VITRUVIUS TO VINYL: Paradise Lost

A Field Report from the Cul-de-Sacs of Despair

Annette Lucia Giesecke

Figure 1: Harmony Hollow, detail. aerial view. (image GlobeXplorer 2005)

Another parcel of land has come up for sale. The land is purchased by an individual with a vision, a vision of a new residential “community” to accommodate what is reportedly unprecedented growth in suburban areas. The land is surveyed; individual parcels are laid out; and houses are built. The moment has arrived for the Developer to christen his creation and publish the covenant that shall thenceforth govern it. He calls the “community” -- for such is the current moniker for “subdivision” -- Harmony Hollow.1 It is this particular community that the author called “home” from August 1, 2000 through August 1, 2001, and what follow are a series of observations on the extraordinary impact of the new suburban community on the essence of community itself. 2

Community by definition entails the binding of individuals in a social relationship; “communitas,” from which it derives, is variously described in the Oxford Latin Dictionary as “just possession or use, participation, partnership, sharing” and as “social relationship, fellowship, social ties, organized society.”3 It is the communally-minded nature of humanity that Vitruvius, writing just over two thousand years ago, viewed as a factor integral to the progress of civilization.

As Vitruvius was an architectural historian and critic, it was the architectural component of this evolution that most deeply interested him, and what he foresaw, among other things, was the continued improvement of the dwelling over time.

The men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves, and groves, and lived on savage fare. As time went on, the thickly crowded trees in a certain place, tossed by storms and winds, and rubbing their branches against one another, caught fire, and so the inhabitants of the place were put to flight, being terrified by the furious flame…Therefore it was the discovery of fire that originally gave rise to the coming together of men, to the deliberative assembly, and to social intercourse. And so, as they kept coming together in greater numbers into one place, finding themselves naturally gifted beyond the other animals…they began in that first assembly to build shelters. Some made them of green boughs, others dug caves on mountainsides, and some, in imitation of the nests of swallows and the way they built, made places of refuge out of mud and twigs. Next, by observing the shelters of others and adding new details to their own inceptions, they constructed better and better kinds of huts as time went on. And since they were of an imitative and teachable nature, they would daily point out to each other the results of their building, boasting of the novelties in it; and thus, with their natural gifts sharpened by emulation, their standards improved daily. 4

From an architectural perspective, the basis of a utopian community is the dwelling house. Arguably, architectural utopianism has been, or at least seemed to be, within our grasp many times since the time of Vitruvius. Thus, for instance, the domestic architecture of Vitruvius’s time, as exemplified by the houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum, certainly had utopian elements.5 There was an ideal towards which the design of the Roman house aimed; this ideal, the simultaneous achievement of the sense of “prospect” and “enclosure,” was based on the fundamental human need for shelter, orientation, and territoriality. What characterizes the Roman house is the inscription of nature, for its core was the garden. Nature thus architecturally inscribed duplicated or mimicked the original “paradise,” the walled enclosure that was the Persian garden in antiquity. The inhabitants of the Roman house accordingly had the benefit of living in harmony with nature and of living in security; this was the effect of clumping living spaces around a garden and turning an anonymous façade to the outside world.

Since the example of Pompeii and of the work of architectural utopians such as Garnier, Wright, and Le Corbusier is readily available to us, it is all the more surprising that Vitruvius’s prediction of continual progress in building style and technique is, at present, unfulfilled and that his principles have been all but abandoned; Vitruvius had preached the importance of siting structures carefully, of tailoring form to function, and of employing climate-appropriate, quality building materials. What is responsible for the demise of Vitruvian thinking is the American “middle class dream.” As remarked by Duaney, Plater-Zyberk and Speck in Suburban Nation:

...the faceless communities and vinyl atrocities of today’s suburban reality find their origins in the pastoral dream of the autonomous homestead in the countryside. Articulated throughout U.S. history, from Jefferson through Limbaugh, this vision has been equated with a democratic economy, in which homeownership equals participation. However, this equation seems to have its limits, as only a small number of people can achieve that dream without

