Second Nature City: The Grid, the Cube & The Frontier

From MArch Thesis: Interior Perspective from the City, looking toward the western suburbs and the frontier beyond

THE GRID PLAN ("SPEED LEVITCH" VIDEO LINK)

The earliest known use of the Grid Plan dates to Ancient Egypt, particularly in the organization of funerary sites. Grids were used extensively in the planning and construction of colonial cities in the Greek and Roman Empires. Indeed the original Roman Grid still defines the very center of many ancient cities (See Below).

Original Roman grid visible at the center of Florence

The Grid was similarly used throughout ancient China though with more emphasis on axial progression and the organizing principles of Feng Shui. While the Chinese used the grid to denote pure or sacred space (temples, the Forbidden City, the spaces of the domestic life, etc.), Western Empires referenced the grid as a means of organizing conquered territory (note that Imperial Capitals are not defined by the Grid).

For Empires the Grid provides unparalleled efficiencies in the movement of goods and people through space. It is a highly efficient tool for organizing space as a commodity (something that is more valuable in exchange than it is in use). In this sense, a speculator or a developer can make reasonable assumptions about any number of parcels without having to conduct a more thorough survey.

The Grid requires central planning and authority in order to impose it natural landscapes. It is ubiquitous in highly organized societies. It is the hallmark of Empires. When governments weaken and fall the Grid ceases to replicate itself across. Paths of travel revert to more natural parameters. After the fall of the Roman Empire European towns grew organically, slowly defining the intimate labyrinth of small streets that we now associate with places like Paris and Florence (notice the disintegration of the grid in the image above outside of the original Roman perimeter).

Nowhere was the Grid used as extensively and on such a large scale as in the colonization of the North American Continent. The Land Ordinance Grid of 1785 defined the future of a vast field of states, counties, townships and family farms across most of what is now referred to as the Midwest & Great Plains (Literally everything between the Appalachian & Rocky Mountains). At the end of the 18th Century this was the frontier. The Frontier Cities of the Midwest exploded in a historical instant. They expanded and matured not as organic centers of trade and culture but as massive machines for organizing the productive wealth of the continent. The cities and the landscape, from Toledo to Denver, were defined almost exclusively by the relentless repetition of the grid. American urbanism and country living grew together as one process that domesticated the landscape, exploited its natural resources and packaged its wealth for consumption and exchange. From the beginning of settlement, the cities and the landscape of the Midwest were bound in a symbiotic relationship of growth and exploitation. Nowhere, perhaps in the entire history of civilization, was this process as transparently defined as it was in Chicago.

In his insightful and profound book, Nature's Metropolis, William Cronon dissects the co-evolution of Chicago and the American West. By the late 19th Century Chicago was the fastest growing city in history. It's unbridled expansion was fueled by an eager exploitation of the American landscape, the transformation of its resources into commodities, and the distribution of these commodities to all points East and West.

Built on a former sea bed (in this case a lake bed), Chicago's grid had few obstacles. Indeed the only diagonal (non-orthogonally north-south) streets in Chicago were laid on old Potowatomi trails (Clark, Lincoln, Milwaukee, Ogden, etc.). The acute observer will notice that, despite the apparent lack of topography in Chicago, these diagonal avenues actually occupy very slight ridges in the landscape that would have been less likely to flood when the City was nothing but a prairie marsh.

The Chicago Grid (Looking East Toward the Lake)

Today the Grid still defines the daily life and travels of Chicago and most of the Midwest. In fact the Grid disappears only for a moment in a relatively narrow band of post-1970 suburban sprawl that begins west of O'Hare and ends at Elgin. When the Grid is broken in the exurbs of Chicago it is only at a local level. Like suburban Detroit, major orthogonal thoroughfares still define the metropolitan edge. The Midwestern Grid, in other words, can only be escaped at a very small scale - inside a subdivision, at the end of a cul-de-sac. Once the westward pioneer is truly in the country, the Grid returns and spreads its industrial organization for a 1000 miles west to the Front Range of Colorado.

View from the "Ledge" at the Sears Tower Skydeck: "Circle" Interchange to the lower left, the Frontier ahead. It's worth nothing that there is nothing taller than the Sears Tower (natural or man-made) until the pioneer has reached the Rockies.

THE CUBE, like all of these projects, is a work in progress. It is an Agent of the Grid; an enigmatic object that has propagated the Grid's spread across the landscape. It has repelled people across the continent. More recently it has begun, strangely, to attract the pioneers back to the center. It has built towns and farms and suburbs. It now folds them back to the center. Now that the frontier is closed and the growth machine has stalled, the Cube has become a beacon, a magnet for those escaping the endless landscape that it has domesticated. It has become a symbol of uncanny urbanism, a way of life that is at once familiar, but presently forgotten. The Cube is the closet, the storage unit, where we've packed our histories away so that we could seek a freer life out west. It is the trunk of memories in the attic. It is everything that we love and hate about our past and our cities. It is what made your parents leave in the '70's. It's what compels you to return now. It is a promise not of comfort and purity but of stimulation and transformation. It is the emotion of being a citizen caged by the necessary organizing infrastructures of the civilization.

The Cube defines our City. Without it we would be lost in our total, ephemeral freedom. We would have no social contract. No infrastructure. No laws. No rights. We would be totally free as individuals until we met someone stronger than us - in which case we would become slaves.

Some believe that without the Cube this land would be a paradise, a Garden of Eden. That might have been true once, thousands of years ago, before the earth was defined by the Grid. But now, the frontier is closed. Their is no exterior to civilization. Everyone is part of it. Everyone is inside. There is no escape except collapse and, like it or not, we're all too civilized to endure that. We're all to adapted and addicted to technologies. We're all too specialized. Billions lives would have to disappear for us to roam completely free again. Our only humane, civilized choice is to retrench and reinvest. Our only real choice is to return from our privatized dreams and aspirations.

The Cube exists in order to give presence to your history. It is the objectification of your hopes, dreams and nightmares. It is what allows you to overcome rather than escape. It is the weight that hold us together. It is the Black Hole of North American Civilization ... as long as it exists.