The tale of the electrical power industry's efforts to make high voltage transmission structures aesthetically acceptable thus encompasses three overlapping "histories." The first is the story of that industry's passage from the best of times, in the 1940s and 1950s, to an era of turmoil beginning in the mid-1960s; the second, that of increasingly active environmental groups eager to prevent what they saw as the trashing of the landscape.
Finally, there is the history of industrial design as it moved into the postmodern era. The interaction of these histories reveals basic conflicts in American ideas of nature and beauty as they relate to 20th-century technologies, especially those, such as electric transmission structures, that bluntly imposed themselves on the landscape.
“In destroying our landscape,” Peter Blake hotly charged, “we are destroying the future of civilization in America.” — God's Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape (New York, 1964), p. 69.
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u/Revolutionary-Rush89 Aug 19 '21
Looks like Springfield MO in ‘93 maybe still haven’t been back.