Non-Design and the Non-Planned City

Abstract

This study seeks to understand the larger cultural context that gave rise to what is referred to as "non-design," a term designated to denote a particular aesthetic that is characterized by a suspicion of, and/or rejection of, "conscious" design, while embracing various phenomenon

that emerge without "intention" or "deliberate human design." The study traces the phenomenon of "non-design" in British and American design culture of the postwar period. The author argues that following Friedrich von Hayek's theories of the "undesigned" nature of social institutions and his concept of a "spontaneous order" of the 1940s, non-design first

emerged in design discourse and practice in the early 1950s in England, particularly in the work of certain members of the Independent Group, and by the mid-1960s it gained currency in the United States in the architectural and urban theories of Charles Moore, Robert Venturi

and Denise Scott Brown, and particularly in Reyner Banham's writing on American urbanism. While rarely made explicit, this dissertation argues that the concept of non-design played an important role in design and urban debates of the postwar period.