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JULIAN BEINART: I want to tackle another interesting and rather
confounding issue in relation to the space and social content
of cities.
And that has to do with the fact that not all people in society
agree with the ideology that the city maintains for the moment,
or the society maintains for the moment.
To change the world is an ambition of many people,
or groups of people, who believe that they can artificially
create environment which of a higher order of goodness
than the environment with which they now are presented.
Often, these situations come about as a reaction
to something negative about the existing city.
We will go through a number of these.
Obviously, this is a very large subject, again,
and needs a need for me to make a few arguments about it
rather than ending with the complete bibliographic
explanation of all of the attempts
to identify the intentional communities
within the Metropolitan area of cities or isolated from them.
The word utopia has a double meaning.
In Greek, utopia means no place.
Utopia means that you, the single you, is a good place.
Already the double Greek word meaning
indicates some characteristics of which we have to deal with.
The created environment in these cases
are meant to create a good world,
but they also are isolated.
The word is first used in English
by Thomas Moore's book in 1516, where
he describes a utopian island.
It's an island which already indicates
that it's separate from other existing
phenomena, physical phenomena.
Secondly, it has 58 spacious and splendid cities on the island.
The island is 200 miles long.
There's equity of property enable.
The houses are never locked.
No private possessions are tolerated.
The owners change every 10 years,
and they're selected by drawing lots.
So really, you find in the first of the utopian explanations,
or exercises, as association with equity,
that this is a place where private property is not
significant.
There's a random distribution statistically made available
through the drawing of lots.
Many of these themes involving a boundary condition involving
the distribution of resources, involving
the maintenance of the society are characteristics
of these ideal communities.
[INAUDIBLE] more right of the ideal state or about
the new island of nowhere.
There's a notion that this environment
can exist in a sense nowhere, which means that he doesn't
touch another environment.
There's an interesting linkage of people during this time.
For instance, looking back with the great book
by Edward Bellamy, in the 1850s, describing
Boston as a communist city, mechanically controlled
communist city, in which a man falls
asleep and wakes up 100 years later and he sees Boston
transformed.
Mechanism is an important attribute
to that changed environment.
So compelling was the book that it sold millions of copies
here in the United States.
It was a bestseller.
It was read by a man called William Morris in England.
William Morris was a great [INAUDIBLE] founder
of the socialist league in England,
a man of enormous significance, who
wrote a book called News From Nowhere,
completely antithetical to the concentrated vision of Bellamy.
For him, a decentralist solution which
abdicated the role of cities with the option.
For here, at the same time, we have two 19th century figures
not in contact with each other, but their works
are in contact with each other.
The one comments on the other's by writing a book.
News From Nowhere also refers to Samuel Butler's book Erewhon,
and Erewhon is an anagram of nowhere.
I'm just trying to indicate to you the density of interest
in this phenomenon.
The 19th century which is our focus
is the century of great expectations.
Much though enormous problems were manifest.
There was a sense that, given the right kind of conditions,
solutions would be found.
Great Expectations is again a novel by whom?
Who?
Dickens, Charles Dickens, it's hes 13th novel.
What happens in Great Expectations?
A young orphan by the name of Pip
encountered wonders in a field and encounters
an escaped convict.
His life is then is the subject of this book.
It's a book about how you can as an orphan encounter an escaped
convict and still make a success of things.
Many of these utopias are subject to the creation
of new models of social relationship as
antithetical to what exists.
If the family is weak, the kibbutz
takes children and separates them from their families
and rears them separately.
So there's a [INAUDIBLE] an Institute
for the Promotion of Social Character
in New Lanark, Scotland.
So does the French utopianists [INAUDIBLE]
in [INAUDIBLE],, all of these places
have environments where children can grow up
independent of the family.
The notion of in loco parentis is established
to provide the rights for people who look after children
separate from their family.
If the society exhibits great Puritanism,
as Victorian society did, Charles Fourier
proposed his utopian project, the phalanstery,
on the notion of passion, sexual passion.
Humphrey Noyes in the United States
is personally somebody to be hugged and created
Oneida, the town of Oneida, in New York state.
If drink and alienation and drugs are the problem,
Owen's reform of character--
Institute for the Reform of Character in New Lanark.
Pullman explicitly says, I will not
allow my workers to own houses, because that
will mean they will become separate and want
to live an independent life.
I want them to behave according to the rules, which I said.
This is paternalism, which of course, resulted
in complete decay of the community.
If the outside world is a new secular world changing
very rapidly, the response of the Shakers
is to create a religion which remains absolute.
No sexual intercourse is allowed in
[? Shakerdom, ?] which creates a fundamental problem
of population increase.
So it has to convert people.
