Sociologies (Feb 2017)
L’utopie du middle landscape américain
Abstract
« The houses and the automobiles are equal figments of a great dream » Reyner Banham (1971) explained in Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies, « the dream of the urban homestead, the dream of a good life outside the squalors of the European type of city ». Understanding this dream to which the house is related imply to go back to the very foundations of a culture of life peculiar to the United-States, and whose roots can be founded in the first settlements established on the ground of the New World. This dream has constantly mobilized people’s minds with the hope that this ideal world will be realized one day: a world where no more distinction will be possible between city, country and nature, in the image of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, project being part of this long mythical quest.
