Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 16

SUNNYSIDE GARDENS DID NOT ARISE in a vacuum. The ideas inspiring its creation developed at a time when cities in Europe and the United States were crowded, unhealthy places, and reform-minded citizens sought ways to ameliorate, or even transcend, those social ills. If we recognize that condition as a societal problem, and if we have the means to rectify it, reasoned housing reformers, then clearly we have the obligation to do so. The earliest steps called for improving specific conditions by mandating minimum standards of light, air, and sanitation. Too often, of course, the minimum became the maximum. Dissatisfied with the limited results of such an approach, urban critics began to reenvision the city entirely. What would we build if we could start anew, they asked.

In both London and New York, two truths were unavoidable. First, living conditions for a large number of city dwellers were abhorrent. Working-class and immigrant neighborhoods were overcrowded, with poor sanitation and a disease environment producing alarming rates of infant mortality and communicable diseases. “The mass of the people live in hovels and slums and our children grow up far from the sight and pleasure of green fields,” wrote Raymond Unwin, the architect of Hampstead Garden Suburb. Second, Unwin saw that undeveloped land at the edge of the city was rapidly being built upon without any discernable plan. “Our land is laid out solely to serve the interests of individual owners, without regard to the common needs,” he observed.¹ For him, designing and building for the common good was the essence of urban planning, but unless that principle was installed as municipal policy, cities would continue to grow in a haphazard, destructive fashion.

In the early 1900s, however, there was no mechanism whereby cities could control or guide growth. “Governing bodies have looked on helplessly while estate after estate around their towns has been covered with buildings without any provision having been made for open spaces, school sites, or any other public needs,” wrote Unwin. “The owner’s interest, too often his only one, has been to produce the maximum increase of value or of ground rent possible for himself by crowding upon the land as much building as it would hold.”²

In addition to those capitalist imperatives, there was the banality or even ugliness of what was being built. It should not be surprising that aesthetics would remain a low priority where maximizing profit was the primary motivation of builders. Adapting construction to the specifics of site was not a consideration either and that resulted in the obliteration of the natural features and irregularities in the landscape. “Instead,” complained Unwin in dismay, “some stock plan of a house which is thought to be economical is reproduced in row after row without regard to levels, aspect, or anything but just one point: Can the building be done so cheaply that it can be made to yield a good return on the outlay? Is it any wonder, then, that our towns and suburbs express by their ugliness the passion for individual gain which so largely dominates their creation?”³ In a word, what is lost in such unplanned sprawl is charm. The question was whether the expanding metropolis would bulldoze natural features in favor of undifferentiated sprawl and congestion, or whether we could envision and realize an alternative, an environment that might unite town and country and encourage the happiness and potential of its residents. Building on the Arts and Crafts movement, which sought to bring beauty to everyday objects and so improve the conditions of industrial workers, housing reformers asserted that no one should be ineligible for the enjoyment of an environment of beauty and charm on account of social class.

In 1898, Ebenezer Howard published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, reprinted in 1902 under its now familiar title, Garden Cities of To-Morrow.⁴ This slim tract, with its schematic diagrams of the “Town-Country Magnet,” would seem the very model of Edwardian Era eccentricity, but almost at once Howard’s concept captured the imagination of both professional architects and planners and the general public, and launched the garden city movement.

Howard opened with the observation that while there was great overcrowding in the cities, at the same time rural areas were being depopulated. This imbalance only worsened the quality of life in both places. Central to his idea was the dispersal of industry rather than accepting as inevitable its concentration in congested cities. As current development trends only accentuated the differences between urban and rural living, Howard envisioned the best attributes of each combined into a new configuration, the garden city. These new towns should not be permitted to grow in a haphazard fashion, he contended, and the best way to assure that end would be to build according to a rational plan and to surround the city with a greenbelt.⁵ As it was unlikely that the British government would ever finance such a venture, it would be the responsibility of private citizens to invest in that future.⁶

Garden Cities of To-Morrow provided an attractive ideological framework, but suburbanization and a lowering of population densities in London and New York would have occurred in any event as new rapid transit systems opened up previously distant precincts to residential construction. The question was whether the expanding metropolis would bulldoze the landscape in favor of undifferentiated sprawl and congestion or whether it was possible to envision and realize an alternative—an environment that might unite town and country and encourage the happiness and full potential of its residents.

