The uncharted Kahn: The visuality of planning and promotion in the 1930s and 1940s

Art Bulletin

Volumn 88, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 310-327

  Shanken, Andrew M ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b 232 Wurster Hall ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849521368     PISSN: 00043079     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2006.10786292     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Guy Greer, "So You're Going to Plan a City," Fortune 29 (January 1944): 122.
2. Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
3. The account of Kahn's early career leans on Michael J. Lewis, "Kahn's Graphic Modernism," in Drawn from the Source: The Travel Sketches of Louis I. Kahn, by Eugene J. Johnson and Lewis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 1-24;
4. and David B. Brownlee and David G. De Long, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991), 24-29.
5. Paul Emmons, "Diagrammatic Practices: The Office of Frederick L. Ackerman and Architectural Graphic Standards," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 1 (March 2005): 4-21.
6. See also Ellen YiLuen Do and Mark D. Gross, "Thinking with Diagrams in Architectural Design," Artificial Intelligence Review 15, nos. 1-2 (March 2001): 135-49.
7. Rudolf Modley, "Pictographs Today and Tomorrow," Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 4 (October 1938): 663.
8. Architectural Forum 78 (May 1943): cover.
9. See Edward R. Tufte's Beautiful Evidence (forthcoming) for an analysis of Barr's diagram. An earlier, less-known possible source is Russell Van Nest Black's diagrams in his 1930 article "Theory of Planning the Region as Exemplified by the Philadelphia Tri-State Plan," City Planning 6 (July 1930): 184-98.
10. See Willard C. Brinton's Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts (New York: Engineering Magazine Company, 1914).
11. I am indebted to Edward R. Tufte's readings of charts and diagrams in his various books on the subject. See in particular Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1983).
12. Robert Westbrook, "Fighting for the American Family," in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 195-222.
13. William E. Leuchtenburg, "The New Deal and the Analogue of War," in The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 35-75.
14. National Resources Planning Board, After the War - tmoard Security (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1940), 8.
15. JoAnne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
16. Russell Van Nest Black, Planning for the Small American City (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1933), 58.
17. Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1990), 60.
18. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: T. F. Unwin, 1903);
19. and Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 3.
20. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 178-79.
21. In addition to the Social Realist image, Kahn's visual source here may have been his own work for the United States Housing Authority (USHA), whose Information Service Division hired him in January 1939 to draw cartoons for its literature, much of which was little more than publicity efforts to sell people on its programs. See Peter Shedd Reed, "Toward Form: Louis I. Kahn's Urban Designs for Philadelphia, 1939-1962" (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1989).
22. The two pamphlets were Oscar Stonorov and Louis I. Kahn, City Planning Is Your Responsibility (New York: Revere Copper and Brass, 1942)
23. Modley, "Pictographs, Today and Tomorrow," 659.
24. See also Nancy Cartwright et al., Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
25. and Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna 1919-1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), esp. 395-400.
26. Rudolf Modley, How to Use Pictorial Statistics (New York: Harper's, 1937);
27. and idem, "Pictographs Today and Tomorrow," 659-64.
28. "Otto Neurath Visits Russia," Survey 68 (November 1, 1932): 538-39;
29. Otto Neurath, "Visual Representation of Architectural Problems," Architectural Record 82 (July 1937): 56-61.
30. Le Corbusier, The Modular: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954).
31. See E. J. Carter and Ernö Goldfinger, The County of London Plan (London: Penguin Books, 1945);
32. and Sir Ronald Davison, Social Security: The Story of British Social Progress and the Beveridge Plan (N.p.: G. G. Harrap, 1943), 26-27, 32-33.
33. For an account of the importance of the Beveridge Report on American planning, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in the Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1998), 488-501.
34. Spiro Kostof, ed., The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
35. See Sarah Williams Goldhagen's analysis of this debate in Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 24-40.
36. See Sigfried Giedion, Architecture, You and Me (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 48-51.
37. Louis I. Kahn, "Monumentalily" in Architecture Culture 1943-1968, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture / Rizzoli, 1993), 47-54,
38. Konrad F. Wittman, "Education for Planning," Pencil Points 25 (May 1944): 60-64.
39. Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram, 164.
40. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941), 542.
41. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 357.
42. Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning (New York: Dover, 1987).
43. For an early expression of this attitude, see Clarence S. Stein, "Dinosaur Cities," Survey Graphic 54 (May 1, 1925): 134-38.
44. Andrew M. Shanken, "Between Brotherhood to Bureaucracy: Joseph Hudnut, Louis I. Kahn and the American Society of Architects and Planners," Planning Perspectives 20 (April 2005): 147-75.
45. and Goldhagen, Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism, 35-40.
46. David Brownlee, review of Goldhagen, Kahn's Situated Modernism, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61 (June 2002): 237-40.
47. and Louis I. Kahn, "Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia," Perspecta 2 (1953): 10-27.
48. Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963). Chermayeff had worked with Kahn during the war in the American Society of Planners and Architects.
49. Edmund N. Bacon, The Design of Cities, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). See esp. the diagrams on 254, 255, 259.
50. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960).