“A car with a view”. Considerations on the landscape seen and represented through the windshield

The twentieth century development of architecture and the contemporary definition of landscape are inextricably bound with the rise of the automobile. Baptized by Le Corbusier as a symbol of a rational and industrial culture, the perspective “view from the car” gradually embodied the freedom and anarchic wandering of the American on-the-road culture. Although allowing for a new way of considering the landscape, cars were designed to give as little feeling of the road as possible, eventually readdressing the driver’s perception of space and turning the windshield into a screen. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s analysis of Las Vegas presents a retroactive, theoretical gaze on the effects on the suburban city promoted by the automobile development which is largely resulting from driving along the Strip and looking at the buildings and signs through the windshields. As signs replace architectural aesthetic devices in the city, they also translate the corporeal perception of the road into visual codes in the car’s cockpit. While the Venturi were trying to readdress the theoretical debate on the city towards reality, their moving “observatory” was getting them farer from reality, imposing on them as a new kind of medium.