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JULIAN BEINART: The first sheet on the handout really--
I forgot to give it to you last time.
It's simply the argument that for every major ideology
associated with the change of a city,
there's a housing type which it generates as well.
And this is just a little sketch of some of the work
that we've done in the classes--
London, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Sunnyside Gardens,
and so on.
For those of you who are interested in architecture,
that should be a help.
There are not many cities which originated in the 19th century.
Chicago is one of them and probably the major one.
What was the population of Chicago in eighteein
[INAUDIBLE] It doesn't matter.
There were a few Indians living on a piece of land
which connects the lake to the Mississippi River.
And Chicago-- I think it'd be silly to ask you
what Chicago means.
It's an Indian name for something, wild garlic.
Many cities have an affection for nature in their names.
Bang Makok is the Village of Wild Plum in Thailand.
Mumba Devi is the godess of fishermen.
What is Boston?
Saint [INAUDIBLE] town--
Saint [INAUDIBLE] is the god of fishermen, I think.
Certainly, Boston comes from Saint [INAUDIBLE] town.
Now, the extraordinary thing about Chicago
is, compared to the cases we've done up to now--
number one, that it has no walls.
Number two, it has no royalty.
It has no invested aristocracy.
What else doesn't it have?
STUDENT: History?
[INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah.
No, you're right.
You're right, absolutely right.
The argument for Chicago has always been [INAUDIBLE] OK.
Be why we talk about these generalities.
The second page on your handout is 100 years
of building activity in Chicago done by Homer Hoyt, the man who
did the [? vector ?] theory of city form, which we dealt
with a couple of weeks ago.
This categorizes building activity in the city.
And we will go through it stage by stage.
But it's remarkable that we can depict Chicago's history
in terms of economic activity, whereas we
haven't used that as an index for any of the other cases.
Chicago is built by the private sector.
It has no city--
or such a weak and corrupt city government that everything
about Chicago in its 19th-century period,
certainly, was based on the primacy of the individual
making his own way against all odds.
Chicago is referred to as the city of wind,
not because the wind blows there but because of the hubris
of its politicians and its salesmen.
Wind refers to the air that's blown out
of the mouth when you brag.
I will go through this in more detail.
In 1848, when the railroads crossed this country
and made their major midwestern stop in Chicago
instead of St. Louis, which would
have been a more direct route, this
was all because of the bullshit of politicians.
In 1893, when the Chicago World's Fair
celebrated 400 years after Columbus,
it should have gone to St. Louis.
But it went to Chicago.
Chicago is the only city in the world which built
the first skyscrapers on sand.
It's the first city in the world and the only city
in the world which built an illegal subway system, 50
miles of illegal subway built by private development
without the city knowing.
Or if they knew, they were submerged in bribes.
I will go through all of these examples.
So we can characterize Chicago adequately
in Park and Burgess's model of a concentric universe
in which movement is outwards.
To make it in Chicago, you need to immigrate.
And the immigration zone is the inner zone of transition.
And then you make it, and you move outwards.
American cities are primarily immigrant cities, as opposed
to European cities.
And this model, plus the ethos of Chicago,
represents, in more stunning detail, this phenomenon.
I was talking about Frank Lloyd Wright and one of his clients.
His clients were new.
They were people like the man who invented the zip.
They were people willing to see technology
as a possibility for advancement.
People made enormous amounts of money just by being in Chicago.
I'll go through some of the real estate
transactions in a few minutes.
So the themes we can look at and I'll
try to give some examples of, how
the city is an economic engine.
The cycles produced through advancement and setbacks
in economics has fascinated cycle theorists
like Kondratiev and Kuznets and people of this kind.
But nobody has yet been able to perfect it.
If you perfected cycle theory, you
would be the wealthiest man in the world, I should think,
or the wealthiest women in the world.
But the free market system implies risk.
And therefore, a correct depiction
of the way Chicago is built in the free enterprise system
would suggest a diagram much like Hoyt's diagram.
Secondly, the city and nature--
there's a wonderful book by William Cronon called Nature's
Metropolis about Chicago.
It's worth reading if you have nothing else to do,
which is not likely.
But Nature's Metropolis is written
by a man who was a professor at Yale.
And he's now, I think, in Wisconsin, where he's from.
He's an environmentalist.
And he depicts the natural state of Chicago,
and its regional hinterland, and the transformations that occur.