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compromising it for all involved. As the middle class rushes to build its countryside cottages at the same time on the same land, the resulting environment is inevitably unsatisfying, its objective self-contradictory: isolation en masse.6

It is my contention that the failure of the developer – driven community is based to a large degree on the lack of attention to the siting and orientation of houses. In other words, the meaningful relationship of an individual dwelling to the natural environment is in effect non-existent. What is clearly uppermost in the developer’s mind is fitting as many homes as possible into a given parcel of tragically reclaimed forest or farmland. The paradise garden is gone in these communities. Each house has a “garden,” but this garden is not a walled enclosure affording security, pleasure, and relaxation. The garden here is nothing more than a bit of open space onto which all houses “face” at the rear. At first glance, such an arrangement may appear to have a certain affinity to the gardens of Thomas More’s Utopians:

On the rear of the houses, through the whole length of the block, lies a broad garden enclosed on all sides by the backs of the blocks. Every home has not only a door into the street but a back door into the garden…The Utopians are very fond of their gardens. In them they have vines, fruits, herbs, flowers, so well kept and flourishing that I never say anything more fruitful and more tasteful anywhere. Their zest in keeping them is increased not merely by the pleasure afforded them but by the keen competition between blocks as to which will have the best kept garden. Certainly you cannot readily find anything in the whole city more productive of profit and pleasure to citizens. Therefore it would seem that their founder attached the greatest importance to these gardens.7

Figure 2: Basketball hoop, Harmony Hollow. (photo, author)

However, the experience of the garden is quite different in the new suburban community. The experience here is panoptic (Fig. 1). A person standing in his or

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Figure 3a: Sisters’ Dairy and Weave Shop (built ca. 1795), Hancock Shaker Village, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. (photo, courtesy Hancock Shaker Village, Inc.)

Figure 3b: Author’s dwelling, Harmony Hollow. (photo, author)

her garden space can look into all surrounding houses and contiguous garden spaces; meanwhile those inside these houses have an unobstructed view of this same individual. All houses on a given street block face onto what is ultimately a single open space, and the absence of walled gardens eliminates any sense of privacy. Our communities are not communal in nature, and no one really wants to

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share this amorphous space. Indeed, the garden is subconsciously perceived by children to be such a distasteful space that they have begun to reclaim the street as a playground. I never saw a child playing in the playhouses and swing sets that have been erected in garden spaces, yet individual basketball hoops abound, all of them in the street (Fig. 2), about one of these for every four or five houses. Thus even the use of these basketball hoops is not communal; there is little sharing here. Football, baseball, and soccer too are played in the street, not in the “garden.” In the case of adults, flight from the garden is also readily in evidence, for driveways, visually framed by the gaping maw of the garages they service, have become favorite places for sunbathing and barbequing.

Figure 4: East view of the Church Family Dwelling at Hancock Shaker Village. Unidentified artist, ink and watercolor on paper (ca. 1870). (image, courtesy Hancock Shaker Village, Inc.)

Ironically, what back onto these suburban gardens are the austere rear “façades” of the houses, and as many of these houses are of the so-called neo-colonial variety, the general resemblance to Shaker architecture is often striking (Fig. 3a & b). This external resemblance extends to the disposition of houses vis-à-vis one another, that is, clustering around an open space (Fig. 1 & 4). What is also striking, however, is the difference between our new suburban communities and those of the Shakers, a difference highlighted by the apparent similarities. In the Shaker community, exterior austerity resulted directly from a deep-seated, faith-based insistence on practicality and opposition to superfluity in the material world.8 Needless to say, this austerity was not limited to one side of a structure. In the case of our suburban houses, the austerity of the rear façade results from the cheapness of the builder, or put differently, from the necessity of keeping the

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Figure 5: Ornamented house façade, Harmony Hollow. (photo, author; use by permission of owner)

