Journal of the American Institute of Planners

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On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning

Denise Scott Brown

To cite this article: Denise Scott Brown (1969) On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning, Journal
of the American Institute of Planners, 35:3, 184-186, DOI: 10.1080/01944366908977950

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 Interpretation

O N POP ART,
PERMISSIVENESS,
AND PLANNING

Denise Scott Brown

During the last sixty years, the nonjudgmental, non-

directive attitude has influenced the arts, the humanities,
and even the social sciences. Recently, architecture and
urban design have felt its impact, and professionals, im-
pressed by upheavals in society and the arts, are begin-
ning to look for new, more receptive ways of seeing the
environment. Hopefully, through such confrontations,
architects and urban designers will be inspired to de-
FIGURE 1 Good Year Tires, GGlO L a u d Canyon, N o r t h Hollywood. velop a respectful understanding of society’s c u h r a l
Photograph by Art Alanis in Thirty-four Parking Lots by artifacts along with a strategy of planned development
Edward Ruscha, 1967. to suit the felt needs of its people.
184 AIP JOURNAL MAY 1969

FIGURE 2 El Plrso, Window, Arizona, from Twenty-six Gasoline Sta-
tions by Edward Rmcha, 1962.
Someone has called the nonjudgmental at-
titude the greatest invention of the twentieth century.
Everywhere-in literature, the arts, the social sciences,
the humanities, in planning, and now in architecture
and urban design-it is making inroads; and in archi-
tecture, urban design, and planning it works for the
better and is much kinder to people.
Perhaps Freud in our time initiated facing the un-
faceable. The words “nonjudgmental,” “permissive”
and “nondirective” relate first to psychiatry, Merton,
borrowing functional analysis from the biologists, sug-
gested that if activities which appear to be “dysfunc-
tional” continue to exist, they must obviously be func-
tional for someone, ergo closing one’s eyes and ordering
them to go away won’t remove them. Gans in a similar
vein has shown how Levittown, hated by architects and
berated by the upper classes, is much of what its OCCU-
pants want, and that architectural diatribes on the use-
lessness of sociology and the immorality of sprawl
won’t make it go away. A generation of planners from
the social sciences has made this its rallying cry, praising
Los Angeles and the “nonplace urban realm,” denounc-
ing the class biases and aesthetic hang-ups of the archi-
tecturally trained “physical planner” and urban de-
signer, and pushing for the reformation of the planning
profession in a new image-their own.
The same thought in linguistics produced the “nondi-
Denise Scott Brown, an Associate Professor at the School of
Architecture and Urban Planning, University of California at
Los Angeles, is an Associate in the firm of Venturi and Rauch,
Architects (Philadelphia). Her article, “Little Magazines
in Architecture and Urbanism,” appeared in the July 1968
Journal.
INTERPRETATION : SCOTT BROWN
rective” Random Home Dictionary of the English
Language, followed by an uproar from pedants in the
name of the maintenance of standards. The movement
has hit political science, education, social welfare, and
public health, though maybe only at the outer edges;
and in literature there are, among others, Gertrude
Stein’s effort to “put some strangeness, something unex-
pected, into the structure of the sentence in order to
bring back vitality to the noun,” and Tom Wolfe’s
attempt to evolve a prose style suitable to the descrip-
tion of Las Vegas.
In the arts the tradition is longer. Francis Bacon said,
“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some
strangeness in the proportion.” The shiver that is en-
gendered by trying to like what one does not like has
long been known to be a creative one; it rocks the artist
from his aesthetic grooves and resensitizes him to the
sources of his inspiration. It may be achieved by break-
ing rules as did the Mannerists. Here the jolt comes
from the unexpected use of a conventional element in an
unconventional way, the arch with a column under its
keystone, the classically detailed room with undassical
proportions. This effect might also come from use of
a new and shocking source-Le Corbusier’s photo-
graphs of western grain elevators and tops of ships
managed to kpater the bourgeois, to blow the minds of
the citizens, of several continents for several years.
But no longer. The revolution has been lost in its
successes over the whole hard face of the metropolis.
Today it is the aging “modern architects” who “will
not see.” Their neatness compulsion, as they design
their multimillion dollar renewal projects or sit in
judgment on the work of their colleagues in misnamed
“art commissions,” deadens the environment and brings
disarray to the lives of many.
In the fine arts a new horror-giving energy source
has been discovered: the popular. This too is old.
Beethoven doubtless once shocked the salons with his
themes from folk tunes, but the Beatles have “made it”
into the intellectual elite, and Rauschenberg and Lich-
tenstein are on the cover of Time. Yet we are still
outraged if an architect comes out for billboards or if a
planner removes the emotion from his voice when talk-
ing of urban sprawl. The first has “sold out to the
crassest motivations in our society,” and the second