Another question was whether rearranging the spatial arrangements of society made it possible to also transform its economic basis. Howard asked, following the arguments of Henry George: What if, instead of the profit from housing going into the pockets of distant owners, it flowed back to the community? A new community simply incorporating the prevailing economic arrangements could not be the goal. C. B. Purdom, the financial director of Welwyn, explained that the land values had to be “socially enjoyed.” A garden city would have to be developed “on the economic basis provided by the systematic and deliberate creation of land values, the profits on which form part of the town’s revenues.” The idea of the land “being in public ownership, or held in trust for the community,” was an essential feature.⁷

To prove his theory, Howard organized a private company to build a garden city outside London. In 1903 work began on what was called First Garden City, Letchworth, and in 1919 construction of the second community, Welwyn, was underway. While not directly connected to Howard, Hampstead Garden Suburb, which launched three years after Letchworth, embodied many of his ideas and was the work of the same architects, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker.

Lewis Mumford saw the garden city as a rebuke to the increasing regimentation and mechanization of contemporary society. What concerned Mumford was not so much architecture in and of itself—though he certainly embraced the principle that aesthetics is never irrelevant—but the impact of the built environment upon the human spirit. He championed Howard because “he returned to the human scale, and he conceived of a means of increasing the size and complexity of social relations without destroying this scale.” Furthermore, by planning regionally and establishing controls for area, density, and population, new towns would offer an outlet for future growth without repeating the mistakes of the past.⁸

Many of Ebenezer Howard’s ideas were simply impractical and, given the economic realities of suburban development, unlikely ever to be followed exactly. His interest was not so much in the form of the new community—the plan and architecture—as its potential for economic and social change. He envisioned the garden city “as a vehicle of fundamental transformation … the path to a higher plane of living.” The result would be “not only a new balance of town and country but harmonization of human society with nature and reconciliation of individualism and socialism.”⁹ Howard’s followers embraced that spirit of idealism and optimism and shared with him a desire to transform society.

Howard’s garden city ideal inspired generations of planners and urban critics who embraced his underlying principles and goals while adapting their own designs to specific conditions. As much as Howard intended his little book to be prescriptive, in practice it remained largely inspirational. Housing reformers would work toward his ideal, never fully attaining its complete realization but holding ever true to its aspirations.

How deeply the garden city idea resonated with the public and the speed with which it spread across Europe and the United States is remarkable. A year after his book appeared, Howard and a few admirers organized the Garden City Association with the ultimate goal of bringing his ideas to fruition. Predictably, the movement initially attracted a variety of socialists and land reformers; Howard himself was sympathetic to socialist solutions to societal ills. But for his ideals to be realized, practical men of business and standing would be required, and there was a surprising degree of sympathy with his ideas among Britain’s industrialists.

Not all industrialists blithely consigned their workforce to urban slums. In 1888, W. H. Lever began building Port Sunlight for his workers, a garden suburb named for the popular Lever Brothers soap. Located across the Mersey River from Liverpool, it represented “the first effective large-scale integration of nineteenth-century social reform with picturesque town design. For the first time, the utilitarianism of social-minded town planning, with rows of narrow houses on straight bye-law [sic] streets, gave way to a new sensibility of the garden village.” In Birmingham a few years later, chocolate manufacturer George Cadbury developed his own workers’ village, Bournville, with the avowed purpose “of alleviating the evils which arise from the insanitary and insufficient accommodation supplied to large numbers of the working classes, and of securing to workers in factories some of the advantages of the outdoor village life, with opportunities for the natural and healthful occupation of cultivating the soil.”¹⁰

Clarence Stein visited Bournville in 1908 during a break from his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts. In a letter to his brother, Stein expressed his sympathy with the plight of the urban masses in England and his dismay over their living conditions. “The poor of the big cities here seem quite as badly off as at home, perhaps worse,” he wrote. “The streets are full of ragged, dirty children, and plenty of the grown-ups are no better kept.… They seem to be crowded together in tenements facing on narrow lanes or alleys.” Bournville, by contrast, was a revelation, a parklike setting where the residents benefited from a direct connection with greenery, with tree-lined streets and front and rear gardens planted with fruit trees. He adds that the planting preceded occupancy of the homes, “so they have the initial care of a good gardener.” He took lessons from the siting and design of the houses, as well. The homes, rather than “being built in solid, monotonous rows, as they are in most workingmen’s villages, are made for two to four families each. And then they are of an endless variety of design.” He enthusiastically declared that it was “the most inspiring thing I had seen in England.” He came away with the lesson that “utopian dreams can be made realities, if we only go about it in a practical, sane way.”¹¹

Port Sunlight and Bournville were essentially suburbs, extensions of an adjacent city. What set Garden Cities of To-Morrow apart from those industrial precedents was the idea of building a new, self-sustaining city entirely separate from the existing metropolis. Howard had the audacity to insist upon building such a place altogether and all at once.