The Global Postcolonial Moment and the American New Town: India, Reston, Dodoma

Document Type

Journal Article

Role

Author

Standard Number

0096-1442

Journal Title

Journal of Urban History

Volume

38

Issue

3

First Page

553

Last Page

576

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

As with many of the 1960s new towns, scholars place Reston, Virginia, in the garden city tradition. This essay argues instead that Reston brought to the United States a unique midcentury architectural vernacular, born not in Britain but in the postcolonial world. The war effort spirited American architects abroad. Some stayed to advise governments building independent nations. One of them was the New Yorker Albert Mayer, along with members of his firm. Designing new cities in India, these Americans came into contact with Indian architects creating their own sense of a national built environment. Reston brought the form created by these encounters to the Washington suburbs. The essay highlights the links between the revised modernism of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in the 1950s and postcolonial building practices. Reston then became a pedagogical space, as international visitors circulated its representative forms abroad again, to India, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania. --author-supplied description

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