Publication date:
April 29, 2026
This podcast was created and researched by me, Eira Tansey, founder and manager of the archival consulting company Memory Rising. The theme music was created by Bright Archives, an independent archival production house.
Episode listening links:
Resources mentioned in the episode:
The Garden in the Machine: Planning and Democracy in the Tennessee Valley Authority by Avigail Sachs
Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America by Avigail Sachs
Previous podcast episode with Micah Rutenberg
Transcript:
INTRO:
[Eira]: Welcome to No Time for Fear, the New Deal history podcast where we examine how the United States’ ambitious response to the Great Depression can provide a blueprint for improving Americans’ lives nearly a century later. Today, we’re talking with Avigail Sachs, who is a professor of architectural history and theory at the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she is also the associate dean for research. Sachs is the author of the book, The Garden in the Machine, Planning and Democracy in the Tennessee Valley Authority. She also co-authored the book, The Mechanized Landscape, Statecraft and Environment in the Tennessee Valley Authority, with previous podcast guest, Micah Ruttenberg.
In this episode, we talk about how the New Deal influenced the architecture and planning professions, the role of the public in TVA planning, and the relationship between the built environment and ideals of pastoral landscapes.
INTERVIEW:
[Eira]: Avigail, thank you so much for being with us today on the podcast. We are so excited to have you, especially I’m familiar with your work from having interviewed one of your recent co-authors and also recently read your book, The Garden in the Machine, Planning and Democracy in the Tennessee Valley Authority, which came out from the University of Virginia Press in 2023. Can you share with us how you first became interested in the New Deal?
[Avigail]: Sure. And first of all, just thank you so much for having me. Micah was telling me great things, and I’m glad to be here. So my interest really began when I was a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, and I was interested in how architecture education became modern. And the story that most people told at the time, and it’s still the story you’re most likely to come across, was that modernism began in Europe. And was brought to the United States by several architects who, as one of my advisors said, took the boat. And that here there was a struggle for modernism. In fact, that is the title of a book by Anthony Olofsson which helped me understand this narrative. But the more I looked into this narrative, the more I realized that it wasn’t quite so simple and that a lot of the European ideas were not exactly what the Americans were talking about. But at the same time, they shared both aesthetic and political ideas about what modern architecture should be. My question was, where did this come from? They answered it very clearly with the New Deal, that this was a time that radicalized them. This is a time that made them think differently about architecture. Quite a few of the people I was looking at were working for the Farm Security Administration. So in a sort of vague way, I thought, well, maybe the next project should be to go backwards in time and look at the New Deal and architects in the New Deal. But I ended up coming to Knoxville and taking a job here and discovering that the landscape of the TVA is amazing and that the archive is even better. And once I had an archive, it was really clear that this is turning into a project about architects who work for the TVA and for entering the New Deal.
[Eira]: And I will just say that the book is a joy visually as well. It is just totally loaded with amazing archival photographs that I’m sure that you ran across over years of research. So as an archivist, it was a real pleasure to look through the visual parts of that book as well.
[Avigail]: Thank you. Yes, since I was speaking to architecture students, that was part of what I was putting a lot of emphasis on.
[Eira]: Can you tell us more about the title of your book, The Garden and the Machine? Because that has, especially for people in your line of work, that I think has a very specific reference to another work that some of our listeners might not know. So if you can tell us more about the title and its significance.
[Avigail]: Gladly. So one of the most important books in the history of American landscape and American ideas of land and of how to approach it is a book that was published in 1964 by Leo Marx called The Machine in the Garden, A Technology in the Pastoral Ideal in America. And this book is so important in so many ways that we don’t have time to go through it. But for me, one of the things that was really interesting about it was the way that Marx set up the project. He began with a dichotomy between the machine, which for him was things like… Railroads and technology and organization and things like that. And the garden as a reference to the untouched, the so-called untouched continent of North America that was likened to a Garden of Eden. And so he begins with this dichotomy as if these two things are completely separate and that the machine is somehow utilitarian and everyday and the garden is somehow something wonderful. And the beauty of the book is that by the end of it, you realize that that was just a ruse and that he’s really showing you how the two things come together and how much these things were tied together.