The notion of converting people because you have a truth
is fundamental to certain religions today.
I dislike the idea intensely, but that's a personal dislike.
So I should dislike Mormonism, which believes in it.
One good thing about the Jews is they don't sell their religion.
Or they maybe do it in subtle ways,
but they don't missionarize.
Missionarism is an interesting phenomenon,
but it's only the result of a belief in an absolute truth.
If industrial chaos is what we encounter in the existing
world, you'll find the paternal order
of factory towns of Pullman outside Chicago,
South of Chicago; Port Sunlight, the factory town of the Lever
Brothers in England, Bournville, the factory town of the Cadbury
family, and so on.
If you believe the result of the chaos
is centralized order or disorder,
you opt for options for decentralization.
William Morris believes that over time, Manchester
and London would disappear and be replaced
by a small-scale, self-supporting, landscaped
environment, which I'll detail a little later in the class.
Or you believe in the work of Peter Kropotkin,
the first urban geographer, the Russian Prince
who disagreed with Marx about the new state,
arguing that a centralized state was likely to fail in favor
of a decentralized order.
He argued that even during his stay in England--
I can't remember the date-- at the end of the 19th century,
he said that 80% of the factories
only employed 8 to 10 people.
He was enormously impressed by the Jura region of Switzerland,
J-U-R-A, which is the home environment of Le Corbusier,
by the way.
What impresses Kropotkin is the capacity
of watchmaking to organize itself there.
There are many enterprises, all small, all competitive, all
producing good product.
So his referenced to industrial chaos is agglomeration.
And he disputes agglomeration economics
as fundamental to the production of first-class industrial
product.
That's just the list of the antidotes.
And the-- I'm just going to go through, very briefly,
some more characteristics of these places.
There's often an authoritarian order socially,
but they're economically democratic.
The authority is necessary to maintain the tension
and to distract from the attraction
of the outside world.
There's no question of choice here.
If choice is economic, well, that's OK.
But if it's social, it's dangerous.
These projects all have boundary problems.
They need to be separate, but they can't exist separately.
The Shakers need new inputs of population.
They often need-- many of them are
agricultural and industrial businesses, which
is the economic base, and they need markets.
You can't eat your own food and maintain yourself totally.
You need a means, something to change, producing income.
You get what?
These places don't locate in the wilderness.
But they're located in the middle landscape,
which Frank Lloyd Wright understands very well.
His the notion of usonianism is really
a way of dealing with the middle landscape.
He built 615 houses in Oak Park and the Unity Church
in this middle landscape.
I'll deal with Broadacre City a bit
later on, when we're dealing with Wright himself.
The difficulty about how to be yourself and yet
be a part of a group, how to change
and yet to remain the same.
Many of the critics of these intentional communities
talk about how rigid, fixed, without much process--
they are wooden, mechanical, contrived, inanimate.
I visited the drug rehabilitation commune
north of San Francisco called Synanon.
Synanon was dealing with people fighting heroin addiction.
We were met at the airport with people
dressed in black leather on black motorcycles
and escorted to Synanon.
Synanon was headed by a man, a single man,
who had a mad impulse that the only way to cure heroin
was to be as tough as the drug itself.
In theory, it was a fascist community.
If he decided that you shouldn't have wives,
you don't have wives.
If he decided that people should--
one morning, he wakes up, and says there'll be no smoking.
There'll be no smoking.
At the same time, Synanon had people in it--
drug addicts who are highly confident people
other than their addiction.
Lawyers, businessmen who lived in Synanon,
because it was a better option than anywhere else
there to live.
He organized them so that they made money.
They would get up early in the morning and call businesses all
over the United States, arguing that Synanon
was a charitable organization.
They sold pencils with Synanon on the pencil.
They were so tough that they enabled a lawsuit
against one of the San Francisco newspapers
for talking about them.
They became so fascist that the lawyer that
was employed in Los Angeles who worked for the newspaper
in the lawsuit discovered a snake in his mailbox one day.
The community destroyed itself.
The story here is you have to be very powerful socially
in order to maintain the distance between you
and the existing environment, which you're finding
incompatible and dangerous.
This is an endless struggle.
You can go as far as to make the community
as insular as possible.
The Shakers controlled the physical form
of their environment absolutely.
All meat was cut into square pieces.
They were places where you could only--
certain places we could hang your clothes.
You weren't allowed to embrace somebody of the other sex.
You weren't allowed to shake hands
with a foreigner, a stranger.
And so endless epicurean qualities.
Let me just go on.
An interesting theme here is that we're
both interested in space and society.
This is a good opportunity for us to look at these experiments
as dealing with both.
