François Dallegret Un-house. Transportable standard-of-living package, 1965 The Environment Bubble Dessin au trait sur film translucide et texte sur acétate transparent, 76 x 76 cm. inv. 005 12 02
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the idea of a de-materialised dwelling 1960s and ‘70s USA architecture | political influences by yann ricordel - healy
During the last ten years, the Chinese littoral from Shanghai to Guhangzu through Hong Kong has progressively become the largest continuous urbanised zone in history. This most extreme present is the development of a phenomenon first observed at the very beginning of the 1960s in the USA by French geographer Jean Gottmann in Megalopolis, the urbanized northeastern seaboard of the United States ,1961. From Louis Sullivan’s criticism about the lack of coherent urban planning at the end of the nineteenth century to Rem Koolhas’ Delirious New York of 1978, the American northeast megalopolis has been seen as unstable due to social, economic, political and
demographic issues. In Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities , published the same year as Jean Gottman’s book, this instability turns to a real state of crisis with over- rational dehumanised city-planning policies inspired by Robert Moses that neglected real human needs and emphasised functional zoning. An informal school of thought on the American city arose at this time, stressing ideas of ecology and the possibilities of self-construction, reaching its apex with Peter Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies of 1971.
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