Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Read online

  12

  On the Way to Exurbia

  For the first time in history, urbanization does not mean concentration.

  Despite Arcadia’s claims, New Daleville will not really be a village, and it is too rural to be called a suburb; it’s what city planners call an exurb.1 Exurbs are a relatively new phenomenon. Nineteenth-century garden suburbs such as Riverside and Chestnut Hill were far from the city but were firmly tied to downtown by railroads and streetcars. The first postwar suburbs were called bedroom communities precisely because their inhabitants only slept there but worked, shopped, and played in the city. Exurbs are different. “They have broken free of the gravitational pull of the cities,” writes David Brooks, “and now exist in their own world far beyond.”2 Such extreme decentralization is the result not simply of car ownership but of mobile communications, privatized entertainment, and an increasingly effective distribution of goods and services. These technologies have enabled people to work as well as live far beyond the urban periphery, in areas that were previously entirely rural, such as Chester County. For the first time in history, urbanization does not mean concentration.

  This dispersal is apparent in New Daleville, where everyday life will be marked by an extreme and far-flung mobility. The future inhabitants will drive to work in West Chester and Downingtown, shop at the Exton Mall, and buy fresh vegetables from Amish farm stands in Lancaster County. For Christmas gifts they may go to King of Prussia. If they get ill they’ll be taken to the Southern Chester County Medical Center, about three miles away. Presbyterians will go to church in Fagg’s Manor, Baptists will travel to nearby Cochranville, and Roman Catholics will attend Our Lady of Rectory in Parkesburg. School buses will take the kids to the Octorara educational campus, six miles away. Mothers will ferry their kids to soccer practice, and to Chuck E. Cheese’s and the multiplex on Saturday afternoons. They may join one of several golf clubs in the area. For recreation they’ll go to Longwood Gardens or the Brandywine River Museum. They will occasionally visit Wilmington or Philadelphia, but for most of them the visits will be few and far between.

  Exurbia is recent, but its advent was foreseen a long time ago. In his 1902 book about the future, Anticipations, H. G. Wells titled a chapter “The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities.”3 He observed that the way people live is always a function of transportation. A city of pedestrians is limited by a radius of about four miles; a horse-using city by seven or eight; but the radius of a city with suburban trains could easily expand to thirty miles.4 Wells predicted that faster trains, omnibuses, telegraphs, telephones, and something he called “parcel-delivery tubes” would make the concentrated city obsolete. He imagined well-off city people living far out in the countryside. He was vague about the physical form of what he called “urban regions,” except to say that they would be extremely spread out and would definitely not resemble traditional cities.

  It was left to another visionary to flesh out this idea. Frank Lloyd Wright had spent most of his early working life in and around Chicago, but it was not that city that stimulated his ideas about the future. In 1922, after a decade spent mainly in Europe and Japan, the already-famous architect settled in Los Angeles.5 Los Angeles in the twenties was the fastest growing city in the country, but it was growing in unusual ways. Despite its relatively small population of half a million, the city stretched from San Bernardino to Santa Monica, a distance of nearly seventy miles. The Pacific Electric Railway, which operated a thousand miles of track, provided access to this vast region, as did private automobiles. With the highest rate of car ownership in the world, and a network of boulevards, drives, and highways, Los Angeles was unlike any large city in the United States — or anywhere else.

  The chief reason for Wright’s move to California was to find new clients. In 1923, in concert with a local real estate developer, he designed a planned community on a four-hundred-acre tract in Beverly Hills. The speculative project was aimed at winning the financial support of the celebrated oil millionaire Edward L. Doheny, owner of the land.6 Large-scale planned communities were nothing new in Los Angeles, and in fact the largest of these, Palos Verdes Estates, was under way at the time of Wright’s proposal. Palos Verdes, developed by Frank A. Vanderlip, a New York City banker, was a classic garden suburb with one exception: it was intended for people with cars.7 To preserve the spectacular natural beauty of the coastal peninsula immediately south of the city, its planners, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Charles Cheney, left half of the 3,200 acres unbuilt, in the form of nature preserves, parks, and golf courses. They dispersed schools, village centers, and golf courses across the entire site. Houses — in compact groups — were likewise scattered, connected by a far-ranging network of roads, including a twenty-mile scenic drive that was brilliantly fitted to the hilly coastal terrain. To make Palos Verdes “an ideal garden suburb and residence park,” main thoroughfares for heavy traffic were kept apart from residential streets, which were designed to discourage fast driving.