To me, nature in Chicago was something
that could be improved upon.
As everything else could be improved
upon through [? manual ?] labor and intelligence,
so nature could be improved upon.
Nature could deal with the consequences of modernism.
I mean, Louis Sullivan, in Kindergarten Chats--
his little book, kindergarten chats--
Louis Sullivan was one of the great architects
of the late 19th century in Chicago.
He and his partner, Adler, did the transportation building
in the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
But Sullivan-- when I show you his auditorium building,
you will read in the toilets the notion that--
no, no sorry.
Forget it.
I'm mixing the ideas.
You will see in the system of decoration
an attempt to maintain an association
with natural form, much like Otto Wagner in Vienna.
These are hybrid people.
Louis Sullivan was very angry at the neoclassical system
of the Chicago World's Fair.
He said it would set back America considerably.
We'll talk about the Chicago World's Fair
later in the class.
Let's look at some of the other themes.
The distinction between the activity
of the private sector and the weakness
of the communal environment--
after the Great Fire of 1871, there were two responses.
The one was, gee whiz, what an opportunity to rebuild Chicago
anew.
The other one was, we are guilty because we blasphemed God.
Two positions expressed by optimists
It was the day after the fire.
There was a-- you will see--
a real estate booth in the ashes selling land.
You get, perhaps, the starkest interpretation
of this theme in the book The Devil in the White City by Eric
Larson, another book that you need
to know about if you want to know about Chicago.
Here, up to 200 women, young women,
are killed by a sociopath in his hotel, up to 200.
Who know whether it's 200.
Nobody ever was able to account for the number of bodies
that he either put into acid vats or burned.
These women just disappeared.
There was no police to account for who would--
27 million people visited Chicago for the six months
that the fair ran.
Women just disappeared.
The only way in which Holmes was a sociopath was discovered
was because of a private security insurance
man in Philadelphia.
A man named [? Geyer ?] started tracing
what was happening in these deaths,
in some of the deaths that were reported to him.
The Chicago city and the Chicago Police were ineffable.
So you have this extraordinary view
of the dark side of an environment at the same time
as progress is next to what Burnham called the White City
as opposed to the Dark City.
The White City with this new Chicago World's Fair.
It had its dark side as well, the [NON-ENGLISH] But the fact
that in a city as late as 1893--
in Chicago's case, it was late, it was almost a century
after it was formed, 70 years--
we could have the private sector maintaining
astounding technological process.
I will show you a diagram which compares the Ferris wheel built
by a young engineer from Pittsburgh for the Chicago
World's Fair.
For the first time, the public could
circulate above the level of a city and see it.
This was more astonishing than the Eiffel Tower four years
before and, perhaps, even more astonishing than Tatlin's
monument to the Third International.
This is the city which again defies logic
by building skyscrapers without foundation.
Well, the foundations are rafts which
float on the sand rather than columns.
There's no rock.
This is the last place in the world where you would expect
the genesis of the skyscraper.
And the first tall building--
I mean, Otis invented the elevator, the safety elevator.
Before, the elevators had been used since Roman times.
But the safety elevator means that the elevator,
if it breaks, it has the cable system which protects the fall.
The first skyscrapers, probably the--
I will get to that.
I wanted-- will detail all of these things as we go along.
The Chicago World's Fair was stolen from St. Louis.
St. Louis got the 1904 Olympic games,
the first one held in the United States and the second one
in modern times.
The first one was 1900 in Paris.
The Chicago World's Fair has a number of extraordinary things
attached to it.
The one is the building of the grandest environment ever seen
in this country.
The manufacturer's building could
house St. Peter's, St. Paul's, the pyramids,
the lot in one building.
It was massive.
It's extraordinary.
At the same time, it had a branch
or a road of 600 feet wide called the midway, where
the vulgar aspects of honkytonk American culture
could be associated with.
I'll briefly talk about the idea of the White
City, Reverend Moody's city in Pullman, Illinois.
What is a Pullman car as opposed to an ordinary railroad car?
In a Pullman car, it's business class.
There are black man dressed in black uniforms
with white gloves who carry your bags
and elevate the conventional train system.
120 trains entered near Chicago, as early as 1857, each day.
Pullman built a new town at the entrance
to the southern part of Chicago.
You pass Pullman, Illinois if you came to Chicago
for the World's Fair by train.
Pullman, like many utopianists, tried
to produce a culturally superior environment for his workers.
