How Frank Lloyd Wright Tried to Solve the City
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
What amazed me after reading some of his books are the physical effects of today's cities on humans (and animals).
Some examples:
Living higher than 4 stores: there is evidence that this will disconnect you from the life happening on ground level.
Streets made for cars: cars are more important than humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Burley_Griffin
These turn of the century architects lived at the birth of the affordable motor vehicle. To them the motor car was no doubt a symbol of the future and of marvelous connection with the world around them not unlike how I feel about the way I have seen the internet grow in my lifetime.
Canberra today - whilst still a beautiful city is too big for itself even with only a 0.5mil populous. The city is now too large in area and choked with congestion relying on buses as the only form of public transport. There is no longer anyway the city could feasibly afford to install any supplementary public transport like light rail.
The idea of a a dispersed city is idealistic, but a dense city is functional.
Compare that to a city like Groningen:
I really don't see how horses would be better than bikes though.
I cant see a problem in riding across New York - I have done cross central London a few times.
You can get kids bike seats and trailers I see a tandem with a kids trailer do a commute from my village to the local town (3 miles quite often)
I have to admit I often thumbed my nose at 'those Americans and theird cars', but only until I spent some time in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Once there, I realized that it's pretty much impossible to do anything without a care! It shocked me.
At least they build the roads to accommodate down there. 4 lanes each side for regular avenues, and the travel density justifies them. Up in the northeast some major interstates and roads like i78 and route 22 are two lanes with the traffic of a 3 lane each side highway.
Whenever I move next, though, I'm moving where I can take public transport commutes to any office I work at (if any at all, I'd prefer remote, maybe one in office day a week). The monetary investment and insane risks with cars is just way too much to justify.
Biking to work is fine, I just wish people quit implying its an alternative to cars or mass transportation when its very weather dependent. Got a change of clothes at work? Not where I work you don't, top it off where I am going to put the bike though I did have a nice folding BMW one awhile back.
That said, Americans in particular are used to being in a "comfortable" environment all the time. It's a cultural thing, and those take forever to change, but there's nothing inherent in the calculus of weather and biking (with a few obvious exceptions).
Differently, check out Vishaan Chakrabarti's A Country of Cities, which disagrees with Krier (and thus agrees with Wright) on the skyscraper: http://www.amazon.com/Country-Cities-Manifesto-Urban-America... It suffers, IIRC, from not enough citations but is otherwise pretty strong on its argument.
I tend to lean towards agreeing with Chakrabarti and Wright more on the vertical space issue, largely because Krier never quite managed to form a coherent argument against density except that it was being done badly. Krier, on the other hand, highlights the idea of the poly-centric city which is at least a reality in Seattle (where I live).
Is anyone familiar with his highway plan? My impression of city planning is that roads are the hard, boring part, so I'm curious if Wright's roads were just a thing he drew between his beautifully arranged buildings and parks, or if he had an actual plan for how to move people efficiently around his cities.
Saying "everyone should live close to their workplace" only works if you have a single, mega-office/industrial park, with all of the housing arranged tightly around it. Once you have two places people can work, changing jobs requires people to change houses, and only people who work together can live together. So in practice you need to have a transportation system that allows everyone in the city to commute between work and home in a short amount of time during a small window of time in the morning and afternoon.
Sitting in traffic in a beautifully designed city does not sound particularly more fun than sitting in traffic in a poorly designed city.
So, yeah, this strikes me as being a utopian vision by a talented architect dabbling in something outside his expertise.
You're assuming zoning.
Check this out: office. And then put a house on top.
More reasonably, do what I ended up having to do in SimCity: zone a couple spaces as commercial, then zone another couple spaces as residential, and then zone another couple spaces as commercial, and keep flipping back and forth.
I work at Industrial Widgets, it's in an intermingled commercial/residential building, there's an apartment free on the three floors up from the very office.
My wife currently works at Consolidated Sprockets across town. There's an apartment across the street. However, it's just an internship at she hopes to get a job at Conglomerated Weevils in a few months. It's located in a third location.
Where should we live?
http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/fallingwater/
(Kentucky Knob is also really interesting, and so close that it's certainly worth visiting both if you're in the area.)
Interestingly, at construction it had severe structural and environmental deficiencies. For example, mildew was a huge problem for many years, and the perfect cantilevers were not strong enough and sagged until they were repaired in the early 2000s.
Her approach was almost the direct opposite of Wrights (and of many urban reformers). Her focus was the street and interactions between residents, shopkeepers, and other inhabitants of the city. Her realization (mirrored well by Garrison Keillor in a biographical documentary I caught a year or so back) was that cities are collections of neighborhoods or villages. rglover her contrasts his impression of Chicago with the small towns of Ohio in which he grew up. My experience with large cities is that frequently their downtowns are impersonal (though even there I've found my niches), but it's in the neighborhood that their character really shows. Sometimes it's a character you don't much care for, but often there's a sense of place and community, even in dynamic and rapidly changing cities, which can persist for years, decades, or even generations. It does take time to appreciate and find, though.