The extraordinary thing is that very seldom
do change occur on both fronts.
There's an enormous physical design conservatism
in many of these places.
Fourier's phalanstery, in taking the versions which
are propagated, looked like Versailles.
They are large, palace-like structures,
learning and innovation in them is the invention of something
called a rue interieure.
Interior.
The rue interieure is a very simple system
whereby the staircase in the section of a building
is public and open to everybody.
So that you-- the idea of mixing is a public act.
The rue interieure is found-- can
be found, as we'll see after the spring vacation,
in many of the Russian propositions from 1917 to '32.
You'll also find it in Corbusier's Unité
d'Habitation in the center here where commerce is proposed.
Corbusier will belong to the same society
of intentional communities as did Fourier.
This notion between there being a fixed quotient
for in which you could operate economically,
you haven't got money.
So how do you innovate architecturally?
I need to start in an old building for which there's
no market.
Squatting is part of these communal intentions.
We will see some examples in the slides of projects
like Fountain Grove in California,
which proposed building an incredible apparatus
of Victorian architecture in order to create--
attract a community of people.
We'll look at the work of a number
of these people in the slides.
I've chosen three architects to include in the discourse.
The three architects are Tony Garnier,
the French utopianist who designed a project called
the Cité Industrielle, who really believes that you can
take the paternalistic factory town and change it through
architecture.
The second one is Frank Lloyd Wright.
By the way, Garnier believes--
was an anarchist who believed that there
would be no law courts nor police necessary in his town.
The second case is the case of Frank Lloyd
Wright who really, his politics are as loose as his buildings.
He designed over 700 buildings.
And we built over 700 buildings.
So when I say looseness, it means
not necessarily a pejorative, but a description of the range
of work that he did.
He is a man who in Broadacre City
proposes that the American citizen has a right to own
five of five automobiles.
At the same time, he designed the projects,
the [INAUDIBLE] Center for Chicago and builds
and proposes--
if he has a political philosophy it's called democracy.
He writes a book called The Architecture of Democracy.
But he's really a supporter of variations on the system.
Usonia is really a version of the middle landscape
in which the American has the right to own a house,
have an automobile.
But in Broadacre City, he also has helicopters flying
over the town in his drawings.
What that's about, he admires Henry Ford.
Because Henry Ford in Muscle Shoals in Alabama
proposes a 75-mile-long city, which
didn't occur because the United States government
under Senator Norris proposed in 1933 to do the Tennessee Valley
Authority rather than sell the rights to Henry Ford.
Henry Ford almost ran for-- as president of the United--
for the presidency of the United States as a result.
Again, there is an instinct in Wright
always to look at the opposite situation.
Democracy involves freedom.
Freedom can be assumed through the manipulation of agriculture
and industry at the same time, which is Ford's great mantra.
Ford wanted to build a city in which his workers would only
work half the day or three quarters of the day
and work in their own garden and make food for themselves
for the rest of the day.
So we can-- when we look at Russia between 1917 and 1932,
you have the extraordinary opportunity
of observing all of the energy which
transforms spatial propositions and also deals
with a completely new social order.
Marx, of course, disliked the idea
that his thinking was utopian.
He said, my dialectical studies are
based on the reality I study, the stock market's prices
in the London Times every morning.
I'm dealing with reality, not with utopia.
He disliked Fourier.
He called Fourier's phalanstere a brothel.
Although Fourier claimed he was a socialist and so on.
Sorry, Anna.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Yes, I've got--
I've done two.
Corbusier is the third.
Corbusier is a more, perhaps, complex story.
First of all, he's European like Garnier.
He has enormous ambitions.
I'm sorry I haven't got my notes in front of me.
We'll get to him in a minute.
But the basic proposition in Corbusier's case
is that the plan is the object of discussion.
The plan is either right or not right.
[INAUDIBLE] plan that he makes is
the result of enormous social study
and enormous physical awareness.
And that, once it is right, it doesn't matter
what ideology it supports.
His first project-- he really has three theoretical plans.
The first-- let's leave Corbusier for a while.
I'll come back to him in a minute.
I have to watch time because there's a lot of stuff.
I think I'm going to skip some of these observations.
One of the interesting ones is from a student in this class
in 1993 who writes to me and says,
"A comment on today's lecture remarks,
'Freud and utopia dreams.'
I was reminded of Italo Calvino's book, Invisible
Cities."
And I quote, "With cities, it is as with dreams.
Everything imaginable can be dreamed.
But even the most unexpected dream
is a rebirth that conceals a desire or its reverse, a fear.
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and equally of fears.
Even if the thread of their discourse is secret,
their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful,
and everything consumes everybody else."
