The American City: Ideal and Mythic Aspects of a Reinvented UrbanismAuthor(s): Alex KriegerSource: Assemblage, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 38-59Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171064Accessed: 07/09/2009 15:17

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Alex Krieger The American City:

Ideal and Mythic Aspects of a Reinvented Urbanism

Alex Krieger is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, and principal in the firm of Chan & Krieger.

1. Houston, Texas, in 1986, looking toward the downtown

Observing European society at the dawn of the twentieth century, Oswald Spengler was convinced that all great cul- tures were city born. Observers across the Atlantic have been less certain about where great cultures are nurtured, and more ambivalent about the cities in which they seem to flourish. As if in response to Spengler, Louis Sullivan articulated one common American opinion: "The great minds may go to the great cities," he wrote, "but they are not born and bred in the great cities . . . for the formation of a great mind solitude is prerequisite." Other Americans have lamented possessing civic instincts while lacking the "forms of a high old civilization," forms most readily found within venerable cities. Such is Henry James's lament in The American. Some have pointed to the physical concen- tration indicative of cities without, however, locating any corresponding commitment to urbanism; "a mountain range of evidence without manifesto," as Rem Koolhaas has suggested of Manhattan. Contemplating the nature of their own cities and still intrigued by those of their Euro- pean ancestors, many Americans have wondered whether all cultures evolve their own particular urban forms, and have asked what these might be for an American culture.

What follows is an examination of the form of the Ameri- can city. The intention is not to dwell on cities as mere physical constructions but rather to see whether the forms constitute an evidence of their builders' aspirations, to link the "mountain range of evidence" to the fragments of ur- ban manifesto posed by American civilization.

39

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I formed a plan as harmless as it was extravagant . . . where our little society, in its second generation was to have combined the innocence of the Patriarchal Age with the knowledge and general refinements of European culture; and where I dreamed that in the sober evening of my life I should behold the cottages of inde- pendence in the undivided dale of industry.

A founder of Pentisocracy, 1793

I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is you can make a right turn on a red light.

Woody Allen about Los Angeles in Annie Hall, 1977

For three centuries Americans have built cities at a rate faster than had any civilization before them. They have built cities instinctively and expediently, at times with noble intentions but generally with a speculator's fervor, often with some intellectual trepidation though rarely with much hesitation. The product of all this city building neverthe- less leads some to call America -even with enthusiasm - an "urban civilization without cities."2

Tradition-minded urbanists find such a consequence in- conceivable, and wonder instead whether America has be- come a civilization without urbanity. Indeed, New York (or more specifically Manhattan) notwithstanding, and overlooking the Boston of its original peninsula and the cores of several dozen other cities, America has long been a suburban culture. The prefix "sub," however, denoting "less than" (as in sub-par) rather than "alternative to" (as might be the case), serves an injustice. Suburbanization itself, today associated with the conventions and limited aspirations of middle-class life, was not so long ago consid- ered a radical idea. For example, a contemporaneous ac- count in Pagent Magazine referred to Llewelyn Park one of the first of the planned nineteenth-century romantic suburbs - as that place of "long-haired men and short- haired women."3 In 1857 such an observation would not recommend the place to those mindful of convention.

But apart from the suburb, or perhaps because of the prev- alence of suburbia, a belief has persisted that Americans, by and large, have had trouble accepting urbanism as cen- tral to their culture, and consequently have, more often than not, built cities that are less than urbane and difficult to love. The American city is occasionaly admired for its size and boundlessness, for its energy, for its material

wealth, for its lack of exhibited sentimentality toward a past, for its ability to accommodate change, for its incom- pleteness and modernity. More frequently, the American city is feared for these same characteristics. In any event Americans escape at most opportunities to places that seem - to them - more hospitable to the processes of life, but to students of cities, less abundant in time-honored aspects of urbanism.

The American city has engendered awe or fear, at times mistrust or disdain, but rarely genuine affection as in the case of, say, a Frenchman expousing a love for his Paris. Can one imagine a citizen of one of the great capitals of Europe sharing Henry Ford's conclusion (reached with a particular instrument in mind): "We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city"?4 Or William Jennings Bryan's exhortation (while campaigning for the presidency in 1896): "Burn down your cities and leave our farms and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country"?5 Or the words of Thomas Jefferson (of agrarian heart but the most urbane of intellects): "I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man"?6 A popular nineteenth-century slogan stated: "God the first garden made, and the first city Cain," with Cain standing for moral decay, corruption, artificial- ity, vanity, lust, calculation, and materialism.7 The slogan recalled a principal biblical interpretation of the city as a place of iniquity, created to escape God's judgment and therefore a place of the damned.

The dilemma is that such sentiments, expressed through- out the course of American history, enable historians and social interpreters to label American culture anti-urban.8 On the contrary, rather than disregarding time-honored ur- ban values the American instinct has been to reinterpret the nature of urbanity in concert with a body of ideals and perceptions fundamental to the Enlightenment. These ide- als include the pursuit of reason and science, in search of a secular understanding of the natural world; the pursuit of personal liberty and social egalitarianism; the admiration of agrarian philosophy; the pursuit of property as a source of wealth and independence; the pursuit of individualism and self-sufficiency; the veneration of nature and of pastoralism;

40

Krieger

2. G. A. Crofutt, "American Progress," 1873

THE INCREDIBLE NEW YORK OF 1930: THE CITY OF SKYSCRAPERS.