So I was working on the project, and it had a really mundane title, something like Architects in the Great Depression or something like that. But the more I looked at the material I had, the more I realized that these architects and the landscape architects who worked with them were seen by many other people in the TVA as visionaries, as a bit utopianists, as people who had some crazy ideas. And even more importantly, that this is the way that they’d been described. So the most important work on the architecture of the TVA was a book by Walter Kreis named TVA’s Public Planning, The Vision, The Reality. And in there too, he sets it out as this was an idea that was going to just… Change the world and it got shot down by the big awful machine. And I’m not drawn to stories that are that polarized. I think it’s especially important for design students to know how complex things are and that it takes a lot of work to take an idea and make it a reality. And so that got me thinking about Leo Marx and his use of garden and machine, and then also about the fact that the garden was actually a term that connected to a lot of the things that I was interested in that these architects were thinking about, and that the machine was a very easy word to apply to something enormous, bureaucratic, wide-ranging as the TVA. And really, a machine can be many things. It can be just a vehicle, something that you board, but it can also be something that you get into, an environment in which you operate. And I think that’s what happened to these architects, is they had these ideas, but they really recognized that they need to operate in the machine for anything to actually happen. So, giving that title was a way of sort of bringing together different things that I was thinking about.
[Eira]: Yeah, that’s really cool. And I appreciate also for myself the explanation of Leo Marx’s significance since I have a human geography background and just friends with a lot of urban planners and read environmental history. And I’ve always seen references to him. So now I feel like I also have a little bit more context.
[Avigail]: I think the important thing was that he was looking at Americans on his own terms and not trying to compare them to anybody else. And now we kind of take that for granted. But at the time, it was very important.
[Eira]: Well, one of the other things that I found really interesting about your book was it put into perspective some of these larger conversations happening around architecture, landscape architecture, and planning in the 1930s. So if you could break down those larger contexts for us. I know that could probably be several college classes, but give us some of the context around that and also how TVAs work in those areas fit into those larger professional norms happening at the time.
[Avigail]: As I already mentioned, I was interested in the period in which architects were rethinking what their practice was and what their role was in society. I started with the 1950s and then moved backwards to the 1930s. Let me maybe zoom out for just a moment and say if you think about it, through most of history, architects very naturally worked for the elite. And their goal was to help the elite conserve their power and perpetuate their rule in whatever version that was. So they were involved in building temples and mosques and churches and palaces, public buildings, monuments, fortifications, all sorts of things like that. And anything that had to do with housing, especially for middle and definitely for working class people, was just not part of what architects thought about at all. And it’s really only in the 18th century with the emergence of European Enlightenment ideas, ideas about human rights, about individuality and so on, I won’t go into the whole list, that this question of whom do you design for is even challenged, is even questioned. And it’s really not until the 19th century, the middle of the 19th century, and especially the end of the 19th century, that you actually have people who begin to take this idea and put it into practice. And we know them as reformers, as progressives, and this is where the politics of it comes in because to propose changing things and to make things happen was often, in most contexts, especially capitalist context, a challenge and therefore political.
And one book that really helped me understand this history is called A History of Housing in New York City, Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis by Richard Pluntz. And he points out how much even basic things like codes against fire and for air and so on are really reform, are really a political statement about how the built environment should be. In a general way, and I’m using very broad strokes here, in the 19th and early 20th century, architects who got interested in reform work break off from architecture. They go and define themselves as planners. They define themselves as landscape architects. Almost all the early planners were trained as architects. There were no planning programs. But during the Great Depression and especially part of the New Deal, there’s a real movement, at least a very vivid discourse about what would happen if we’d also change architecture and make all these ideas part of architecture. And this is not an easy thing at all to do because the more professional you are, the less political you can be. And the more political you could be, the less professional. There’s a happy medium there that is very difficult to maintain. And that was actually my main preoccupation with the book that came out of the dissertation, which is titled Environmental Design, Architecture and Politics in Post-War America. I was trying to look at how these things played out.
So in that context, with those interests, the TVA was a unique institution. Here was a big, big, bureaucratic, very successful unit that was willing to invest both politically and professionally and hired architects and landscape architects and planners, gave them work at a time that many did not have work. I thought before beginning this project that they mostly hired young idealists, but no, they were hiring established people in the field and giving them a lot of freedom. So for someone who was interested in this question of politics and architecture and practice and so on, and moving it backwards to the 1930s, the TVA was just a fantastic example to look through it.
[Eira]: And I think that one of the things that your book does a great job of doing is talking about a lot of people might know that Benton MacKaye, is that how you say his last name?
[Avigail]: You know, I’ve heard it both ways, McKay and McKay.
[Eira]: Well, and you’re in this. Center of where, you know, a lot of the AT stuff is. So for our listeners who don’t know, he was, you might say, the godfather of the Appalachian Trail. But what a lot of people don’t realize is how visionary his original proposal was. And he worked in TVA for a very brief period of time. But it’s interesting to learn about how people like him had these really very visionary thoughts around what planning could eventually advance to, a very utopian ideal of planning, and then some of the political constraints of the CVA that didn’t allow it to totally fulfill that. And I think that also gets back to some of the very classically American tensions between centralized planning and decentralized work, which was a constant push and pull within the TVA as an agency.