The student says, "Does that mean the crazier
the expressed desire the greater the perceived fear?"
And now to answer that.
I mean, it's a very interesting connected idea
which Calvino in his brilliant asserts.
There's also a work which refers to perversion
as a form of utopia.
In a book called Perversion and Utopia,
there's a "essential affinity between the utopian
and the perverse in so far as both
seek to circumvent the reality principle
which defines the human condition.
Man has always endeavored to go beyond the narrow limits
of his condition.
Perversion is one of the essential ways
and means he applies in order to push forward
these frontiers of what is possible
and to unsettle reality."
These are strange associations with utopianism.
They're not explicit.
I mean, Fourier's preoccupation with sexuality
is not homosexuality.
It's not sexuality amongst children.
It's not sexuality with animals.
So, therefore, in our code of behavior, it's not perverse.
It's about as tame as Shakespeare
writing about Romeo and Juliet as young people in love
with each other.
Yet, if you argue that if you wish to confront reality,
you have to go beyond certain boundaries,
certainly, the rules of what constitutes perversion
are there to be broken.
I don't know many social attempts
to create perverse communities in this sense.
Maybe they're not on the record because they're
hidden like dreams.
And the consequence of fear is so great
that the notion that the more you exaggerate yourself
and your options, the more you indulge
fear because the more the society--
it's such a tense argument that I don't
know what to say more about it.
Utopia has always been a relatively gentle phenomenon.
If we see a society screwing up, let's get away,
make our own little thing.
We'll suffer.
We'll cut our meat square or we'll go to church every day
or we'll do whatever it is.
We won't have sex forever, whatever.
I'm talking as if I'm talking about religion.
There's a certain faith-based notion involved in--
I mean, take Étienne Cabet, the man whom I mentioned
in relation to Ildefons Cerda in Barcelona.
Cabet envisioned an ideal world called Altruria.
And like many others, he set out with 89 people--
89 French people-- to the United States
to build this ideal community.
He bought some land in New Orleans.
It didn't work.
He went northwards to Illinois and found
the Mormon community of Nauvoo, which
had been in which had been isolated as the Mormons trekked
through four cities on their way to Salt Lake City and Brigham
Young found the truth.
Cabet died miserably in Nauvoo.
His supporters in Barcelona wrote and said,
can we come out?
And everything was horrific.
They couldn't maintain themselves.
They didn't understand the United States.
The United States was a great place of experimentation.
Robert Owen, after making money in Manchester,
went to New Lanark in Scotland, then came to the United States
and proposed ideal square communities.
There were 41 Fourier communities
in the United States, one of which is the most interesting
of all.
There's a town in Wisconsin called Ripon.
It's near Kenosha, Wisconsin.
There was fully a community there
which objected to the fact that the United
States was slow in dealing with slavery in the 1850s.
It said, we're going to form a new political parity, which
is going to use the premise of freedom.
It formed a political party.
Which one did it form?
The Republican Party, the Republican Party in this
country was formed in a Fourier sex-free--
no, sex-plus environment.
The Ripon Society is still one of the arms
of the contemporary Republican Party.
The United States attracted other Fouriers like Victor
Considerant who built La Réunion in Fort Worth, Texas.
In fact, the USA was very much seen as a promised land.
Up to the Civil War, there 130 intentional different
communities.
1860 to 1960, 200.
Post 1960, 2,000.
OK, let's look a bit more carefully at some of these.
Any questions?
Why do these things fail?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, the Mormons didn't fail.
The Mormons haven't failed.
So I'm wrong in asserting--
I mean, I suppose I shouldn't confuse secular
with religious communities.
In a sense all religion is a utopia, promises eschatology,
afterlife--
which is a utopian notion because nobody has ever--
we don't know if anybody has ever experienced heaven or not.
Heaven is an intellectual construct
in the view from the human mind.
And the promise of eschatology, both
in all of the major religions except for Buddhism.
I don't know what Buddhism promises after death.
I have Buddhists in this class.
Let's just talk a little more about some of the--
some of these propositions.
AUDIENCE: So why did this utopia fail?
JULIAN BEINART: Which one?
AUDIENCE: These-- the question that you asked, you asked why--
JULIAN BEINART: Imagine having a--
well, first of all, the formula is wrong.
The formula is wrong because it doesn't deal with circumstances
which promote continuity.
Cabet bought some land in France from somebody
who sold him a piece of land in New Orleans.
He didn't know that New Orleans has a terrible climate
and has animals and all kinds of things.
He landed with a bunch of Frenchmen.
How the settlers, first settlers in America have survived,
God alone knows.
But Étienne Cabet then moved to--
Victor Considerant built La Réunion on his wife's money.
