motivated by the desire to dispense with the price mechanism and to replace it by central direction.¹⁰¹ He also noted that, under the leadership of Frederick Law Olmsted, Patrick Geddes, and Lewis Mumford, the degree to which town planning had developed into an anti-economics approach would make an interesting study.¹⁰² This analysis was part of a growing discontent with the will-to-utopia, as Mumford put it, and the shortcoming of planning that was being acknowledged in multiple disciplines.

The non-design approach informed some of the more radical reassessments of modern urban planning, evident in, for example, Jane Jacobs’s pioneering work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a devastating critique of central design that exposed the anti-economics of town planning while championing the informal social and economic networks of ordinary people of the city. Building on Warren Weaver’s theory of complexity, Jacobs asserted that cities are problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences.¹⁰³ Not unlike the research pioneered by the Independent Group a decade earlier, through a careful observation of daily messy street life, including informal commerce, what was once perceived as arbitrary or chaotic began to be considered as a new type of complex order, aided by theories of complex systems in the sciences.¹⁰⁴ Jacobs encouraged her generation to regard the spontaneous order of cities—far from being solidified chaos—as something capable of being understood, instead of in some dark and foreboding way, irrational.¹⁰⁵ She argued that while the variables may be countless and complex, they are not haphazard; they are ‘interrelated into an organic whole.’¹⁰⁶

By the early 1960s, complexity theory was at the center of Hayek’s work on spontaneous order.¹⁰⁷ In The Theory of Complex Phenomena (1964), Hayek presented a case that was strikingly similar to Jacobs’s notion of organized complexity. Both recognized the primacy of local knowledge and the role it played in spontaneous order, and both understood the limitation of large-scale planning. In its place they argued for the right to pursue one’s own individual plan. Relying on biological analogies, both saw feedback (or cybernetics) systems as key to a dynamic evolving environment.¹⁰⁸ Jacobs advocated an incremental approach to city change, similar to