And lastly, we'll look at Burnham's 1909
plan and subsequent attempts to modify the girth.
OK, back to the handout.
The first peak, dated about 1830,
is the building of a transportation connector,
a canal which connects.
The hypothesis about Chicago was it
connected the world's waterways or could
connect it was waterways.
From the Atlantic, here are the lakes and a small [INAUDIBLE]
You have the widest river in the world.
This is not a trivial opening.
It never produced the effect that it
was destined in the minds of investors to produce.
There's no traffic which travels along this route.
But it was a brilliant hypothesis
which, in 1830, enabled Chicago to take off.
You can see the peak.
The first boom in 1835, land values increased by 150%
in two years.
I quote from a journalist.
"I have never seen a busier place than Chicago
at the time of my arrival.
The streets were crowded with land speculators hurrying
from one sale to another.
A negro dressed in scarlet bearing a scarlet flag
and riding a white horse with housing housing of scarlet--
oh-- was housing [INAUDIBLE] scarlet
announced the time of the sale.
At every street corner, the crowd gathered behind you."
The total land sales, according to Hoyt in Chicago,
in 1830 were $168,000.
In 1836, it was $10,500,000, over 60 times in six years.
1848, the canal was finished.
Chicago was developing as an agricultural center--
wheat, and lumber, and the beginning of manufacturing.
But it was a town, I quote, "without pavement, sidewalks,
sewers, gaslight, streetcars, or railroads."
The second boom came with the decision
to have a railroad pass through in 1848.
Our chief, ultimate importance of the canal, the lake,
traffic, and the plank woods for a plank roads
was that they gave Chicago sufficient advantage
to attract the railroad.
It was important in making Chicago a great wholesaling
and manufacturing center.
In 1836, it took 30 days to get from Chicago to New York.
In 1849, it took seven days.
In 1852, it took 36 hours.
[INAUDIBLE] the time construction
between New York and the Midwest, when being reduced,
amplified the centrality of Chicago in the Midwest.
The slump of 1857, overspeculation
in Western land, Michigan Southern stock
dropped from $88 to $9.
European demand for wheat in the 1871 Civil War
meant Chicago kept economically after.
The post-war boom of 1865 to 1871
re-established in Chicago's industrial base.
By now, it had manufactured the largest meat-packing industry
the world had ever seen using a conveyor belt system which
Henry Ford, amongst others, appreciate
and introduced into his automobile plants.
1871, The Great Fire, one of the greatest holocausts in history.
The resurrection is optimism or blame.
1878, the boom, improvement in the American economic
condition, the first steel-frame skyscrapers.
Home Insurance building, 1884.
Steel-frame [INAUDIBLE].
[INAUDIBLE] building, 1891.
16 floors.
So on and so on.
So if you're going to build the city
through private initiative, private investment,
you're going to have to deal with the cycle
of economic advancement, and boom, and depression.
Chicago managed-- you'll notice that in the European examples,
post-Engels, I spoke often about the condition of the poor.
The condition of the poor was not
an aspect of civic consciousness in the time
that I'm talking about.
If you went to Chicago, you made it.
If you didn't make it, somehow or other,
you survived, either by crime or by some other kind of device.
There was no social program.
The city didn't exist as an arbiter of human condition.
Human condition followed what the market produced.
The fire of 1871 paralleled the fire of 1666
in London similarly.
I mentioned the illegal building of a 50-mile set of tunnels
in 1914.
Earlier, the city, in 1890, had given permission
to private building owners to dig in their basements
to provide insertion of a telegraphic wire.
The telegraphic cable was soon seen
as a ruse for digging mud out of the basement of your building
and connecting it.
At times, there was a train which
carried mail and deposited goods in the basement of Carson
Pririe Scott and Montgomery Ward, the two biggest modern
department stores at the time.
It even, at times, produced ice for air conditioning.
It became transportation.
How did the city--
how did the businessmen deal with it?
By bribes, of course.
That was how all business was done, also by telling lies.
The developers claimed that they were only laying
cable for a telephone company.
They dug at night so people would not
notice the amount of dirt being smuggled away from the scene.
They found that the tunnels were almost 13 feet high.
Part of this was that two people a day
were being killed in the city by trains going
through crowded crossings.
But this is the only example in modern history,
or even in any history, of the illegitimate building
of a major infrastructure system underneath the city.
It's a wonderful story.