He exhausted her fortune and then the place collapsed.
Poor man.
My question is not, I suppose, why it failed.
My question is, what good does it
do to us even if it doesn't fail or even if it fails, sorry?
Victor Hugo writes that utopianism
is the truth of tomorrow, that you need in society people who
are going to take chances, propose alternatives
to reality.
Therefore perversion, provided it does not harm anybody--
and that's difficult to ascertain--
should be an allowable phenomenon, such as I've
often objected to the Olympic games not allowing
drugs to be taken by athletes.
Because drug taking is a normal human activity.
It depends on the severity of the drug, of course,
and obviously as a model to young people.
But in a marijuana-free society--
which is probably not intoxicating enough
to cause you physical harm--
the stretching of the boundaries of society
are probably an asset.
Therefore I would stop--
I would not want to live in a utopian settlement
myself because the very impulse that
drove that utopia is frustrated once you're in the utopia.
You cannot behave differently in a Shaker community.
You'll be thrown out the first day.
But if you went and said to Ann Lee, who herself
was a maniac who suffered six dead born children
in Manchester, if you'd knocked on the door in the morning
and said, "I think we should have scrambled eggs for lunch
today" and cut it diagonally, it's just intolerable.
It's, in fact, an antidote to its own phenomenon.
In order to survive, you have to be in a decided way.
The political dissenters like William Morris and Kropotkin
and so on wrongly placed all the blame
at the phenomenon of the agglomeration
economies of cities.
He believed that you could replace
the success of the economic and cultural success of cities
now finally celebrated by the whole world.
You must remember that it's only in recent times,
that when I studied city planning for the first time,
cities were sort of a strange sort of curious phenomenon
which people some day may be interested in.
The first book in English on the condition of the third world
city was written here at MIT as late as 1959, William--
what's-- Man's Search for Shelter in an Urbanizing World.
A man who worked in India decided to--
maybe these are some important generalizations
about the third world city as opposed
to the European American city.
So the phenomenon of urbanism and its intellectual equipment
is relatively recent.
And talking about hundreds years the 150 years ago
is not to be taken literally in relation today.
For instance, Morris--
I don't know where it is.
Yeah.
And the same with Kropotkin.
Kropotkin envisaged, as did the first [INAUDIBLE] proponents
of the--
Russian, after the Russian revolution
of the power of electricity and the electrical grid,
that this urbanist movement in Russia,
which we'll deal with after the spring vacation,
was fundamentally based on the fact
that you now had a power grid system which
expanded the possibility of location
in fundamentally different ways.
Of course, it had other problems.
I don't know what to--
I'm going to-- let's talk a little bit
about the architects, seeing as this
is a class which deals with architecture as well
as with society.
Tony Garnier's industrial city, which
he proposed as a Rome scholar at the French Academy in Rome,
he tried to get the Rome Prize for something like eight times.
Finally they gave it to him.
And they asked-- when he came to Rome, he had to--
he had to study a Roman town, Tusculum.
He confounded them all by making drawings
of a new industrial city.
The conservatism of the French Academy
wouldn't allow him to continue the work.
But he did.
When I was a Rome scholar myself and I arrived in Rome,
I went to a party--
to a reception at the French Academy
in honor of Tony Garnier, which is quite an interesting paradox
that they would celebrate the man 100 years after his life.
Garnier was a superb draftsman and believed
in architectural form.
For him what was wrong with the works in Pullman,
Illinois or in [? Bornsville, ?] or [? Port ?] [? Lever ?]
and so on, the town was always--
as you will see in the slides--
divided into a residential zone where the workers lived
and the works.
The works was where the industrial production
took place.
Tony Garnier embellished-- he did extraordinary drawings
of the works.
The works would be built of concrete.
They would be wonderful, in a wonderfully built environment.
He said all my buildings will have round corners.
The concrete will-- they will all
be built of concrete, which is a new ingredient,
a new structural ingredient.
And all the corners will be rounded off.
Instead of the residential quarters of Pullman, Illinois
where people couldn't own their houses,
he made-- and you will see the illustrations--
he made landscaped environments for houses.
He's got the interiors which looked
like Roman [? castnock ?] compounds.
What's a Roman house called?
I forget.
There's a Roman word for that.
It's not mensa, it's--
whatever.
Who speaks Roman?
Latin, anyway.
What's Latin for a house?
Casa probably.
Probably casa.
Frank Lloyd Wright cites Henry George quite frequently.
I've mentioned Henry George, his name in passing in this class.
Indeed, George was an American--
I don't know what-- economist, I suppose.
What would you say Henry George was?
An economist?
A land economist, who ultimately believed
that land had no value other than what people attributed
to it through use, that land itself
was only useful for agriculture.
