Suburbia as a way of life

If Louis Wirth wrote his famous essay "Urbanism as a way of life", the following promo-video for the city of Redbook offers a portrayal of what we might call suburbanism. The short movie was produced in 1957 in USA and, even though we might already know a lot about the suburban dream, it is still stunning to hear, for instance: "The people who created the suburbs are young adults and the shopping centers are built in their image."
On the one hand, there is a continuous stress on the idea of a do-it-yourself house and family, on the other automatism seems to play a key role. Life is divided between family-care and the shopping center, parties take place at home rather than in clubs or bars...

We were already, already bored

I am sure you have not missed the last album by Arcade Fire "The suburbs" and the marvelous video by Spike Jonze "Scenes from the suburbs" that follows here:



Does it really represent suburban living? Well, check-out this 2006 Canadian documentary movie about suburbia, "Radiant city": though we know already the ills of suburbia, director Gary Burns and journalist Jim Brown did a good job showing an average middle-class family in its everyday life in "Evergreen" neighborhood. You can get a pretty precise idea about the appeal that suburbia holds, but also about the most common negative externalities and disillusions that people soon have to face. Be patient till the end of the documentary, you will get a surprize!

The Changing City - mid 1960s

Though oversimplifying reality and popular in attempt, this short film from the mid-1960s gives you an interesting hint of the debate about suburbia and the city in general in USA at that time, catalyzed
in New-York on one side by the journalist and activist Jane Jacobs and on the other by the urban planner Robert Moses: avoiding the risk of drawing a caricature of them as antagonists, it is nonetheless possible to say that Jacobs, especially with her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", 1961, addressed a sharp critique to the most rigid elements and aspects in terms of urban planning and architecture of Modernism, which Moses happened to represent. This film touches in 15 minutes the questions of sprawl and suburbia, car-dependency, social boredom; urban renewal and investment, decay of city-centers, governance.

Bearing in mind the contemporary tendency and easiness in pointing out the failures of Modernism, one of the main urban and housing modernist catastrophes, contemporary to Jacobs, was the 1954 housing project Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, best-known for the Twin Towers in New-York. The following is a description by Robert Hughes, quoting architecture historian Charles Jencks, claming the demolition of Pruitt Igoe (1972-74) to be the death of Modernism.



Like tragically September 11 and the Twin Towers, Pruitt Igoe became widely popular on screen, as you can see from Kooyanisqatsi, film documentary by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass.



Related posts:
Urban renewal: 1955 vs. 2006

Velvet Fence

Photo by Jk***

“When one talks of mass-production houses one means, of course, the “housing scheme”. Unity in the constructional elements is a guarantee of beauty. A housing scheme affords the variety necessary for architectural composition and lends itself to design on a large scale and to real architectural rhythm. A well mapped-out scheme, constructed on a mass-production basis, can give a feeling of calm, order and neatness, and inevitably imposes discipline on the inhabitants. America has given us an example by the elimination of hedges and fences, rendered possible only by the modern feeling of respect for other people’s property which took its rise over there; such suburbs give a great sense of space; for once hedges and fences are removed, light and sunshine reign over all.”

Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture, 1923

Photo by yan2003

I know that I will be banal, but I just couldn’t resist to comment on these lines which I went through a couple of days ago. Let’s go brainstorming now: ...America, fence, tunnels, Mexico, Tijuana, border, suburb, sprawl, gated communities, Los Angeles, Mike Davis, police, Iraq, Ford, Detroid, crisis, respect, Richard Sennett, Cabrini Green, black people, bus, woman, hamburger, cheese... (I stop because I am going too far.)

This L-C’s text reminds me the beginning of Blue Velvet by Lynch, in which you have the perfect suburban house and lawn, but the wooden fence is too white, roses too red, grass to green, people quietly gardening, the 1950’s fireman smiling as he passes by: everything larger than life. In fact, just in the adjacent vacant lot, you could find a decomposing human ear, your door to the dark, night, evil side of suburban life.