Broadacre City, Form and Space Diversity and Small Locally Owned Businesses
Bernard Pyron
Broadacre City, Form and Space Diversity and Small Locally Owned Businesses
Bernard Pyron
One harmful effect of the takeover of American commerce by the huge corporations and the driving of most small locally owned stores out of business is the reduction of public life in the United States. Now, if you drive through miles and miles of city and suburban environments there are no places where you can stop and interact with other people. In the cities, towns and suburban areas of the country you don't even see many people walking around outside their homes. They are either inside their homes or out in cars driving around.
American life is to a great extent confined to being inside homes or offices and inside cars driving around.
By the fifties the major institutions of American society, especially government, corporations, education, the medical profession and institutional Christianity had developed into more of a top-down order of control.
Because tremendous control over society could be exerted from the top of large corporations and from the top of the government, this hierarchy made it possible for a very small group of the ruling elite to have the power they now have. The ruling elite is not totally secret or behind the scenes; we know who some of them are. Now state, county and city governments follow the federal government. But this conformity was not the intent of the Founding Fathers. The corporate hierarchy has also driven a great many local small businesses out of business. For example, thirty, forty or fifty years ago, small grocery stores were scattered all over , but now we have to drive miles to Krogers, or Wal-Mart (Red China Central). There was more public social life in the small grocery stores of a bygone era than now in big chain stores like Wal-Mart.
Now, add to this diminishing of opportunities and places to interact with other people, the lookalike nature of our architectural forms and our spaces in the man built landscape - which is a low order of form and space diversity to live in. And in addition put all this together with the fact that most of us live in urban environments with a lot of pavement and not too much nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright made war upon the box as architecture, and on the simplicity of space structuring of the International Style for sixty years or more. Wright broke out of the box in steps. Over a period of years he developed ways of making interior space in his big Prairie houses flow in and around jogs in walls, into other spaces,and he varied the ceiling heights to structure space vertically. With its horizontal lines and hip roof, the Malcolm Wiley house (1934) of Minneapolis reminds us of the horizontal look of the Prairie houses.
In his rectilinear 90 degree angle designs, Wright broke up the monotony of the four walls and ceiling which create the space of a room as a box. He jogged walls to avoid the monotony of long straight lines, created partial partitions within spaces, and created partial ceilings so that he broke out of box space in the vertical dimension. His lighting decks, many times decorated with greenery and Sung dynasty vases or contemporary pottery, broke space in the vertical and allowed it to flow above the deck. A whole wall was sometimes replaced by tall french-window doors. He put rows of windows up under the ceilings and eaves to replace the single windows that broke the continuity of a wall. "Rooms" were opened to the next "room" by elimination of doors. Wright made space flow in and out and up and down. He created interior space that was ever changing as one moved through it. The sculptured external form of his buildings are expressions of his interior space.
The box room is created by four 90 degree angles. So, to brake out of the box even more, Wright developed his diamond module system of design so that the 90 degree angle corners become 120 angle corners. The hexagon is a six sided geometrical form with each side having 120 degree internal angles. And a octagon is an eight sided form with 135 degree internal angles. Wright experimented with the hexagon system of design and briefly with something like the octagon, before finally developing his diamond module floor plan, where all angles are 120 and 60 degrees. This diamond module floor plan system was used by Wright to create more complex space structuring inside the houses, and more varied and diverse house exterior forms.
Wright did one project for a small suburban "town," for which he designed the streets, homes and some larger buildings. He first presented this plan in his book The Disappearing City in 1932 and by 1935 he and his apprentices built a very detailed twelve by twelve foot scale model of Broadacre City. But this project was never built.
See: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/
See: http://gothamist.com/2014/01/
Also: http://www.mediaarchitecture.
Also: http://paleofuture.gizmodo.
In the study I did with three research assistants in the spring and summer of 1970 I focused on the city block level of design.
