Preface

I mentally mapped out this book during the contemplative solitude that naturally accompanies coast-to-coast motorcycle rides—in my particular case from San Francisco to New York City on a 1200cc Triumph Bonneville. Of course, one should not ride such distances, as motorcycles are rather dangerous (so don’t take this as an endorsement for mixing scholarship and easy riding). However, accompanying this danger is also unfiltered and overwhelming access to the appearances of the world around you. Motorcycles have no windshields, dashboards, screens, or roofs, meaning one’s field of vision is vastly increased. It was likely this Brobdingnagian perspective that brought to the foreground of my attention the appalling ugliness of the built environment, or put another way, the appalling contemporary environments in which human life takes place today and how they are developed almost entirely without any knowledge of the field of aesthetics.

Somewhere around Utah it became obvious to me that most of the constructed world between San Francisco and New York has been the product of only twentieth-century architectural practices and urban theories. There are no Parises, Kyotos, Sydneys, or Romes between the American coasts. Instead, we have places like Modesto, Reno, Omaha, and Des Moines—all almost entirely dominated by the urbanism of modern-ish office boxes clad in featureless glass, beige stucco strip malls, endless parking lots, and even more endless (if such a thing is possible) suburban sprawl. While entirely unprovable, it takes no particular genius to connect the dots between aesthetics being removed as a subject from architectural education in the years surrounding World War I and a subsequent century of fantastically ugly and inhumane built environments produced by architects almost completely ignorant of aesthetics as a discourse.

And so, upon my iron horse I decided what the world needed most wasn’t more deeply jargoned scholarship or indecipherable journal submissions about how terrible the world is—but rather a primer that was more easily consumed. The Forerunners series, with its focus on “Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead,” was the perfect outlet for these developing ideas. On that note, these are very much ideas-in-development, but I thought them worth getting out into the world sooner rather than later in the hope of better articulating how architecture and aesthetics do and can intersect at our particular moment in time to—fingers crossed—help in some small way to point us toward a more beautiful and just century of environment building that we should all hope is forthcoming.