There's a part of me which rejoices
in the idea of building an illegal sub,
one day waking up and finding that you
have a subway system under your city nobody knew about.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]
JULIAN BEINART: No, there was no permission given.
STUDENT: But why?
JULIAN BEINART: But why what?
STUDENT: Why did [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: I think I've explained
that the city was inevitable.
The city didn't exist.
Local government was corrupt [INAUDIBLE]
Chicago is known as the Shock City.
You could get away with murder, as many people did.
The great murders in the history of Chicago are not fiction.
They're reality that have become fiction in American violence.
The fact that human beings can do extraordinary things
shouldn't surprise us.
The building of the pyramids was as extraordinary,
if not more extraordinary, investment in human labor
and guile than the illegal building of a subway system
in Chicago.
Anyway, the other advent in Chicago of significance
was the attempt to extend buildings vertically.
Chicago was hardly the place that one
would expect this to happen.
There was no rock or significant rock formation
under the center of the city.
You need at least that support system
unless you can devise an alternative, which was devised,
of floating buildings on platforms.
The Home Insurance building in 1884
was the first building built out of a steel frame.
Before that, all building was--
by the way, I forgot to mention.
In 1830s, there was a man--
and not an Indian, an American white man--
on a canoe on the Chicago River.
He invented something which transformed the building
industry of the United States.
Well, he devised a system for manufacturing wooden housing
by using a balloon-frame system instead of a post and beam.
A balloon-frame system uses two-by-fours or two-by-tens
and make them into panels which become the sides of houses,
as opposed to the historic system of erecting posts
and then spanning the space with beams.
This man revolutionized the construction of housing.
And he's little known.
He should be known more widely.
Because since then, the pervasive building
of single-family wood construction
has manifested itself as a major economic force in the United
States.
Anyway, back to the skyscraper.
Under 20 floors of height, a tall building [INAUDIBLE]
needs to worry about its own weight and, to a small extent,
about wind.
Above 20 floors, wind becomes the major factor
in the construction resistance that you provide to the wind.
These buildings are all under 20 floors.
Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a building a mile high.
What was he thinking about?
What did he have in mind?
He wasn't a foolish man.
I'm not quite sure I know, nor do I know that anybody knows.
The [INAUDIBLE] building, at that time,
would have been so outside of any technical calculation
system.
The fact that you may be able to wrap a city in one building
is interesting.
The John Hancock building in Chicago--
who knows Chicago well?
Do you know the John Hancock building?
The John Hancock building, except for industry,
has all the artifacts of a city in one building.
There's parking, shopping, offices, and housing.
Accomplishing this one in Chicago,
much later than Frank Lloyd Wright,
perhaps suggests a remodel that he had in mind
for building a Usonian utopia vertically.
Frank Lloyd Wright built a small office building in Oklahoma.
What was the uniqueness of his building,
the small building in Oklahoma?
Do you know?
It's the only office building at its time
that had offices and housing on the same floor.
Here, the separation is vertical.
I've got to watch out for the time.
It is long.
Chicago's a long and interesting convoluted story.
I'm trying to untangle it.
I'd rather leave this out, but question
as to whether land speculation in the form of a grid
is a vehicle of capitalism is arguable.
I've written, disagreeing with Mumford and Richard
[? Sennett, ?] two formidable opponents, on this premise.
Mumford, for instance, says resurgent capitalism
treats the individual lot, and the block, the street,
and the avenue as abstract units for buying and selling.
The rectangular street and block system projected indefinitely
towards the horizon was the first universal expression
of capitalistic fantasies.
Each lot being of uniform shape became a unit like a coin,
capable of ready appraisal and exchange.
Yeah, that means you can buy a piece of land in Florida
without seeing it.
I suppose that is possible.
But with the grid system reducing
the complexity of investment to a unit is all that goes on.
What about [INAUDIBLE] plan?
Here's a man who made an infinite-- the largest housing
environment in the world, history.
By using a 113-meter by 113-square-block system,
with infinite variables in it, not built, but according
to him, to his plan.
Is that a capitalism?
Is that a result of capitalism?
The other example, one of the largest buildings
of mass housing, is in Soweto in South Africa.
It's nothing to do with the market at all.
It was built by a white government enforcing its power
on--
STUDENT: Well, it actually makes me think of James C. Scott's
argument about seeing like a state,
and how states want to simplify things, and, I mean,
how capitalism uses those [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, I think he's right.
