Big Frank, Unwitting Champion of Suburban Hell

The Rectangular Survey 1785. A monumental retasking of territory in service of captial, despite the locals.

Conceived in model in 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City was the embodiment of his urban philosophy and is an important precedent in the history of suburbia. However Wright’s plan is somewhat anomalous within this historical course. Despite his apoplectic ravings about the hellish conditions of the American metropolis, Broadacre anachronistically continues the lineage of American urban gridirons from the 19^th Century. It also manages to predicting that banal white collar vision of hell: suburbia. This ambiguity means the Broadacre Grid is more a vehicle to transmit Wright’s polemical views on urbanism than a concrete solution. It reads better as a visual manifesto that espouses low rise individualist buildings, connected to commercial social and industrial centres by a (then futuristic) arterial road network.

Part of a larger drawing set exploring Broadacre. Shows roadways and non domesetic footprints.

The plan represented a typical Midwestern landscape superimposed with a grid of eighty by fifty metre modules. These acre plots are mainly populated by single family dwellings, intended as Usonian Houses, with the remainder forming a smallholding. This agrarian pattern checkerboards the majority of the plan. Precedents for this organisation of territory stretch back to the late 18^th Century, however what is radical about Wright’s proposal is the procurement and allocation of land. Broadacre was tied to Federal lands owned by the government. According to the plan, these regions would be subdivided into the acre plots and redistributed to the populace on a scale only matched by the contemporary Soviet Union.

 The housing is suspended between two highways that run North South. The primary interstate is buffered by industrial programme and is punctuated with amenities for road travellers, like hotels and petrol stations. The second narrower highway to the East defines the location for social and cultural features. They are connected by secondary East West roadways at 1 mile intervals to feed the residential interior. To provide the vehicle access necessitated by the plan, the grid disintegrates without the highway network into branching stems of farm roads and clusters of housing.

 At no point does Wright form conventional streets, nor urban blocks within the plan. Borrowing a cup of sugar from the neighbours would more likely play out like a stage in the Oregon Trail. If in indeed you could call those distant specks neighbours. Wright's utopia is completely antithetical to the collectivist fantasies of the Europeans. Broadacre city is a field of infrastructure, into which objects can be dropped relatively autonomously, forming islands of programme within the sea of houses, fields and roads. The concentration of amenities in the plan is deceptive. When stretched over its intended area Broadacre City becomes far sparser and more homogeneous.  People would be almost entirely reliant on their car for transportation. Proposed as a utopian alternative, Broadacre city actually came to epitomise normative suburban character. 

North Cucamonga, San Bernadino County, CA. So much for the small holdings, but the principle here is the same.
(BingMaps Copyright Microsoft)

THE GRID: Earliest Common Ancestor

Part two of  THE GRID essay about establishing the origins of the American urban grid.

Earliest Common Ancestor

The first question posed by an investigation of history is always where to begin. Our immediate situation sits largely at odds with the previous century. There is evidence to suggest that the 20th Century is distinctly anomalous. It was defined by a dichotomous, almost paradoxical, relationship between conflict and expansion; our capacity to stand on the Moon and commit genocide were realised within the same epoch. This era is now history, its latter decades shift back towards a trajectory suggested by human history in general and our current society bears greater resemblance to the imperial laissez faire democracies of the late 18th and 19th Centuries, than the collectivist social democracies of the 20th(Di Battista 2015). The following discussion will establish the suburban genesis to examine the reasoning of the proposed masterplan. 

 

Although to contemporary eyes the gridiron is emblematic of an American city, the grid’s origins lie across the Atlantic. In 1767 Craig’s plan for the New Town of Edinburgh proposed the draping of a grid over the ridge adjacent to the existing settlement. The Old Town was a dense herringbone of buildings that connected two monumental edifices, the castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. By comparison the New Town was designed as an Arcadian vision of affluence and elegance, held within the rigorous matrix of gridded streets. It was created as a response to the concern that Edinburgh would haemorrhage its wealthy citizens to London (Ballon 2012). The grid here is a device to apply the Enlightenment dogma of hierarchy axis and unity onto a tabula rasa (Glandinning & MacKechnie 2004). 

Its use, in juxtaposition to the Old Town, not only espoused modernity but further entrenched the social division between the gentry and the mob. The grid here enforces plutocracy of the old order using the thinking of the new.

Craig's Plan for Colonial Edinburgh

Aerial Image of Colonial Lima

However, it would be naive to consider this divisive authoritarianism a new phenomenon. It is also here that the first strand of the American Grid emerges. During the Spaniards’ conquest of South and Central America in the 16th and 17th Centuries, they developed a systematic way of occupying newly conquered lands called the Law of the Indies. This planning code began as an informal, doubtless intuitive, framework that crystallised into an exhaustive blueprint governing every aspect of city planning. By choosing existing settlements the grid could be used to obliterate the defeated regime’s street patterns. The message to the local populace was clear. This land belongs to Spain now (Altman, Cline & Pescador 2003). The grid could further enhance the supremacy of the colonists because it predisposes rapid and efficient expansion, a necessity when establishing footholds in distant lands. The use of a gridiron provided the conquistadors with a pragmatic language that defined the colonial order and became a clear signifier of European dominance of an area. 

