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To those of us who look at Los Angeles and see no sense at all,
"Landscapes of Desire" offers a vivid and rewarding account of the
particular visions that drove the period of Anglo dominance in the
Los Angeles region, from about 1850 to about 1985. William
McClung's fascinating essay, supported at every point by wonderful
illustrations, shows that Anglo settlers and developers wanted
nothing more than to make sense of their surroundings, but that
their two dominant paradigms were at war with each other.
Anglophone Los Angeles, McClung says, has tried strenuously to
reconcile two competing mythologies of place and space: one of an
acquired Arcadia - a found natural paradise - and the other of an
invented Utopia - an empty space inviting development. The
collision between these two underlying ideals is still present in
the ambivalence at the heart of the city's and region's
understanding of themselves. The Arcadian dream of nurturing
inherited beauty entailed idealizing the region's Hispanic past.
Yet that past was simultaneously belittled by the utopian vision of
arid landscapes watered into Anglo plantations and ranchos reshaped
into cities. From Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel Ramona to the
work of artists David Hockney, Edward Ruscha, and Terry Schoonhoven
in the 1960s and after, Los Angeles has been an arena of competing
and often incompatible constructions of ideal place and space.
Looking at architecture, landscaping, literature, historiography,
painting, conceptual art, and such ancillary activities and crafts
as booster pamphlets, real estate promotions, and citrus box
labels, McClung presents a new and refreshingly revisionist view of
the city's growth. Examining designed spaces, including buildings,
parks, freeways, and whole neighborhoods and communities, he gives
readers a strong sense of the contradictions, failures, and
triumphs that continue to govern L.A.'s image of itself. This is
"Los Angeles Times" Best Nonfiction Book of 2000.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1977.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which
commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and
impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes
high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using
print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in
1977.
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