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; LIKE A DIVER ON A 1000-FT. SPRING-BOARD: A WORKMA N ON THE NEW ? EMPIRE STATE BUILDING SILHOUETTED AGAINST A PANORAMA OF NEW YORK- LOOKING NORTH TO CENTRAL PARK AND THE HUDSON RIVER tLEFT).

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3. "The Incredible New York," brought to the readers of the Illustrated London News in 1930

the belief in progress as providing continuing opportunities for social and geographical mobility; and finally, the pur- suit of origins, on the one hand, and of that which is new, on the other, in a New World seen as the setting for the transformation of society based on these enlightenments.9

While the American city was formed in relationship to such ideals and myths, the criticism of the American city commonly begins with an enumeration of its shortcomings relative to traditional Western urbanism. That the New World expanded the frontiers of social organization is uni- versally recognized. That such social experimentation would affect the means of aggregating spatially in commu- nities is less frequently acknowledged. And if social and political experimentation provided a means of evaluating old-world institutions and values, why not its corollary in matters of civic design? Europeans have often perceived such a potential in the New World cities. Tradition-bound but restless for political, social, and technological revolu- tions, eighteenth-century society could use the Americas to imagine primary forms of community. "In the beginning," proclaimed John Locke, "all the world was America." Throughout the nineteenth century when the traditional city was facing despair more than hope, American cities just being built rather than being radically transformed by industrialization - offered the possibility of circumventing the chaotic tendencies of rapid growth and mechanization. While seeking an authentic modernity, twentieth-century European travellers to America caught glimpses of what modernism would bring to the city. 0

Consider the impressions of one European upon his first encounters with the American city: The striking thing is the lightness, the fragility. .... The [city] has no weight, it seems barely to rest on the soil . . . born tem- porary [it has] stayed that way. . . . The result is a moving land- scape for its inhabitants, whereas our cities are our shells .... We Europeans change within changeless cities, and our houses and neighborhoods outlive us; American cities change faster than their inhabitants do, and it is the inhabitants who outlive the cities .... That is why they see their cities without vain sentimentality .... For us a city is, above all, a past; for them it is mainly a future; what they like in the city is everything it has not yet become and everything it can be. ... The past does not manifest itself in them as it does in Europe, through public monuments, but

41

assemblage 3

4. Charleville, France, engrav- ing by Martin Zeiller, 1656

5. Savannah, Georgia, engrav- ing by Peter Gordon, 1734

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6. Guthrie, Oklahoma, the main street after four weeks, 1889

through survivals. . . . These are there simply because no one has taken the time to tear them down, and as a kind of indication of work to be done. ... Our beautiful closed cities, full as eggs, are a bit stifling. ... Once you are inside the city, you can no

longer see beyond it. In America . . . frail and temporary, form- less and unfinished, they are haunted by the presence of the im- mense geographical space surrounding them . . . you feel, from your first glance, that your contact with these places is a tempo- rary one; either you will leave them or they will change around you. . . . The cities are open, open to the world, and to the future. This is what gives them their adventurous look, and even

.. a touching beauty."

The impressions are those of Jean-Paul Sartre, neither an architect nor urban theorist but an observer with an appre- ciation of the American city as a reinvented city.

Two engravings, of the nascent cities of Charleville, France, and Savannah, Georgia, prefigure a number of Sartre's insights. Charleville was laid out between 1608 and 1620. Its founder, Charles Gonzago, like Savannah's James Oglethorpe, was an admirer of Renaissance town- planning principles, which he introduced to France. Indeed, the Place Ducale in Charleville would become an inspiration for the plan of the Place Royale in Paris. Savannah was commissioned by King George II in 1734 in an attempt to secure England's southernmost colony against Spanish ambitions. The engraving served in part as a promotional brochure for the colony. Separated by less than a century, these images project two kinds of urban- isms. Charleville is defined and finite. Savannah is partial and without boundaries. Charleville is centrally ordered and hierarchical. Savannah is a field or a matrix. Charle- ville distinguishes itself from what lies immediately outside its perimeter; its defining walls are among its dominant physical features. Savannah is merely a clearing in the for- est, bounded only by the area cleared to date. Charleville portrays a collective form, while Savannah seems to form itself by collecting individual elements. Charleville exudes stability. Savannah is unmistakably incomplete, barely rest- ing on the.soil.

The majority of American cities, created overnight, "camps in a desert" or clearings in a forest, without the benefit (or the liability) of preexisting contexts, retain this evanes- cence. The Oklahoma land rush, as if staged for an epic Western film, replicated in a matter of days a century of urban development. Less than four weeks after the region had been opened to homesteaders a nascent Guthrie was

clearly in place. A historian has written of another region: "There was no fork, no falls, or bend in the river, no nook or bay on Lake Erie or Lake Michigan; no point along any imagined canal or railroad, in fact not even a dismal

swamp of dense forest, but could be classed as a choice location for a flourishing metropolis."12

The expectation of becoming a "metropolis" is ubiquitous among American settlements, and a remarkable number of these metropolises have flourished. Many continue to reenact the speculative fervor that facilitated their origins, experiencing jarring cycles of booms and busts (existing as solid or "see-through" cities, as contemporary developers would say). Rarely do their geographical settings or limita- tions of infrastructure impede a dream of becoming the next Chicago - or as it was assumed before the railroads

began crisscrossing the middle west, the next Cairo, Illi- nois.13 For each Cairo that failed a Kansas City flourished, and is still being formed, acquiring sufficient "weight" and a fabric with which to inspire or delimit subsequent devel-

opment.

