194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (review)

The most enduring of the American myths is that of the rugged individualist, the yeoman landowner, who tamed the frontier and answered to no one. Equally important has been the struggle of the reformer to tame that individualistic nation through some form of social planning.

Andrew M. Shanken's 194X provides an intellectual history of architecture and urban planning in a time of little building and less architecture, resulting in what he terms "paper architecture,' plans and images that linger in archives, but were never implemented. In addition, the study examines the political, economic, and social theories of the era through the lens of the planning movement of the war years. "194X" was a code for a future-oriented movement, rather than a style. Unable to design for actual buildings due to the exigencies of the wartime economy, planners developed plans unfettered by the restraints of economics, politics, or aesthetics. In the process, architecture and urban planning changed to a theoretical construct, in which planners created model cities and towns designed to improve urban life and community.

The study shows the array of forces used to market and promote the concept of urban planning and with it the promotion of a top-down confiscatory approach to postwar life while simultaneously paying lip service to American ideals. Minimizing and distorting any parallels to the centralized power of European 'isms" of the 1930s, the planners nevertheless presumed the authority of totalitarianism. At the same time, the study lays bare the American distrust of reformers, especially those whose ideas would be imposed at the expense of individualism and private property.

Shanken examines the process in which the plans themselves became a genre, a futuristic literature, which allowed for a new intellectual analysis and debate. An odd mixture of designers, engineers, psychologists, sociologists, joined the discourse on a planned society in the media, producing this culture of planning along with a wholesale acceptance of modernism.

Despite their attempts to cloak the planning in the rhetoric of motherhood and apple pie, the planners, many of whom had cut their professional teeth in the Socialist Realism of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, were eager to replace the notion of private property with a collective version of the city. In promoting their visions, the planners walked a tight line between wartime xenophobia, fears of "un-American" ideas, and a government unwilling to embrace and impose their more rigid and centralized plans. The appearance of a "powerful centralized government bureau" would be softened. Landowners would receive a share in the new neighborhood for vacating the land, resulting in "a forced migration and demographic shift" (67).

The well-researched, well-written and well-illustrated book offers an interesting case study of American political reform that serves well beyond the confines of architectural or planning history. It could be useful reading in a graduate class in history, political science, urban studies or architecture, but its often specialized vocabulary makes it less appropriate for an undergraduate class.