This talk examines changes to, and changing attitudes towards, the commercial landscape in the United States in the middle of the 20th century.   Bookended by New Deal efforts to modernize Main Street and National Trust programs to revitalize Main Street, the talk considers the architectural impact of the proliferation of the automobile and the critical responses it produced.

Gabrielle Esperdy is an architectural historian and critic whose work examines the intersection of architecture, consumerism, and modernism in urban and suburban landscapes, especially in the U.S. in the20th and 21st centuries.  Her first book, Modernizing Main Street (Chicago, 2008), examined efforts to use the architecture of modernism to transform shopping districts and commercial strips as an antidote to the Great Depression.  Her current book project studies attitudes towards the commercial landscape and their influence on architectural discourse since WWII.  Her blog, American Road Trip, considers historical, monumental and offbeat sites, as well as the ordinary, non-heroic places and communities that are the cultural bedrock of the built and natural landscapes of America.  She is Associate Professor of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Editor of SAH Archipedia, an online resource for the history of the built environment.  Her work has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Design, Perspecta, History of Photography, and Design Observer.

This lecture is sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Society of Architectural Historians.