Capitalism does.
If I buy an IBM share, I'm buying one-hundred-thousandth
of its typewriters and a hundred-thousand
of its elevators and so on.
Yes.
And of course, that's understandable.
But whether-- in a city, a grid system adjacent to a river
is a good deal different from a grid
system adjacent to a mountain.
They are natural deformations.
And it's not as easy to--
what Mumford is saying is that in the case of Chicago,
there was no care given to the modulation
of the size of blocks to who developed where, and how,
and so on.
He's, in fact, saying that the free enterprise
system has invaded the spatial property of a complex city
and reduced it to barrenness.
It's an intriguing proposition, which I have--
you know, Boston doesn't have a grid system.
And there's been as much speculation in land
in Boston as there has been in Chicago.
So give me a break.
Those of you who are designers should
stop thinking in terms of the geometry of things,
in terms of simple outcomes.
STUDENT: I think that's true in the long term.
But in the short term, I know specific examples
where a community can't get a grocery store because it's
an old non-grid layout, and grocery stores only
want squares or rectangles.
And so there, you have--
it's not because of capitalism, but temporary market norms,
development norms realted to the grid.
JULIAN BEINART: What about Manhattan?
STUDENT: Yeah, It's not always true.
But it's true of some [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, I always get out
of this by saying cities are more complicated than I know.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]
JULIAN BEINART: There's a juxtaposition
between the market, and between capitalism,
and goodness of outcomes.
It's like saying the American Express introduced
the traveler's check for the first time
at the Chicago Exposition.
And there were new foods, things like fast food and so on.
Is capitalism to blame for producing these innovations?
Was capitalism to blame for--
I don't know.
I think it's-- it strikes me as being too elementary.
Richard Sennett, on the other hand, has another argument.
I don't have time to go into it.
I want to spend a few minutes on the World's Fair and then--
the World's Fair, in many respects,
was fundamental in the history of Chicago
and, perhaps, fundamental in the history of the United States.
The Crystal Palace, which is my favorite 19th-century building,
produced a slew of exhibitions in Paris.
1851, the Crystal Palace; 1855, 1868, 1889, 1900--
five exhibitions between 1855 and 1900.
They were all there to promote technology, newness, modernism,
and the market.
There was no internet, obviously.
The availability of information--
there was no telephone.
So this was almost back to Neanderthal times.
So you needed these great events.
The Crystal Palace had pieces of India
in the first part of the exhibition.
The Crystal Palace genesis found its last major output
in the 1900 Fair in Chicago, at least in Paris.
But in 1893, seven years before Paris, this enormous task
of building an environment which would be so impressive, so
capitalizing on the energy that Chicago could generate--
if Chicago could build a skyscraper-- at the time,
in 1893, there were really 20 skyscrapers in New York.
They had the big department stores.
They had mass methods of producing meat and food.
They had enormous grain towers on the water or next
to the water.
The idea of having to make something
which manifests itself--
the second problem with an exhibition
is that it only lasts a short time.
It's, of course, an enormous advantage
in that you can risk building a building which
is more likely to be thrilling and dangerous than any before.
The story of the Ferris wheel is a fantastic story.
There was a competition for a vertical element.
The Eiffel Tower, in 1889, had dramatized
the idea of an exhibition.
Let me just draw this.
Chicago faced the competition of the Eiffel Tower.
In fact, the competition which was held, produced, [INAUDIBLE]
fantastic entries.
[INAUDIBLE] wanted to build a glass umbrella covering 193
acres, four times larger than St. Peter's.
[? Proctor ?] wants to build a tower 1,150 feet high, 150 feet
higher than the Eiffel Tower.
The competition was considered a failure.
Eiffel was contacted and asked whether he would come and do
something as well.
This is a stark admission on the part of Chicago
that anybody else in the world could do better.
Somebody revived the idea of one of the entries
in the competition by this young man,
Ferris, who had proposed that you
could create a vertical system, in this case--
I don't know what its height--
a system which could do what the Eiffel Tower--
and I may as well do Tatlin's Tower.
It was never built--
that you could create an environment which moved.
36 cars-- the engineering consequences
of putting people into cars and then twisting them,
twirling them around in the air, was significant.
No wonder the Ferris wheel was considered too dangerous.
And they actually had to build a model of it.
Well, it's not a model of it.
They built it, finally, and tested it.
And to everybody's surprise, but not to Ferris' surprise,
it actually worked.
