Author: Jeremy Scott White

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13:

The Summer Olympic Games of 1932 is not an architectural story in the narrow sense of the term. If "architecture" is broadly defined as landscape and the process by which it is shaped, invested with meaning, and packaged, then the organizing effort is a very architectural story indeed. Booster brought the Games to Los Angeles as a surrogate world's fair. The Organizing Committee -- that select group of boosters enthusiastically supported by local publishers -- sought the opportunity to host the Olympics for the purpose of promoting the city. They endeavoured to manipulate the landscape as a means of making the Olympics a showcase, but "manipulate" here means not so much the building and rebuilding of material form, constructing streets and buildings, it also means the construction of experience by a variety of material and ephemeral means. Even before the athletes arrived, the booster's project was the creation and projection of a holistic image of landscape - they called it arcadia - a landscape without internal contradictions and organically suited to the ideals of Olympism and the mythic ideals boosters had recanted for fifty years. They accomplished this largely by suppressing, or making invisible, aspects of the landscape and attendant social relations that contradicted the booster's narrative. This dissertation treats the Olympic event as a synthesis of motives and strategies, an urban episode in which local boosters inflected and re-interpreted the Olympic scheme. In a larger context, this study questions the importance bestowed upon visible and monumental buildings in the study of modern architecture and urban planning