Is it not somehow reassuring that the great twentieth-

century monolith and, for some, the primary antagonist of the city, the skyscraper, despite its size, objectness, and insu-

larity, can also create a fabric if multiplied sufficiently? Of course we should have known this in the 1930s when Rockefeller Center was being completed, or even earlier when the proprietous structures of Chicago's commercial

Loop were first rising. But as with many innovations, pos- sibilities are assimilated slowly. Planners and mayors of several cities are coming to fear skyscrapers and seek to

disperse them, unappreciative of Michigan Avenue and the

43

assemblage 3

What city offers waterfront dining, - international cuisine, trolley cars and one spectacular view after another? e.

: : A Study by the Development Division of

VELAND ELECTRIC ILLUMINATING COMPANY

7. Cover of a promotional bro- chure for Cleveland, Ohio, 1947

P-p-

ttsburgh. If we told you that Pittsburgh is some- times called "the San Francisco of the

East," you'd probably smile. Until you visited the city.

The first thing you'd notice is the view. A dramatic skyline framed by blue skies, water and trees. The second is the food. International dishes pre-

pared by people whose heritage taught them how.

Then you'd visit ajazz supperclub, or a concert, or a Broadway musical. And wtile you strolled througt a

sculpture garden at the water's edge, watching the city lights, you'd feel the

resemblance.

Pittsburgh is America's Renaissance

city, all dressed up and ready for com-

pany. Ready for a visit that will really

put a smile on your face. Ask why Pittsburgh is a great place

to be. Greater Pittsburgh Convention

and Visitors Bureau, Four Gateway Center. Pittsburgh, PA 15222 {412) 281-7711.

You've got a friend in Pennsylvania.

8. Magazine advertisement on behalf of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1986

9. The Loop of Chicago, view from the Sears Tower, 1981

10. "City of the Captive Globe," Rem Koolhaas, 1978

44

Krieger

11. Postcard view of Aspen, Colorado. The mountain range is clearly the focus of the image, and sure to outlive the town clinging to its base.

Avenue of the Americas as seminal contributions of Ameri- can civilization to urban form.

The establishment and maintenance of a fabric demands a certain endurance of place. One factor that makes endur- ing contexts difficult to achieve is identified by Sartre in the "cities which we survive." Ephemerality has seldom been regarded as an attribute of the physical city; the en- durance of the preindustrial city is what appeals to us. But to a civilization maturing under the dual forces of indus- trialization and romanticism, endurance is ultimately in- herent in the natural orders, not in human artifice. Faith in the endurance of the land and its resources, coupled with an orientation toward material progress, mandates that products be perishable, intended for use but also serving to stimulate the production of successors to whom they give way. As a man-made phenomenon, even the city cannot escape transience. A century prior to Sartre, Baudelaire had drawn a similar conclusion, paradoxically, by observ- ing Haussmann's powerful and stable boulevards taking shape. For Baudelaire the apparent solidity of the new boulevards could not alter the fact that the citizens of mid- nineteenth-century Paris had outlived the city of their birth. 4 The endurance of urban form could no longer be relied upon. Far more than its ancient predecessor, the modern city would become a facilitator of services, a re- ceptacle of goods, a warehouse rather than a repository, its spaces formed not out of a desire to establish points of stasis but for "expediating processes.""5 As the processes changed, so would the spatial requirements.

The need to process livestock and goods created a vast net- work of terminals, depots, and freight yards in the post- bellum city. The need to process insurance premiums, mortgages, equity funds, and legal records has created even vaster volumes of office districts in the postindustrial city. In the 1950s, Boston's first major urban renewal program was propelled by the Prudential Insurance Company of America, which built its corporate headquarters over a long-underutilized array of rail yards adjacent to the Back Bay. And so a mixed-use commercial center synonymous with the late-twentieth-century city proudly replaced a complex synonymous with that of the late nineteenth cen- tury. It is unlikely that the next major reuse of this land is

45

assemblage 3

12. What appears to be a

paving pattern is a system of streets laid out in preparation for a suburban subdivision, :iS, circa 1974.

14. John Portman, Renaissance . Center, Detroit, Michigan, 1978

15. Manhattan Bridge, New York City

13. Daniel Burnham, a city hall for Chicago, 1909

46

Krieger

16. Downtown Boston in 1964, Over ninety acres were demol- ished as the first step of urban renewal.

a century away. How permanent are the spatial require- ments currently producing the speculative office tower, that ubiquitous volumetric extension of the city's grid? What will the cities do with the acreage devoted to airports when technology eliminates the need for the half-mile runway? For many cities, the problem of reemploying buildings and land devoted to obsolete functions surpasses the nineteenth- century problem of finding additional land for expansion.

In a transient city, Sartre's "moving landscape," what sur- vive best are the facilitators of movement. To accommo- date both Walt Whitman's expectations of freedom and Jack Kerouac's restlessness, American streets must precede their defining edges. Unlike traditional counterparts, de- fined by adjoining walls and activities, the very void of the street assumes artifactual properties. It becomes tangible, autonomous, three-dimensional, the tool and symbol of the passion for mobility. To achieve a point of stasis for Chicago, Daniel Burham proposed a great crossing of axes marked by a grandiose city hall. 16 Occupying the same site today is a highway interchange that boastful Chicagoans describe as the world's largest. How more fitting a monu-

ment this is for a city that flourished at the crossroads of nineteenth-century continental trade routes. Paradoxically, the freeway - a mere facilitator of movement - becomes one of the few constants of the urban landscape, occasion- ally, as in the bridges of Manhattan, aspiring to the gran- deur achieved by monuments to cultural constants of the past.

