Sociological imagination and the city

About this book

This dissertation gives an account of encounters between architecture and planning education in America during the quarter century running from the height of the Great Depression through to the launch of Sputnik, approximately 1933 to 1957. During this period, planning education progressed from its status as a sub-component of landscape architecture and sometime fellow traveler with architectural education to a parallel recognition within the university environment as a legitimate division coordinated with these other two. Yet during the same time, professional architecture education also underwent a significant transformation, emerging as a component of higher education in which valued forms of academic research that interfaced with design were newly in place and increasingly central to the field. The dissertation argues that these parallel transformations, entailing struggles between research and design, depended heavily upon the ongoing emergence of new organizational, funding and administration practices simultaneously within the federal government and the modern research university, transformations linked to the emergence of the social sciences as an interdisciplinary mediating force within the various different locations of research activities within American society. Identifying a "sociological imagination" directed at the American city as a new frontier for designed research projects within both government and academia during the 1930s, the study sequentially catalogues episodes whereby a disparate set of figures networked together the previously distinct domains of government, professions and higher education, generating in turn by the mid-1940s a situation ripe for exploitation during what would unfold as an unprecedented postwar boom. After opening with a synoptic summary of developments in both architecture and planning education prior to the early 1930s, noteworthy events vital to educational developments, occurring over the subsequent two decades, are investigated. In conclusion, a focus on transformations during the 1950s at one particular American architecture school (the School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania) in the final chapter explicates how the groundwork laid prior to 1950 allowed both planning and architecture educators to promote new value for the particular symbioses between research and design each encompassed within the environment of American higher education. What is revealed is a tactic that simultaneously legitimized and elevated these coordinated divisions within that environment while at the same time introducing new disciplinary and professional understandings of them.