Land itself had no value.
It's what human beings did with it that promoted its value.
And therefore he said--
he concocted the notion that Henry Stein and Clarence Wright
used in Radburn and Sunnyside Gardens
is that the increase in value of land
is the result of community's action,
not only individuals' action.
And therefore the agglomeration of value in land
should be assigned and assigned to the members
of the community, not to an individual.
In that sense, if you want to use the contemporary Republican
Party's definition of socialism, it's probably socialism.
But Henry George was hardly a socialist.
Frank Lloyd Wright was said to have hungry person
that he would imbibe anything that came along
and justify it by virtue of its apparent truth.
Corbusier had a different kind of philosophy.
I'll show you some of his early sketches
in which he would almost make scientific diagrams
of the three human establishments.
He would diagram which of the three human establishments are.
He would make a section through a building showing the sun.
He'd do a vector of the sun in the day in time.
In his section, he would establish the top of a building
has relationships to the sun and to heliotherapy.
Garnier put-- he's down in the Southeast of France
up against the hill.
On the top of the hill, he put the institution
of heliotherapy.
Why the French are so interested in being healthy because
of the sun, I don't know.
But it's a tradition of apparent human hygiene and human health.
Corbusier also proposes the lifting up of the city
off the ground about 15 meters.
This is to create a landscape of greenery.
Again, the Europeans always assume that big moves in cities
are made by the state.
Somehow for him the city would be made this way
by a new state, by a state, which would exist independent
of its ideology.
The first Corbusien plan is for a city of three million people,
Ville contemporaine.
Here the capitalists occupy the center of the city
and the workers drift out to the outskirts.
This, nobody wants to build this.
His second plan, the Plan Voisin,
which is a plan for part of Paris, which
removes the existing diagonal system of Paris
and replaces it with a set of teeth,
dents, those are orthogonally-shaped
continuous building environment.
His third plan, when he's asked by the Russians
after 1917 to come to Moscow and do a plan,
is a linear, system of linear--
much like the MARS Plan for London--
in which he puts housing in the center.
And that is to appeal to the new Marxism.
He's asked by the mayor of Algiers
to come to make a plan for Algiers.
The story of Corbusier in Algiers
is worth an afternoon's discussion.
Corbusier makes a whole set of plans over a number of years.
They are called the Obus plans.
Amongst his most famous was Obus A,
which has an elevated highway system running
on the coast with housing underneath it.
This is the first attempt to build housing in modern times
under a transportation system.
It turns out to be very difficult to do.
The amount of noxious material that automobiles give off
are not certainly something you want to live underneath.
However, he makes plans like that for Rio de Janeiro and Sao
Paulo, all dream plans.
So angry with the response from Algiers--
by the way, he in his plan to remove the Quartier de la
Marine, where the Battle of Algiers
was fought, the great movie, and builds those two towers facing
France, maintaining that colonial relationship
between Algiers and France, which Algerians hate.
He's so angry that he writes a letter to Mussolini
to help him.
The French government is at this time in a pro-Nazi mood,
the Vichy government, Marshal Pétain.
They appoint Corbusier as the director of some kind
of thing of government.
He writes to Marshal Pétain.
He says, please help me tell these Algerians
that they need to behave.
So he ends up writing to the fascists for help.
He goes through from capitalism to Marxism to fascism
like playing the piano to see who--
who can succumb to the right note.
For him, the built plan is--
he says it over and over again.
He wrote thousands and thousands of words in his life
amongst all these buildings.
Why don't we look at some of these illustrations?
What has happened to the commune movement?
Would it always exist and flourish depending on time?
The larger question is how propositions about alternatives
are massaged within society or are honed within society?
We have become fascinated with the word innovation.
What constitutes social innovation?
Same sex marriage laws?
Certainly, that's an invasion of a kind.
Even in Argentina, it's approved.
Our great new pope--
I don't know if this story is appropriate,
but our great new pope when he was cardinal
ran a vigorous campaign against same sex marriage
by the wife of the previous president--
horrific story.
Anyway, Catholicism is a utopian venture in a certain sense.
It prescribes the truth different from other truths.
It doesn't abide by movements in reality,
such as contraception and limited population
and so on and so on.
So we have powerful utopian forces in modern society
who've engaged in great wealth and great power
and contradict other utopian ventures as best
they can in a power game.
It's too complicated to make sense of it.
I want to make sense of it a bit better
in the second half of this class where we deal
with contemporary urbanism.
Sir Thomas More on the left, his 200 mile island.
It's amazing, the first notion, described notion of utopia
in the early 16th century should advocate social equity.
He was an interesting man, Sir Thomas More.
