Recapitulation

1
Recapitulation

• utopia
• dystopia
• planning for progress
• progress as relative and relational
• the garden city
• the contemporary city
• the broadacre city

2
The Garden City Movement

• Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928)
• Tomorrow - a Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898)
  Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902)
• Push-pull factors in urban development
• town magnet
• country magnet
• town-and-country magnet

3
1000 acre centrally located citygrand central
park and civic core5000 acres of permanent
agriculture and parklandnew towns connected by
rail

• The garden city

4
Letchworth and Welwyn-Garden Cities Built
5
The contemporary city

• Roots in the works of
• Tony Garnier, French architect, 1917 treatise on
  cité industrielle formal classicism and
  functionality of the machine age
• Futurists - Filippo Marinetti and Antonio
  SantElia, 1914, La Citta Nuova
• Bauhaus School, Walter Gropius, Weimar, 1919, the
  avante garde

6
The contemporary city

• Charles-Edouard Jeanneret - Le Corbusier
• (1887-1969)
• Modernist of the International Style
• The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (1929)
• 3 million inhabitants
• several hundred acres of Paris to be demolished

7
The contemporary city

• Le Corbusiers basic formula both architecture
  and cities should be machines for living
• key to reduce the congestion of city centres by
  increasing their density by building up - high
  density, high-rise city cores leaving land for
  green space and private transport
• class segregation elite to have spacious and
  best appointed tower blocks workers to have
  small garden apartments in satellite units some
  distance from the centre (Brasilia)

8
The contemporary city

• Plan Voisin
• eighteen 700-foot towers to be built on the
  historic north side of the River Seine
• uniform cells/apartments, standardized furniture
• La Ville Radieuse (1933) - giant collective
  apartment blocks
• The heroic scale of his ideas and his sheer
  irrepressibility drew admiration from architects
  and urban designers who wanted leadership and
  recognition, while his willingness to confront
  the automobile era drew admiration from
  technocrats. From this admiration grew a
  conventional wisdom that was centred on the need
  to modernize cities through ruthless
  redevelopment, tearing out their centres and
  replacing them with high-rise housing linked by
  intrusive freeways (Knox 1995, 158).

9
The contemporary city

• LUnité dHabitation, Marseilles, 1950s
• integrated community services
• daycare facilities
• shops
• poured concrete sections and panels, textured and
  sculpted with recessed windows and balconies
• inexpensive and amenable to prefabrication the
  grid

10
Demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe Project, St Louis
11
The broadacre city

• Frank Lloyd Wright
• individualism, naturalism
• response to automobility (Mumford noted that
  automobiles were antithetical to the very idea of
  the city)
• premised on assumption of three inalienable
  rights
• social right to direct medium of exchange -
  social credit
• social right to place on the ground to be held
  only by use and improvement
• social right to the ideas by which and for which
  we live public ownership of invention and science

12
The broadacre city

• planned metropolitan decentralization using the
  vehicle to enhance opportunities for individual
  lifestyles and closeness to nature
• decreased densities and more land per occupant
• differentiated and individualized homes
• based on use of high-pressure concrete, plywood
  and plastic for housing, surrounded by networks
  of landscaped parkways and freeways
• these semi-rural neighbourhoods were to be
  serviced by massive public service stations
  providing a range of low-order goods and services

13

• Here now may be seen the elemental units of our
  social structure the correlated farm, the
  factory-its smoke and gases eliminated by burning
  coal at places of origin, the decentralized
  school, the various conditions of residence, the
  home offices, safe traffic, simplified
  government. All common interests take place in a
  simple coordination wherein all are employed
  little farms, little homes for industry, little
  factories, little schools, a little university
  going to the people mostly by way of their
  interest in the ground, little laboratories ...
  (Wright 1935, in The City Reader).

14
Radburn

• Clarence Stein and Henry Wright
• 15 miles from Manhattan in Fair Lawn, New Jersey,
  1928
• based on Sunnyside superblock (Sunnyside, Queens,
  1924-28)
• traffic channeled through road hierarchies,
  residential areas virtually traffic free, cycle
  and pedestrian paths
• housing clustered around irregular shaped open
  spaces

15
Radburn
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Summary

• Utopia - progress - planning
• Relative and relational project that is context
  dependent (viz. space, place, time and culture or
  society)
• Utopian pursuits in city (residential)
  development
• Howards garden city
• Le Corbusiers contemporary city
• Wrights broadacre city
• Radburn