[Avigail]: Absolutely. And I’m glad you mentioned Benton MacKaye because he, if you think of a sort of spectrum of people from the very professional who says, I don’t care about utopia to the utopia is all that matters. I don’t really care how you do it. He’s very much at one end of that spectrum. And that’s one of the reasons he doesn’t last in the TVA. And a lot of histories of architecture and a lot of the stories that architecture students learn are about those visionaries, those artists or those reformers who Howard Rourke is sort of a model. And I appreciate the importance of these people, but I think that if we’re training people to actually do things in the world, we need to talk more about the ones who said, okay, I might have to compromise a bit here, but I will get something. And that’s why they were the ones who interested me. The ones who stayed in the TVA and made it work for them. Those were the ones who I wanted to write about.
[Eira]: So one of the things that your book highlights is the way in which it seemed like TVA and especially the architects, the planners, the landscape architects that worked for the agency, that they, at least in its early decades, they really emphasize public participation, whether through visitor centers, recreational facilities, planned demonstration, communities, etc., etc., And so can you talk about this way in which TVA’s architects really engaged the public and made them integral to the success since this was such a new visionary agency?
[Avigail]: I think there are really two strands that come together in all of this design work. The first is the one that I was already mentioning, that these are architects, some of whom even trained in Europe, some of them trained in the United States, who are committed to reshaping architecture and using it as a tool for…
Bettering society at large and for creating opportunities for people, not just for the elites, but also they talk about farmers and working class, but their conversation is usually more geared towards the middle class or towards professionals. This was very, very important to them. In other words, not having people come and use their spaces would have meant that they hadn’t done their work properly and their job properly. And that is even more true of people who were in landscape architecture and in planning. This was basically the difference between what they were doing and traditional architecture. So this was crucial. But in the case of the TVA, it connected with another trajectory, which was very central, which was that the TVA, as you said, was constantly in tension because it was a centralized planning project. They had a lot of power over the environment, not absolute power, but a lot of power, which was unprecedented and has not happened again. So it really was a unique story in the history of the United States. And in many ways, they’re copying things that are happening in authoritarian regimes, like the Soviet Union and later fascist regimes and so on. But they’re very, very conscious that that’s not the environment in which they’re working and that they need to balance it with an understanding that there is voting in the United States and they can be voted out.
Right. And that can happen very, very easily. And in fact, all three directors, but especially David E. Lilienthal, one of the first three directors, was extremely worried about that. This was constantly on his mind. And not by chance, he was the one who took responsibility for the power production and rural electrification, and that was the part of the TVA that got the most pushback. So he knew what he was talking about. So the TVA was constantly, especially the directors and sort of the upper group of the TVA, constantly in a feeling that they have to persuade the public that they are important. And here I’m using a term that Tim Kulvahas and his colleagues used. Proposed in the book Design and Persuasion, and that anything that they could do to make the public like them and use them and see them as a force for good would bolster their opportunity to continue doing things. And the architects, especially the lead architect, the chief architect, he’s called by many names. Someone named Roland Wank, who was a Hungarian who came to practice here in the US, very quickly and very, very ably made a connection between design and between this bigger role. And really carved out a place for himself and a whole group of architects to impact parts of the project that were not intended to be architectural at all from the beginning. So the housing part was always going to be in the hands of architects. That was not a question. But to also do what I call public architecture and to make lookouts and visitor centers and so on. That was really, really special. And they’re wonderful to visit. I recommend it.
[Eira]: And my understanding is some of the visitor centers that were originally created, or maybe they were more some of the behind the scenes parts, some of those have since closed, right? Didn’t a number of them close in the 90s? Or at least like going in to see like the turbines by the hydroelectric dams.
[Avigail]: Yes. So the visitor centers were really for two things. One is to see the dams themselves and to enjoy the dams. And they were part of a whole sequence of experiences. You can go fish, you can ride bikes, you can do all sorts of other things. And then the second part was to actually enter into the powerhouses and see how the electricity is produced and see the really amazing architectural work that was done to elevate that experience. That is the part that closed. It required docents because you can’t just let people wander in. To an electricity producing facility. And in the 1990s, if I understand correctly, I’ve also heard that it only happened after 9-11. But at some point there, TVA just made the decision that this was costing more than it was worth. So they stopped that part. But the visitor centers themselves are still open now. Again, mostly not in the winter with certain qualifications, but they’re mostly there. And the outdoor parts, the lookouts and so on, for the most part are maintained. Some of them have been taken over by forests, but a lot of them are still there.
[Eira]: Yeah, that was one of the things that there was a part of your book that I love that I have a hiking background. And you talked about how some of the landscape architects really were like, there’s going to be the spot at which we want the visitors to have this very clear scenic view of the dam so they can appreciate its monumental scale or whatever kind of message we’re trying to get across. And then, of course, we all know about deferred maintenance. And so the fact that like some of these places are now grown over by shrubs. And so you kind of lose that. But that really, I think, drives home the impact of viewing these things and the sort of, you know, machine and the garden parts of it unified together and how much they deliberately thought about really driving that home for people visiting.
