God's Own Junkyard  

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"Blake's book falls into the jeremiad tradition of Frederick Allen and the earlier" --Building the Nation Americans Write About Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Landscape ... edited by Steven Conn, Max Page

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God's Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape (1964) is a book by German-American architect Peter Blake.

Blurb:

"Contains many black and white photos of the desecration of the U.S. landscape in the late 50's/early 60's."

Excerpts

"It is a deliberate attack upon all those who have already befouled a large portion of this country for private gain and are engaged in befouling the rest."

"At present, these should-be leaders are, instead, performing for Mr. Ripley's "Believe It or Not" circus: architects, painters, and sculptors are outdoing one another in acrobatics, in hot pursuit of novelty; taste makers are busy watching the box office and the circulation figures, instead of making taste; and the public (which includes the public uglifiers) simply follows the lead of our supposed "intellectual elite."

"For the truth is that the mess that is man-made America is merely a caricature of the mess that is art in America — and a very mild caricature at that. The inscription on Sir Christopher Wren's tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral contains the famous words:"If thou seek his monument, look about thee." God forbid that this should ever become our epitaph."


See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "God's Own Junkyard" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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