Non-Design

"In his inventive manuscript, Anthony Fontenot reveals the affinities between Friedrich Hayek's libertarian conception of state power and the aesthetic deregulation sought by "non-design" architects and urbanists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Reyner Banham, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Jane Jacobs. These figures, generally considered liberals who rejected the cultural presuppositions of "high" architecture, sought to let capitalism reveal what the American built environment could or should be. Fontenot further limns the implications of this affinity for political liberalism, drawing surprising connections between the cultural turn away from the state and the evolution of aesthetics and the built environment"--