1 I have substituted “Harmony Hollow” for the actual name of the “subject community” in an effort both to focus any criticism of subdivision life not on the residents but on the builders who are responsible for their conception and to point up the fact that contemporary “community” names, which are in no way site specific or site-appropriate, are thoroughly interchangeable. This essay is an elaborated version of a paper delivered at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies in Buffalo, NY. I am deeply grateful to my Buffalo audience for their helpful comments, to Paul Hyde for digitizing my slides, to Christian Goodwillie for helping me obtain images of Hancock Shaker Village, to the librarians and slide librarians at Winterthur, and to Donald Dunham for his insightful criticism.2 In documenting my own suburban experience I unwittingly followed in the footsteps of Andrew Ross and Herbert Gans, whose work would prove to be of the utmost importance in shaping the argument that follows. Their experiences are documented in Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999) and Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Random House, 1967).3 Oxford Latin Dictionary, combined ed. (1982; repr. 1985), s.v. “communitas,” definitions 1 and 2.4 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris H. Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), 38-39.5 For a detailed discussion of the utopian element in Roman domestic architecture, see Annette Lucia Giesecke, “Beyond the Garden of Epicurus: The Utopics of the Ideal Roman Villa,” Utopian Studies 12, no. 2 (2001): 13-32. 6 Andres Duaney, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 39-40.7 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) 121.8 See John S. Bowman, Shaker Style (New York: Smithmark Publishers, 1995), especially 13, 17, and 27; William Lawrence Lassiter, Shaker Architecture (New York: Vantage, 1966), 19-23; Julie Nicoletta, The Architecture of the Shakers, foreword Robert P. Emlen (Woodstock: The Countryman Press, 1995), 10; and Scott T. Swank, Shaker Life, Art, and Architecture: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (New York: Abeville Press, 1999), especially 37-57.

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price of houses down. At the same time, however, the suburban ideal is one of conspicuous consumption, to mirror one’s social standing and material wealth in the aspect of one’s domicile, so tremendous effort is put into exterior decoration limited to the street façade of the house (Fig. 5). The suburban ideal is accordingly façadism, but ironically, the impression of quality and stylishness is not even skin deep. For where the Shakers built their buildings to be functional and to last, the suburban home merely creates the impression of quality, an impression that quickly disappears as one draws near. What appear to be wood frame structures are revealed to be clad in vinyl (Fig. 6a & b); mutton bars in windows turn out to be decorative inserts; and gable vents are merely senseless ornament.

The visual impression of affinity between the Shaker community and the modern suburb is further enhanced by the fact that both display a limited palette. The Shaker Millennial Laws -- specifically Part III: “Concerning Temporal Economy,” section ix, which concerns building, painting, varnishing and the manufacture of articles for sale -- state:

No buildings may be painted white, save meeting houses. The meeting house should be painted white without, and of a blueish shade within. Houses and shops should be as near uniform in color as consistent; but it is advisable to have shops of a little darker shade than dwelling houses. It is unadvisable for wooden buildings, fronting the street, to be painted red, brown, or black, but they should be of a lightish hue.

Barns and back buildings, if painted at all, should be of a dark hue, either red, or brown, lead color, or something of the kind, unless they front the road or command a sightly aspect, and then they should be of a very light colors.9

9 Edward Deming Andrews, The People Called Shakers: A Search for the Perfect Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 285.

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Figure 6a: Wood siding, Boys’ Shop and Spin House, Sabbathday Lake, Maine. (photo, author. use of the image courtesy United Society of Shakers, New Gloucester, Maine)

Figure 6b: Vinyl siding, author’s dwelling. Harmony Hollow. (photo, author)

While not always strictly adhered to, the exterior color specifications of the Millennial Laws were founded on the desire to distinguish the meetinghouse, the spiritual center of the community, from the buildings subsidiary to them, to distinguish dwellings from shops, and shops in turn from out buildings subsidiary to them. What drives the CC&R palette restrictions of the contemporary suburb is, however, not a faith based hierarchical scheme but a protectiveness or sense of panic regarding the potential for the decrease in property values resulting from a neighbor’s display of bad taste. The result is virtual homogeneity; what distinction can really be made between shades of gray-beige?

