building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

culture. No other country gives rise to this process of both
discrimination and exacerbation, of radicalisation, of the essential
details of our European cultures... What had remained critical and
religious esotericism in Europe, in the New Continent transforms itself
into pragmatic esotericism, thanks to a sudden jolt, or to a twist of a
geographic exile, which imitates in the founding countries of the 17 th
century, man’s voluntary exile into his own conscience. All the American
principles respond to this twofold movement to develop moral law in
peoples’ consciences, and to radicalise the everlasting, utopian need of
the sects and the immediate materialisation of this utopia in
employment, customs and life style. To touch down in America still
means to land in this “religion” of the way of life Tocqueville spoke of 108 .
The dynamics between the moral needs contained in this visualization of America
and utopian idealizations are well founded. The vast American spaces have over the
years offered opportunities to build a complex relationship with the environment.
As we have seen before, this relationship had become clear over time as
architectural models linked to the agricultural practices were defined and as town
planning the settlements evolved.
On the basis of the reasoning followed so far, the city acquires even further the role
of a place of conflict and of a warning for the American intellectual. It was always
going to be the Europeans, who found the fascination and the disenchantment of
the contemporary myth in the metropolis, the skyscrapers and new materials.
If the city, especially Paris, is the object of cultural interests and becomes landscape
in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, in America people show a similar
interest not so much in built‐up area, but in the unexplored territories and show the
same amazement at the wilderness as the former do at metropolitan life. Later, at
the beginning of the twentieth century, the object of interest shifted to the
“suburb”, namely to the process of decentralization and promotion of idealized
rural life.
108 BAUDRILLARD, Jean, Amerique, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1986 (it. tr. by Laura Guarino,
L’America, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1987, p. 63) [english text translated by the editor from italian]; See
TOCQUEVILLE, Alexis de, De la democrazie en Amerique, Paris, 1835‐1840 (en. tr. by Henry Reeve,
Democracy in America, New York, The Colonial Press, 1900); (Italian translation La Democrazia in
America, edited by Giorgio Candeloro, Milano, Rizzoli, 2010)
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