The architect Robert Venturi, discussing public space, once suggested that "the open piazza is seldom appropriate for an American city today except as a convenience for pedestrians for diagonal short-cuts," explaining that "Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television." That pessimistic observation, published in 1966, was a useful polemic against a modernist orthodoxy that Venturi helped to upend, but it obviously hasn't aged well, nor was it quite true even then. If "family gathered around the TV in the living room" was one dominant social arrangement of the mid-twentieth century, it remains so today due to inertia more than any recent cultural force.
#34: The Backdrop City
#34: The Backdrop City
#34: The Backdrop City
The architect Robert Venturi, discussing public space, once suggested that "the open piazza is seldom appropriate for an American city today except as a convenience for pedestrians for diagonal short-cuts," explaining that "Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television." That pessimistic observation, published in 1966, was a useful polemic against a modernist orthodoxy that Venturi helped to upend, but it obviously hasn't aged well, nor was it quite true even then. If "family gathered around the TV in the living room" was one dominant social arrangement of the mid-twentieth century, it remains so today due to inertia more than any recent cultural force.