It ran and provided a view of Chicago
which people h ad never had.
The Ferris wheel was located not in the main space
of the exposition.
A significant notion about the exhibition,
it had the Court of Honor of these buildings on either side.
You came in by train, connected to the water
here through a gate, secondary buildings along here,
the idea--
at right angles to this, 600 meters--
600 feet in width.
It was something called the Midway.
The Midway was first going to be headed
by a man called [? Putnam, ?] who
was an anthropologist from Harvard University.
He was going to use this environment
to depict the human species in anthropological terms.
He was proposing building a model of a man and a woman
based on extracting images from 224 samples of Americans--
something crazy, all kinds of stuff.
For some reason or other, Burnham and these people
decided that this was going to be boring and stupid.
They brought in a man called Sol Bloom who
was a 25-year-old showman from San Francisco who had already
produced shows which brought in Egyptian women
from dances from Egypt and sold them to American audiences.
Sol Bloom projected an environment in here
which had Algerian, Egyptian, foreign
to the American population.
And the Eiffel Tower is located here, and not in here at all.
So this was the White City.
And this is the city of the--
Octavio Paz says Americans go to Mexico
to fulfill the deep recesses of depression,
something of this kind.
There is a wonderful piece, written many years ago,
called The Social Uses of the Slum,
arguing that the slum provides illegal advantages to people
who live outside it and don't pay
the costs of the existence of the slum.
So you get the idea that there are two sides to America.
There's the side of the establishment
of the symbols of power.
These buildings are bigger.
The Manufacturer's building is bigger
than anything in history.
[INAUDIBLE] is important ways of entering.
And this is just at the road, next to which
are the strangest things in the world--
not strange anthropologically, but strange entertainment-wise.
Issues of sexism and racism clouded America at the time.
1904, the first Olympic games in St. Louis,
anthropologists wanted to measure--
he wanted a day in which he wanted
to measure why Black men ran faster than white men.
The Chinese-- I could quote you from the Chicago newspapers
about the Chinese.
Just assume that America had not liberated itself.
This is premodern America.
It had not liberated itself from the crutches of--
there was a Woman's Building.
This was not the first time that a Woman's Building was built.
A Woman's Building was built in the Philadelphia exhibition
20 years before.
There's something interesting about the Woman's Building,
which was a fairly large building designed
by a 21-year-old woman.
There was a kind of competition which 13 women entered.
Only eight women had graduated from architecture schools
between '78 and '93.
They were Syracuse, [? Cooper ?] Union, MIT.
The competition was won by a 21-year-old MIT graduate called
Sophia Hayden, H-A-Y-D-E-N.
Sophia Hayden had a tough time.
She wanted to depict a modern environment for women.
The people who were paying the money in Chicago,
the ladies wanted to have a decorative interior filled
with all of the fashionable items
that women had in their lives.
Sophia Hayden suffered a breakdown.
And her story's well told in the book by [INAUDIBLE]..
On the story of Holmes, the sociopath,
you have to read the book to get the nuances of this man's guile
and how he managed to offer accommodation in his hotel
to young women visiting the fair.
If there was a black part opposite to the White City,
it would be this.
I quote from his book.
This is after the police had investigated the problem.
The earliest phase of the investigation
began when the police, holding their flickering lanterns high,
entered the hotel basement, a cavern of brick and timber
measuring 50 feet by 165 feet.
The discoveries came quickly--
a vat of acid with eight ribs and part of a skull
settled at the bottom of mounds of quicklime,
a large [INAUDIBLE] and a dissection table stained
with what seemed to be blood.
They found surgical tools and [INAUDIBLE] high-heeled shoes,
bones, 18 ribs from the torso of a child, and so on and so on.
The book is an intriguing examination
of what disasters could befell a city which
was advocating, at the same time, these kind of displays,
not only for its--
I mean, Americans had never seen anything
as ordered as in this environment in 1893.
There are stories.
There are books of reports of letters written by grandmothers
coming from Idaho or somewhere to the World's Fair, entering
the Court of Honor at night and fainting
because they'd never seen anything made by human beings
quite that way.
The other story which I think is interesting
is the story of Pullman, Illinois, the attempt
to build a new town for workers to build these new railway
cars.
It was an environment which much paternalism involved itself
in--
that is, to create an environment in which
the workers would have a higher level of culture and education
as a result of living in this town.
