How Car-Centric Thinking Changed Architecture (and we should change it back)

Excerpt from the S04 episode of The Life-Sized City in Los Angeles with Mikael Colville-Andersen.

Modernism once promised liberation: clean lines, concrete towers, “machines for living.” When the Bauhaus movement declared ornament a crime developers in Los Angeles drank the kool-aid and started dumbing down architecture to match the automobile. Cities obediently stripped themselves of detail, texture, and memory. The strip mall, billboards, signs with huge, simple lettering are all products of this movement.

You’ll see how car culture and modernist dogma collided to erase the human scale from our streets, why movements like New Urbanism and neo-traditionalism are clawing back space for beauty and continuity, and why even Brutalism—once reviled—is being fetishized on Instagram.

Anti-modernism, Bauhaus, car centric cities, modernist architecture, Brutalism, New Urbanism, traditional architecture, architectural revival, city design, anti modernist movement, architecture critique, car culture urbanism, fast food metaphor cities, Le Corbusier, Jane Jacobs, urban design.

#Architecture #AntiModernism #Bauhaus #Brutalism #UrbanDesign #CarCulture #NewUrbanism