Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's Grandson Remains Faithful to Organic Architecture

Eric Lloyd Wright would like to follow up on his grandfather's plan for a new city. He says it would be different than other well-known "dream cities," such as architect Paolo Solari's Arcosanti, now under construction in central Arizona.

"He did, back in 1933, a whole concept which he called Broadacre City," he said. "It was very much a 'Jeffersonian' [diffuse, American] concept - whereas Arcosanti is more European and high-density in a small area. My grandfather's idea was different; it was spread out with everyone having a small, farm unit. But [they're] not suburbs. People blame [Frank Lloyd Wright] for being the 'father of the suburbs.' Broadacre City was not that. It was his theoretical concept, which he said was a 'city that's everywhere, but nowhere.'"

Posted 7:03 PM by David

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This post inspired in part by the 2 blowhards very interesting series of posts (with an enormous number of comments) on Books and Publishing with titles such as Writing a Book and Writing a Book Redux and The Book-Besotted.

Here's my thought for today:

I'm involved with a little project --- publishing a book --- which raises the issue of "review copies." Such books are copies given to newspapers and magazines in the hope, with the prayer, the supplication, in fact, that the book will be read and reviewed, or even just reviewed. The economic and psychological future of the publisher and author are very much influenced by what is said, or even whether the book is even given any notice at all.

So publishers shower books on media. I asked some people who worked for one of those free, weekly, proudly "alternative" papers if I should send a book for possible review. They started laughing. "The hallways are piled with books. They come in by the hundreds. There are stacks everywhere. We take them and give them away for party favors." That was a discouraging introduction to book marketing. I'm told that the secret of publishing is to create a "buzz" long before the book ever gets to the printer so that the reviewer will paw through those mounds of unsolicited books to grab a title which has been buzzed. People who can create that whisper of import are paid extremely well, I would suspect, and I certainly can't imagine being able to hire one.

So I am wondering if I should even bother sending out unsolicited review copies. Why waste the paper and postage? Not that it's always wasted by any means; the first edition of this book got a wonderful notice in The Washington Post on the basis of an over-the-transom copy. But overall, there seems something so undignified and striving in simply mailing copies to people I don't know and saying "Here. Please write about what I think."

So this time around I'm thinking that I might simply post a PDF of one chapter of the book on the web site associated with this blog. People can download it. Read it, maybe even print it out. If some reviewer likes what she sees, she can email me and ask for a review copy. Perhaps I'll even send out an appropriate email to announce the book. Who knows, maybe even surprise really important reviewers with snail mail? As in paper to announce more paper.

The custom for university and college teachers is to request a copy on their departmental stationery; some publishers require some degree of payment as a sign of sincerity. One has to bear in mind that even a "real publisher" may only print 5000 copies of a book and so to then send out 250 copies willy-nilly --- 5% of the whole print run! --- seems to me as if it would add up. Better to have them meet half-way. No?

But there is another question which interests me: why should review copies be free at all? Gratis. No charge. "Here, take one. In fact, take another for your brother-in-law." Well obviously that's the custom and it's what has evolved in the rough-and-tumble hard-scrabble of the publishing world: review copies are free. At least I assume that The New York Times, for instance, doesn't pay for review copies.

But review meals are not free. I gather that restaurant reviewers pay for their meals and even seek to preserve their anonymity. "Is that man over there in the bow tie taking notes actually a spy for the Guide Michelin?" That must be a restaurant-staff game. The principle is to both receive the same treatment as other diners and to avoid even the hint of a bought review.

Why should it not be the same for books? Especially now in the digital age, publishers can post samples of their books to engender interest--- and of course noted authors need only announce the availability of their title to have it pounced upon.

Certainly the two items are not precisely the same. A book remains the same but a restaurant meal can be improved for a known reviewer by a better cut or a larger portion. But certainly --- I hope, I assume --- that serious New York design media would decline a free trip to Cincinnati to review the Hadid museum; why should it so naturally accept a free book? Yes of course scale. Can a reviewer be influenced by a free $20 book? Probably not. But there is such a thing as a principle. It would seem that the practice of review copies would have passed its prime. With only a few books to review each week, certainly money is not the issue. If they want to read it, buy it. No?




Posted 6:59 PM by David

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I want one; in fact I need a WiFi Finder.


Posted 6:55 PM by David

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Emily Eakins of the NYT characterizes Christopher Alexander as Architecture's Irascible Reformer who has been

"waging a quixotic campaign of messianic ambition: to heal the world by reforming the way it builds.

Humanity, he says, is ailing. And the built world is both source and symptom of its disease. Where there should be beautiful buildings in harmony with nature, he says, there is mostly "architecture which is against life" instead, "insane, image-ridden, hollow."