Pullman wouldn't allow people to purchase houses.
He believed that they would become selfish and indulgent.
He attempted to provide--
he produced the Hotel Florence in the center
with Black waiters, a multipurpose arcade containing
the town's post office, the Pullman loan.
and savings bank, the arcade theater, the library,
and others.
In fact, there is an element of the need to civilized people
according to the norms of somebody, the owner.
In Frank Lloyd Wright [INAUDIBLE]
projects [INAUDIBLE] talks about Beethoven being played
in the street or wherever.
Shakespeare, in the upper part of the arcade,
was meant to appease these workers who
couldn't have prostitutes, who weren't allowed alcohol,
and were divorced, and had to exchange the good life
as destined by Pullman, who was making
a lot of money out of them.
The workers revolted, and the National Guard
was called in in 1894, and Pullman was destroyed.
In 1909, Daniel Burnham, who was the architect and manager
of the Columbian Exposition, was asked by the City Business
Club, later become the City Planning Commission,
to make a plan for Chicago.
I will show you and discuss it when we look at the slides.
I think let's leave time for a little
looking at these illustrations.
There subsequently was a plan done by a German immigrant,
[INAUDIBLE] in 1950 to reconstruct the grid
system by cutting of some of the grids.
Maybe I didn't explain things fully enough.
Is there anything in this series of sagas, and hypotheses,
and stories, and events that intrigues you
that I haven't explained fully?
No?
OK.
Well, then, I've done a good job.
The wild garlic piece of land between the Lac des
Ilinois and the Mississippi River
is the genesis of the city of Chicago.
Its history of development is best explained
by Hoyt's analysis.
Next.
Here's the river and the first layout of blocks.
That's a view of the town in 1845.
Next.
This is after the railroad.
Next.
The fire which, again, as in London, starts with ships
and eliminates this large black area--
one of the major urban fires in history.
Next.
Through the flames and beyond, as it was and as
it is, Wells and Company.
Post-fire, a real estate agent.
Next.
Chicago kept on spreading.
This is 1893.
Next.
The [INAUDIBLE] building, I think about 20 floors
in height.
The traction system for use in the [INAUDIBLE]
in the meatpacking industry.
Next.
Some people argue that the French,
the Parisian exhibitions had to produce
all the technology which wasn't available in the city itself.
Some people argued the Chicago World's Fair
had all of these infrastructure already in existence
in the city itself.
Next.
This is the ladies toilets of the Auditorium building.
Here is a city, and this is part of Louis Sullivan's
decorative system.
a city which is rough and speeding along
has another aspect to it.
You could argue that cities should first
make money and then reculture themselves.
The first [INAUDIBLE] argued in the Third World
economic environment that first, make cities.
For instance, an alternative to [? Chandigarh ?]
was presented as a city of mud growing,
eventually, into a city of gold.
The images is that the important thing
is to establish the economic system, make it work.
And then invest in the superficial aspects
or the superior aspects of culture.
Here, in a city in which there aren't
proper streets, in which people get killed in the street,
get killed anywhere else, here is the cultural contribution.
This is what the new middle class need to enjoy.
Next.
The part of the Colombian exhibition which involved
the Court of Honor, the major buildings on the flank
and the electricity building, the [INAUDIBLE] building
[INAUDIBLE] administration, entry by train,
the base and statue of the Republic, the harbour,
and so on.
Next.
The Woman's Building, you can see the Midway Plaisance
in the distance with the Ferris wheel
in position, as opposed to the neoclassical facades
of the old part of the exhibition.
Next.
Extraordinary historical devices-- the crescent,
the arch, the isolated sculpture.
Next.
Louis Sullivan and Adler's Transportation building whilst
Sullivan rejected the neoclassicism
of this exhibition.
He nevertheless had enough attraction to it
to build this building.
The Administration building, with a dam
which is larger than the Capitol in Washington.
Next.
Sorry, I made a mistake.
This is a Woman's Building by Sophia Hayden.
In the interior of the Woman's Building,
a mixture of new electrical equipment
for the modern kitchen and half-nude women
dressed up in drapery as the other half of the woman's life.
Next.
Ferris wheel.
And you can see the Austrian village, the Algerian,
the Moorish Palace, the street of Cairo, the German village,
the Javanese village.
Next.
That's Sol Bloom, a little older than 25.
Next.
There's a kind of hybridity in looking
at the history of cities.