Returning to the placement of buildings, the apparent uniformity of the physical layout of Shaker villages was a direct reflection of the activities and goals of the community as a whole; there were not specific laws determining how a community should be laid out.10 The placement of buildings was, accordingly, an organic development. Each community was separated into “families” 10 On the physical development of the Shaker community, see John Bowman, Shaker Style, 17; Robert P. Emlen, Shaker Village Views: Illustrated Maps and Landscape Drawings by Shaker Artists of the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 6-11; Julie Nicoletta, Architecture of the Shakers, 23-33 and passim; and Scott Swank, Shaker Life, 20-35.

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organized along spiritual rather than bloodlines, and each family had its own set of buildings. These subsidiary sets of buildings were dominated by a Dwelling, which played an important role in shaping behavior to conform to Shaker laws. The Meeting House, it should be noted, stood on the property of the First (or Church Family), the leading family of the community. In addition to the grouping of buildings by family, there was another principle underlying the physical arrangement of buildings in a Shaker community. Generally, main buildings such as the Meeting House, Trustees’ House, and main dwelling houses were placed along major roads while secondary buildings tended to be located behind the main ones. The effect of this was to draw outsiders into the heart of the community, to display the community’s spiritual and physical prosperity to the outside world. The Trustees’ Office embodied this link with the outside world, for it was here that visitors could come to request tours, spend the night, or even shop for herbs, textiles, and other goods. The arrangement of main buildings along major thoroughfares not only allowed the curious to pass through or penetrate the community but it also assured that necessary goods and stimuli from the outside world could continue to reach the community. No such depth lies behind the positioning of the contemporary suburban house. There is certainly no hierarchy among buildings. Each house is seemingly equally important or unimportant, yet there is no sense of community here, and certainly no communal egalitarianism. Each house is a dwelling independent of all the others, and in the end, isolated from them as well. Because each house’s immediate environment is so hostile, lacking in privacy and any sort of comfort that the garden might offer, the inhabitants retreat into the furthest corner of the dwelling, as far as possible from a real window to the threatening world outside (Fig. 7a). This behavior is the polar opposite of life in the Shaker community where all would come together to dance in chambers bathed in natural light (Fig. 7b). While the most important Shaker buildings were located on main arteries to the outside world, suburban houses are located along roads purposefully removed from the world outside. Developments are demarcated by faux gates and designated as “different,” elite,

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Figure 7a: Family room interior, author’s dwelling. Harmony Hollow. (photo, author)

Figure 7b: Shakers near Lebanon, New York. lithograph, ca. 1830. (image, courtesy The Winterthur Library: The Edward Deming Andrews Memorial Shaker Collection)

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by signs bearing misleadingly grand-sounding, inappropriate names. Thus suburbanites suffer a two-fold isolation, from larger community and from neighbor.

While it would be blatantly false to state that the Harmony Hollow house is derived from the architecture of the Shakers, it is nevertheless the case that both share a common ancestry. Although there were no official stylistic architectural stipulations for Shaker communities, it so happened that the Adam or Federal colonial style, which was the dominant style in the United States from about 1780-1820, came to be favored.11 The Adam style was a refined development of the preceding colonial Georgian style, which in turn emerged as the dominant recognizable style of the eighteenth century. What predated, and indeed coexisted with, the Georgian adaptation of stylistic trends imported from England, was an assortment of colonial “styles” that were based on the individual vernacular traditions -- modified on the basis of materials at hand and in response to local environmental conditions -- of the multi-national immigrants to America.12 Shaker architecture, then, was a bona fide manifestation of American colonial style, and it is beyond question that the relative austerity of the Adam style was well suited to the particular utopian ideal that the community wished their structures to reflect.

The power of architecture to express, and even advertise, one’s convictions and aspirations has certainly been harnessed in the contemporary suburb as well. As often noted, the single-family, detached house plays, and has from the first played, a unique role as a cultural symbol in America. Ours is a “culture that reads houses as texts on character, taste, goals, and success.”13

Stylistically, the contemporary suburban house has been described as neoeclectic, and among the neoeclectic styles, neo-colonial is the most popular. The neo-colonial style is a bastardized offshoot of the Colonial Revival style that appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it features a quixotic blend of stylistic elements borrowed haphazardly from colonial prototypes to conjure up a mythicized, pre-industrial past and a sense of tradition that could give a “cohesive public identity to people divided by social class, religion, dialect, or regional origin.”14 Pseudo-colonial ornamentation is applied in order to make our houses appear to be something other than what they really are, “something better, older,

11 See Julie Nicoletta, Architecture of the Shakers, 49-52.12 Discussions of colonial architecture consulted here include Leland M. Roth, American Architecture: A History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 1-151; Virginia and Lee McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) 1-177; Carole Rifkind, A Field Guide to American Architecture (New York: The New American Library, 1980), 1-37; and Harold Donaldson Eberlein, The Architecture of Colonial America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1915).

