Introduction

There is a drawing by Saul Steinberg called A View of the World from 9th Avenue. It is known fondly as ‘the world according to New Yorkers’. It was one of the New Yorker’s most famous covers, entered popular culture as a poster and has had many imitators. Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas was subversive not only because it provoked serious thought about a cars cape urbanism that had hitherto been regarded as utterly without value, but because it suggested that if space could be organized by information – by names – then it might not necessarily be organized by depth of field and by the spatial figures that thrive in depth of field. Objects do not really get small when they are far away, they just look like they do. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that Freud discovered the unconscious for psychoanalysis in the Vienna consulting room of his private practice.