Non-Design

Anthony Fontenot’s staggeringly ambitious book uncovers the surprisingly libertarian heart of the most influential British and American architectural and urbanist discourses of the postwar period, illuminating the unexpected philosophical common ground between enemies of state support, most prominently the economist Friedrich Hayek, and numerous notable postwar architects and urbanists like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Reyner Banham, and Jane Jacobs. These urbanists espoused a new idea of “non-design”—characterized by a rejection of design and an embrace of various phenomena that emerge without intention or deliberate human design. This diffuse and complex body of design theories discarded many of the cultural presuppositions of central design associated with “high” architecture and planning of their time, casting off socialist goals and instead aspiring to let capitalism teach us what a built environment could or should be. Their theories of non-design shunned the tradition of the pioneers of modern design in favor of the wisdom—and freedom—of the market. Fontenot reveals the little-known affinities between spontaneous order and the aesthetic deregulation sought by Jacobs and other ostensibly liberal thinkers and Hayek’s more controversial conception of state power. He details what this unexplored affinity means for our conceptions of political liberalism. In drawing a host of surprising connections between the cultural shift away from the state and the evolution of the aesthetics of the non-planned built environment, Non-Design thoroughly recasts conventional views of postwar architecture, urbanism,  and both liberal and libertarian philosophies.