Transcript No Slide Title

Recapitulation
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utopia
dystopia
planning for progress
progress as relative and relational
the garden city
the contemporary city
the broadacre city
The Garden
City
Movement
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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-andcountry
magnet
1000 acre centrally located city
grand central park and civic core
5000 acres of permanent agriculture
and parkland
new towns connected by rail
The garden city
Letchworth and WelwynGarden Cities Built
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
Sant’Elia, 1914, La Citta
Nuova
• Bauhaus School, Walter
Gropius, Weimar, 1919,
the avante garde
• 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
The contemporary city
The contemporary city
• Le Corbusier’s 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)
The contemporary city
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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).
The contemporary city
• L’Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, 1950s
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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
Demolition of the
Pruitt-Igoe Project, St Louis
• 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
The broadacre city
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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
The broadacre city
• “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).
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
Radburn
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
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Howard’s garden city
Le Corbusier’s contemporary city
Wright’s broadacre city
Radburn