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JULIAN BEINART: The piece that I've had handed out to you
covers the trajectory that we will follow from 1 to 7.
Let me make a comment about the formal structure
of these examples.
The grid is a universal language.
It is used in the cosmic model in Xi'an in 190 BC.
And it's used in the 1811 Manhattan extension plan.
The assumption is, if one takes this too literally,
is that the grid is a language which
can perform its function in almost any context.
That is possibly true.
In each case, it requires one to ask questions
about the nature of the grid-- its context,
its size, its manifestation, what the contemporary culture
was attempting to produce.
The commissioners who laid out the 1811 Plan for Manhattan
spoke in terms of trying to create
the most everyday environment they could.
What does every day mean to them?
They're the examples of New Amsterdam,
the Dutch settlement, and the British settlement,
which followed.
Wall Street, by the way, was the separation
between the English and Dutch settlements.
So the explanation for the centralized cosmic order
of Xi'an and the same or similar use
of a grid in Manhattan many years
later with this second set of plans or plans for grids
of many European center cities.
They're all grids, but infinitely varied
in size and dimension.
The diagram is that of a Bastide town in the southwest.
This one happens to be a town which divides the blocks up
according to a diagonal measurement.
I'll deal with that move more carefully.
The next is a diagram, a fictitious diagram,
of a Roman town showing the rectangularity which
exists around the tying of a central knot
by this subdivision of the blocks
according to a horizontal east-west line
and this north-south line, the Decumanus and the Cardo.
And the second last--
the last is an example of contemporary fascination
with linearity following the notion of machine performance.
Henry Ford who probably advocated assembly line
production more than any other industrialist in modern times
when he wanted to make his own city in Muscle
Shoals in Alabama, didn't use a linear system.
Well, maybe-- there are very few plans of Muscle Shoals.
But it was a long city which really interfaced
agriculture and industry.
Ford's notion was that America had
gone wrong in building industrialism
without agriculture.
He's postured it for Muscle Shoals, which I'll
discuss later in this class.
It's interesting.
Every person-- Henry Ford said, anybody who works for me
should spend part of his time in a garden
or in a creative agricultural performance of some kind.
The example on the second to last page,
Southwest Washington in plan, and our first notion
that the city should be made up over time by points of interest
based on the topography and on a diagonalized system
of connection was opposed by Jefferson.
Jefferson made an earlier plan which
is very difficult to decipher but is
longitudinal and rectangular.
L'Enfant is quoted here as saying, how boring a grid plan
is.
"Grid plans are tiresome and insipid, however, answerable
they may appear on paper or seducing
as they may be on first aspect to the eyes,"
compared to Alexandria in 77, which
was a rectangular plan, which was
occupied right from the beginning
and worked subsequently very well.
So one of the aspects of the machine model,
which this seems to suggest, is that it has
a very high speed of return.
You can have a plan in an extreme situation, which
requires a minimal amount of surveying.
It has a high aspect of legibility.
According to Gestalt's theorist of urban form,
they would say that it's because there is only one angle
in a right angle intersection.
Any other intersection involves more than one angle.
And the basic fundamental law of visual economy,
would suggest that you would prefer the security
of the right angle.
That is a linguistic assumption.
And it's probably got a meta truth associated with it.
It's not the only reason that this grid form
appears in the machine model.
The cosmic model, which we discussed last time,
put forward the ideal of a crystalline city,
stable and hierarchical, a magical microcosmos
in which each part was fused into a perfectly ordered whole.
If it changed at all, it did so only in this mechanical--
not in mechanical-- rhythmical, ordered,
completely unchanging way.
Thinking of the city as a practical machine on their own
is an utterly different conception.
A machine also has permanent parts,
but the parts move and move each other.
The machine can change, although it does so
in some clearly predictable way.
Stability is inherent in the parts, not necessarily
in the whole.
A whole grows by addition.
The wider meaning is simply the sum of its parts.
It can be taken apart, put together in reverse.
Its pieces can be replaced.
It is factual, functional, cool, not magical at all.
This is a very basic statement, that you can arm machine
with magical properties is perfectly
possible for the human brain.
We will see in the later examples
where, in fact, this is an aspect of the machine model
which appears much later.
In its earliest times, it's very pure.
The machine model occurs historically most often
when its settlements are temporary, secondly when
they have to be built in haste or being
built for clear, limited practical aims.
The expansion of Manhattan North of Houston Street
invoked no magical properties.
When the Rockefellers intervened and built Rockefeller Center,
there was some sense they did so partly, historians claim,
to maintain the hegemony over that part of Manhattan
where their house was.
Rockefeller Center can be seen to fit
into the overall machine-like system of Manhattan,
yet on its own it evokes larger cultural invocation.
