building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

limit/prevent its growth. In fact, the pre‐established size was thought to be the
most suitable and therefore could not be improved.
On the basis of these general instructions they built the towns of the Far West,
Missouri and of Nauvoo (to be beautiful in Hebrew), Illinois (1839‐1840). After
Smith was killed, the Mormons continued their march west. In 1847 they were in
Nebraska, where they and their new leader, Brigham Young, founded the so‐called
Winter Quarters [Figure 62]. The following year they arrived instead in the Great
Salt Lake Valley of Utah, establishing the first of dozens of communities in the
desert: Salt Lake City [Figure 63]. However, the Mormons were not the only ones to
be fascinated by the desert. Throughout American history, the desert represented a
particular form of wilderness, a territory in which nature is transformed into a zero
degree landscape. The margins of the American Great Basin Desert were for many
the ultimate utopian possibility: great spaces that disappear over the horizon,
immersed in the warm, trembling light, continue to hold great fascination over
those who traverse them with a knowledge and understanding of their history.
In Scenes in America Deserta (1982), Reyner Banham regrets the indifference of the
average American towards the desert and reminds the reader of the importance it
has had over the years:
“Deserts are not a matter of indifference in the history of the U.S. Their
location athwart the institutionalized urge to
meant that it became their Manifest Destiny to be crossed. From North,
East, and South, the barrier of the Great Basin Desert was probed and
tested, explores and surveyed, from almost as soon as the Anglo Saxons
became aware that such a barrier existed. So, it was crossed –by
trappers and Mormons, the U.S. Army, the transcontinental railroad
surveyor, by wagon trains and the U.S. mails, by the Atchison Topeka
and Santa Fe, by the Union Pacific, by the old National Trails Highway,
and Route 66; and ultimately by Interstates. The ability of the railroads
and great highways like 66 to generate romantic memory and nostalgic
glamor suggest that these thin lines of transportation drawn across the
waste places represent something more in American imaginations that
merely ” 136 .
136 BANHAM , Reyner, Scenes in America Deserta, Salt Lake City, Gibbs M. Smith inc., 1982, pp. 91‐92
(Italian translation by Raffaella Fagetti, Deserti americani, introduzione di Marco Biraghi, Torino,
Einaudi, 2006, cit. pp. 83‐84)
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