UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Gordon Cullen and the “Cut-and-Paste” Urban Landscape A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture by Miriam Engler 2013 © Copyright by Miriam Engler 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Gordon Cullen and the “Cut-and-Paste” Urban Landscape by Miriam Engler Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Sylvia Lavin, Chair The new rules of the emerging consumer economy radically reconfigured both the discourse and practice of architecture during the postwar era. Architecture became a commodity whose products were sold through mass media to mass audiences, via images that performed as advertising. In this world, image makers, rather than theorists, stood at the forefront of the architectural production, performing as “visual marketers.” Thomas Gordon Cullen (1914–1994), the subject of this dissertation and one of the best-known twentieth-century architectural draftsmen to emerge from Britain, flourished during this visual consumerist push. Cullen gained widespread acclaim in the 1960s and 1970s following the publication of his book Townscape (1961) and its abbreviated edition, The Concise Townscape (1971). Cullen is therefore closely associated with the three decades-long Townscape campaign, initiated and promoted by the prestigious London-based magazine The Architectural Review, which espoused a visual modern-picturesque approach to city design. Though Cullen is well known, he is little studied and—owing specifically to the malleability of and contradictions in ii his legacy—even less understood. In examining his urban ideas, most scholars have placed him in the history of urban design. An in-depth study of Cullen’s printed image and modus operandi, however, is conspicuously missing. This study fills this gap. It provides a structural understanding of Cullen’s massive popularity and influence through his image-making trade—its professional status, income sources, clients, norms of success, production modes—and through his drawings. These influences work palpably beyond urban design and Townscape: they signal a major shift in the role of image makers and the status of the image in the production and consumption of popular architecture in the postwar era. This study uses key samples of his published work; exemplary samples of original drawings, sketches, and journal notes from his personal archive housed at his residence in Wraysbury, England; and a range of academic references and citations, as well as formal interviews and informal conversations, to examine the ways in which Cullen (1) packaged and sold architecture as visual “merchandise” to manufacture consumer desire, (2) reinvented the landscape perspective as a tool to rethink the postmodern city, (3) reconfigured the design book as a new kind of literary architectural genre, and (4) constructed his audience. It shows that Cullen was precisely fitted to the requisites of a society of spectacle in a hyper-consumerist economy. Not only did he shape the postwar generation of architects and landscape architects educated between the 1970s and 1980s across the world, but he continues to exert his influence over both professionals and laypeople today. Knowingly and mostly unknowingly, many see the world through Cullen’s eyes—as mobile, pedestrian, at eye level, and spectacular. And many draw or design the city through bricolage and montage—a “cut-and-paste” maneuver of a constant Cullenesque interplay in virtual and actual space. iii The dissertation of Miriam Engler is approved. Dana Cuff Dell Upton Sylvia Lavin, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 iv CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES …………………………………………………………………… viii PREFACE ……………………………………………………………………………... xiii VITA …………………………………………………………………………………… xvii CHAPTER 1. Locating Gordon Cullen in the Realm of Image Making and Consumer Culture... 1 Image Making in Architecture: Forerunners and Contexts……………………. 3 Normative Ways of Studying Cullen…………………………………………… 6 A Structural Approach to Understanding Cullen………………………………. 13 What makes His Drawings Cullenesque? ……………………………… 18 Study Method and Framework…………………………………………………. 21 Dissertation Chapter Outline……………………………………………………. 23 Cullen in Suspension……………………………………………………………. 33 CHAPTER 2. Image Makers and the Marketing of Modern Architecture: The Thirties……….. 36 A Product of the 1930s………………………………………………………… 39 Commercial Artist and Metabuilder…………………………………… 39 Among the “Who’s Who” ……………………………………………… 42 Direct Influences………………………………………………………. 44 Personal Traits and Proclivities………………………………………… 51 Image Making at Work………………………………………………………… 54 Shelf Appeal…………………………………………………………… 54 Readymades: Cut-and-Paste Cullen Style……………………………. 56 The Place of Photography in Cullen’s work………………………….. 