We'll talk more about that as we talk later on in this class
about some of this.
I said, it's most useful in temporary situations
when the environment is built in haste,
when it's built for clear of limited practical purposes.
But it's also used to allocate land and resources quickly.
There's a kind of built-in idea of equal distribution in mind
as well.
You'll recall Marx's comment which
I made at the beginning of the class
about the emerging distinction between country and city.
What emerges as urbanization occurs
is increasing gap in land value between anything
that's urbanized and anything that ruralized.
To pay back the enormous investment in labor,
the Romans, for instance, paid back
veterans who served in the army by land.
It needed to subdivide the land in an equitable fashion.
The word in English "lot," it refers to a plot of land
has the same root as the word lottery.
The lottery was used quite extensively
in this equalization.
So the machine model becomes a checkerboard in some sense
in which you can give people the promise of land value,
but you cannot exactly initiate a central point.
There may be a central point the crossing of the Cardo
and Decumanus, but that would be reserved for the Roman Forum,
not for private land.
In the Laws of the Indies, Los Angeles,
the last of the Laws of in the Indies cities in the United
States, the Central Plaza was 200 by 400 feet.
And then the grid spread out from that.
So this notion of a democratic distribution of urban land
is fundamentally in the process of urbanizing at low cost--
conditional low cost.
The cosmic model required enormous investments
in defense.
The first set of examples we look at are the Egyptian slave
quarters built to promote the eternal life
of the pharaonic cult. For reasons
which are rather obscure, Egypt was not accompanied.
Egypt's development from 3,000 BC onwards
didn't involve internecine warfare,
which meant that no investment need to be made
in wars to defend a local site.
Once you invest in the local site
and pay for the cost of fortification, you don't move.
Cairo was a much later phenomenon.
In the 3,000 years until about 600 BC,
there were no cities in Egypt.
Thebes and Memphis were only temporary cities.
They were built to enable the construction of the metamorph--
not metamorphosis-- the metaphysical structures
for the post-life of the pharaoh.
It took so much human labor to build
one of these cosmic structures that the idea of labor and cost
and materials didn't go into anything which we would
describe as a normal city.
It went instead into the business
of construction and the environment for the afterlife.
Yet that piece of the pharaonic complex,
which housed the laborers, were based on a per striga
system of block development, which
we'll show you in the slide.
But--
AUDIENCE: I have a question there.
JULIAN BEINART: Yes.
AUDIENCE: If I wanted to make of these cities
the amount of resources that you have invested,
both in time and effort, that cements
the population [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Sure, sure.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE],, how does it work in cities like--
I'm thinking of Teotihuacan in Mexico,
Fatehpur Sikri in India, that for this vast complex
that eventually they--
JULIAN BEINART: Both of them disappeared.
Fatehpur Sikri disappeared because
of a fundamental problem of water, a miscalculation
of the amount of salt in the water,
which caused the city to be--
prior to modern times few cities have disappeared.
Fatehpur Sikri is one of them.
Teotihuacan under Mexican rule became a tourist artifact.
The Aztec religion was no more fundamental
after the Spanish hegemony.
So it lost its fundamental purpose.
We don't lose citizens easily anymore.
And that is an argument will come about later in this class.
But bear in it mind, the death of cities
is really a phenomenon of pre-modern times.
And both examples you give, in the one
lost its fundamental mechanical system.
Salty water is no longer the basis for a wonderful town
that Fatehpur Sikri was.
And Teotihuacan didn't have an adaptive mechanism
to sustain its growth.
It was no reason for it to grow.
Tenochtitlan, on the other hand, had all of the capacity
as a capital city on the lake.
The combination of the mysterious quality
of the original-- of the landing of the eagle
in the center of the cosmos.
That was taken over as an astronomic-- anyway,
we'll talk more about this.
You raised an interesting argument.
According to the fifth century Greek historian Herodotus
told--
I don't know how he knew this, but 100,000 men
were engaged for three months each year
for 20 years in moving blocks of stone to a pharaonic site.
He claims that there must have been
something like 4,000 workers which
had to be housed permanently.
So Leonard Woolley the archaeologist
writing about Tell el-Amarna describes the housing
as monotonously alike, each with its kitchen parlor in front,
its cupboards and bedrooms behind,
the very patina of mechanically devised industrial building.
Same arguments made by other archaeologists.
The distinction between enslavement of labor and cultic
objectives is characteristic of this Egyptian phenomenon.
A more elaborate system of using the machine model
takes place in Hellenistic towns.
In colonial situations, it's very unlikely
that the mother city will be replicated
in the colonial system.
Delhi is not like London.
The Laws of the Indies towns, Bogota, is not like Madrid.