The city, of course, has always been a great catalyst of change. The medieval German adage "city air makes men free" implies free access to economic opportunity, cultural advance, and eccentric tastes as well as political choice. But while the preindustrial city changed by being built upon - determined ruins supporting new walls - modern technologies and modern predilections result in substitu- tion rather than elaboration. Of whatever preceded the Re- naissance Center on the shore of the Detroit River there is no trace, and the newness of the development challenges the ruinous fabric of the surrounding city not to rebuild itself, but to be replaced. Maybe this is expected of De- troit, the automobile-made city, where last year's models command little attention. But what must admirers of Bos-

47

assemblage 3

17. An American home near Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.

ton, historic, slow-to-change Boston, conclude from con- templating a 1964 aerial view of the city, its heart virtually demolished as the first stage of urban renewal? With their cities exquisite arenas for rapid change, Americans have demanded a counterpoint, and in their homes and home districts have forged equally powerful symbols embodying convention, tradition, and (at least the illusion of) perma- nence.

The invocation of home calls to mind another characteris- tic of American urbanism. In the traditional city, evolving slowly under exacting social constraints and limited tech- nologies, the emphasis is on the collective, Sartre's "shell"; paradigms for urban aggregation seem to precede a con- sciousness of the individual unit. In America the emphasis remains with the building unit, from which paradigms for settlement patterns then emerge. In Georgian Bath the line or wall may be said to be of first importance. In Colonial Providence the silhouette seems to take precedence. Appro- priate to a society championing egalitarianism, the primacy of the discernable unit, whether familial or institutional, is almost always respected. Periodically, however, alliances

seeking to balance individual prerogative and the public good must form.

In the American city, such an alliance seemed most clear along the residential "Elm Streets," those unlikely places of convergence of the tenets of romantic classicism. Chestnut Street in Salem, Forest Street in Oak Park, Main Street in Litchfield, South Street in Houston, and countless others embody a fragile harmony of architecture and landscape. For a moment a synthesis seemed possible in the interac- tion of communal order - established by the line of the street and the embracing branches - with individual iden- tity - expressed in the exuberance and eccentricities of the houses themselves. Along Elm Street private caprice and public manners coexist beneath an arcadian canopy.

If the Strada Nuova in Genova, lined with late-sixteenth- century palaces for a mercantile nobility desiring urbanness- on the outskirts of town, represents a Renaissance residen- tial ideal, then Westmoreland Place in St. Louis, lined with late-nineteenth-century villas for a capitalist nobility, provides the New World's rebuttal. The narrow, vertical

public way of Genova is replaced with the spaciousness of

48

18. The Great Crescent, Bath, England

19. View of the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island

Krieger

20. An "Elm" street of Red Oaks: South Street, Houston, Texas

22. The Strada Nuova, Genova, idealized view of the street

21. The Strada Nuova, Genova

23. Westmoreland Place, St. Louis, Missouri, villas for a capitalist nobility. The setting is a virtual figure-ground reversal of the Strada Nuova.

24. Westmoreland Place in its context of private streets, a hint of parallel lines emerging from the forest

49

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assemblage 3

25. The Jeffersonian grid across the rural midwest

26. An early-nineteenth-century engraving of a southern plantation framed by its bountiful garden

a pastoral landscape. The private courtyards sheltered from the street have given way to yards and porches and bays and bearms that connote private idiosyncracy while en-

livening the public way. What is figure in Genova, the

space of the street and that of the hidden courtyards, delin- eated by the walls of the joined palazzos, becomes its op- posite in St. Louis: there, an open landscape is ubiquitous and the figure, of course, is that of the house, promising like its Genoan counterpart elegant suburban living to which, in America, all could aspire.

Michael Dennis has pointed out the similarities of certain neoclassical French streets, for example the rue Poisson- niere in Paris, to American Elm Streets.17 These, however, were at most a prelude, an aberration within their own culture. Though the French neoclassicists may have wished to realize more such streets, they lacked the cour-

age of their Enlightenment convictions, the necessary dis- tance from their own history and precedents, and sufficient land free from entail. In the colonies, the presence of un- limited land and the perceived absence of history stimu- lated a naive inventiveness.

To appreciate Elm Street as a balancing of communal val- ues and private prerogatives, two cardinal metaphors of American settlement must be drawn out. In the evolution of an American spatial order, the gridiron, as the principal pattern of settlement, and the garden, in its many guises as man's bond with land and nature, have played dominant

roles. The gridiron, a rational tool and thus a sign of hu- man presence, establishes a measurable and perceivable order over the land. It is a product of society. The garden, as all gardens since Eden, represents nature, yields both sustenance and pleasure. It is a product of individual culti- vators. Forming a network over the land, grid and garden together express accommodation between man and nature, rationality and spirit, societal constraints and individual expression.

Understandably, Jefferson championed both. As a farmer who once called himself a "savage from the wilderness of Virginia," Jefferson always preached that the cultivation of the land should be the primary occupation of Americans. He speculated that an agrarian republic might be spared the cyclical waves of repression and conflict common in Europe; moreover, he believed that land ownership fos- tered egalitarianism and a virtuous citizenry.18 Therefore, to Jefferson, a method of partitioning the land to ensure small land holdings was imperative. In the precision of the surveyor's gridiron he saw a means to achieve a pattern of settlement consistent with his ideals, and throughout his life he advocated its use for defining towns and regions.