  Following Olmsted’s lead, Wright adapted his plan to the topography of Beverly Hills and took advantage of automobile access to spread the houses across the steep terrain.8 Unlike the traditionally styled residences at Palos Verdes, however, Wright’s houses were decidedly original — Mayan/Art Deco compositions with hillside terraces and hanging gardens, and whereas Olmsted laid out the roads discreetly hugging the slopes, Wright used retaining walls and bridges to integrate the roadways dramatically with the architecture. The proposal was original and exciting, but there is no evidence that Doheny showed any interest.9

  The Depression obliged Wright to close his West Coast office and return to Wisconsin, yet the influence of Los Angeles was not lost on him. In 1931 he gave a series of lectures at Princeton University, in which he argued that personal mobility was radically transforming traditional urbanism. The impetus to put his ideas on paper came soon after. In January 1932, The New York Times Magazine published an article titled “A Noted Architect Dissects Our Cities.”10 The author was the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who described his radical vision of the modern city. “We must immediately discard the traditional type of house and allot to each inhabitant a soundproof living room, with plenty of light.” These living rooms, as the accompanying illustrations showed, were in apartments in immense high-rise buildings set in parklike surroundings. Cars would be carried on elevated highways. “Everything will be new,” he wrote.11

  Wright despised Le Corbusier and the newly named International Style of architecture he personified.12 Moreover he heartily disagreed with Le Corbusier’s analysis. Only two months later, the Times published Wright’s withering response.13 What was the point of a skyscraper city? he asked. “Super space making for rent, to enable super-landlords to have and to hold the super-millions in super-concentration to make super-millions of superfluous millions?” Like Wells, Wright argued that decentralization — in transportation, communication, technology — was the preeminent modern trend. Instead of a vertical, concentrated city, he described “the horizontal line of the machine age, indefinitely extended as the great architecture highway and by the flat plane of the machine age expanded into the free acreage of the Broadacre City.”14 Instead of bringing nature into the city, Wright proposed extending the city into the country.

  Later that year Wright published The Disappearing City, whose dramatic title summarized his argument. His description of Broadacre City sounds like a vast version of Los Angeles, but without the downtown: “Giant roads…separate and unite the series of diversified units, the farm units, the factory units, the roadside markets, the garden schools, the dwelling places (each on its acre of individually adorned and cultivated ground), the places for pleasure and leisure.”15 This vision was based on a simple yet radical insight: “What we need is the wedding of the city and the country….There you have all the advantages of the city, without the city.”16 Always an iconoclast, Wright later proclaimed, “In the City of Yesterday ground space is still reckoned by the square foot. I
n the City of Tomorrow ground space will be reckoned by the acre.”17

  Wright was always careful to stress that his ideas were not utopian. “It is nothing that I have invented,” he once said.18 “There is plenty of evidence now at hand to substantiate all the changes I outline.”19 He anticipated the coming of shopping centers, which he called “roadside markets,” office campuses, suburban department stores, and service station convenience stores. Wright was interested in transportation and predicted the replacement of long-distance trains, then at their zenith, by air travel. He also saw a future when people traveled in “cars with sleeping accommodations and cuisines aboard, touring the country,” in other words, RVs. He even predicted a kind of Internet: “As the citizen sits in his car, he may press a variety of buttons or turn an indicator and obtain any section he desires of the modern newspaper — the forests saved and millions of tons of waste paper eliminated.”20 Wright the visionary could be remarkably blinkered. The one thing he did not see coming was large-scale agriculture; instead, he assumed that farming would remain decentralized, with individual families growing much of their food on their one-acre lots.

  It was inevitable that Wright, an architect, would give Broadacre City physical form. The opportunity arose in 1934, when Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department-store magnate (and the future client of the famous Fallingwater house), commissioned him to build a large model of his futuristic city. Some historians maintain that Wright did not intend Broadacre City to be taken literally.21 But the twelve-foot-square model, representing four square miles of vaguely midwestern countryside, with topographic detail, miniature buildings, and tiny cars, made a strong impact precisely because it was realistic.

  Wright’s vision is a curious blend of pragmatism and science fiction. A two-level highway (cars above, trucks below), with a high-speed monorail in the median, connects to a grid of country roads. The specially designed interchanges, which don’t really function effectively, are compact versions of cloverleafs. Transportation is provided by strange-looking cars and “aerotors” — personal helicopters resembling flying saucers — likewise designed by Wright. Fourteen hundred families are accommodated in a variety of houses. Scattered apartment towers are halfway houses, for the “city-dweller as yet unlearned where ground is concerned.”22 The county administrative offices are in a skyscraper. Schools, motels, shopping malls, professional offices, factories, farms, vineyards, an aquarium, a large circular stadium, as well as a drive-in megachurch, are dispersed across the landscape. The random scattering must have appeared odd in the nineteen thirties, but it is immediately recognizable to anyone who has flown over Phoenix or San Jose.

  The most radical aspect of Broadacre City is that it not only has no center but has no edge. The model Wright built is not a model of a complete city; it is a model of a small piece of what is obviously a much larger urban area that goes on forever, or at least until it runs up against a natural obstacle, such as a lake or a mountain. Previous ideal cities, even ones as radical as Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, were based on a differentiation of city and surrounding countryside, but Wright described a world without countryside — and without cities.