[Avigail]: And this goes back to Leo Marx that we were talking about before. And so the core of his book is about this pastoral ideal and this idea of how Americans would like the landscape to look, which is some kind of combination between natural but also natural. You know, with a pastor, something that has been worked through. And that by the early 20th century, this idea of a pastoral landscape has very specific aesthetics attached to it. And they are the aesthetics of a dam in a forest with a little glade and so on. And so creating opportunities to see that was tapping into American psyche in a very, very deep way that has been extremely successful. And I often take guests and friends to Norris Dam and other dams and they’re like, but it’s beautiful here. They don’t expect it because they think they’re coming to a dam. But no, it is made up, it is set up and designed to be much more than that.
[Eira]: Yeah. Well, you have written more than just this book. You’ve written other things about these New Deal projects. And so the question I want to ask you is what I ask all my guests, which is, if we are in a different political reality in which New Deal era policies were once again politically viable, which program or initiative would you most want to see revived? Or what brand new policy in the spirit of the New Deal would you propose?
[Avigail]: Well, here I’m an architect who’s written a lot about housing, so I’m going to have to choose that. One of the interesting things about the New Deal was that one way of understanding it, it was an introduction of a new idea of what is freedom. And freedom is usually described as individual choice, the freedom to own land, the freedom to amass resources, and so on. Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his government and the progressives who were part of it also saw freedom as freedom from want, freedom from worries about where the next meal is going to come from, whether you’d have a roof over your head, and so on. And a lot of the New Deal is based in that assumption, that this is the freedom that the government is supposed to provide with the thought that that will allow people to become worthy citizens in a democracy and not just cogs in a wheel as they might become in an authoritarian regime. And the important thing is that they included housing in that. And besides TVA, where I talk a lot about housing, but the 1937 Housing Act, which was the first time that anyone ever said the word public housing in American policy, is also part of this story. And so to me, as an architect who is interested in the built environment, interested in how people live in it and how they thrive in it, this idea that at least some of the housing should be under centralized public, call it what you will, control, that it cannot only be a commodity is a very, very, very fundamental one. The book I recommend in that is by Gail Radford. And let me get the exact name for you so that you have it properly. But Modern Housing in America, Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Really sort of changed my understanding of these ideas. And so this is not to say that there isn’t a lot of design that is in the realm of choice and that there shouldn’t be a lot of opportunities for people to express themselves, but that we should also have the idea of public housing, that for those who can’t do it, there is a system that helps them, to me, is just a fundamental human right. So I would love to see that conversation coming back.
[Eira]: Yes, especially for those of us who live in cities where the rent is skyrocketing and the ability to own a home feels like it’s getting out of reach. I think that’d be great.
[Avigail]: It never goes away as an issue.
[Eira]: Right. Yes, it’s need and relevance only continues to get stronger and stronger. Well, this has been a real pleasure to have you on today. And so for anyone who wants to follow your work, where’s the best way for them to follow along with what you’ve put out and what might be coming out next?
[Avigail]: As I said, I teach at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and there is a website for faculty, which I try to keep updated. So that is a good place. And, you know, when I Google, I don’t get any things that I don’t want people to know about. So I think it’s okay to just say. I do have an Instagram where I post photographs. For many years, it was pictures of the TVA, but I’m kind of done with that now. It’s on to different things.
[Eira]: Well, very good. We will put all of that in the show notes. And Avigail, thank you so much for being here with us today. It was a real pleasure to have you and talk with you about your work on the TVA.
[Avigail]: And thank you for doing this and for inviting me.
[Eira]: You bet. All right. Thank you.
OUTRO:
[Eira]: Thank you for listening to this episode and thanks to Avigail for being a guest on our show. You can find links to her work in the show notes, including a link to her book, The Garden in the Machine. Thanks to everyone for their patience with the timing of the recent episodes. I’m still dealing with some life challenges. This podcast is a passion project of mine that I would eventually like to get production assistance for to keep it on a more regular schedule. If you like what you hear and want to support the work that goes into making this podcast, please visit notimeforfear.net. I’d love for you to share this episode with a friend, leave a review and consider making a donation if you’re in a position to do so. So that I can keep making the show, including the launch of season two later this year. Thank you to Amy W. For their recent donation.
This podcast was created and researched by me, Eira Tansey, founder and manager of the archival consulting company, Memory Rising. The theme music was created by Bright Archives, an independent archival production house. I’ll see you next month when we’re back to talk more about the history of the New Deal.