| This dissertation focuses upon the built environment at four urban universities in the United States, Yale University, Columbia University, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and the University of California-Berkeley, and documents this relationship between liberalism, modernism and the postwar American college campus. To many liberal leaders - within the university and without - the development of universities and their surrounding communities offered a place for the employment of a new visual and spatial language for America's postwar democracy, and the architecture and urban planning associated with a number of elite universities provided an arena where modernism - which, postwar liberalism, valued rationality, technology, a mistrust of ideology, and an orientation towards the future - could flourish. Government agencies showered such campuses with increased federal funding, and welcomed a turn in architectural style that highlighted the new values of the immediate postwar era. In terms of urban planning, urban universities and their allies even adopted the language of Cold War anti-communism, arguing that university expansion and other forms of urban renewal were valuable instruments not only of domestic "containment" in the war against blight and inner-city decay (not surprisingly, such rhetoric, and the designs this language inspired - as in the discourse surrounding communism - took an incredibly masculine turn), but also in "liberating" such cityscapes from the horrors of urban blight. Within the world of university planning - as in the realm of American liberalism - the city came to be seen as something of a laboratory, a place where the greatest problems confronting American society could not only be viewed, but also conceivably solved. Along similar lines, the architecture and planning behind such universities highlighted the perceived strengths of postwar liberalism, and their robust modernist design, much like that of many of the US embassies scattered around the world, served as a visual reminder of American potency in the postwar struggle against global communism. These structures would also come to be viewed as symbols by other groups of actors, including community activists and student protesters - or groups that came to challenge postwar liberalism in America's cities. |