Athens had its own unique structure.
It was an Iraqi site.
It had limited agricultural resources.
And it needed to expand as part of its Mediterranean expansion
to the south to Africa, to the east to Asia Minor,
and to the west eventually to Sicily and to Southern Italy.
The building of colonial empire took
place not because of the advantages of the mother city.
In fact, fifth century democracy in Athens
is unlikely to have been spread.
There's one theory that says the Greek islands
or the Greek colonial sites--
not islands-- were the result of the expansion of democracy.
Democracy only occurred in the first century BC.
The colonial expansion of the Greeks
prior to that, the most important
of the colonial towns, the grid-like towns,
was built in 479 by the planner Hippodamus, who had a stutter,
he had long hair, and had interesting political theories.
He discovered the method of dividing cities
and cut up Pireas.
He's also known by some historians
as the inventor of the gridiron and the father
of town planning.
Hippodamus, 479, Miletus-- this was the first time
that a town was considered as a totality in a certain sense.
All the parts of the town were in place,
except perhaps for industry.
One doesn't know from archaeology
how much industry took place in these colonial times.
They were essentially trading towns.
Mumford argues that the grid serves
as a method for making form of clarity of international trade.
There's something to be said for having
a recognizable or legible environment as you
move into new environments.
You put your stamp on a place.
It's almost like building a Hilton Hotel, which hardly
serves to emulate the environment
or to affect the environment.
But Mumford's argument is that modern trade requires
a standardization of commodity.
He later on, in talking about American grid of expediency,
refers to capitalism and the grid of expediency
as phenomenally correct and absolutely connected.
Whether this is true, we will discuss
as we go through this class.
There's no absolute connection between capitalist theory
and grid phenomena.
I'll speak to this point a bit later in this class.
The other towns of distinction were
Olynthus in the Northern Greek peninsula.
Oh no, it's not on the peninsula-- it's
further north, north of Athens.
And Priene, 300 BC.
All of these involve the same phenomena
shaped within the grid.
And agora, a wall, a wall didn't conform
to the grid-like system.
These towns were built on defensible sites
so that the wall system was informal and took account
of the minimum ways of building infrastructure on sloping land.
The British architect Peter Smithson in a talk on the BBC
once argued against the classical vocabulary of Greece.
He of course, is an architect who
very interested in informalism.
And he argued that one should really
look at the Greek fortifications as a structure for one's
intellectual heritage rather than the classical system
of the Greeks.
Cartilaginous whether he's right or wrong, and he won't tell us.
There is no central axis made by the intersection of major axis.
The agora was at the center.
The grid was exemplified, again, as a grid of absolute equality.
These towns have had lives beyond the Greek time.
They were taken by Hellenism, by Romans, and most of them
disappeared.
They couldn't withstand-- the requirements have changed.
Greece was replaced as a power in the Mediterranean
and [INAUDIBLE] disappeared.
But I have referred to Mumford.
He says, I quote, "a new regularity and system
in commercial affairs causes a formal order
that when you are faced with the presence of a hill or curved
bay, there's no effort to adaptation
for change of pattern."
A similar phenomenon occurs in the Roman Empire.
I'm just going through these things
very quickly because we're limited in time.
Each of these examples has a literature available.
If any of you want to follow the particular literature involved,
just send me an email and I'll send you the references.
It's impossible in a class like this to go into the details
more than the general description.
You have to assume that the generalizations are correct.
It's my fault if they wrong.
Built cities in an empire--
there was no empire to the extent in the world's history
prior to the Roman Empire, not in scale.
The Romans built something like 5,627 towns.
Towns were often at the intersection
of important points.
Her empire stretched from Scotland to Slovakia
to the Middle East to North Africa.
Again, some of the same phenomena occurred.
Timgad, the great Roman town in North Africa,
is a town for veterans.
It's subdivided into equal blocks
to repay veterans for service.
There are two characteristics of a Roman town.
Again, the same phenomenon of the commercial order,
of an international commercial order,
creating the logic for formal order or local formal order.
Germanicus, the Roman, general says,
"I can feel I'm still in Rome if I
journey from London or the beginning of London, Londinium,
to Rome."
The poet Rutilius Namatianus says, "a city of the far flung
Earth you have made."
So there are two compunctions in the Roman city.
The one is to create a locus, a place of significance,
much like a camp.
For that already the connections to the space outside
of the town is made by emphasizing the Cardo
and Decumanus system.
We have the Greek town, much like the magical town
before it.
It was an isolated phenomenon sitting
on often very complex territory, and building a wall which
fitted the territory's form.
And although there may be a port here, as in the case of Priene,
there was no attempt to connect this to anything else.
There was no empire large enough.
