Copyright by Samuel Tommy Dodd 2014
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Copyright by Samuel Tommy Dodd 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Samuel Tommy Dodd Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Televising Architecture: Media, Public Engagement, and Design in America Committee: Richard Cleary, Supervisor Anthony Alofsin Anna V. Andrzejewski Janet Davis Christopher Long Steven Moore Televising Architecture: Media, Public Engagement, and Design in America by Samuel Tommy Dodd, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2014 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I want to acknowledge Richard Cleary, the supervisor of this project. He motivated me to ask questions worth asking, to answer them with scholarly rigor and honesty, and to always seek ways to apply them inside the classroom. It is an honor to work with Dr. Cleary and to call him, respectfully, my colleague and friend. The diversity and talent of my other committee members has been a source of inspiration. Anthony Alofsin encouraged me to tackle the challenging projects with courage and to strive to say something meaningful. In Janet Davis’s seminar on methods and theories of popular culture, I realized how the questions I wanted to ask could yield rewarding answers. Steven Moore’s quest for teaching and research methods that are truly interdisciplinary motivated me to push my work into other fields of study. Christopher Long welcomed me to UT and has been a source of guidance ever since. Anna V. Andrzejewski provided a much-needed boost of encouragement during the final stages of this project. Professors Rebecca Houze, Helen Nagata, and Barbara Jaffee in the Art History Department at Northern Illinois University saw potential in a young and inexperienced student. It is not an exaggeration to say that without their early training and direction, I would not have come to the University of Texas at Austin. At the University of Texas, I found a dynamic intellectual environment full of generous friends and colleagues. Monica Penick and Tara Dudley provided models in their own work and willingly shared their ideas and enthusiasm with me. At the Center for Sustainable Development, Barbara Brown Wilson showed me how to handle authority with kindness and respect. I am thankful to the professors of the architectural history and theory program who have provided support: Mirka Benes, Fernando Lara, and Michael Holleran. To the staff of the Architecture and Planning Library and the Alexander Architectural Archive I owe many thanks: Beth Dodd, Nancy Sparrow, Donna Coates, Martha González Palacios, and Dan Orozco. At the Dolph Briscoe Center for American iv History, I thank Sarah Cleary, Margaret Schlankey, and Katherine Kenefick. In generously granting me access to special collections and archival materials, they have contributed to my love of material culture and preservation. Funding for this project came from many sources, including a fellowship at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution; a Continuing Fellowship provided by the University of Texas at Austin Graduate School; travel funding from the School of Architecture; teaching assistantships under Richard Cleary and Christopher Long; research assistantships with Richard Cleary and Anthony Alofsin; and a research associate position at the Center for Sustainable Development under Barbara Brown Wilson and Steven Moore. This project is, more than anything, the product of my own value systems, taste cultures, and work ethic—the development of which can be tracked from my family roots in Cushman, Arkansas, to the four acres I call home in Woodstock, Illinois, before taking final shape in Austin, Texas. To my parents, Tom and Kathy Dodd, I owe everything. Their love and support account, in part, for the pages that follow, and for everything of value I set out to do with my life. I am thankful to my sisters, Leigh, Crystal, and Tammy, for their friendship and encouragement. To my extended Arkansas family, I give my full gratitude and love. I dedicate this dissertation to my friends: Andrea Beth Carroll | Ashley Chadwick | Meghan Kleon | Kenneth Kwok Suzanne La Follette | Adam Maher | Aurora McClain | Laura McGuire Dan Pino | Priyanka Sen | Kelso Wyeth with special thanks to Kathryn Pierce and Ryan Mitchell. v Televising Architecture: Media, Public Engagement, and Design in America Samuel Tommy Dodd, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Richard Cleary Starting in the 1940s, the cultural revolution associated with the popularity of television placed new demands on how and where designers communicated the value of their work with the American public. Televising Architecture explains how architects, planners, and other design professionals used television as a communication technology and as a cultural platform for shaping public opinion on the built environment. Each of the six chapters describes a specific purpose and context for the application of television to architectural