By this, Mr. Alexander means not only strip malls, office parks and tract homes, but also much of what is fawned over these days by highbrow critics. In his view, the recent spate of flashy confections by big-name stars ?? from Frank Gehry's glittering Guggenheim Bilbao to Rem Koolhaas's interactive Prada boutique in SoHo ?? is not just pretentious and sterile. It is actually making us ill.

"Architecture is a very strange field," Mr. Alexander said over lunch here in the medieval town not far from West Dean Gardens where he grew up and has lately been spending much of his time. "It's almost as though they've induced a mass psychosis in society by introducing a point of view that has no common sense and no bearing on any deeper feeling."

I wouldn't go so far as Alexander apparently does to claim that there are "objective" standards of beauty. But there are indeed "social agreements" about what is beautiful --- consider personal physical beauty if you have any doubt --- which are so widely held and shared as to act as essentially firm standards.

Anyway, this book is far too long for me; I'll await the executive summary.

What's interesting is that Eakins (the reporter) almost seems to be shocked, as if it is a new idea, by Alexander's assertion that modern starchitecture is silly, which neatly illustrates Alexander's contention.


Posted 6:55 PM by David

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Plenty of space to park.
Yes, but isn't there too much of a good thing?

Posted 2:33 PM by David

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Thanks to Nick Aster for telling me about the Degree Confluence Project as I always like to know where I am. This sign, though not quite on point, has always appealed to me:



Posted 2:41 AM by David

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"News you can use"?
Posted 10:32 PM by David

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Brian will love this exhibit about The Art of Chess,, "an exhibition of 19th and 20th century chess sets designed by artists." (italics added)
Posted 9:27 PM by David

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See interesting reference to science fiction story The Roads Must Roll at Wikipedia. Thanks to this post at Historical Ramblings.
Posted 7:46 AM by David

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If I had the wealth of Bill Gates (or even a noticeable fraction) I would put up the money to fulfill Buckminster Fuller's vision of a Geoscope.

In lieu, I am looking for a great urban atlas of cities on CD-Rom or the web. Any suggestions? Maybe the Berlin Digital Environmental Atlas on CD-Rom is a start?

UPDATE! I am not the only one who loves the idea of Making the Geoscope a Reality.


Posted 4:10 PM by David

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I am in whole-hearted agreement that face-to-face meetings are here to stay.

Which is why people who want to get things done will always be wanting to travel and to meet each other, and why Transport Blog will accordingly need to go on for ever. Virtual meetings (such as that between Perry and Dale ?? see above) definitely have their place in the grand scheme of things. But face-to-face meetings are even more likely to make things happen.

I've chosen "Staying put" as the category for this posting. But of course what I'm really saying is that staying put, again and again, is not enough.

The face-to-face meeting, whether intentional or accidental, is the wild card in all predictions about the physical shape of the future i.e. cities.

In fact I would go even further and suggest that it is the importance to people (or lack thereof) of the accidental & chance encounter which determines whether there is enough political will to implement the pedestrian-oriented changes which so many politicians seek to implement.
Posted 11:52 AM by David

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I was just going to say virtually the very same thing about this great blog.

Nick, the spotter at Beyond Brilliance, works forward from existing physical details (rather than forward from intellectual conceptions) ...as in...

Post hoc not a priori.

Posted 3:31 PM by David

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There are lots of good reasons to husband oil in the ground but Jim Kunstler's concern that unless we do so we won't have enough to run our SUVs seems a bit off the mark. No? Conservation Reconsidered" — Reconsidered

It was in 1967 that a little paper called "Conservation Reconsidered" appeared in the American Economic Review, sandwiched between contributions by Peter Diamond on stock markets and Charles Plott on majority voting,

The author was John Krutilla, a research economist (Reed College, Harvard PhD in 1952) working for the Washington think-tank Resources for the Future. From his dry first sentence ??— "Conservation of natural resources has meant different things to different people" ??— he fastened attention on a historic shift of perspective that then was taking place

For more than a century, Krutilla wrote, economists had been preoccupied with the problem of scarcity. He recalled that barely twenty years before, his own organization (which had begun life as a presidential commission on raw material shortages) had examined the rate at which scarce natural resources were consumed during World War II and concluded that the long decline in their prices had ended.

What remained was thought to be a problem of optimal inter-temporal utilization of fixed stocks. The only question was, how fast to burn the coal? To use up the remaining copper?

Yet, Krutilla noted, recent studies had concluded that advances in technology so far had compensated "quite adequately" for depletion. Silicon was beginning to substitute for copper. Some optimists were arguing that there might be essentially no fixed limits to growth.