doesn’t recognize chaos when he sees it. But architects
and urban designers are, in fact, Johnnies-come-lately
on this scene and can learn from others. From Edward
Ruscha, for example. His Twenty Six Gasoline Stations
are photographed straight: no art except the art that
hides art. His Some Los Angeles Apartment Houses
are end-of-the-world, bridge-playing, walk-up, R-4,
togetherness type, with the Tiki at the doorway and a
pool in the patio. Ruscha’s Thirty Four Parking Lots,
photographed f rom a helicopter, resemble D’Arcangelo
paintings : arrowed, tensioned, abstract diagrams where
oil patterns on the asphalt reveal differential stress from
differing accessibility. His Sunset Strip, a long, ac-
185
 cordion fold-out, shows every building on each side of
the Strip, each carefully numbered but without com-
ment. Deadpan, a scholarly monograph with a silver
cover and slip-on box jacket, it could be on the piazzas
of Florence, but it suggests a new vision of the very
imminent world around us.
Planners and urban designers should be leading the
way since this vision is so pertinent to design in the
city, but it is the moviemakers-for example, Antonioni
in LA Notte and Red Desert and more effectively in
Blow-Up-who have investigated the architectural im-
plications of the local scene. TV commercialmakers
and billboard designers have stolen a long march on
architects in the important area of the mixed use of
words, symbols, and forms to reinforce each other for
high-speed communication with a moving public.
Years ago, poets and collagists tried mixing high and
low sources: Sweeney and Latin, bus tickets and a vio-
lin; and the Beatles do it today. But we lobby to remove
the corner store (or at least the sight of it) from the
campus, the gasoline station from beside the public
building, and the billboard from the landscape. Our
architecture becomes tidy, exclusive, and terribly irrele-
vant. Even the people, where possible, will scurry in
“urban concourses, underground.
” Architects and urban designers have been too quickly
Action painting, the use of the controlled accident,
could re-animate urban design, but urban designers who
admire the ordered variety of the architecture of the
Dogon or the mill town, miss it in Levittown and design
it out of Reston, where nothing is accidental, not the
decorations in the shop windows, not the graffiti cast
into the sculpture, and not the careful vistas which,
FIGURE 3 6565 Forrntain Avenue from some Los Angeles Apartments
b y Edward Ruscha, 1965.
186
as surely as the little Kodak arrows in Disneyland, say
“take my picture.”
Architects who buy Op Art should buy Los Angeles.
It is the same even, open-ended system with multi-
ple possibilities for the definition and redefinition of
focus depending on where you’re at. Sometimes the
yellows shine brightest, sometimes the blues.
These new, more receptive, ways of seeing the en-
vironment, inspired by other sciences and arts, are
almost desperately important to architects or planners
who hope to stay relevant; and when the artistic fash-
ions move on, we shall still be here because this pop
city, this here, is what we have. Despite Ladybird John-
son, it will not be swept under the rug; it needs, rather,
a new Pattrick Geddes to enter where “neither Brahmin
nor Briton” would penetrate, to document and analyze
with loving respect, and to prescribe a conservative
surgery based on the belief that there is pattern in the
sprawl, order in the chaos.
This is not to abandon judgment, for planned action
implies judgment. Judgment is merely deferred a
while in order to make it more sensitive. Liking what
you hate is exhilarating and liberating, but finally reaf-
firming for judgment.
normative. Where the facts and intangibles are many,
a mystique or a system-a philosophy of Man and the
Universe or a CIAM grid-may substitute for the col-
lection of facts or for hard thought. Thismakes them
poor scientists and, strangely enough, indifferent artists
as well. Social scientists have been the opposite: mea-
suring trends while Rome burns, sniffing at other
people’s “values” when they should be recommending
new norms for a new society. But all this is coming to
an end. Architects and social scientists meet today in
many fields, from social protest and advocacy to the
analysis of the mass culture and its artifacts. Citizens
groups retain advocate architects and urban designers as
well as advocate planners, and even in Europe where
early “modern” architectural authoritarianism is still
strong, architects and urban designers are learning to
put Los Angeles and Las Vegas on their travel itiner-
aries as well as the denser areas of Manhattan, admired
by LeCorbusier.
Young architects who confront social issues often
abandon both architecture and urban design, frustrated
by their irrelevance-as practised by many professionals
-to real urban problems. They embrace instead social
or systems planning, or projects which demand social
and communal concern rather than professional service.
This is wasteful and should be unnecessary. For the
best thing an architect or urban designer can offer a
new society, apart from a good heart, is his own skill,
used for the society, to develop a respectful under-
standing of its cultural artifacts and a loving strategy
for their development to suit the felt needs and way of
life of its people. This is a socially responsible activity;
it is, after all, what Gans and the pop artists are doing.
AIP JOURNAL MAY 1969