The Roman town was an empire town.
The Cardo and Decumanus centralized in a forum
and was an version of an encampment which
could be built anywhere.
It's the basis of London, it's the basis of Paris,
it's the basis of Bratislava, it's
the basis of 5,000 settlements.
That's A. And we call this castrametation,
a nominal phenomenon.
That is to logically extend the marking of the territory
outside the town.
This is called centuriation.
Sorry, you can't read my handwriting-- castrametation,
centuriation.
That is the measuring of land outside the town by a surveying
technique using a gromaticus, a manual on utility
needs how to lay out parcels of land.
These were both used for agricultural purposes
and also as payment for service.
So the hermetic quality of the Greek colonial settlement
is quite different in spirit.
Every crossing was a town.
The notion of being the center of a empire
is different than the metaphysics of being
the center of the Earth.
The one is provable, the one is not provable.
The one is metaphysical, as in the cosmic model.
You'll remember my quoting Vassiliadis
regarding the centeredness of the archaic world.
The centeredness here is the linking.
Of course, the center of Rome, with all its fora
and magnificence, was the center of a fundamental system
of financial distribution.
The Roman Empire was built on physicality.
That is, on the learning how to tax people locally, and then
feed the money back into a central place.
This is the first model of colonial enterprise.
You find some wonderful reactions to it.
Bellini's opera Norma-- has anybody seen Norma?
You should see Norma.
Norma is the story of the Roman occupation
of the capital city of Gaul.
And Norma is the local woman who leads
the revolt against the Romans.
She of course falls in love with a Roman lieutenant.
And both of them disappear into the God only knows what.
Or if you want another invocation of the Roman city,
read Shakespeare's play Coriolanus.
Coriolanus is a bad Roman and he suffers on his attempt
to return to Rome to his mother center,
but fails in his attempt.
OK, there's a lot to be said about the Romans.
The territory subdivided by the gromaticus is generally 6 by 6,
or 36 units.
And this is the circumference of land
plowed by one ox in one day.
I'm wanting to go through this very quickly because we
have to look at some images and there's no point.
I'm only trying to make a central an argument as I
can about each case.
One of the arguments I'm not making
is the influence of materials.
The Romans were the first people to invent concrete.
And the public quality of the Roman city
is ascribed to the availability of concrete.
For those of you interested, there's
is a piece by an MIT Professor, Heather Lechtman
called Roman Concrete and the Roman Architecture Revolution.
She argues that hydraulic setting cement
was an attractive ceramic medium for a period buildings.
These could be processed at ambient temperatures
from readily available raw ingredients
and cast into large, designated spaces.
It produced integral monolithic structures,
which could be incrementally extended.
The Greeks had to meet in the open space.
The Jews still meet in the open space
up against the Western Wall against the remnants
of Herod's Temple.
The Romans for the first time made
it possible to enclose space and convert the spaces
is no larger than about six feet enormities corridor
is a very concrete phenomenon.
The Pantheon is an example.
But Lechtman doesn't only refer to the Pantheon.
She refers to the aqueducts, to the whole system
of building public buildings at the scale that they did.
The Greeks weren't great builders.
They were aesthetes.
There's a thesis last year by Daniele Cappelletti who argues
that the Romans enabled the beginning of what he called
[INAUDIBLE] architecture--
that is, the interior of buildings.
The Greeks weren't interested in interiors--
they were exterior, externalizers.
A plan of the agora doesn't follow any access.
It's a jumble of things, much like the Mayan town.
If you devote yourself to creating buildings which only
makes sense given the exterior, what they can see
or how they can be seen, you can deviate from the model
that the Romans used.
The post-Roman period, we call the Middle Ages.
In my learning of history, these were the Dark Ages.
Nothing happened-- the world only
emerged after a period of immense turmoil in Europe.
There's been recent history done on this period from 300 to 900
AD, from 400 to 880 AD, to mention two new books.
There's not too much to be said.
The Roman system was localized in every respect.
Large families and the church took over sites
from Roman camps.
The fiscal system-- there wasn't a centralized economy funding
taxation into Rome, so each set up
a competitive system for towns.
One of the things that the Roman roads did
was to allow the subsequent cultures to use the system
of moving large distances.
The Christian Church took advantage of this.
In the story of [INAUDIBLE] what's the town in the--
my mind has slipped--
the town I wrote about in the first reading?
It's [INAUDIBLE] one of the saintly cities in Northern
Spain, [INAUDIBLE] named--
AUDIENCE: Compostela
JULIAN BEINART: Compostela.
Of course, it's named after James.
It's got the same name as San Diego and all of the-- sorry,
I try to remember too much.
Pilgrimage was made possible by virtue of the Roman roads,
so was in medieval connections in commerce.
