UTOPIAN SCHEMES: HOWARD, LE CORBUSIER, AND WRIGHT

Idealistic thinkers in centuries past lamented the evils of civilization and created a genre of literature
known as utopian writing. Plato’s Republic might be the earliest example, but the consummate vision
belongs to Thomas More’s Utopia. These accounts of some fictional paradise provide us with a means of
measuring the prospects of human endeavor by showing how we can perfect ourselves and our society
even while exploring our all too frail shortcomings as a species. Over the centuries, utopian literature has
provided important inspiration to socially concerned individuals, as has the equally fascinating genre of
dystopian writing, especially science fiction’s dystopian accounts of life in future cities (such as William
Gibson’s 1984 book, Neuromancer). Utopia, from the Greek word meaning “no place,” and dystopia, a
more recently coined expression that means an imaginary place of dread, are examples of places that
exist elsewhere in time and space. While the former usually signals the modernist theme of progress, the
latter represents our fears about the myth of progress. This yearning for the perfection of settlement
space and the realization that it may never be attained due to the limitations of our civilization constitute
an important strain in Western literature and cinema. The philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991) calls all
such spaces that exist in our minds as imaginary places heterotopias. As mental conceptions,
heterotopias have the ability to influence our behavior and to define prospective schemes for architects
and planners. In nineteenth-century Europe, when the evils of industrialization and urbanization became
a major social concern, individuals exercised the utopian spirit by conceiving of alternative urban
environments. Some of these modernist visions were highly influential in the planning and architectural
professions, and indeed by the twentieth century, architects no longer confined themselves to the design
of individual buildings but composed manifestos and schemes that addressed the living and working
arrangements of the entire city space itself. Among the important conceptualizers of new urban
environments are Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The modernist vision of each
was expressed, respectively, as the Garden City, the Radiant City, and Broadacre City.

The Garden City

Ebenezer Howard, who lived during the turn of the last century, was a social reformer in England. Like
others of his time, including Friedrich Engels, he was appalled at the social costs of British
industrialization. Some thinkers, such as Robert Owen, responded by founding a utopian movement that
advocated the construction of communities (such as New Harmony, Indiana) that would counteract the
evils of the industrial city but required a fundamental break with acceptable ways of family or social life.
Howard’s response was to propose an alternative way of living that everyone could follow, even those
uninterested in the utopian movement’s social change.

To Howard, the city represented the future of economic growth, but it was, to express it directly, a lousy
place to live. In contrast, the rural areas remained in organic harmony with their surroundings, but they
were afflicted with limited economic opportunity. Howard’s vision combined the two. He proposed that
all new industrial growth be channeled to new locations in outlying areas that would combine industrial
employment with country living on a moderate, human scale. These “garden cities” would represent the
very best of city and country living.
The concept of the garden city proved to be very powerful (see our discussion above of Espoo and
Tapiola, Finland). Capitalist industrialization in the nineteenth century knew no bounds. The older cities
were crowded and polluted, and large cities gobbled up their adjacent countrysides in a relentless
process of accretion. Because planners understood that growth was inevitable, they were attracted to
Howard’s idea of breaking urban expansion off and aspiring to locate new industry and housing in
moderate-size communities.

Howard’s ideas influenced the “new town” movement in England, which was responsible for building
hundreds of such places, as well as the measured establishment of medium-size cities in Russia,
although the latter case does not embody the ideal of the “garden,” or suburbanized urban environment.
In the United States, a group of architects, notably Clarence Stein, popularized Howard’s approach.
Working with local authorities and developers, they constructed several places across the country,
including Garden City, New York, outside of Manhattan, and Baldwin Hills, California, located in Los
Angeles. Ebenezer Howard lived to see the opening of the New York community in 1928. In practice,
most of the American garden cities lack their own industry and hence are little more than middle-class
suburban housing developments with some interesting features, such as shared public spaces. These
ideas, all derivative of Ebenezer Howard’s vision, are still put in practice by developers of large suburban
residential projects such as planned unit developments, or PUDs.

The Radiant City

Le Corbusier was the professional name of the Swiss-born French architect CharlesEdouard Jeanneret
(1887–1965). Along with several German architects, such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, Le Corbusier is considered the founder of the international style of design and one of the leaders
of the modernist movement in architecture. The type of building associated with this movement is
familiar to anyone who has seen the skyline of a large city, because the design concepts took over the
world of architecture following World War II. International-style buildings are clean, straightforward,
rectangular shapes with flat roofs. They are framed in steel and feature large glass windows that are
sealed shut. Not until the postmodern architectural revolt of the 1980s were downtown office buildings
liberated from the dictates of this concept.

Le Corbusier was influential because he propagated certain ideas about city living instead of confining his
practice to building design. He believed in the triumph of technology over social conditions of
industrialization. Buildings themselves were to be “machines for living,” that is, the most efficient
designs for the sustenance of everyday activities. The urban environment would itself have to be
changed to conform to the dictates of more enlightened architectural design. Because Le Corbusier
lamented the terrible social costs of industrialization, he proclaimed the modernist rallying cry,
“Architecture or Revolution,” sincerely believing that capitalist countries had little choice but to follow his
ideas or confront the revolt of the urban masses. Le Corbusier’s ideas and those of his contemporaries
constituted the ideology of modernism, which legitimated the notion of progress and the improvement
of human conditions year after year through the intervention of technology. Modernist ideology
asserted that the lot of individuals could be improved by the acquisition and application of knowledge—
scientific, technological, architectural, social, and psychological. Part of modernist culture was the
celebration of architecture and “modern” ideas about city planning.