practice. I consider public affairs programs produced by the American Institute of Architects; the use of closed-circuit television for space simulations; public service announcements meant to offset negative coverage on urbanism; interactive television projects that elicited community participation in planning; and PBS mini-series on the history of American architecture. I conclude by discussing Home and Garden Television (HGTV) as a lesson in media convergence for design professionals in the twenty-first century. Televising Architecture provides a new way to understand architecture not as a text, image, or built object, but as a complex system of communication models — including representation, negotiation, mediation, and participation — that occur between design experts and the public at large. I draw from the work of media and technology scholars who treat media as sites of negotiation and convergence. One of my primary vi methods is to analyze the largely untapped archive of architectural images, texts, and sound-bites found in television programming. I do so by examining programs themselves, including frame-by-frame analysis to identify what the programs communicated through visual tropes and camera and editing techniques, and a textual analysis, drawing on transcripts, program summaries, and press coverage. As a result, Televising Architecture provides historical perspectives— and a series of media lessons— for understanding the practice of architecture in our current digital culture, wherein architects must navigate a new media environment in the pursuit of social relevance. vii Table of Contents List of Figures & Tables x Introduction Architecture by Television 1 Television: An Architectural Medium? 5 The Media Environment 12 Six Convergences 19 Television as Archive: Towards a New Method 23 Chapter One Television and Public Relations for the Architecture Profession 26 “The Architect’s Program” and Public Relations at a National Scale 29 The Ethics of Public Relations 33 Architecture for the “Public Interest” 43 Art in Your Life, San Francisco, 1952 46 So You Want to Build, Dallas, 1952 53 Ongoing “Advertising Angst” 59 Televising the Profession 63 Chapter Two Simulating Space: Television Enters the Design Studio 67 The Nebraska Experiment, 1965-66 70 TV vs. Film vs. Computers 78 The Glasgow Experiment, 1967-70 83 Televising Space: The Medium is the Message 87 Chapter Three Shaping Television’s Image of the City 93 Televising the City in Crisis 97 Televising Options in the City 102 Measuring Television’s Effect 109 Television as a “Mass Educator” 113 Neighborhood Confidence Project 115 Shaping or Selling the City? 117 viii Chapter Four Interactive Television and Participatory Planning 121 Jerome Aumente and the Video Movement 125 The Regional Plan Association’s “Choices for ‘76” 132 “Design-a-thons” and Live TV 137 Interactive Television as Design Process 147 Chapter Five “Personal Views” of American Architecture on PBS 149 Mobil’s Cultural Advocacy 152 “The Search for a Usable Past” 155 Missing the Mark 162 America by Design 165 TV Worth Watching? 172 Televising the “Personal View” 175 Chapter Six Beyond TV: HGTV as Media Convergence 178 Watching HGTV 181 HGTV Design Star 187 “HGTV’s Dream Home” 192 HGTV Magazine 196 Decorating for Dummies? 200 Conclusion Popular Media and Design Practice 207 Endnotes 215 Figures 271 Tables 322 Bibliography 337 ix List of Figures Figure I.1. Ildefonso Aroztegui, an architect from Montevideo, Uruguay and post- professional student at the University of Illinois, presents his plans for the “television studio of tomorrow” for the cameras on WRGB Schenectady, February 1944 (Illinois Technograph [February 1944]: 16). Figure 1.1. Chart showing AIA membership increases (Henry Saylor, The A.I.A.’s First Hundred Years [Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1957], 30). Figure 1.2. Edmund Purves, Executive Director of the American Institute of Architects, 1952 (Journal of the A.I.A. [September 1952]: 126). Figure 1.3. Landscape architect Robert Royston (left), shown with Leland Vaughan (center) and Robert Anshen (right), explains his work in the episode “Design in Your Garden” of Art in Your Life (Allon Schoener, “An Art Museum’s Experiment in Television,” Museum: A Quarterly Review 5.4 [1952]: 340). Figure 1.4. Advertisement for So You Want to Build (Dallas Morning News [13 April 1952]: V.7). Figure 1.5. Advertisement for the Vacation Home model (Dallas Morning News [24 May 1953]: 8.1). Figure 1.6. Advertisement for Cowboy Classics seen next to ad for So You Want to Build (Dallas Morning News [13 April 1952]: V.7). Figure 2.1 Philip Thiel, movement notation, 1961 (Thiel, “A Sequent-Experience Notation for Architectural and Urban Spaces,” Urban Planning Review [April 1961]: plate 5). Figure 2.2. Movement notation made as part of an experiment using television to simulate space at the University of Nebraska in 1965 (Stuart Rose and M. Scheffel Pierce, “Simulating Space,” Architectural and Engineering News [August 1944]: 47).