A pilgrim could come to Compostela from Bulgaria,
walk or take a donkey, move through France
where they would stay in religious hostels,
eat Coquilles Saint-Jacques, which
is the food which emanates from Compostela, because Compostela
is a signature in the scallop, much like shell petroleum.
It adopted the scallop as its important logo.
I think the first post-medieval notion
of the machine-like phenomenon occurs
with the expansion in the 13th century
of the French Bastide towns.
Bastides is B-A-S-T-I-D-E-S. In the 13th century,
the Central Royal Authority built something like 177 new
towns in the French territory in the south.
Between 1241 and 1330, you have towns
like Carcassonne, Beauvais, Montpensier, [INAUDIBLE]..
These settlers who were asked to come and populate these towns
were there because of the French authority's wish
to propose to defend, imposed their will
on the distant parts of the empire.
They also developed as markets centers.
A grid of convenience, the quickest
and most equitable way of laying out a town on a new site.
The form of these towns is also grid-like.
The plan differs in some fundamental respects.
The plan is a formal order which is generally orthogonal.
But the plan, it doesn't follow the Roman preoccupation
with a single axis.
It pairs roads.
This is the central square.
And where the road passes through the central square,
it is arcaded.
The church is generally located on a side site.
These sites was subdivided in grid fashion.
There's a gate here, a gate here, there's a gate here,
and there's a gate here.
And the same impulse to make it attractive for people
to migrate, to pay them for the effort of migration, the state
takes on the role of building the walls, and so on.
Has any of you been to a town like this?
Which town do you remember?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: Well, Montpensier
is probably the best known.
It has the most developed system of arcades.
If you have any chance to visit Montpensier, do so.
The wine is good.
The arcades are called cornier.
And the subdivision of the land is
called in French it's referred to as checkers.
And popular game checkers has similar notation,
formal notation, as the layout of the town.
By the way, Winston Churchill's house
was named Checkers as well.
Haven't the faintest idea why, but it's amusing.
The largest decentralization after the Roman
occurs in the Spanish occupation of Latin America
and the southern part of the United States.
This is about a crude a generalization as one
could make, but I'll try.
In 1494, the Meridian of Tordesillas
is divided Latin America into Portuguese domain
and the Spanish domain.
The Laws of the Indies applies to this domain here
and also to this domain here, which was part
of South America at the time.
We'll talk about the grid of expediency here
and the cattaneo model here.
C-A-T-T-A-N-E-O-- New Haven, Savannah, Charleston.
Let's makes generalizations about them.
In 1573, Philip II, understanding
the military, religious, and financial availability of land
in the hinterland of the Americas,
created an argument or set of principles on which towns
would be laid out.
These are called in English the Laws of the Indies.
They describe the way you are set of rules which specify--
I'd better hurry-- the size of the individual components
of the town.
The main plaza was to be oriented
so its four corners pointed to the four
cardinal points of a compass.
It shall not be smaller than 200 feet wide
and 300 feet long, no larger than 800 feet long, and so on.
It had a formal message to convey
to the Indians who located around where the new settlement
tool place.
"When the Indians see them, they will be filled with wonder."
That is the church.
The Indians should not be let into this town
until the church is finished.
The church architecture represents the formal attribute
of colonial superiority.
The Indians must understand that they have been conquered
by a superior race, therefore the church,
which is to the Spanish the highest
form of contact with God and the only formal attribute
that we have other than behavior and ritual,
becomes the temple of the Roman town, at least
to the Laws of the Indies town.
St. Augustine, Florida was the first application
of the Laws of the Indies in 1565.
Los Angeles was the last of the Spanish settlements, 1781.
So the period of this 1565 to 1781
takes care of many of the towns, St. Augustine.
The Anglo-American grid, which is the grid of experience
to the North, overlaps with the Laws of the Indies grid
in towns like Albuquerque.
If you want to look further into how this structure works
when the two collide, I'll give you the reference.
It's a piece written by an ex-student
from this class published a number of years ago.
The Portuguese Empire was left to develop
according to a pattern different from the Spanish towns.
The Portuguese Empire was casual.
It really spent most of its presence
in the Iberian Peninsula looking outwards and being
dramatic, reoriented, and conquering the sea routes.
Sao Paulo, which is now one of the world's largest cities,
one of the few 20 million-person cities,
has its origin in nothing more than three
different religious sects forming the town on a hill
away from the water.
Sao Paulo should have been on the water.
These people made a mistake, and in competition
with each other set up three points of growth
in central Sao Paulo.
AUDIENCE: How do the Law of Indies
apply to a city like Mexico City,
because it was actually kind of established.
JULIAN BEINART: It adapted.