You could argue that almost any city in motion
will produce hybrid versions of situations.
We've had a hybrid version of the independent woman--
on the one hand, dressed up as a nude model; on the other hand,
percolating over a new toaster in the kitchen.
The same with the American psyche--
what do you go and see, the largest manufacturing building
in the world?
Or come and enjoy yourself seeing
the exotics of Cairo street?
Next.
It all ends very quickly with fires, one in the cold storage
environment, another in the Manufacturer's building.
And this whole place is ruined.
And it's back to scratch.
Next.
Pullman, Illinois, the Florence Hotel
on the right with the clock tower,
the typical plan of an industrial manufacturing town.
Next.
The Arcade, perhaps one of the earliest shopping
centers in the United States.
Next.
1894, the workers and the National militia
are called out to protect Pullman.
Next.
Burnham, on the extreme left, at the City Business Club
and his plan to create a girdle around the city, six miles out,
and to diagonalize the grid where
possible with diagonal systems, leading to a newly created
center civic promenade and a large cultural enterprise
along the waterfront and the harbor.
Next.
Originally, all the railroads would follow the same pattern,
entering the center of the city.
The park system would be greenery located
in [INAUDIBLE] system.
Next.
Burnham had large drawings of Paris.
Haussmann was a long time in advance.
But neoclassical Paris was what Burnham was using as a model.
Next.
This is the German urbanist, [INAUDIBLE]
attempt to revise the grid system
by cutting it in to different systems,
breaking it up in places, leaving it
where it is in places, instituting
a different [INAUDIBLE] in some places,
and really revamping the whole system.
He was also attracted by [INAUDIBLE]
tall office building and residential towers
as a proposition.
Next.
And the last of this is Mario Gandelsonas' book
The Urban Text, an attempt to take the grid and the river
and to reframe it, is best I can put it, as a set of steps
that you take in reconstructing the deep structure of this grid
and river into systems that look like that.
Peter [? Eisenman ?] used the system in studios at Harvard.
If we have a chance at one of the next classes,
I will show some of that work.
It's a set of--
it's based on the notion that you
can dig deeply into of an environment,
reconstruct it, and re-elementize it
in a new way, which is that.
I don't know what the hell it means.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]
JULIAN BEINART: It has no practical value.
You should look at the book The Urban Text
and decide on your own.
I'll give you my opinion.
Chicago is now considered as one of the greenest cities
in the United States.
What does that mean?
STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Sorry?
STUDENT: The green spaces are mostly private.
JULIAN BEINART: Does it matter what they are?
Certainly not as far as the environment, the air,
and pollution is concerned.
If you privatized all the roofs of buildings
and made them green, you'd have an enormous effect
on the energy output in a city.
I'll just leave-- if you want to,
I'll give you the reference to the study which
posits Chicago is the greatest city in the United States.
It's largely the greening of the roofs of buildings.
Chicago can do anything.
It's an example of a city as an artifact which
manufactures-- re-manufactures itself almost at will,
just through a kind of sense and will.
I mean, that sense of will--
STUDENT: How much of that will gets
lost once the city becomes institutionalized?
JULIAN BEINART: A lot.
You just can't bribe your way through.
No, absolutely.
Chicago as a story is a story of free will.
Anybody coming in from anywhere making it, and behaving
like an important person.
STUDENT: There's a sense of rapaciousness in the DNA
that you showed.
JULIAN BEINART: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.
The social cost of the free-sector environment was
slowly picked up as the country--
I mean, this was a pretty--
[INAUDIBLE] I was trying to think
of the percentage of Black people
in this country who still live below the poverty line.
I think [? 16%, ?] or 50% of the Black population
lived below the poverty line in 2013.
This is from William Julius Jones' work at Harvard.
And the statistics are borne out.
This country has never caught up with the capacity
to socialize poverty.
It's assumed that--
Mitt Romney is an arch example of somebody
who believes that the free market system will eventually
produce enough social benefit to take
care of the exaggerations of the market.
I don't know what else to say.
It's such a big generalization.
We'll come into it later in this class.
Certainly, the European cities, from Engels onwards, face the--
and the Communist Party never had
any leverage in this country.
The trade union movement in this country
doesn't resemble the British trade union
movement in any way at all.
The British trade union movement educates people in voting,
for instance.
The American trade union movement is--
half of the American South doesn't involve the trade union
anyway.
And that's where most of the new automobile manufacturing plants
are going.