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Notes on a Tennessee Town

In my suburban Washington, DC childhood, I had a remarkable next-door neighbor, a grandfatherly figure called Bob Coe. Bob was a landscape architect—trained at Harvard—whose early career had been spent with the Olmsted brothers. A man of sincere liberalism, he signed on with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1930s and was responsible for landscape design at a number of sites throughout the project.

The one that he spoke of most, though, was Norris—a planned community built in 1933–34 to house TVA workers who were building a giant dam nearby. Bob had lived in Norris, and it was there that he met and married his wife, Kay, a preternaturally kind Tennessee native who taught first grade for over fifty years. The two of them spent hours each week working in their beautiful garden which was, for me, a paradise—the most lovingly cultivated half-acre I have seen before or since. I assumed Norris was a variation on this garden.

A couple of months ago, I finally had the opportunity to visit Norris and take a dam tour down the Clinch and Tennessee. Norris is lovely: the garden city layout of the town is carefully informal and sensitive to the hilly topography, and it contains a number of astute spatial deployments, including a repeated grouping of three houses around a common lawn that struck me as beautifully scaled and latently convivial. Throughout the town, I thought I could recognize Bob’s rich, serpentine and layered sensibility in landscaping grown lush.

The original houses that have survived are very small and inexpensively built, but have a compact elegance. One mustn’t overstate the consequences of 350 houses: the current atmosphere leans toward the funky, and Norris remains a very small place with a few modest shops and services, two schools, and several TVA labs and workshops. The vibe is tender, though—even moving. Kids are wandering the pathways at dusk. Neighbors are chatting in the commons.

Here, I thought to myself, was a genuine town, built out in the optimistic idiom of interwar modernity. At Norris, and nearby Oak Ridge, there’s a lingering aura of purpose that exceeds the site planning. The plan conveys a way of seeing spaces as continuities, flowing in scale from the town to the river to its watershed to regional topography to the organization of the nation and beyond. The spectacular dam down the hill and the beautifully managed river are there to testify to what a town can do. A place with a grounding beyond economy, this is not a company town but its flipside. Its rationalism is gentle and its layout sinuous. Those curves—understood as the contour-following outgrowth of a compact with nature—reflect a strong feeling for the welfare of the environment: an ecological vision, an idea of sympathy, not of discipline.

A recent visit to Taliesin revealed another classic intersection between form, ideology, and organization. Taliesin continues to draw both the shape and the reasons for its routine from the religio-architectural principles laid down by “Mr. Wright.” To the degree that these principles are complicit and shared, the place works wonderfully in both its hierarchy and its collectivity. Like Norris, the architectural frame still functions adaptably despite the inevitable ebbing of the force of the cultural project of Wrightian architecture. And the specificity is superb; a complex that continuously reads its own site.

Not long after my trips to Norris and Taliesin I spoke at one of the periodic conclaves of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), this one in Ann Arbor. I have had a modest career in the past few years playing Tim Leary to Andres Duany’s Gordon Liddy at these events, offering hyperbolic dissent to his neo-traditional, generic planning strategies. The argument has some merit: it’s no accident that Seaside and Celebration have become icons for creepy social control, symbols of fraud and camouflage, private interest masquerading as public, the opposite of Norris.

Not living in a very civic time, we do get a huge overproduction of surrogates and appropriations of civil life—the Disney effect. How to resist? I don’t suggest that we must be Shakers or rural electrifiers to find reasons for shaping townscapes. But real town life is not simply a matter of consumption, of mass customization, or even of market-driven “choice.” Not an original insight but one shared, I’m happy to think, by many in the CNU. Indeed, I became skeptical of my own interlocutory position at that conference in Ann Arbor. I felt a bond with the range of projects presented by a softer, more formally disinterested wing, including Peter Calthorpe, Bill Morrish, and Anne Vernez-Moudon, among others.

Norris is something I think all of us might agree on: we’re all trying to keep alive the idea of a town, of the next Norris. Norris is no Disneyland—it’s malleable, and the intentionality is soft. It was founded in a real fantasy of the demos. The New Deal really was a big deal for a lot of people—Bob and Kay among them. The cluster of ideologies and strategies behind it readily attached to (and were shaped by) both the pastoral planning of the garden city movement and the organizational vision in the exponential thinking of Patrick Geddes, Benton MacKaye and other godfathers of the experiment. Refitted now for other ways of living, Norris succeeds in its revalidation of the founding plan by contemporary events and in its retention of strong atmosphere and community.

There are two big issues confronting town building today, and they are the same ones that produced and were addressed by Norris: environment and equity. Towns both organize and steward the environment, anchoring the natural economy. They are themselves produced from the countryside and, at the same time, they are its annihilation. Environmentally informed planning is the medium for declaring a truce. The recent flash of Bush terror—a scorched-earth policy from hell—showed how close to the surface the paranoia about recolonizing hard-won boundaries for sprawl is. This is a true civil emergency, and planning is the only answer.

Planning always engages questions of equity. In America, equity resides in property, and a town plan represents its division. But a real town creates a proprietorship that exceeds property: town plans are the medium of negotiation between public and private rights, and freedom and power are as legible as can be. The plan is the mechanism for quantifying parity or scarcity—of space, of environmental quality, of architecture.

The beauty of Norris lies in its smooth enclosure of these desires. Its light lie on the land, its distributive dream, its modesty, and its aspirations for a culture and region larger than itself make it a model.

2001