It Be Your Own Kind
It turns out, it was our own architects that may have designed this ideology into our heads. In Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, the post modernist architect declares that America does not require piazzas, since they should be at home watching television instead. It is crazy to me that even designers were so infatuated by this new lifestyle. This lifestyle led to the individualist life we live today. If only the urban life was emphasized instead of the suburbs. Human migration such as this has incredible impacts on the design of our world, which in turn affects how society thinks.
I think rather than it being just plainly at the hands of the American architects' mentalities, what potentially inspired this mentality largely has to do with the amount of land that we have in America. In Europe, they are limited by space, so they design upwards as a collective public. In America however, we still have 4.6 million square kilometers that are undeveloped. That's almost 50% of the country without a single person living in it, so we have the space to spread out and have some sort of individualized mentality.
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