Exactly a hundred years ago, the Western world was pervaded by a frenetic enthusiasm for a new invention that began to invade cities: the automobile. While poets and painters devoted their imagination to it, engineers and architects envisioned new urban imaginaries to accommodate its arrival. Existing studies on cars and architecture have largely focused on the built form, but have paid comparatively little attention to the early architectural visions that helped construct the car’s cultural legitimacy. This paper addresses that gap by investigating these early visions and their role in laying the groundwork for what would become the most dominant spatial and cultural condition of the twentieth-century city: the carscape.
Through a historical reading of projects such as Melnikov’s car-bridge in Paris, the Futurama exhibition in New York, the Lingotto rooftop circuit in Turin, and Wright’s Motorcar Observatory, this research examines which car-centric visions were proposed, debated, built, or mythologized—and how they were conceived not as neutral infrastructures of mobility, but as powerful spatial expressions of modernity’s ideology of speed, separation, and control. Some took physical form as entirely new typologies; others endured as provocations. Together, they redefined the relationship between architecture, movement, and territory around the logic of automobility.
Today, as we confront a new technological rupture—AI and self-driving vehicles—and an urgent sustainability agenda centered on walkable and resilient cities, the spatial legacy of the car enters a phase of mutation. Tracing its origins and the visionary responses that first gave it form is essential to understanding how those ideas continue to shape our cities—and how they might now be critically reimagined.
Bibliography
- Banham, R. (1971). Los Angeles: The architecture of four ecologies. Penguin Books
- Urry, J. (2004). The ‘system’ of automobility. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(4–5), 25–39
- Berta, M. (2023). Paesaggi accelerati: Spazi per il progetto tra infrastrutture e territorio [Doctoral dissertation, Polytechnic of Turin].