In which case, the problem was less one of husbanding resources stocks for future use as providing to the present and preserving for the future "the amenities associated with unspoiled natural environments, for which the market fails to make adequate provision."

The resource that now required conservation, in other words, was nature itself, raw and unrefined, valued not so much for its use (or even its potential future use) as for it very existence.

In writing thus, Krutilla was articulating in the idiom of contemporary economics a series of concerns that what had been on minds at least John Stuart Mill. He translated into professional lingo concerns that had been raised by Aldo Leopold and S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup, among others, that the knowledge produced from rare species and ecosystems might be worth something some day.

The problem, it seems to me, is that we will have some sort of fuel to run personal vehicles and we haven't yet figured out how to integrate cars into cities in a way which doesn't detroy the pleasure of both. I think that if anything Kunstler has "the problem" (from an urbanistic perspective) exactly reversed: we will not run out of oil or any other equivalent portable fuel source.
Posted 8:33 AM by David

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The major thing I learned from Edward Said as an undergraduate and posted here was to be aware of the use of language to deceive, (which of course has made me particularly aware of his language.)

My earlier comment about The New Criterion's nasty fun should, for the record, be clarified; the use of language to discuss physical reality is an important theme of this blog.

I object to this paragraph:

"In pursuit of their ideals, the mistakes that some of those bright young people made included armed robbery, widespread kidnap, assassination and random murder. By the time the army carried out its coup in 1976, over 3,000 people had been killed in the political violence unleashed by the young idealists. The dirty war, terrible and unforgivable as it was, did not arise by spontaneous generation."

The paragraph is slippery. It cleverly sets up an equation:

1. un-numbered "mistakes" by some young idealists
with
2. very specific "3000" deaths
explicitly
3. "unleashed by the young idealists."

By using numbers, it gives the impression of accuracy without actually offering any; it's an interesting rhetorical trick: the inclusion of a number, any number, spreads a gloss of authority to the entire paragraph. Further, the author admits that the young idealists made "mistakes." Yet he then goes ahead and transforms their mistakes into the cause of 3000 deaths and essentially absolves the government of culpability.



Posted 8:28 AM by David

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Fresh Bilge writes , about Frank Herbert's Dune, one of my very favorite books, combining as it does all of life's key issues:

money, sex, power and landscape.

One passage is particularly striking. It's about "details" and the importance of being meticulous.

A splashing sounded on her left. She looked down...saw the watermasters emptying their load into the pool through a flowmeter. The meter was a round gray eye above the pool's rim. She saw its glowing pointer move as the water flowed through it, saw the pointer stop at thirty-three liters, seven and three-thirty-seconds drachms.

Superb accuracy in water measurement, Jessica thought. And she noted that the walls of the meter trough held no trace of moisture after the water's passage. The water flowed off those walls without binding tension. She saw a profound clue to Fremen technology in the simple fact: they were perfectionists.

No surface tension. It could stand as an anthem for us all.

Posted 5:20 AM by David

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What could have been a cinematic set-piece explains my somewhat cavalier perspective on the previously-mentioned issue of "running out of oil".

***

It was just after the oil embargo of 1973, a formative, traumatic experience for people my age. I was waiting to walk across a street with a slightly older and extremely astute colleague. One of the first domestic (USA) "compact cars" rolled by. We both noticed it.

"Detroit," my friend intoned and pointed accusingly, "just saved the suburbs."

***

What he meant, of course, was that the fuel efficiency of the compact car would save America from having to change its spatial structure, move closer-in, densify, rebuild center cities and all that. He was dead-on correct. In the past 30 years suburban expansion has continued apace. And there is plenty of room for vastly higher oil prices, no matter how much people might complain; Europe has suburbs at $5/gallon. The cars simply get more efficient so that people can continue to live in their detached single-family "estates."

If one is concerned about the terrific, soul-destroying ugliness of suburban expansion, as Jim Kunstler surely and rightly is, don't look to higher oil prices as a savior. The primary impact of high(er) oil prices on suburban development will be a change in the size of cars. Consequently, if the change is expected to be long-term, the major spatial impact will be smaller parking spaces.

Good urban design --- walkable, pedestrian commercial districts --- will not be a direct result of high(er) oil prices.
Posted 12:30 PM by David

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Brian's impressed by a nouveau kind of trottoir here and here.

If Brian's impressed, I am prepared to be so as well, though I am usually dubious of technical gimmicks. And a moving sidewalk seems to fit in that category. But who knows...
Posted 9:30 AM by David

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