This dissertation traces the emergence and development of the environmental-managerial project by which federal bureaucracy in the United States sought to administer the visual environment after about 1970. Although this effort relied on interdisciplinary practices and techniques, architects became principal actors in these workings of the administrative state: architects, initially, offered the projective visualization procedures through which state officials sought to account for environmental ‘degradation,’ but eventually, and perhaps more crucially, these practitioners laid out theoretical frameworks for the concept of the aesthetic which afforded a legally specified lens for assessing the value of particular environments. On one hand, the governmental strategies that transformed nuclear reactors, highways, strip mines, and other forms of environmental disturbance into phenomena that existed primarily on an optical register clearly belonged to a broader governmental strategy of pacification. On the other hand, turning to vocabularies and concepts traditionally rooted in the ineffable, subjective traditions of aesthetics and taste undermined the drive toward data management and quantified systems of accountability that otherwise characterized the operations of the administrative state. That the effort to reconcile these contradictions required recourse to a distinct array of art-historical, psychological, economic, and statistical procedures, often at odds with one another, reveals conceptual, procedural, and practical conflicts at the base of the managerial approach to the environment in the U.S., as well as the lasting infiltration of these systems into the self-redefinition of architecture as primarily a profession of image managers. Through examination of a wide range of archival sources, this dissertation attends closely to the mechanics of this historical development—the incremental processes of visualizing, psychologizing, quantifying, and projecting that constituted the chain of techniques by which the aesthetic came to be submitted to regimes of governance in the U.S., as well as their effects, intended and otherwise— which together operated to fabricate consensus around the increasingly unmanageable problem of the environment. It is this process of fabrication, the process by which the management of beauty came to constitute a powerful technique useful to “democracy,” that this dissertation traces.
