![]() ![]() ![]() The Human Drift was in the same tradition as other Gilded Age proposals like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: a socialist utopia aiming to redress the excesses of capitalist exploitation. Gillette’s blocks were 900 feet across, which was large for a pedestrian-oriented plan but on par with Manhattan’s 800-foot blocks. Below the surface were three levels for electric transport, deliveries, maintenance and infrastructure. Gillette proposed a well-connected street network made of hexagonal blocks and triangular, glass-roofed islands. Everyone would live in 25-story apartments arranged around domed atria. Gillette proposed a city of high rise towers to be located in the region of Buffalo, NY and powered by Niagara Falls. Possibly the earliest was King Champ Gillette’s “Metropolis,” which he outlined in his book The Human Drift (1894). By the 1920s, various visions had been floating around for over a generation. ![]() There was nothing new about proposals for a vertical, industrial metropolis. Disconnected street networks became the default pattern throughout the second half of the twentieth century. These initiatives were blows to connected streets in multiple ways. Drawing on the Garden City tradition, their solution was a universal pattern of low density cul de sacs set in superblocks. Here was something new, they reasoned: door to door service at 30 mph or better! Gradually they concluded that all the old assumptions about connectivity could be tossed aside. As mass ownership of cars and trucks became a reality in the 1920s, the regionalists along with their allies in government, and eventually the real estate industry, began to rethink thoroughfare patterns. ![]() The American regionalism movement denounced overcrowded, unhealthy cities and the growing threat posed by automobile collisions. The selling points were speed, efficiency, cleanliness and progress, a message that played especially well in America. European modernists like Charles-Edouard “Le Corbusier” Jeanneret and Ludwig Hilberseimer were revolutionaries, fascinated with large-scale schemes that would wipe away the old order and comprehensively reorganize cities for personal mobility via the automobile. Some architects and planners believed they could transmute the power of mass motor vehicle use into a force for good: a force to alleviate poverty, squalor and oppression of the masses. World War I was pivotal in motorizing the U.S. It was the first time motorized vehicles were decisive in a large battle. In 1916, military trucks allowed the French to win the battle of Verdun. America went from 8,000 vehicles in 1900 to 9.2 million in 1920 and 23 million in 1930. Growth of vehicle production was explosive. The invention of the automobile changed all that and gushers of oil provided the fuel. Most city folk traveled at 2-4 mph (the speed of walking) and even those with vehicles didn’t move much faster than 7-9 mph (the speed of a horse and buggy). The routes between buildings had to be as convenient as possible because everyone moved slowly, compared to today’s motorized transport. It was taken for granted that well-connected street networks were the best way to build cities. See also Introduction īefore the automobile age, people didn’t think much about connectivity. Later he also became the director of Chicago's city planning office.This is part 2 of a series. Like many members of the Bauhaus, he emigrated to America where he arrived in 1938 to work for the practice of Mies van der Rohe in Chicago while heading the department of Urban Planning at the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture. In 1929, Hilberseimer was hired by Hannes Meyer to teach at the Bauhaus in Dessau. In 1927, he was one of the fifteen architects who contributed to the influential modernist Weissenhof Estate exhibition. Thereafter he worked in different practices as well as an independent architect and urban planner and published numerous theoretical writings on art, architecture and urban planning. He then worked in the architectural office of Peter Behrens in Berlin. Hilberseimer studied architecture at the Karlsruhe Technical University from 1906 to 1910. Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer (4 September, 1885 - 6 May, 1967) was a German architect and urban planner best known for his ties to the Bauhaus and to Mies van der Rohe, as well as for his work in urban planning at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago. ![]()
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