Most of these generalizations and rules
are systems of order which have to compete with the existing
structure.
The Greek town, had it been in the desert,
would have been paid less attention to it.
The Egyptian town, being on the flat land,
didn't deal with topography.
The story of Mexico is a long story,
and I haven't got time unfortunately to--
maybe I can send you an email about it.
But the story of Mexico City.
Where are you from.
AUDIENCE: I'm from Mexico.
JULIAN BEINART: Where?
AUDIENCE: So I know the story of Mexico.
What I'm trying to understand is how
it deviated from one standardized town
the photos and another.
JULIAN BEINART: It followed it as best it could.
One needs to look at Bogota or Quito
to find much more pure example--
I'm sure both Bogota and Quito are much purer
examples of building new towns on the basis
of little competition.
Mexico City was unusual.
Most of the Laws of the Indies towns were new towns.
OK, let's jump.
The amount of time left for discussing
the influences on the laying out of most of Central--
not Central America, Central and North America--
can be found in books by John Rep's Town Planning
in Frontier America, a number of texts.
One of the best that I would refer to is Conzen's writing.
The reference isn't in this class,
it's for class number 24.
Conzen, a British geographer, has
written very excellent stuff.
Essentially the components of the grid of expediency
are the following--
number 1, the Land Ordinance of 1785
which divided the unbuilt parts of the United States,
first only part of it, then finally
most of the United States, into a grid of 6 by 6 miles.
Local authorities or local towns could then
subdivide within this grid.
Most of the subdivision was taken care of by two forces,
either private development, which subdivided length
into smaller units, or the railroad companies which
merged [INAUDIBLE] develop [INAUDIBLE] profits
hand-in-hand.
The standard plan used by railroads for 33 towns
developed by one group alone in Illinois.
There was another force at work, and that
was the movement of religious groups such as the Mormons
across this country.
There were Mormons starting in 1913 up in New York.
They moved to a Kirkland, Ohio, they were pushed out of there.
They move to Missouri, the revelation
that this is the new place.
They moved out of there.
They went to Nauvoo in Illinois and spent the winter quarters
in 1847 in Nebraska.
And finally in 1847, after a journey of 17 years,
Brigham Young said, this is the place
and he developed Salt Lake City.
Salt Lake City is a grid city, which has a set of micro-rules
about street--
which lots can be facing the streets, and so on.
I'll talk about that later.
Two people who've argued about the grid of expediency--
Lewis Mumford has called urban land
becoming a mere commodity by the parceling of land
a quick conversion of farmstead into real estate
and a quick sale.
Richard Sennett has written in the Conscience of the Eye
about the Protestant ethic of being
satisfied with what he calls the Protestant ethic of space.
"Here is where the good found its place.
It was a space for economic competition
to be played upon like a chessboard.
It was a space of neutrality, and neutrality achieved
by denying to the environment any value of its own."
This attempt to argue in this way
argues that, if I buy any IBM share,
I buy a piece of its typewriters--
I don't know if they still makes them--
a piece of real estate, a piece of its land.
My $5 share, or $47 share, is a commodity
as a reduction of a large complex whole.
The argument is that the city is a complex whole.
And reducing it to a commodity by gridding it
takes no account of the essential qualities of a city.
There's a kind of cosmic memory associated with his critique.
How capitalism developed Boston with no grid
is, of course, a question I would ask Richard Sennett
or Lewis Mumford.
Not all American cities were like Chicago.
The cattaneo of cities on the East Coast,
I have got time to--
but they essentially are best described
by the Plan of Savannah, written very elegantly in an analysis
by Stanford Anderson, who's a Professor in the Department
of Architecture.
It essentially takes the grid plan
and centers it into neighborhoods
with parks in the center.
It divides the road system into wider roads
which run north-south.
Why do the roads in Manhattan are wider, 100 feet wide,
going north-south, and 50 feet wide going east-west?
What are the roads connecting in the Rome sense?
Docks, water traffic on either side of the island.
So the east-west street should have been wider
than the north-south street.
The north-south are avenues.
Why?
Let's try to answer that question
in talking about the 1811 Plan.
The 1811 Plan was no cosmic plan.
According to Roy Strickland's writing,
it simply adapted the measurements
of the British settlement, which took
over the Dutch original 1623 settlement.
There was a wonderful exhibition of the 1811 Plan in New York
last year.
I don't know if any of you saw it.
Did you see it?
Pretty.
It says more than I can possibly say.
In the commissioner's report, it says,
"we could not bear in mind that a city is
to compose principally of the habitations of men,
and that straight-sided and right-angled houses
are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in,
effective these plain and simple reflections are decisive."