Since Jefferson's continental surveys, the American city has been characterized by its expansive grid. For many it has come to signify expediency, speculation, neutrality, indif- ference, monotony, and merely a means of defining prop- erty. Sartre hinted at its other properties - pluralism,

50

Krieger

27. A bird's-eye view of Herrington, Kansas, 1887

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boundlessness, and freedom: "These long straight unob- structed streets carry one's glance, like canals, outside the city. You always see mountains or fields or the sea at the end of them."'9 At least you feel that you may see them and that they may be accessible. Another European had gone further: "The winding road is the pack-donkey's way," Le Corbusier proclaimed.20 For him, as for Jefferson, the straight road was "an action and the result of self-mastery," and therefore sane and noble. While the gridiron plan may be found throughout the history of settlement, particularly during periods of large-scale colonialization, in the New World it seemed to acquire a special significance, an ideo- logical substance.21

Though relentless in the hands of the land speculator, threatening to overwhelm the landscape, the gridiron serves to promote its antithesis, the individual's garden. In America the garden as cultural metaphor has had at least three, overlapping manifestations, each acquiring mythic dimensions and promoting a particular consequence for the city. In a Jeffersonian sense, the garden has represented the fitting domain of the freeman, and has been expressed as a cultivator's paradise. In the spirit of romanticism, it has represented a certain constellation of forces deemed necessary for the cultivation of the spirit. Finally, it has represented a refuge in which to remove oneself from the traumas of industrial civilization.

A cultivator's paradise the New World was, attracting mil- lions to its fertile lands, and by the mid-nineteenth century

becoming identified as the "breadbasket" or "garden of the world."22 So powerful was the national identity with agrar- ianism that well into the twentieth century any economic crisis set in motion another back-to-the-land movement. That few ever actually returned to the farm was immate- rial. Though compelled by the temporal temptations of the city, the American always looked to the farm for assurances of stability. To move further from the center of town, to decentralize the city, seemed quite natural, a means of re- turning to imagined origins and ancestral landscapes.

Seeking imagined origins also meant that the very heart of the city needed to be gardenlike. The nation's capital, Washington, D.C., is a telling example. The City Beauti- ful-inspired MacMillan Commission Plan of 1902 pro- jected a neoclassical order, as befitting a government becoming aware of its central role among powerful na- tions. Paris, Versailles, Vienna were the models, and the mission was to fulfill the promise of L'Enfant's original plan. With remarkably few changes, the vision was real- ized. The graphics of a common tourist map, however, reveal another (desired) spatial order: the public edifices and monuments are rendered in a sea of green that ignores the geometries of the neoclassical arrangement. And the experience of the Mall is closer to the rendition of the map. While sensing a monumental order of vista and axi- ality, a visitor finds himself in a prodigious but vaguely defined park. This is neither an accident nor the result of poor Beaux-Arts planning. Senator MacMillan's commis-

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28. General Plan for Central Washington by the Senate Park Commission, 1902

29. Portion of a tourist map of central Washington, 1974

- I : : t 1 j/V: ...... ' - p IA

30. Map of Kansas City Park and Boulevard System. Undeveloped in 1888, it had exceeded four hundred acres by 1910.

31. The Chicago lakefront, looking north from the Loop. Over twenty miles of parks and beaches were recaptured from private ownership and indus- trial uses.

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32. The Public Garden, Boston, Massachusetts, 1869

sion was, after all, called the Senate Park Commission, and its broadest mandate was to develop a district-wide park and open-space network of which the Mall would be a mere part.23

It has been argued that the urban park and open-space net- work, conceived specifically for the use and pleasure of the public, were America's foremost contribution to nine- teenth-century urban design.24 It is a supposition difficult to refute, if only because of the scale of the endeavors by hundreds of cities and towns to create park systems. The initial proponents of the park system - Olmsted, Down- ing, Cleveland, Kessler - were not principally motivated by beautification or by the social conceits of the English gentry who sought to surround themselves with pastoral scenery. Rather, they believed that the reintroduction of nature into the increasingly dense, increasingly expanding, increasingly "unnatural" industrial city was necessary to maintain it as a habitable domain, particularly for the common citizen who could not retreat to a country estate. Olmsted and his contemporaries sought to demonstrate that a vigorous young nation could physically respond to the social problems brought about by massive urbaniza- tion. The integrated park and boulevard system was that response, and it formed the basis for the initial struggles with city planning in America.25

Generous and grand, and permeating the city with the "healing" virtues of nature, the urban park combined the requirement for a prominant public realm - deemed nec- essary by virtually every urban culture - with the ideolog- ical prescription to follow nature. The public park became a post-Enlightenment analogue to the traditional public

square, a place of order and repose carved out of the chaos of industrial urbanism. While the economic and social forces accelerating industrialization were also forcing the

frequent rebuilding of the city, the park - as an embodi- ment of nature's immutability - would provide a measure of constancy within the ever-changing city.

