BOOKS OF INTEREST

TWO CENTURIES OF OUTSIZED PLANS AND EXTREME INFRASTRUCTURE. THE GARDEN IN THE MACHINE: PLANNING AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY BY AVIGAIL SACHS; CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS, 2023; 300 PAGES, $34.50. Established in 1933 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) oversaw the transformation of huge swaths of the American landscape. The architects, planners, engineers, and landscape architects hired by the TVA imagined a power utopia overlaid across rivers, valleys, and forests. Avigail Sachs, a historian and educator in the theory of architecture and landscape, documents the story of an impoverished region undergoing change. Her clear-eyed prose, accompanied by archival drawings and photographs, gives equal weight to the biographies of TVA staff and the projects (housing, visitor centers, dams) they constructed. HYDROELECTRIC SUBLIME EDITED BY…