Waking Leviathan: Frank Lloyd Wright’s rural urban ideal from Art and Craft Of The Machine (1901) to The Living City (1958)

There still exists in the collective global imagination a ghostly ‘image of progress’ framed by a nature-dominating narrative that distorts reality. As living standards rise worldwide, the demand for natural resources is accelerating in a familiar pattern: cities eat the rural, and the rural eats the wilderness. Ecology, society and economy are not the either/or variables they are often portrayed as being: there is no society without ecology, and no economy without society, each is embedded in context. As globalised societies become increasingly urban, the notion that cities ought to become self-sufficient has been widely popularised in both the architectural profession and in academia, legitimated through the use of the term autopoiesis (Greek αυ’τo ‘self’ and ποίησις ‘creation’), borrowed from the field of chronobiology. The opposite of autopoiesis, a closed process in which context might be an afterthought, is allopoiesis, the process whereby an organisationally open system produces something other than itself. Reality is many-layered and emphatically simultaneous, and while designers are busy fine-tuning daydreams of ‘self-sufficient cities’, regions and ecological systems now supporting real cities are being fragmented and erased in vast swaths, often taking once thriving cities along with them, further accelerating centralised urbanisation. Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Living City is a conceptual rural urban model for decentralised development that attempts, through its evolution in several iterations (from 1901 till 1958) to provide a humane alternative to centralised commercial urbanism. Wright’s life (1867-1959) and work spanned from the Victorian age to the space age, and The Living City is arguably his most ambitious attempt to ‘bridge the gap’. In arguing for contextual, open-ended planning methods it provides a suitable polar counterpoint to contemporary notions of cities as self-sufficient. As a precedent stimulating awareness of the fundamental need for the ‘humane proportion’ of industry and agronomy, it is of urgent relevance today

Between the Lines

Narratives employed when writing about a place and building a place have a central theme in common: both weave between the human, personal and emotional experience of place and the physical, spatial and atmospheric place – a dialogue between the inner and outer worlds. This article builds upon a lecture given at the University of Zurich’s Department of Literature’s conference Shifting Grounds: Culture, Literature and Spatial Phenomenologies (2016), addressing several explicit uses of literature to inform the design of contemporary urban place. These uses are drawn from practical experience at Studio Vulkan Landscape Architecture, where we use literature to access a deeper understanding of how people perceive and describe their experiences of place as well as descriptions of place. The examples of literature central to our work and the accompanying projects they have informed shed light upon four facets of our contemporary urban landscape and the experience of them: 1. bodily spatial experience, 2. nature, 3. the sensory experience of being in suburban woodland fragments and 4. traffic and sound

The Interoperative

Infrastructure can be wielded as a means of promoting the common good or as an institutional weapon of exploitation. Regardless of how a particular infrastructure is represented, it is not always clear which role it plays at any given moment

[EXPORT] Exhibition

INDIANAPOLIS CITY ENGAGEMENT PROJECTS BY SIX INTERNATIONALLY ACTIVE ARTISTS How can you understand your city more deeply? This exhibition presents the ways in which the Indianapolis-based informal collective We Are City has answered that question over the past two years. At the center of this show are the products of We Are City’s artist-in-residence program, which has brought six internationally active artists into conversation with Indianapolis residents. Featuring these artists’ visual, audio, linguistic, and material responses to their time in Indianapolis, as well as other documentation of We Are City’s activities, [EXPORT] shares the group’s city engagement efforts with a new audience in Columbus. [EXPORT] is curated by Laura Holzman, Public Scholar of Curatorial Practices and Visual Art at IUPUI. It features work by Oliver Blank, Jace Clayton, William Zoe FitzGerald, James A. Reeves, Rocio Salceda, and Matthew Skjonsberg

Do It Yourself: From Individual Sovereignty to Civic Design

With the Usonian Automatic construction system, Frank Lloyd Wright provided citizens of Usonia—Wright’s preferred term for a culturally advanced North America—with the means of “doing it themselves,” of building their own homes and communities. Though designing ways to provide moderate-cost housing on a large scale had preoccupied Wright for years—and resulted in his invention of numerous construction systems—the Usonian Automatic would be different: almost open source in its sensibility, it was explicitly intended to allow anyone to build their own buildings, of their own earth, on their own ground

Metrics of Utopia: Optionality, Aesthetics and Patrick Geddes’ Ideal of Synoptic Utopia

My dissertation, ‘Periodicity and Rural Urban Dynamics’, hypothesizes that the simultaneous experience of strongly contrasting sensations is pleasurable, and that ‘abrupt urbanism’ can enhance both rural and urban experience. This article investigates the dual dimension of Geddes’ survey, physical and social, highlighting the importance of the principles of ‘synoptic vision’ and ‘vital budget’ introduced in his Cities in Evolution, and their relation to the concept of Utopia – to which Geddes gives an original and effective meaning as evolutionary and deeply contextual. Both the notions of synoptic vision and vital budget are based on an organic dimension, addressing body-related metrics in town and country as tools for design and, finally, for establishing democracy. In order to reanimate Geddes for Horizontal Metropolis, the article considers these two concepts and their metrics by inscribing Geddes’ theory and statements into a wider chronological trajectory, looking at his legacy as evidenced by his relations with contemporaries, and more recent affirmations of his proposed associations between the body, energy, mobility, metrics and democracy