Sir Robert Owen, the young British philanthropist
who after the experiment in New Lanark
came to the United States, the crisis or the change
from error and misery to truth and happiness, wow.
Truth and happiness in the United States
is living in an enclosed castle with a gate.
These communities would be dotted on the Midwest
much like Broadacre City.
Next.
There you can see one of them on the left.
On the right is the best image I could find
of the decentralist's version.
The big city is gone.
Here is in our environment a non-polluting environment.
The landscape is vital and indulges farming and landscape
for beauty's sake.
Here's a river.
There's traditional methods of power.
There are new methods of power.
There's a windmill on the top, on the hill on the right.
This is the antidote to London.
This is William Morris' version of what the world would
be like if you could substitute London for it, a bad choice,
I believe.
Next.
Victor Considerant and Charles Fourier's phalanstere,
an extraordinary sensibility that this
is using the same architectural forms as used in--
under the auspices of royalty.
What is it about behaving differently
that will succeed if you put it into a palace?
There's something about this dream and fear story.
If I dream too much, I need to supply myself
with nourishment, security.
And maybe architecture of a certain kind
produces security when you dream too far.
Next.
Rue interieure on the left, pretty modest invention.
Courtland's wife made so much fuss about it.
And this on the right is the interior version
of the phalanstere called the familistere
by Jean [? Godin-- ?] next--
[INAUDIBLE] Guise in France.
Next.
And this preoccupation with the establishment
of the child's world as outside of the family, these
are children in Robert Owen and [INAUDIBLE] being
looked after by not the parents, but by trained educators.
There's something about the next generation
of people being uncontaminated by the effect
of the appearance.
The kibbutz movement in Israel went through great crisis
around the extremes of this attention
to the education of children.
Next.
The one environment which maintains the physical form
as an absolute is the Shaker movement.
This is a Shaker settlement in Hancock, Massachusetts.
On the right are just indications of the precision
of the environment.
There is no doubt as to where you hang your hat.
Everybody will wear the same hat.
Everybody will wear the same clothes.
The broom will hang in the right position next to a door.
Next.
The American scene Humphrey Noyes and his Oneida community,
also based on some version of sexuality.
The Rappites, the Bethel Rappites,
the great movement across this country.
The Mormon-- next--
the Mormon spatial program, they lay out
one square mile of territory.
Their houses will be built of stone and brick
according to the choice of the owner.
But the layout often alternates the direction of the plot line
horizontally or vertically.
There's some theory about that which I don't quite
understand myself.
Can you imagine why it would be better
to have houses facing the side of other houses?
I don't know quite.
I never quite figured this out.
But then I'm not a great reader of Mormonism.
The Mormonic communal activity in California,
here theosophist community acting out Aeschylus,
part of the Greeks' tragedy, a kind
of freer version of the Mormon program.
Next.
Fountain Grove, how can I explain this?
I can't.
It's just wonderful.
It's just a drawing for a developer, the idea of what
would attract people if they came to live
in a different environment.
Unique versus replicable plans is
the text underneath all of the [INAUDIBLE]..
I could live here, I suppose, if nobody else was there,
if I had the whole thing.
I'd have my own religion.
Next please.
Another Llano del Rio intentional community.
I think one should look at Drop City rather than these, Drop
City, which is somewhere between the counterculture
of California and cyber culture of the internet.
It's perhaps more interesting to look at than these.
Next.
Now the industrial town, [? Kronenburg, ?]
the Krupp family and Titus Salt, Titus Salt,
Saltaire on the right, distinguishing
between the works and the housing
as two separate components.
Not making use of the river as a great amenity on the left.
Titus Salt bought the Crystal Palace, but it burnt down.
Next.
Port Sunlight by the Lever brothers
taking some of the Garden City ideas of landscaping.
This looks and feels like a different kind of world
than the world of Pullman.
Next.
And a number of strange examples,
that happy colony on the left is by a man
called Pemberton in New Zealand in which
the center of the environment could be farms, model farms.
And there would be four colleges surrounding them.
God alone knows what the world of colleges and model farms
has to do with reality.
But still.
Here is another diversion on the right.
I think it's in Brazil from the 1970s.
And it has a model farm in the center
and then housing just distributed itself outwards.
What is interesting is the variation
of the circular system from the pervasive grid shown outside.
What is it about a model farm which
centers a good environment?
I suppose it's basically from an agricultural world.
Next.
You see the town of Nahalal on the left by the architect
Richard Kauffmann, 1924, I think where, again, there
is a central, a central impulse to create
a central proposition.
And radiating out from it, it's almost as
if the center is inviolate.
The center has to be held.
What's the poem by Yeats?