Prior to the introduction of the park into the city, there long simmered a desire to build a pastoral city, or rather, to inhabit an environment forever balanced between the extremes of urbane sophistication and natural virtuousness, a place where the attributes of both city and country might be simultaneously enjoyed. Inspired by the potential of industrialization and reacting to the backwardness and

oppression of European feudalism, Engels and Marx

sought to eliminate the "idiocy of rural life." By contrast, American social reformers, ever suspicious of the progress produced by technological advance, leaned toward rural

simplicity; Thoreau lamented that "the whistle of the loco- motive penetrates my woods summer and winter."26 But another line of Americans have argued that neither urban nor rural life alone (or separately) represented national ideals. "A plague on both your houses," concluded W. E.

Smythe in a naive little book of the 1920s, whose title, City Homes on Country Lanes, succinctly captures this

longing for a middle landscape.27

The roots of such a yearning date back to the very discov-

ery of America. As an emerging Age of Reason began to seek Truth in the phenomena of nature, the natural world and especially the landscape began to evoke emotions tra-

ditionally reserved for God. To be enlightened was to read God's laws in nature, not in the scriptures. Theories re-

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33. George Innes, "The Locka- wana Valley," 1854. More opti- mistically than Thoreau, Innes incorporates the machine and other signs of progress into a pastoral scene. The puffs of smoke from the engine and from behind the depot seem composed of the same matter as the wispy cloud behind the steeple.

garding these laws of nature were profoundly stimulated by the consciousness in Europe of a New World untouched by the processes of civilization. Rousseau, among others, hypothesized the American Indian as existing in a height- ened state of innocence. Such a state, he argued, could be used to gauge the progress of European civilization and the success of its institutions, conventions, and habits. Critical of these, Rousseau declared his "natural man" superior to civilized man, claiming that the very process of civilization produced artificiality, perhaps even social regression. Out of such arguments emerged the "Ethic of the Middle Link," and, later, the more sentimental cult of the noble savage.28 The best possible human condition came to be represented by a middle position between intellect and in- stinct, between mind and spirit, or, in more physical terms, between the wilderness - the domain of the heathen - and the city - the repository of culture. As such sentiments continued to flourish in Europe, the New World was seen increasingly as an embodiment of these sentiments. Thus, Richard Price, believing that "the happi- est state of man is in the middle state between the savage and the refined," could by the mid-eighteenth century pro- claim: "Such is the state of Society in Connecticut, and some other of the American provinces."29

A century later in these former provinces, citizens like Emerson again championed such an ideal state. No doubt

with Rousseau in mind, Emerson saw the "uncorrupted behavior which we admire in animals and in young chil- dren belongs to . . . the man who lives in the presence of Nature. Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial."30 Emerson was not, however, rejecting the city. He was seeking a re- centering: "I wish for rural strength and religion . . ., city facility and polish. I find with chagrin that I cannot have both."3 The chagrin merely intensified the search for a center. The human spirit needed to question the conven- tions of civilization (housed in the city) by fortifying itself with the truths inherent in nature - if only a setting could be devised that would foster a reconciliation between civilization and arcadian innocence. To this ideal the American mind has repeatedly returned, perhaps never more eloquently in physical expression than in Jefferson's University of Virginia campus.

In his "academical village" a great axis is established, an- chored by the artifacts of man and the elements of nature. The axis stretches from the library, both symbol and store- house of knowledge, to the free and verdant hills of Vir- ginia, to the wilderness. Students and teachers reside in between, amidst a lawn and gardens. For Jefferson the noblest of human functions lay in this conversion of wil- derness into habitat, so long as the laws of nature were consulted during the process.

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34. A view of Westport Village along Lake Champlain, vestigial scene of the middle landscape of romanticism

For many, Jefferson's campus, and the settings of Ameri- can colleges in general, continues to present a model of American urban aspirations, rarely achieved outside uni- versity grounds. Of course, the risk of seeking a middle ground - between town and country - is the abolish- ment of town and of country, which many have advocated, and which the very successes of suburbia have nearly wrought. Somewhat like the nineteenth-century industrial city, which came perilously close to choking itself with its own energy and productivity, the suburban realm, so ap- pealing and finally in this century so attainable, obliterates the extremes upon which it depends for its validation. Even as the traditional boundaries between country and city give way to Wright's imaginary Broadacres or Jean Gottman's very real Megalopolis, the ideal of a middle state persists.32 At midcentury, looking forward to the day when city and country would encroach upon one another sufficiently to form a new symbiosis, Arthur M. Schlesin- ger invoked Plato, who had dreamed of a society in which

youth shall dwell in a land of health amid fair sights and sounds and imbibe good from every quarter; and beauty, the emanation of noble works, will flow into the eye and ear like an invigorating breeze from a purer region and imperceptibly woo the soul from infancy into harmony and sympathy with the beauty of reason.33

Plato's dream may still remain unfulfilled, but the majority of Americans do reside in environments that presume to blend the qualities of town and country. Neither the pre- sumption nor the desire is likely to change even though a rekindled interest in the centers of our older cities is in evidence. Some of these cities are, at last, acquiring suffi- cient weight to make use of their history and fabric. How- ever, their peripheries continue to expand at a much faster rate than their centers can stabilize. Many cities already exhibit the phenomenon best characterized by contempo- rary Houston: an increasingly vertical center, an ever-

densifying perimeter along. circumferential highways, with felicitious houses under canopies of trees (former suburbs) stretching between.