So here we have a plan which many people have commented on,
a plan which is allowed enormous subdivisional specialization,
a plan which has allowed the southern sector to grow
as a financial center.
A central part is a part for department stores,
the combination of housing and offices
and commerce in the rest of the plan.
Essentially, it's a plan which [INAUDIBLE] has correctly
written about as delirious.
One of the advantages of a free system.
There have been rules about building a Manhattan ever
since, the protection of the sidewalks--
the height at which buildings get
build, and so on, over time.
But the central grid has remained.
It is fundamental to the grid system of New York
that Central Park connects east and west.
The grid system is the fundamental flexibility
phenomenon of Manhattan.
And it coupled with the combination
of income and density produces a unique situation
which we will examine more carefully later in this class.
But could Manhattan be developed on a different principle
than a grid?
That's asking a big question.
We'd have to do different plans for that
and try to assemble the conjecture that follows.
We're not doing it, and it's ridiculous to do it.
The lessons from Manhattan are to be
learned by virtue of reading the original plan
and studying the attempts to modify it.
It like many-- how are we doing?
Two minutes-- like many city plans,
is in a constant state of adaptation.
The Second Avenue Subway is the last
of the most recent of the distortions of--
not the distortions, that adaptations
to the plan, the attempt to--
Rowe Price Manhattan failed, it's probably
likely to occur at sometime.
The impossibility of connecting the hinterland to the center
is evidenced by the fact that New York, one
of the primary commercial cities of the world,
has the worst international airport system of any city
competitively.
It's only the arrogance of New York
that let's it get away with having a second rate airport
system.
Those of who have experienced LaGuardia and Kennedy and New
Jersey and have been to great, new airports
can argue for yourselves the distinction.
Carnegie Hall is one of the most uncomfortable places
to listen to great music.
Again, New York gets away through a kind
of economic arrogance.
The theory, which is highly personal to me, that is,
if you develop enough economic strength,
you need not follow it by making everything of the highest
order.
It's a stupid phenomenon, but maybe it's true.
It's only in China, which has new wealth, that people
can build new airports.
It's of course not totally true.
But one of the major concerns about the additive quality
of the Chinese city is that it is a city of addition
and has lost any of the attributes of the cosmos
or even the Roman camp.
We will go into that some more.
The last group of slides will deal
with the evocation of linearity and more modern concepts
of the use of the idea of the machine.
So why don't we look at them, otherwise we will just go on.
This is a long class.
This is an enormous amount of stuff.
I don't apologize for these first three classes.
Most you haven't done enough urban history.
Here are two examples.
The one on the right is from Tell el-Armana.
The one on the left is from Kahun 2460 BC and 320 BC.
Next.
This is the town of Tell el-Amarna
on the east side of the Nile built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten
and occupied for only 40 years.
He had a religious argument with the priest in Thebes
and went across the Nile to build his new town.
The yellow in the plan refers to the workers lair.
There's another story, which I haven't got time
much to go into that.
In Freud's writing about Moses, the book
is called Moses and Monotheism, he
talks about the connection between pharaonic Egypt
and the emergence of Palestine, the sum notion
that this land for Jerusalem is taken from the Dead Sea
Scrolls.
The sum notion that there was some connection passing
on information from the Jevasites,
the first occupiers of Jerusalem, or one of the first,
and the Egyptians.
Next.
The Greek town, Miletus--
Miletus, you can see the structure
of the containing wall.
The orange and darker colors of the imposition of the Romans
on top of the Greek plan.
Next.
OK, Priene, the main axes roads--
again north-south with minor roads east-west,
and the central agora complex and temple complex
and part of the central parts of the town.
The Roman road system, an extraordinary phenomenon.
Just imagine at the birth of Christ
or a couple of hundred years afterwards
that there'd be an empire built as significantly
connected as this.
This gives some indication of the location of the Roman
towns--
5,627 according to one authority.
Next.
castrametation, the idea of the town
as being cemented by two connecting roads,
a fortification around the outskirts,
and the notion of a gridded system outside.
It takes an enormous amount of thought
to imagine a town which has a fortification having
a counterpart formal order outside the town.
That is unique to the Romans.
They were so conscious of the clarity of the empire
that they could imagine making the land--
again, the land as opposed to the city in marks, the land
as a friend of the city.
Next.
Here is the 6 by 6 system of land subdivision
for an ox which can perambulate in one day
the layout made by a [INAUDIBLE] at the hands of a gromaticus.
Here near [INAUDIBLE] in Central Italy,
you can see some of the effects even today of the length
of the centuriation pattern.
The city is only in existence in its relationship
to this space outside it as it is condensed in its interior.
It's a phenomenal idea.
It's an idea which American cities have not,
or modern cities, have not understood completely.