60 Cartoons and Advertising…………………………………………….. 62 Topographical Draftsmanship and Caricature……………………….. 67 Theater and Film……………………………………………………… 72 Photomontage and the Deconstruction of Modern Architecture……………… 76 Drawing the Modern Landscape ……………………………………………… 82 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………… 88 CHAPTER 3. Manufacturing Postwar Townscapes: Images and Words amid a Society of Spectacle……………………………………………………………. 108 Townscape as Spectacle……………………………………………………….. 110 In the AR Circle………………………………………………………………… 115 Coexisting and Competing Townscapes……………………………….. 116 In the Shadows of the Editors………………………………………….. 119 Replacing Piper…………………………………………………………. 125 Scaping the Magazine………………………………………………………….. 126 The Art Editorial Oeuvre……………………………………………….. 127 v Making a “Tactile” Review……………………………………………… 129 Becoming a Photographer………………………………………………. 133 Drawings, Off Strike of Reality………………………………………… 137 From Typography to External Lettering………………………………… 139 Packaging the Magazine: Artwork and Cover Art……………………… 141 The Picto-Journalistic Oeuvre…………………………………………… 144 The Painterly and Conversational Text…………………………………. 146 Drawing the Townscape………………………………………………………… 153 Flattening the Perspective……………………………………………….. 157 Floorscapes and Wallscapes…………………………………………….. 158 Tones, Tints, and Other Tools…………………………………………… 161 Shifting Viewpoints: Serial Vision………………………………………………. 165 Intertwined Trajectories…………………………………………………. 165 From Architectural to Urban Promenade……………………………….. 166 Serial Vision Regained………………………………………………….. 168 Vision in Motion in The Review ………………………………………… 174 Extramural Affairs………………………………………………………………. 179 Out in the Field…………………………………………………………… 181 A Fading Era…………………………………………………………………….. 184 The “Old Boy” Speaks Up………………………………………………. 187 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….. 189 CHAPTER 4. Packaging the Book for Popular Consumption………………………………………. 210 A New Kind of Genre for a New Kind of Audience…………………………… 213 Townscape amid Popular Consumer Culture…………………………… 214 Tiny Beginnings: The Genesis of the Book……………………………. 216 Reconfiguring the Casebook …………………………………………… 222 A Game Everyone Can Play……………………………………………. 225 The Audience Is the People…………………………………………….. 230 The “Physique” of the Book……………………………………………………. 234 The Iconographic Program……………………………………………… 235 A Montage of Purely Editorial Salvage………………………………… 239 Assembling the Book…………………………………………………… 242 The Hypertext…………………………………………………………… 245 Of Critics and Competitors…………………………………………………….. 248 The Lure, the Praise, and the Scorn…………………………………….. 249 Of Other Townscape Books……………………………………………. 253 The Post-Townscape Quandary………………………………………………… 257 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………. 267 CHAPTER 5. Free-Floating Images, Taking on a Life of Their Own………………………………. 281 Detachable Images……………………………………………………………… 285 Bountiful Offspring……………………………………………………………… 288 vi Uniquely British: Conservation Takes Hold of Townscape…………………… 290 Shaping a Generation of British Architects……………………………. 297 Entangled in the Postmodern Project: Charles Jencks, Colin Rowe, and Collage City………………………………………………………… 300 Townscape Goes Global……………………………………………………….. 305 Townscape USA………………………………………………………… 305 A Warm Embrace in Europe and South America……………………… 311 Tossed in Academic Discourses: Supple References, Adaptable Meanings….. 315 Discourse 1: Embodied or Disembodied Eye? Crossing Paths with Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs………………………………… 317 Discourse 2: Elitist, Popular, or Ordinary Aesthetics? Caught between Peter Blake, Robert Venturi/Denise Scott Brown, and Grady Clay……………………………………………………… 324 Discourse 3: Realistic, Romantic, or Absurd? Reyner Banham and Alison and Peter Smithson………………………………… 332 A Legacy of Visual Representation in Print and in Word……………………… 337 The Freehand Landscape Drawing Liberation………………………… 338 Cullen in the Age of Digital Simulation……………………………………….. 342 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………… 348 EPILOGUE: From Townscape to Infoscape……………………………………….. 360 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………… 367 vii LIST OF FIGURES 2.1. Gordon Cullen, portfolio exhibits, 1937–39……………………………………………. 90 2.2. Gordon Cullen, journal entry …………………………………………………………… 90 2.3. Line drawings by Le Corbusier and Gordon Cullen …………………………………… 91 2.4. Le Corbusier’s chaise lounge, as photographed and in Gordon Cullen’s line drawing… 91 2.5. Three examples of cutaway axonometrics……………………………………………… 92 2.6. Gordon Cullen, page spread of sketches of the floating entry canopy, Highpoint II….. 92 2.7. Gordon Cullen, cover of Architectural Review, June 1937, and a cartoon sketch and print, “Marcel Breuer and Moholy-Nagy leave for America, 1938……………….. 93 2.8. Gordon Cullen, promotional posters …………………………………………………..