Each new city, whether Columbia, Maryland, in the 1960s or Las Colinas, Texas, in the 1980s, is posited as an

improved middle ground, an alternative, on the one hand, to overgrown cities and, on the other, to homogenous sub-

35. A view of the University of Virginia, lithograph by C. Bohn, 1856

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36. On the outskirts of a city: some of the less pastoral con- sequences of suburbanization

urban regions. Each alternative paradoxically hastens the suburbanization of existing city centers, whose shopping malls and streetscapes attempt to emulate the perceived successes of places like Las Colinas.

Metropolitan landscapes, such as that of Dallas-Fort Worth, of which Las Colinas is a part, constitute the mod- ern city. And new ones such as Tysons Corner, Virginia, growing from a single suburban shopping center in the mid-1970s to an employment base for seventy thousand people by the mid-1980s, continue to emerge overnight. These metropolitan landscapes are the result of desires and ideals, ideals that become myth. They are no longer a par- ticularly American phenomenon but evident in various stages of evolution throughout the modern world. They are elements of an urbanism that raises questions not entirely predicted by urban archetypes.

What is the usefulness to contemporary society of the idea of a monocentric city, the city of an axis mundi?

Does the idea of the city as a collection of semiautono- mous fragments, or districts, preclude singular unifying organizational or formal patterns? What is the role of com- prehensive vision or artistic inspiration within current de- centralized physical and institutional frameworks? Should there be contemporary equivalents to the monumental spaces of traditional cities?

What should constitute the public realm of a contempo- rary city? Is the privatization of traditionally public areas

(shopping malls in lieu of streets, for instance) an inevi- table consequence of modern culture?

How independent of specific use should the fabric of the city be? Is specificity of use inevitably a temporary condi- tion of any one area or district?

How should the past and "historic survivals" manifest themselves in the fabric of a rapidly changing city? Is abso- lute preservation of entire districts, and even cities, deny- ing the very forces that have always fueled city evolution?

How helpful are the traditional distinctions between coun-

try, town, village, city? Should new categories or defini- tions be explored?

Finally, how should the ephemerality of the fabric of the modern city be incorporated into the city's design? Histori-

cally, building a city had very much to do with the build-

ing of monuments and districts that would reflect cultural values assumed to endure. While fostering social ex-

change, the city sought physically to embody stasis. By building clear symbols of particular social orders, coher- ence and common meaning was supposedly assured. Such a notion of the city never fully crossed the ocean along with the colonists; indeed, the very act of emigration indi-

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37. Houston, Texas, 1986. What appears to be another view of the downtown (see fig. 1) is actually a view away from the city center toward recent development along a circum- ferential highway.

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cated a dissatisfaction with such coherences. Suspicion of

enduring values is implicit when one of Hawthorne's char- acters proclaims, "Giving the impression of permanence is

[what] I consider essential to the happiness of any one moment. "34

What should convey permanence in a contemporary city of innumerable moments, in Los Angeles, a city pro- foundly artificial and "imagineered"?35 Its boundlessness and lack of center, its aggrandizement of private caprice, its web of infrastructure, importing water and exporting mobility, its appeal to lifestyle and fantasy, makes it para- digmatic of our times. Can such a city be constructed en- tirely of artifacts for temporal events, such as the kiosks, gates, and pavilions for the 1984 Olympics? What of value should be built for a culture whose fabric and monuments embody values not presumed to be permanent? This ques- tion has long challenged the builders of the American city, as it now challenges the builders of cities everywhere.

Notes 1. Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (1918) (New York: Dover, 1979), p. 112; Henry James, The American (New York: Scribner's, 1907), p. 45; Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: Oxford, 1978), p. 111.

2. Irving Kristol, "An Urban Civili- zation without Cities," Horizon (Autumn 1972).

3. Quoted in Samuel Swift, "Llew- ellyn Park, West Orange, Essex Co. New Jersey: The First American Suburban Community," House and Garden 3 (June 1903).

4. Henry Ford, "Ford Ideals: Being a Selection from 'Mr. Ford's Page' in The Dearborn Independent," (Dearborn, Michigan, 1922), p. 425.

5. William Jennings Bryan, "Cross of Gold" speech at the 1896 Demo- cratic national convention. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Paths to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 229.

6. Thomas Jefferson, "Query XIX: The Present State of Manufactures, Commerce, Interior and Exterior Trade," in Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954). 7. The origin of the slogan is dis-

puted, with credit given either to the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley or to the better-known eighteenth- century English poet William Cow- par. In any event, versions of it appeared frequently in popular liter- ature during the nineteenth cen- tury, especially those of the "Go West Young Man" boosterism vari- ety. 8. For the broadest overview of the American antiurban tradition, see Morton and Lucia White, The In- tellectual Versus the City (Cam- bridge: Harvard and MIT, 1962). Written during the heyday of urban renewal (which proliferated its own brand of antiurbanism) the message

of the book - that retreat from the

city was untenable for any modern culture- was frequently misinter-

preted as support for further decen- tralization and suburbanization.

9. Toward the end of the nine- teenth century such sentiments, particularly an emphasis on origins and renewal, were synthesized into a "frontier thesis" by Frederick Jack- son Turner. The theory held that it was not the growing and industrial-

izing Eastern seaboard but "the ex- istence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the ad- vance of American settlement west- ward" that explained the character of American society by allowing for the perpetuation of the notion of

liberty, self-sufficiency, and individ- ualism. See Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893), in The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1920), esp. pp. 1-38. See also Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).