Back to Jacobs: finding her The Life and Death of Great American Cities was a watershed for me (and I can still remember the marginalia in my uni's copy at one of her common-sense observations: "God bless you, Jane"). Cities and the Wealth of Nations and The Economy of Cities changed many of my perceptions of what economics was about and where its real centers lay (it's rarely nations or states, cities and metropolitan areas, yes).
Wright's interesting. But he's no authority on cities or urban planning.
No thanks.
In order to both live and function in the city, I had to rewire my brain. I recall the first few months in the city being absolutely terrifying. Not because of any one thing in particular, but your sense of self starts to evaporate. You start to see the boundaries between you and the universe. You feel small.
Occasionally, my girlfriend and I travel back to her home town. An honest to goodness town, too. It's classified as a "village." When I'm there, I often take walks around the entirety of the town. The change of pace is incredible. Even compared to where I grew up, there's a sense of serenity, not just in the immediate experience, but in the people.
The behavior you see there is a total 180 from what you experience in the city – a cold, dismissive brood that makes you feel entirely too insignificant.
When I moved to Chicago I made it a point to visit FLW's home and studio in Oak Park (about 20-30 minutes outside of the city). Though the area he built in has changed dramatically (based on the descriptions told as a part of the tour), there was something really serene about it all. His home was directly adjacent to his studio. Seeing this, the whole time I thought "yeah, I could dig this."
This article makes his vision sound akin to the modern day suburb, which, while there are similarities, doesn't feel like an accurate interpretation. If you get the chance to experience some of his more rural-based work, I would check it out. There's a certain flow to the buildings he designed that elicits a feeling of peace. I can imagine his plans outlined in this article were to accomplish that on a much bigger scale.
I live in Buffalo, New York which to me is a "just right" sized city. I can walk around the urban core as one might walk around a village. It's busy enough to feel lively on a business day, and relatively quiet in the evening.
Having grown up in the suburbs, I only now realize how isolating boulevards and strip malls can be. I like walking and biking. I see my neighbors more. I get more exercise. I create less pollution. I feel more connected and more alive.
I'm not shy to the charm and serenity of country living. The stars alone can entertain me for hours at night. It can be so enriching to have some space, some quiet, some separation, some peace. Some time to think and to work.
Wright's family-per-acre spread seems neither urban, nor rural; technically, 'sub urban' - but not our current suburbia. Still, it seems to lose sight of the value of density. The highways he proposes would mean cars, noise, pollution, and isolation.
Buffalo has a trove of FLW treasures: his boathouse, gas station, mausoleum, Martin house, Graycliff. There is definitely something to them, a sense of space and elegance.
Having warmed to Buffalo's urbanism, the appeal of FLW's 'city' vision is lost on me. But his freestanding works are unique and worth experiencing.
I agree on the isolation of boulevards and strip malls. I prefer areas where there's a microcity/downtown area, but a lot of grassy residential space close by. The modern mega suburbs (with Best Buy's, Wal-Marts, and every fast food imaginable) are terrible.
Certainly depends on the person. Which, whether FLW's desire or not, is why forcing an option on everyone and assuming it's the best for each person is a pretty weak way of doing things.
That's actually my favorite part of humanity: there are a lot of different ways of life/attitudes. Just a matter of finding the one you sync up with best.
I saw it last week, and it's really great. They have the scale model he built there along with a lot of his drawings. A lot of fascinating ideas in there. I just wish I could locate some of his writings on the subject without dropping $200-$300 on an out of print copy of a portion of his autobiography or papers. :(
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead#Howard_Roark
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1701976/ http://urbanizedfilm.com/
If you asked me to name a few architects I would probably have come up with Wren, Mackintosh, Gaudi and Norman Foster. I'm sure that there are a few others that I would go "ohh yeah" to.
Architecture isn't really my thing on the liberal arts side of things, I'm more an Economics and Politics man.
Simpsons did it.
On a more serious note -
> people involved in technology-related careers (ie my would-be future peers) have narrow perspectives on the world due to their reduced levels of interest in a wider liberal arts education
Not any more or less than any other field. It's funny, people are individuals, they often act individually.
I also don't know what you mean when you say that people with technical knowledge (which I have some of) are "more rational about their opinions and conclusions" - I sincerely believe that taking a literary theory class and learning about often-vilified (perhaps not here) ideas such as postmodernism and deconstruction improved my decision-making ability by allowing me to better understand both sides of an issue.