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more enduring, resonant with history and taste.”15 Neo-colonial architectural vocabulary speaks of stability and permanence, thus assuming the virtues of the ancestral house, a rare phenomenon in this country.16 This architecture thus proffers a tangible link with a period that is now believed to have been characterized by “dignity, honesty, and respect for neighbors.”17 Interestingly, the Georgian and Adam styles are the most popular “prototypes” of the neo-colonial house, and in this respect, there is some form of contact between the architecture of the Shakers and the contemporary suburban home.18 Our neo-colonial styles, however, are merely a mimesis of the “real thing,” and regardless of underlying utopian longings that architectural colonial allusion may evince, the fact remains that we are hiding a fundamentally dystopian reality behind this colonial façade. This reality is mass isolation and societal fragmentation. Clearly the outward appearance of the house alone is not sufficient to bring about significant social improvement.

The “community” exemplified by Harmony Hollow, a subdivision filled with houses pretending to be what they are not, may seem to be impossibly far removed from that of the Shakers, but here too one can point to some common ground in the history of each. The Shaker movement had a strong utopian-communal component, and the communal societies to which it gave rise were communities in the strictest sense of the word. A utopian spirit is something that was likewise shared by the founders of first suburbs in America, though the utopian ideal here was based not on hopes of spiritual salvation of a religious sort but rather consisted of the secular desire to create rus in urbe, a healthy experience in nature in the context of an industrialized, urban society.

The years that mark Shakerism’s “classic phase” (1825-1875) saw the burgeoning of a number of other social utopian communities, including the Oneida Community in upstate New York, the Fourieresque North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey, and Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana. Less “alternative,” but certainly utopian in spirit, were the new rural suburban communities of Llewellyn Park, New Jersey; Glendale, Ohio; and Riverside, Illinois. Llewellyn S. Haskell, the founder of Llewellyn Park, was a prosperous businessman who had a real a passion for the outdoors. Perhaps most interestingly, Haskell was also a member of a religious cult known as the

13 Jan Cohn, The Palace or the Poorhouse: The American House as a Cultural Symbol (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1979), 215. It is interesting that Wayne Andrews, Architecture, Ambition, and Americans: A Social History of American Architecture (New York: The Free Press, 1964), xv, has explicitly omitted the Shakers from his discussion. Prosperity as a catalyst for taste expressed in extraordinary architectural achievements is what concerns Andrews’s social history of architecture. Yet it is true that the Shakers were prosperous and that their minimalist expression of that prosperity is architecturally worthy of note.14 Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 84.15 James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Manmade Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 168.16 See Jan Cohn, The Palace, 239-40.17 Linda E. Smeins, Building an American Identity: Pattern Book Homes and Communities, 1870-1900 (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 1999), 83.18 The detached, single-family house itself was, of course, not part of the Shaker experience.

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Perfectionists, who believed that correct living could result in a perfect existence on earth. His love of nature and his Perfectionist ideology are both transparent in his aim to create a picturesque community that was “a retreat for a man to exercise his own rights and privileges.”19 Haskell selected the prominent architect Alexander Jackson Davis to develop his site plan, and their collaboration resulted in what contemporary critics deemed “the most sensible real estate development in American history.”20 Among the distinguishing characteristics of this Arcadian suburb were its undulating streets, designed to respond to and preserve the contours of the natural landscape (and appropriately named “Mountain” and “Tulip,” for example), generous, multi-acre building sites landscaped to complement the environment, and a communal, fifty acre park known as the “Ramble” that was replete with wooded walkways running along a stream flowing over a sequence of waterfalls. Similar in intent and spirit to Llewellyn Park was Riverside, Illinois, the brainchild of Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of New York’s Central Park, and his partner Calvert Vaux. A truly master-planned community, Riverside boasted meticulous planning on every level, ranging from the water supply and drainage to schools, extensive recreational facilities, and a plethora of parks.