Typical Roman fort layout. The original pop-up.

Instantly recognisable amongst the fragments of indigenous settlements, the colonial grid evokes the archetypal Roman outpost. A military fort defined by a grid could be deployed and defended anywhere the legions went and became instantly recognisable as a clear symbol of Imperial occupation in that region (Ballon 2012). 

It is critical to remember these precedents as the discussion about the American grid unfolds. Its genealogy is one of division and imperialism. The grid historically is an oppressor. 

THE GRID: A Serial Exploration

This first post is actually part of an essay I wrote for my Masters. I decided to use it primarily to break that inertia of having to compose some text from scratch and because it forms a major thread of interest that has preoccupied me since first learning and researching the urban realm, namely the relationship between the city, politics and economics. 

I will preface each section of the essay 'THE GRID' and aim to submit a section every week. This first post is a bumper issue that'll introduce the project followed immediately by the first section of the essay. 

PREFACE

I had been cycling for over an hour. It was late afternoon and the sun was more an irritant than a joy. The hum of rubber on the uniform asphalt was beginning to grate on my nerves and yet I was still no closer to answering, where was I? 

Hoggan Crescent apparently, but really I could have been anywhere in Dunfermline, or indeed anywhere in the country. The sense of déjà vu was palpable as I whirred past monotonous rows of two-storey detached and semi-detached boxes. 

Each window carefully provided a consistent level of dinginess and banality. Each street regurgitated the endless variations on road, pavement, grass, doorstep. Identity was only perceived in the type of detritus in the front garden and whether the render was white or beige. 

Nothing determined how deep I was into this labyrinth or suggested an escape. My stupor was interrupted by a familiar appendix of green. This vestigial strip of grass had been labelled Rex Park and offered to the settlement as recompense for the ubiquitous sea of tarmac and crazy paving. Wonderful, except this is where I had started.

My venture into the Dunfermline’s suburban tumour had been defined by boredom and frustration. This was DEX, a vast dormitory where Edinburgh’s commuters could switch off after work. Childhood memories of Leeds floated back with the setting sun. Except my suburb had nicer trees, but really that is where the distinction ends. 

INTRODUCTION

This is an investigation into the reasons behind architectural problems created by the conditions of suburbia. Any new suburban settlement must respond to the issues of homogeneity and identity that create the environment described in the preface. A response must start by understanding the motives behind these issues; it must question the priorities at work and the agency that created recent suburban conditions. 

In the 21st Century connectivity is pervasive. We are becoming increasingly interdependent to manage the growing complexities of our civilisation. This dissolves the boundaries demarcating various human activities and requires us to be evermore intellectually, professionally and culturally omnivorous (Di Battista 2015). We must understand and formulate responses to contemporary problems relative to all the forces that condition them. This text is predicated on the argument that contemporary architectural problems cannot be viewed in isolation. The remit must expand and architecture here is treated as a type of logic, to apply to traditionally extraneous topics. This cognitive language can translate that vast repository of cultural information, the city, into terms specifically relevant to creating a successful architectural response to the situation.

The thesis centres on the creation of a masterplan. A forensic text, it explores the historical relationship between planning and economics to explain their contemporary relationship, using the urban plan to frame discussion in architectural terms. Comparisons between drawn and built forms allow for analysis pertinent to the task of designing this masterplan. The focus of these readings is how the urban device of the grid is used architecturally to manifest a social, political or economic agenda at salient points in history.

Set off! A single will inspires us both...I entered that dark and wooded road

This blog is the resurrection of a previous one, started with enthusiasm and abandoned as university deadlines precluded any form of activity beyond working, stressing about the lack of work or dry sobbing over a pile of balsa and cardboard. Now graduated and with my usual audience no longer trapped in a studio with me and little to occupy my time, it felt appropriate to begin anew.

I am forever awash with thoughts and ideas about anything and everything, especially when it comes to how everything and anything relate to architecture and/or the city. So rather than continually berating my friends, they suggested I found a place where howling into the void about whatever happens to be on my mind is encouraged. Unable to afford a psychiatrist I chose the internet and so begins my foray into blogging. 

“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere"

Sherlock Holmes, Sign of the Four

The broad theme is architecture and the city. However as you will discover, my definition of architecture, much to the pained chagrin of my tutors and peers, its monumentally elastic. Suffice to say that discussions about buildings will form a part but not a majority of things discussed here. Ultimately this blog is best viewed as a landfill of ideas, thoughts, dreams, polemics and rants that might otherwise be contributing to my early demise if not properly vented somewhere. Apparently they can be quite interesting. I will leave it you over the coming months to decide.

I'd like to think that this blog will be a sober and intelligent probing of my discipline. But probably not.

*Title is taken from Dante's Divine Comedy, the end of Canto II of Inferno. This pretty much sets the tone I am afraid. If you aren't a fan of references and increasingly lateral thinking on the discipline of architecture "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."