Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and the Market (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226686066)

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, expressed as a critique of central design and a support of spontaneous order. Non-Design illuminates 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 thinkers espoused a distinctive concept of "non-design,"characterized by a rejection of conscious design and an embrace of various phenomenon that emerge without intention or deliberate human guidance. This diffuse and complex body of theories discarded many of the cultural presuppositions of the time, shunning the traditions of modern design in favor of the wisdom, freedom, and self-organizing capacity of the market. Fontenot reveals the little-known commonalities between the aesthetic deregulation sought by ostensibly liberal thinkers and Hayek's more controversial conception of state power, detailing what this unexplored affinity means for our conceptions of political liberalism. Non-Design thoroughly recasts conventional views of postwar architecture and urbanism, as well as liberal and libertarian philosophies.

Author: Anthony Fontenot
ISBN-10: 022668606X
ISBN-13: 9780226686066
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 07/09/2021
Pages: 376
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 2.25lbs
Size: 10.00h x 7.17w x 1.50d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2022