Next.
Timgad, the great Roman city for veterans on North Africa.
The Cardo and Decumanus here are shortened
because of the location of the forum and the amphitheater.
Next.
Two plans-- Verona on the right and the first attempt
in a relatively Renaissance plan of Florence based on attempts
to introduce a local taxation system
and still respecting the Roman grid.
Next.
The southwest of France--
the Bastide town, a pair of towns.
The cornier in the center, the church on the side.
Next.
[SPEAKING FRENCH] Here you see something interesting
geometrically.
The blocks as they go further from the center
have the horizontal length based on the diagonal
of the previous.
So the blocks get bigger as you go out.
It's a geometric trick.
Here it is.
Next.
[INAUDIBLE] the great town on the Mediterranean,
clearly in prismatic.
This served is one of the launching
points for many crusades to Christianize Jerusalem.
And here's [INAUDIBLE] one of the roads running
through the central plaza, a cornier
system of creating a greater pedestrian
opportunity in the center.
It's like building a permanent arcade around the center.
Next.
Here's the Meridian of Tordesillas--
the Spanish world and the North American world.
Here's a typical Laws of the Indies town.
I think it's Caracas central plaza.
Next.
In contrast, the development of the typical Portuguese town,
as you can see from its early stages,
has developed long strips.
Next.
Again, this is-- thank you.
This is a thesis done on examining the Laws
of the Indies in detail.
It's a thesis here at MIT by Guillermo Frontado.
He looks at the streets at the plazas
and interprets the laws in formal terms--
what distances they occupy, what sections they produce,
and so on.
Next.
So here is the subsequent development
of two central capital Latin American cities based
on the Laws of the Indies.
Here are the major churches on the central plaza.
Here you see the adaptation of the central plaza
theme in subsequent decentralized plazas.
Next.
Subdivision of the 6 by 6 mile 1785 system.
Next.
Salt Lake City, Harrington, Kansas--
built the railway company.
Next.
Chicago, which we'll deal with in some detail later on.
And Burnham's Plan 1907, 1905 Plan
to centralize the grid of Chicago.
It's an extraordinary plan, diagonalizing
the grid towards the center.
It's kind of attempt cosmetize Chicago.
Next.
1811 Plan.
Again, this is out of focus.
Now, why then change this.
The story of Central Park is another story.
Next.
The inevitable connections of the east and west,
maintaining the grid, while still producing
a major public garden.
Next.
The cattaneo model-- that is, dispersing open space
throughout the system and having different widths of roads
is part of the system.
Next.
Savannah, Georgia-- still a marvelous town,
and a town which resisted here.
There's a book called the Night of Garden.
What's the book?
Anybody know the book?
Which talks about Savannah's decision
not to take large companies, like insurance companies
as headquarters because of their attempt
to keep the local system.
Next.
And a few of the modern examples.
This is Soria y Mata, the Spaniard's plan
for linearizing the outskirts of Madrid, a linear model being
a very popular model, taken essentially
from a mass fabrication system.
Next.
[INAUDIBLE] the affirming steed, the magnificent steed,
the superb steed.
The engine of the express train, the steam engine
which people went to see.
And the Ascoral Plan, which Corbusier was one of,
1940, a plan to link Europe, to linearize Europe.
Next.
Captain [? Chambliss's ?] plan for linking New York
and Washington with a public train system that
had an effect on the local-- that
fed off the agricultural land next to it.
Somebody called it a horizontal skyscraper.
Kenzo Tange's 1960 plan for the linearizing Tokyo
and creating a greater use of the harbor, of the water.
Next.
Stupid plans like this by Jonah Friedman to linearize Paris.
Absolute madness-- should lock people up.
Next.
The fascination with bringing together
a number of mechanical forces--
train, bus, pedestrian, and the many schemas
for maximizing density in New York.
The stupidity of the Archigram proposal for moving.
Archigram would have worked very well in Egypt
where you had no investment in permanent sites,
but you moved around.
This is the grasshopper city, which moves around.
If there's anything we've learned historically,
that the inertia of cities in modern times
maintains this position.
I've said this before, that you can count the number of cities.
There are cities in trouble like Detroit,
but there's no disappearance of cities, or very few,
compared to previous times.
Next.
It's called Buckminster Fuller and notion
of using a single machine to cover
the whole of the city of Manhattan.
Next.
I think we end here.
This is Lord Behrens' proposition
for the AEG factory--
just about done-- in Berlin showing
the wonderful correct place for every worker in the system.
And here the nightmare of Soweto outside Johannesburg, or part
of Johannesburg, where race created
a new town in which the machine model is exemplified
par excellence with no pretension
paid to anything else but the disposition of houses
in free space.
OK.