  Most architecture critics, who lived in cities, found his proposal outrageous and greeted Broadacre City with a mixture of derision and condescension. His admirers — embarrassed — turned a blind eye, treating the proposal as the harmless hobby of an aging genius. Several later biographers have referred to Broadacre City as a kind of private WPA program, implying that it was merely an excuse for Wright to keep his office busy during the Depression.23 But work on Broadacre City continued long after the end of the Depression — and long after Wright’s career revived. Over the next two and a half decades, he published two more versions of his urban thesis: When Democracy Builds and The Living City. And in the early nineteen forties, he designed a number of planned communities that incorporated Broadacre City ideas, albeit on a smaller scale: a workers’ cooperative in Detroit, two housing developments near Kalamazoo, and an unbuilt project in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His largest realized work, in Pleasantville, New York, was a subdivision of fifty-five three-quarter-acre lots on a hilly hundred acres.

  What are we to make of Wright’s planning ideas today? For Brendan Gill, Broadacre City remains a suburban nightmare, a “homogeneous non-city,” and a “monstrously enlarged Oak Park,” referring to the Chicago suburb where Wright once lived — although Broadacre City doesn’t resemble Oak Park one bit.24 Lewis Mumford considered The Disappearing City a “clear anticipation (romantically rationalized) of the contemporary exurban sprawl.”25 Others, such as Joel Garreau, the author of Edge City, admire Wright’s “stunning accuracy.”26 But the importance of Broadacre City lies not merely in Wright’s prescience. He turned away from traditional European urbanism, just as he rejected International Style architecture. Yet, whereas his dislike of European modernists such as Le Corbusier was in large part a matter of taste, his rejection of the conventional concentrated city was intellectually grounded. Although Wright was never as anti-urban as he pretended to be, he understood the direction in which the tide of urban history was running. He instinctively saw the economic advantages of decentralization for a country as large and dynamic as the United States. Perhaps he was rationalizing, as Mumford claimed. Wright underestimated the environmental effects of mass automobile use (though he did champion small cars, such as the Nash Rambler), but he was correct in assuming that an economy dominated by growth and technological change required a different, more flexible form of urbanism than the established cities of Europe. What he did not foresee was that the future Broadacre City would be shaped not by architects, as he intended, but by market forces.

  Late in life, Wright published The Natural House, a small practical guide for prospective home builders. In a chapter titled “Where to Build,” he advised on finding a building site. “The best thing is to go as far out as you can get. Avoid the suburbs — dormitory towns — by all means. Go way out into the country — what you regard as ‘too far’ — and when others follow, as they will (if procreation keeps up), move on.”27 Move on. The same sentiment draws people to Chester County today and is the driving force behind Arcadia’s development. In that sense, Wright, no less than Raymond Unwin and Andrés Duany, must be considered New Daleville’s spiritual godfather.

  13

  Design Matters

  Most new residential communities don’t have too little variety, they have too much.

  Almost immediately after the New Daleville ordinance is approved, Jason Duckworth starts working on the so-called architectural guidelines. These are a sort of aesthetic building code that will govern the exterior appearance of the houses and ensure that New Daleville will turn out the way Arcadia — and the township — want. Most suburban builders are used to large lots, where houses are far apart — and far from the street — so the design of one house does not really affect its neighbors. At New Daleville, where lots will be small and houses very close together, the appearance of the houses will be critical. Hence the importance of the guidelines, which will dictate materials, colors, and details.

  The idea of formally regulating the appearance of a place sounds artificial, but design controls were a part of garden suburbs from the beginning. Almost a century ago, Raymond Unwin taught that harmony is essential to a successful town plan and recognized that the planner would need to exercise some degree of control.

  Where the site planner, to complete his street picture, requires even roof lines he should be able to suggest heights for eaves and ridges; where he desires to maintain definite colour schemes he should be able to suggest materials and treatment in accordance with these schemes. Where the position of his building requires a symmetrical, picturesque, or other special treatment to complete some effect aimed at, he should be able to suggest this treatment to the architect or builder who is responsible for the building on the plot.1

  Unwin admitted that the “difficulties of such public control are undo
ubtedly very great,” but he believed that “the evils which result from absolute lack of control are even greater.”2 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., echoed the sentiment: “Whatever may be done for the sake of color, enrichment or decoration, must be controlled by regard for the composition of these masses and open spaces or confusion will result.”3 At Palos Verdes, the detailed controls covered thirty-six pages, so that “every purchaser…may be sure when building his home there that his neighbor will have to build an equally attractive building.”4

  Architectural controls have taken different forms. Frank Lloyd Wright controlled the appearance of the Doheny development by designing all the houses himself. In Chestnut Hill, George Woodward commissioned architects who were sympathetic to his vision. At Palos Verdes, the “protective restrictions” that governed the appearance of the houses were enforced by a so-called Art Jury, composed of prominent local architects. Design review boards are a common feature of many modern planned communities, but when he was developing Seaside, Robert Davis thought a cumbersome review process would discourage future home buyers. Instead, he wanted the requirements to be clearly spelled out in advance so that they could be easily followed by local contractors. Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk admired old Florida coastal towns such as Key West and Apalachicola, whose architectural charm was the more or less accidental result of shared regional building traditions and a limited choice of building materials. But times have changed. Builders have access to a wide variety of natural and synthetic building materials, they can make roofs flat or sloped, and they can order windows of any shape or size. The result is that most new residential developments don’t have too little variety, they have too much.