In 1908, Henry Ford introduced his iconic Model T to the United States.

This not only changed the possibilities of mobility, but also the infrastructure and aesthetics of the cities.

Many places were so completely adapted to the car that by the 1940s and 1950s you could drive straight into many buildings, including cinemas, diners and banks.

The trip by car was affordable and, thanks to sophisticated advertising campaigns, was considered a romantic alternative to the train journey.

The side effects: In 1925, around 60 percent of all deaths in cities with more than 25,000 inhabitants were due to motor vehicles.

A third of these dead were children.

Kai Spanke

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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To make it clear that the fault lay neither with the cars nor with their owners, the term “jaywalker”, which is still used today, soon made the rounds.

This is a careless pedestrian who crosses the street at an unmarked place.

The word "jay" means something like "idiot".

In the face of a relentless car lobby, organizations like the Good Roads Movement, founded in the late 1870s, couldn't do much.

What began as a movement of cyclists was soon hijacked by traffic clubs like the American Automobile Association.

From about 1903, the association's magazine, Good Roads Magazine, was less about bicycles and more about things like highway maintenance.

Pragmatics and flexibility as the most important virtues

Of all modes of transportation, the automobile has had the greatest impact on American society, but horses, trains and airplanes should not be underestimated either.

In his new book, architect Daniel Kaven illustrates how the landscape and cityscape in the American West had to adapt to the wide variety of transport options.

He mixes texts, his own works of art, maps, advertisements and photographs by photographers such as Edward Curtis or Dorothea Lange into an instructive and aesthetically stunning collage.

When he shows the Roman Pantheon right next to a supermarket in his hometown of Albuquerque, where there is only a mobile home in the parking lot ("Breaking Bad" says hello), it becomes clear what he means when he speaks of the "uniformity of the end product",

The sadness of many buildings in the United States, their theme park-like nature and always the same arrangement, all this is revealed to anyone who spends a few days driving in the west of the country.

Interstate highway, exit, parking lots, fast food restaurants, shopping mall, residential communities: You can rely on this sequence.

It is the sign of a culture that counts pragmatism and flexibility among the most important virtues - and which seems both bleak and familiar to us.

From natural landscape to inhospitable possession

For example, shopping malls, which the Austrian city planner Victor Gruen played a key role in designing, are now a matter of course in Germany too.

The self-confessed car hater had European arcades in mind as a model;

have come out since 1956, when his first mall opened in Edina, Minnesota, but air-conditioned comfort zones that Frank Lloyd Wright described as "desolate" and "charm-free."

According to Kaven, the United States has done better than any other nation in converting natural landscapes into inhospitable possessions in the shortest possible time.

There are reasons for this: in 1800, 24,000 people lived in California, in 1900 there were around 1.4 million, and in 2010 more than 37 million.

If you want to understand what such numbers mean - for example for the indigenous people, the animals, the environment - look at the illustrations.

While some of them are often printed and widely distributed, the selection presented by Kaven is consistently impressive.

Busy Sunset Boulevard, photographed by H. Armstrong Roberts in 1952, or a crowded Los Angeles parking lot, photographed by Thomas J. O'Halloran in 1965, reveal more about the country's self-image than any elaborate history lesson.

Daniel Kaven: "Architecture of Normal".

The Colonization of the American Landscape.

Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel 2022. 456 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €62.