While Llewellyn Park and Riverside were unattainable by persons of more modest, “middle class” means, the twentieth century suburban communities devised by Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred aimed at a far less elite audience, and they were a huge commercial success. Neither type of suburban community has escaped harsh criticism. Llewellyn Park and Riverside have been accused of setting dangerous precedents for some of the maladies of the contemporary suburban community: minimum lot size, established setbacks, prohibition of fences, and minimum house prices. All of this, it is argued, leads to a “segregation of income.”21 Levittown, for its part, has fared worse still in the eyes of posterity. Indeed the mere mention of Levittown conjures up a frightening image of excessive conformity and mindless conservatism, of cookie-cutter houses on cookie-cutter lots, of Stepford wives and Organization men, and the death of spirit and imagination generally. Levittown has been blamed more directly still for the de-evolution of the twenty-first century suburb. For all their failings, however, the Levittowns, of which there were three, did possess virtues that warrant attention, virtues that the suburban communities ostensibly descended from them do not possess. That the idea of Levittown possessed a utopian aspect, however elusive, can be surmised from the contribution of Alfred Levitt. Alfred, who was an architect, desired to create a real sense of community, and his ideas for the layout of streets, the town center, parks, and other communal facilities were finally included in the second Levittown. The inclusion in the Levittowns of shopping centers, schools, libraries, swimming pools, baseball diamonds, and village greens bear witness to an attempt at actual community building. Thus Herbert Gans, who documented his two-year stay in the third 19 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 77. The utterance cited here is that of Haskell himself as cited in Jackson’s work.20 Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 78.21 James Kunstler, Geography of Nowhere, 52.

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Levittown, reports that “Levitt was building communities and not just subdivisions, which meant that the entire range of local institutions and facilities typically associated with a community would be established de novo.”22 His response to the critics of Levitt’s efforts at community building is that people here wanted “a new house but not a new life” and that “romantic city planners” and “nostalgic social critics” were expecting too much; what they desired was to “revive a sense of community that never was save in their imagination, instead of planning for the effective functioning of and improved living conditions in those aggregates to which we give the name ‘community’.”23

The elitist suburb of the nineteenth century and the middle-class suburb of the twentieth century, exemplified by Llewellyn Park and Levittown respectively, are similar in that they were master-planned; that is, someone gave their existence beyond the building and “selling” stage some concentrated thought, and the spiritual needs of the inhabitants were, in some way, addressed. A critical aspect of this spiritual need is a relationship with the natural environment. Levittown did provide its denizens with open space for their enjoyment. In this regard Levittown, however uniform and modest its houses, is not so very different from the romanticizing suburb such as Llewellyn Park, though the latter was certainly functioning on a much more grandiose, even regal scale. It is a pity that, generally speaking, we have learned no more from Llewellyn Park and Levittown than we have from Las Vegas. It is easier to reject them outright than to examine their existential fabric. In his classic history of the American suburb, Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson predicted that whatever remnant of community might still linger in suburbia would ultimately be the casualty of a mass retreat into the Edenic “private islands” of the detached single-family home nestled in the restful embrace of its garden.24 Though it is true that the suburban family has turned in on itself, it is not true that any enjoyment whatsoever is derived from the garden. The reality of “communities” like Harmony Hollow is far more grim than Jackson could imagine; here the garden -- regardless of the presence of swing sets and elaborate deck ensembles -- resembles a wasteland rather than a paradise. In the eyes of some, suburban sprawl and all of its attendant horrors constitute a nightmarish manifestation of Wright’s Broadacre City, but equating our suburban reality with Wright’s vision is simply not accurate.25 While it is true that Wright envisioned a decentralized social system reliant on the automobile and the existence of a landscape dotted with single-family houses, his complete vision had very little in common with the present suburban reality. Among other things, Wright envisioned the possibility of transportation via air borne machines called “gyros;” he also envisioned an autochthonous American architecture of “organic” houses, houses built to respond to their physical environment both in design and material.26 These houses were to be modest in scale, not introspective, pseudo-