See: Form and Space Diversity in Human Habitats: Perceptual Responses, Pyron, Bernard, Environment and Behavior, 3, 4, 382-411, Dec 71
And:
http://news.google.com/
The Milwaukee Sentinel - Oct 17, 1970
All the city blocks we created as scale models were rectangles with eight houses on each block. The Control Condition was a design in which all eight houses were simple box shapes and spaced equally apart on the block. Half of the designs featured these simple box houses, and another half of the designs had more complex floor plans and exterior house forms, like "L," "T," "cross," etc plans. One space condition was the Non-Grouping plan, but with houses spaced apart at different distances. There was a Grouping Non-Court condition, and Simple Court and Complex Court conditions. Four houses were grouped together with an interior space to form two courts for the Simple Court Condition and for the Complex Court condition all eight houses were grouped together to form larger and more complex outdoor spaces inside the court designs.
And independent of the Grouping, Non-Grouping, Simple Court and Complex Court conditions, there were the complex house floor plans for half the conditions and the simple box plans for the other half. This experimental design formed a 3 x 4 matrix. A repeated measures analysis of variance statistical test was done using this 3 x 4 experimental design. All participants saw the control condition and one of the experimental conditions of the form and space designs.
The hypothesis was that the participants would look around more at the more complex environments than at the more simple ones was confirmed by the data. And form and space information, or amount of complexity were additive as expected, for determining how much the participants looked around at the environments shown them by the 16mm black and white films.
The more the amount of information in the environment looked at, the more the people looked around to see the environment.
We found that the people in our study looked around more at the movies of more diverse forms and spaces and looked around less at less diverse spaces and forms. Amount of coverage of the visual field by the eye is a measure of the orienting response, and the orienting response is often a part of having an interest in what is seen. On questionnaires the people also said they liked the more diverse form and space environments more than the less diverse - though the preference was greater for form than for space diversity. They liked diverse house forms more than simple forms.
I got some of the ideas for this study of the urban environment at the city block scale from the old man who had lived forty miles to the west of Madison, Wisconsin on the Wisconsin River, Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright did one suburban "town" design he called Broadacre City of 1935, which was a suburban landscape with trees and a few buildings larger than homes, with fantastic looking cars on the streets. But instead of the small city lot of 60 by 120 feet in Wright's design every family would have an acre of land.
In the Arboretum of Madison, Wisconsin there is a small unusual subdivision embedded in the thick forest, with some architect designed houses, sometimes called the "Lost City." It is not laid out in a rectilinear street pattern and is unusual because very little of the forest was cut down. The real Lost City is south of this subdivision, where only streets and utility structures were abandoned years ago and the forest grew over them. In the other "Lost City," which actually exists, only very small areas of the forest were cut down to put the houses on. The result is that the area looks much like a thick forest and the scattered houses are hard to photograph for that reason.
To a small extent, this "Lost City" fulfills Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of a suburban "town" in which individual homes are well designed, and interesting, and not set in a monotonous grid system with all streets at right angles to one another. There is a Herb Fritz house in there and maybe another by him. Fritz was a Madison architect who was a Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice. The Herb Fritz house is on Marshall Parkway, one of the main streets of the small subdivision embedded in the forest of the Arboretum.
Balden Street, east of Marshall Parkway, is the other main street of the small subdivision embedded in the forest, and Covall is a short street running roughly east and west between them. But there is no hint of a street grid design and the streets meander around.
In the early seventies I got into the "Lost City" area from Fish
Hatchery Road. There is a long rectangular conventional subdivision
that is cut out of the Arboretum off Fish Hatchery Road.
What is really lost is the beginnings of an infrastructure of parts of
streets and utilities that has been overgrown by the forest. This is southwest off the end of that conventional subdivision. The real Lost City is off the end of Martin Street,which is the south border of the conventional subdivision, to the southwest. The unconventional small suburb embedded in the forest sometimes also called the "Lost City" is northwest off Carver Street which is the north border of the conventional long rectilinear subdivision off Fish Hatchery Road.
Although the Madison "Lost City" is integrated with the natural forest, it is small and there are no stores or other places there where people can get together to interact. There are only single family houses built into the thick forest.
Why not design a much larger area like the "Lost City" and encourage small locally owned businesses to locate there? Do not allow large corporations to move in.
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