10. Consider, for example, Le Cor- busier's initial encounter with Man- hattan. He admonished Americans for not building their skyscrapers high enough, but was profoundly moved by experiencing a built ana- logue to his imaginary Plan Voison for Paris. See Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White (1947; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

11. Jean-Paul Sartre, "American Cities," in Literary and Philosophi- cal Essays (London: Hutchinson Publishing Company, 1955).

12. Roy Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain 1776- 1936 (Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1942), p. 63.

13. Cairo, Illinois, perhaps epito- mizes the anticipated metropolis.

Located at the intersection of two of the nation's greatest rivers, the Mis-

sissippi and the Ohio, its founders and boosters were convinced that it would become the principal city of the Midwest. Unfortunately, the first transcontinental railroads fol- lowed a more northerly alignment, and Cairo's Manifest Destiny went unrealized. See Herman R. Lantz, Cairo, A Community in Search of Itself (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972).

14. Between 1855 and 1867, Bau- delaire wrote a series of fifty prose poems that became known as Paris Spleen. They were among the first literary attempts to chronicle the radical changeability of modern ur- banism and its effects on city dwell- ers. The poems were, of course, inspired by Georges-Eugene Hauss- mann's systematic transformation of the Paris of Baudelaire's youth. See Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varese (New York: New Directions, 1970).

15. See John Brinkerhoff Jackson, American Space: The Centennial Years 1865-1876 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), the chapter on

Chicago, pp. 72-86.

16. See Daniel Burnham and Ed- ward Bennett, The Plan for Chicago (1909; New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), "The Heart of Chicago."

17. Michael Dennis, Court and Garden: From the French Hotel to the City of Modern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 237-40.

18. Jefferson, "Query XIX." See also A. M. Griswald, "The Ameri- can Democracy of Thomas Jeffer- son," American Political Science Review 40, no. 4 (August 1946): 657-81.

19. Sartre, "American Cities."

20. Le Corbusier, The City of To-

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morrow and Its Planning [originally published in 1924 as Urbanisme] (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929). 21. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, "Jefferson, Thoreau and After," in

Landscapes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), pp. 1-9.

22. Smith, Virgin Land, book 3, "The Garden of the World."

23. John Reps, Monumental Wash-

ington: The Planning and Develop- ment of the Capital Center

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), esp. "The Senate Park Commission at Work."

24. Albert Fein, "The American

City: The Ideal and the Real," in The Rise of an American Architec- ture, ed. Edgar Kaufman (New York: Praeger, 1970). 25. In America the master plans for

city and regional park and parkway networks constituted the first com-

prehensive attempts at city plan- ning. Whereas in Europe city planning as a distinct discipline generally emerged from sanitary engineering and housing reform movements, the American planning profession owes its greatest debt to

landscape architecture. See Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 26. Henry David Thoreau, "Sounds," in Walden or Life in the Woods (1854; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), p. 181.

27. William Smythe, City Homes on Country Lanes (New York: Mac-

millan, 1922). This is one among countless appeals in American liter- ature to seek a middle ground be- tween urban and rural life. For the intellectual origins of such a search, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford, 1964). Marx was the first to term this a search for a "middle landscape."

28. See A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1942), pp. 189-207; Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Ro- mantic Naturalism (New York: Macmillan, 1928); and Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961).

29. Quoted in Marx, Machine in the Garden, p. 105.

30. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Farm-

ing," in Society and Solitude (1870; London: J. M. Dent, 1912), p. 72.

31. Ralph Waldo Emerson, letter to Thomas Carlyle, 1840. Quoted in C. N. Glaab and A. T. Brown, A History of Urban America (Lon- don: Macmillan, 1967), p. 60.

32. Frank Lloyd Wright spent nearly three decades trying to per- fect his antidote to the modern city. Broadacres was to capitalize on electrification and the automobile to achieve a national decentraliza- tion. It would provide every man, women, and child "his natural right to an acre of land," while retaining all of the benefits of modern tech-

nology. See Frank Lloyd Wright, "Broadacres: A New Community Plan," Architectural Record 47, no. 4 (April 1935). Jean Gottman coined the term "megalopolis" in his landmark study of the Boston- New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore- Washington, D.C. urban corridor. See Jean Gottman, Megalopolis, the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (New York: Twentieth-Century Fund, 1961).

33. Quoted in Schlesinger, Paths to the Present, p. 232.

34. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Boston: Tickner Reed Fields, 1851).

35. "Imagineering" is the wonderful term used by Walt Disney to de-

scribe what his teams of artists, architects, illustrators, writers, engi- neers (his "imagineers") were doing at Disneyland and Disneyworld.

Figure Credits 1, 8, 9, 14, 15, 17-20, 23, 24, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37. Courtesy of the au- thor.

2. Library of Congress.

3. 6, 7, 12, 25, 26, 30. Courtesy of the Loeb Library, Harvard Uni-

versity.

4. From Martin Zeiller, Topograph- ia Galliae, 1656. Reproduced in

John Reps, The Making of Urban America (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1965), p. 8.

5. New York Public Library.

10. From Rem Koolhaas, Delirous New York (New York: Oxford, 1978).

11. Photograph by Robert C.

Bishop.

13. The Art Institute of Chicago.

16. Aerial Photos of New England.

21, 22. From Leonardo Benevolo, The History of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), p. 612.

27. Historic American Maps, Ithaca, New York.

28. Washington, D.C., Fine Arts Commission.

29. Smithsonian Institution.

33. National Gallery of Art, Wash-

ington, D.C.

35. University of Virginia Library.

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