22 Herbert Gans, The Levittowners, xvii.23 Ibid, 146-47.

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colonial McMansions imitating the kind of house Wright disparaged as a “bedeviled box with a fussy lid; a complex box that had to be cut up by all kinds of holes made in it to let in light and air, and with an especially ugly hole to go in and come out of.”27 Quite simply put, what Wright understood all too well is that

people need contact with trees and plants and water. In some way, which is hard to express, people are able to be more whole in the presence of nature, are able to go deeper into themselves, and are somehow able to draw sustaining energy from the life of plants and trees and water.28

While the success of domestic architecture depends on relationships with the landscape that it provides, the establishment and success of community depends less on architecture and, above all, architectural “styles” than on the meaningful placement of buildings, domestic and otherwise, with respect to one another in their respective natural environment. The success of the Shakers, for example, had much less to do with the aesthetics of their buildings than with their placement with respect to one another. The contemporary New Urbanists, or Neo-traditionalists as they are also called, have been and continue to be criticized for promoting a form of suburbia that is merely a more expensive cousin of the developer driven subdivision. Neo-traditionalists rely on a series of devices through which they hope to create community. Their creations, which tend to be master-planned towns, incorporate nostalgic architectural imagery to foster a sense of regional and communal identity. They have faith “that spatial devices -- pedestrian scale, mixed use, greenery, front porches -- and other physical amenities can create community.”29 Architectural and urban historian Ada Louise Huxtable has venomously denounced this approach in stating that “clever, ‘authentic’ adaptation makes the ridiculous acceptable; this is a managed eclecticism of a seductive unreality that both blows and corrupts the mind.”30 Her utterance focuses in particular on Celebration, an especially easy target as it is a neo-traditionalist Disney creation. As an effort of community building, Celebration may be far from perfect, but even Huxtable (though tongue-in-cheek) admits that, on some level, “there is not going to be any way not to like Celebration,” for the planning that went into it was “superior.”31 Andrew Ross, who documented his first-hand impressions of life in Celebration, notes that it was not necessarily architectural, back-to-the-future nostalgia and the seductiveness of a mythologized colonial past that drew people to Celebration.

24 Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 280.25 See, for instance, Leland Roth, American Architecture, 387 and Robert A. M. Stern, Pride of Place: Building the American Dream (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 154, who notes that Wright’s “dream, as realized through the ubiquitous presence of subdivided suburbia, turned out to be quite nightmarish.”26 See Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House (New York: Bramhall House, 1954).27 Ibid, 14.28 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 806.29 Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States, 104.30 Ada Louise Huxtable, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (New York: The New Press, 1997), 65.31 Ibid, 65-66. Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States, 101-3, presents a good summary of Celebration’s flaws.

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Although this was certainly a factor in some cases, Ross encountered those who stated that they were more or less oblivious to the architectural styles represented there and that they would have moved to Celebration regardless of architectural styles. They moved to Celebration for what it had to offer in terms of social amenities.32 As Ross observed, a “sense of community is least easy to plan, guarantee, or put a price on.”33 Indeed, community is priceless, and it is fortunate that there are architects and planners who believe strongly that the built, physical environment has a palpable effect on the human psyche and social behavior. Whatever its failings may be, Celebration at least attempts to counter the spiritual desolation that the standard suburban development does not even acknowledge.

The experience of the contemporary suburb is summarized and symbolized by the cul-de-sac. So many new development roads end in cul-de-sacs (Fig. 1). These roads are dead ends on a multitude of levels. They prevent passage to the world outside and thus close the gates of mystery and imagination. The cul-de-sac is off-putting and uninviting, and at the same time it threatens to engulf the American Dream. The contemporary suburb is proof that the dwelling, both in itself and in its disposition towards others, can and does transform the life of the dweller. The result in this case is a life less livable, an aggregation of isolationism, and the evanescence of that which engenders community.

ENDNOTES

32 See Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles, 63-66 and passim.33 Ibid, 218.

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