What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national
identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.
For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing
the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in
which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of
deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they
simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming
Landscapes, Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving
reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that
consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the
environment in the twentieth century.
Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the
history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major
automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway
in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When
the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of
designers--landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners--sought
to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in
the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and
Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less
interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty.
Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of
landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to
twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth
century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of
the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of
infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes
indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting
the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply
altering it at the same time?