"The center holds true."
Some of you should know poetry.
Yeats is a great poet.
"The world falls apart, the center holds, but the--"
something distributes.
Anyway, this is almost primeval preoccupation
with centeredness.
We remember [INAUDIBLE],, this phenomenon
of the center in the pre-modern or in the archaic environment.
Here is a project by the French group called [? Commonaut. ?]
Again, the center is what is the most valuable preoccupation.
What happens around the center just drifts off.
Now [INAUDIBLE] does the same.
Next.
This is Tony Garnier.
Look at the extraordinary depiction of the works.
The works is almost more beautiful than the housing.
The river is maintained as an important production source.
The ships are managed within the realm of architecture.
The works are all along the river.
On the upper left is the housing, the linear housing.
The hill which is behind the housing
has the heliotherapy center in it.
And the communal facilities are in the black on the right.
Next.
The heliotherapy center on the right.
On the left, the all communal auditorium,
all shaped according to a particular concrete
architecture.
Next.
The house, the housing environment, this
is such a far reach from Lever or Pullman
or Krupp or people of that kind.
This is almost the interior of a Roman casa.
The workers, this Renault automobile factory worker's
wife is seen doing a toilet in this extraordinary environment.
Of course, these are dreams.
Next.
Oak Park, Frank Lloyd Wright's middle landscape.
He built 15 houses there and the Unity Church,
one of his great buildings.
Here is Broadacres, the plan of Broadacre City,
Broadacre City, which is a very small piece of the built
environment.
I think its population is something like 25,000, if that.
Here the students [INAUDIBLE] looking
at the project in Arizona.
Next.
The plan is a rather simple plan, the auditorium
and cultural facilities, a kind of environment which--
in which the landscape is a very important feature.
There are lots of facilities such as open air
stalls for selling goods.
The automobile population is not fixed,
but everybody who wants an automobile can have one.
This peculiar perspective on the right
indicates some kind of alternative movement system.
The technology of the automobile has suddenly changed
or it looks as to be changed.
Looks as though it's got telephone dialing
circular systems on the automobile and up in the air
some strange piece of technology.
Next.
Wright [INAUDIBLE] at the same time was indulging his
fantasies on the left in a project for--
I can't remember the date, probably after the Depression
years, the new Chicago life insurance National Life
Insurance Corporation and this very small town
in Bartlesville, Oklahoma for the Price family,
where as I said in a previous class,
we have the first attempt in modern times,
I think, to put offices and housing on the same floor
in a building.
Next.
Corbusier was so authoritarian in his ambit of knowledge
that he could depict the greatest human establishment,
the Ville [INAUDIBLE],, the linear city,
the agricultural community, the journey
of the sun for 24 hours.
Next.
In the drawing on the section on the left,
you have some of the key elements of his building
and also urbanism.
The high, the sun on the roof, the roof
is given to physical culture.
The center of the building is given
to the rue interieure, taken just really from Fourier,
but with no sexuality given.
[INAUDIBLE] the building itself lifted off
the ground with vigorous landscape [INAUDIBLE]..
And this is one of these great buildings in Algiers,
the [INAUDIBLE] building where there
is a semblance to the system on the left.
Next.
The first plan, a plan for three million inhabitants,
the center of which would be the office
environment for the capitalists, very primitive ideas
about vehicular transportation.
But still, it was before the Merritt Parkway was ever built.
Next.
The Voisin Plan, just allocating his nausea
for the 19th century street.
This is an absolute renunciation of what
we call the DNA of Paris.
[? Langier ?] said of making a city, make it like a forest.
There's something intrinsic in the diagonal through which
our friend [? Hartzband, ?] of course, understood.
Corbusier introduces a new form of housing,
a new control of the ground.
Who controls all the open space that is left?
These great parks, who maintains them?
Is there any question that this is an imposition which
is tested on any grounds amongst the people who
are going live there?
This is utopian in the sense that it's a free interpretation
of an alternative-- next--
without taste.
He was interested in the machine and its capacity
for creating linearity.
This is not Henry Ford's system of production,
but a system of communication.
On the lower slide on the left is his proposition
for Rio de Janeiro.
He made a similar proposition along with water--
well, not Sao Paulo is not on the water.
Sorry, this is Buenos Aires I think.
I can't remember everything, pretty.
On the right his work, his work with the [INAUDIBLE] Group,
connecting all of Europe linearly.
Next.
His Algiers proposal, the Quartier de la Marine
on the right side is replaced by two towers facing France.
The idea of inhabiting the space under.
What's going to happen to all of the elevated highways
in the world?
Just about done.
OK, next.
You can also answer the question after the spring
break when you've had time to think about it.