A6769 History of the American City
History/Theory LectureGwendolyn Wright
INTROUDCTION
American cities are simultaneously the product of impressive master plans and banal, unregulated growth, of visions and incremental actions, of architects and many other actors. Individual buildings are set in particular locales, surrounded by streets and other services all of which have dramatic effect on the experience and perception of architecture. Social mores, architectural taste, and economic development all are manifest in patterns of urban design. This course will move between the national or global scale of urban policy and architectural fashion, on the one hand, and the local scale of particular cities and building groups, on the other. Against a backdrop of political and social conditions, as well as a larger cultural milieu, lecture swill focus on spatial and architectural development: the changing outline of cities; the role of infrastructure and economic investment; the play between center and periphery; definition of public and private; the emergence of new building types, styles, and aesthetic constructs; and their effect on what already exists.
Weekly assigned readings include both primary sources from the historical period and contemporary analyses of their long-term meaning and effect. A series of short analyses of visual and written texts, based on each student's research topic, will lead up to a final paper.
TOPICS
Patterns of Community and Conflict
American particularism and European influences; the relationship between architecture, landscape, streets, and urban planning; the role of region, the distinctiveness of place, and the pattern of cultural norms
Colonial Cities and Towns
Cities as the key to European colonization; the laws of the Indies; the Puritan city on the hill
Nineteenth-Century Civic Culture
national Survey Land Ordinance; L' Enfant's plan for Washington and the Commissioner's Plan for New York; urban rivalries and boosterism; modeling industrial space; the dissemination of the grid; the town square
Urban Parks and the City Beautiful
Olmsted and the park system; nature in the city; unity and diversity in American park design; the invention of the American parkway; the Macmillan plan for Washington, DC; the progressives civic cen ters; themes and variations on formal types
Housing Reform and Residential Segregation
Model workers housing; the role of philanthropists, government, and the architectural profession; the project as an ideal environment; the saga and scale of American public housing; cultural preferences versus discriminatory segregation
Suburban Housing and Urban policy
Residential models for family and community life; stages of disurbanization; building controls and restrictive covenants; the success of alternative models; the dominant role of transportation systems; changing families and suburban prototypes
The Social Scientist and the Central Business District
professionalization of City Planning and its separation from architecture; the problem of density and the dream of urban order; zoning for height, use, and density; design implications of the automobile; slab city and the regional plan
Commerce as the basis of urbanism
The fantasy panopticon world of department stores; the rise and demise of Main Street; Rockefeller Center and other urban concentrations of cities-within-cities ; the shopping center and its expansion as commercial and public space
Pragmatist Modernism and Government Auspices
private enterprise and public controls in the New Deal; the Siedlung and the Existenzminimum reinterpreted in American public housing; Robert Moses, Czar of New York; Wright's Broadacre City, Lescaze's New York, and Kahn's Philadelphia
Development and Decentralization: The Post-War Era
The federal Highway Act and the Urban renewal Act; luxury apartments and convention centers in redeveloped downtowns; expressionism and new humanism: in design; new towns in town and outside
Postmodernism and Urban Postmortem
Historic preservation and context ; Disney-fication; Venturi and pop culture; urban tourism; gentrification and neighborhood conservation; segregation and poverty as urban problems ; images of urban violence; ecology
The Lure of the Future and Return of the Repressed: Urban Design Today
Grandiosity and contingency of visions; neo-traditional urbanism; deconstructivism and the celebration of urban fragmentation; theme parks, historic districts, and gated communities; public art and civic space; the centrality of infrastructure