Le Corbusier’s plan for an entire metropolis, the “radiant city,” reordered social space across a large,
industrial aggregation. Instead of the relatively low density of housing and chaotic land use that was
characteristic of the cities at that time, Le Corbusier proposed that buildings should be high-rises. By
condensing the living space using building height, open spaces would be liberated, and Le Corbusier
envisioned these spaces as parks that would surround residential clusters, thereby transforming the
congested, sprawling industrial city into an open, airy, and efficient place of mobility and light.

A second important feature of the new design followed from Le Corbusier’s and the modernist belief in
the virtues of technology. Le Corbusier believed that the widespread use of public transportation and
auto modes of transport would vastly improve the efficiency of urban scale. He proclaimed the “death of
the street,” that is, the pedestrian thoroughfare characteristic of all cities in the past. He envisioned
instead rapid movement facilitated by autos, trains, highways, and feeder roads of people and
commodities between the various nodes of urban space, residences, factories, shops, and government
buildings.

The lesson of Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green (see discussion above) illustrates the deeply ingrained
physicalist fallacy of Le Corbusier. Construction design, which disregards social process, cannot alone
change everyday life. Unfortunately, the modernist ideas of the international style, and especially the
concepts of Le Corbusier, were highly influential in urban planning through the 1960s. Along with Pruitt-
Igoe, another major tragedy of planning in this vein is exemplified by the case of Brasilia, the capital city
of Brazil, which was constructed following Le Corbusier’s idea of the radiant city. Designed by the
architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in 1960 and located in the interior 600 miles from the Rio de
Janeiro coast, Brasilia looks like a giant bird from an aerial view. But on the ground, its limitations have
become legendary. The “death of the street” produced an austere, alienating environment in which
urban life is shrouded in anonymity. Neighboring and community interaction have all but disappeared
because of the inability to overcome the automobile-based lifestyle and the imposing super - human
social scale, which has led to feelings of isolation and anonymity among residents (Holston, 1989).

The city was built to be the country’s new capital, and so government administrators and their support
staffs find employment there. However, Brasilia has failed to attract the diverse kinds of industry and
everyday life that would convert it to a major city. Brasilia, among other austere creations of modernist
city planning, reminds us of the perils of physical determinism and the need for architects to work in
conjunction with social science to bring about an improvement of urban conditions.

Broadacre City
Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) was the premier American architect for most of the past century. His
ideas, unlike Le Corbusier’s, are still appreciated today, even if some of his designs have become
outdated. Wright was no modernist. In fact, he was much influenced by the crafts movement in the
United States and by Asian architecture, particularly the Japanese use of interior space. Wright believed
that structures should be organic extensions of natural environments. Houses, for example, should
emerge from the crown of the hill rather than being built at the top, since the latter should be reserved
for nature. They should embody a fluid connection with the world outside, and their construction should
celebrate natural materials and settings, as exemplified by the Kaufmann home, Falling Water House
(built in 1936), outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This summer home is made of concrete that is stacked
like pancakes on three levels (called cantilevering) so that it sits on a rock above a forest stream. The
water flows under the lower level and out over a falls. Sitting in the living room, one can watch the water
flow and hear the stream as it runs over the rock below.

Frank Lloyd Wright was not enamored with the American city that he saw developing after World War II
and wrote that with each new skyscraper he saw only the death of the city. Wright’s vision of the new
city possessed some similarities with that of Ebenezer Howard, especially the desire to merge the city
and the country, except Wright thought in modular terms. Instead of a single, human-scale community,
Wright envisioned an immense metropolis whose internal structure reduces space to a human scale
through modular design. Each family would be assigned a single- family home on an acre of land! The
space would enable families to grow their own food and modify their surroundings according to their
own personal tastes. Houses would be arrayed on an expansive grid. Wright also liked the possibilities of
the auto, and his Broadacre City assumed that the car would be the basic means of transportation. Each
place would be accessible by interconnected roads and highways feeding into and out of grids.
Commercial shopping would take place in regularly spaced shopping centers, and industry would be
isolated in specifically designed factory areas that were zoned exclusively for business. Wright’s scheme
seems almost like the massive suburban environments of today—and indeed Wright saw little need for
the city. He was one of the earliest architects to envision the concept of the shopping center, and his
factory-zoned area is recognizable as the industrial park of the present, a common feature of
metropolitan environments. The key element of Wright’s vision, however, seems elusive, namely, the
one-acre allotment of land that resolved the city/country dilemma at the smallest scale of each
individual family. While suburban residences often have ample backyards, these are reserved for leisure
activities, including, perhaps, a swimming pool. But Wright’s vision of every family providing for its
sustenance through backyard farming seems far removed from the realities of metropolitan life. Our
review of architectural visionaries provides us with some alternative ways to think about massive
metropolitan environments and reminds us that urbanized land - scapes do not necessarily have to
assume the form they now possess. The present-day approach to metropolitan development seems
oblivious to other ways of building except unending sprawl. But alternatives are possible; only the
continuing belief in physical determinism, which wrongly suggests that architecture and urban planning
can alter social processes, needs to be abandoned. Developers combining proper design with
environmentally aware social science that draws on the legacy of utopian ideas have had some
successes, such as the towns of Columbia, Maryland, and Garden City, New York.