Branding and Symbolism
Business Plan Research
Electronic Commerce
Innovation

John Fraim, GreatHouse Company

"A noontime stroll I took on a regular weekday in downtown Des Moines in April 1995 comes to mind, the streets unpopulated, the desolation complete. It made an Edward Hopper painting look like Mardi Gras."

James Kunstler
Home From Nowhere

"As quickly as the word 'alienation' can be attached to the idea of youth, the image of isolation can be attached to a picture of the suburbs. Is there an unexplored relationship between them?"

William Hamilton
New York Times - 6/12/99

"The homogeneous and undifferentiated character of modern cities kills all variety of lifestyles and arrests the growth of individual character."

Christopher Alexander
A Pattern Language

"I once attended a Sunday matinee in a movie theater (in Littleton, Colorado) that had obviously just been used as a place of worship; the parishioners had left tattered paperback Bibles on the seats."

Lakis Polycarpou (1990 graduate of Columbine High School)
Washington Post - 5/2/99

For most of my life I have been able to avoid living in the suburbs of planned developments and mass produced tract housing. The high point of my avoidance of suburbia was the ten years I lived in the Ohio countryside before moving out west to Santa Rosa, California. The Ohio countryside serves as a type of "benchmark" to measure other areas against.

We lived in a small subdivision of homes nestled around an oval road and a small pond full of loud frogs. The area was created by a Mennonite builder raised on the farm the homes were built on. He lived next to us in a home he built for his family. The homes in our little subdivision were different but had the unmistakable feel of solidness and quality, a mark of Mennonite construction. The neighborhood was a mixture of various incomes and lifestyles. A banker was across the street. A sheriff's deputy and his teacher wife were next door. An elderly couple were down the road from us.

The nearby village of West Liberty was a Mennonite community of aging brick buildings and a downtown that could have been an advertisement for the fading years of rural America. The town's elderly population sat on benches along Main Street in the summer and watched the world go by.

Things in town moved with the slowness of Ohio maple syrup in early March. Everyone knew everyone else and many were related in some way to the core of pioneers who first settled the area a hundred and fifty years ago. The seasons were marked by festivals in the city park and parades down Main Street. My children went to a pre-school in the village called Rainbow World on a street tunneled over by huge old oaks and maples. In the fall the leaves on the trees exploded so brightly they were almost impossible to stare at.

___________________

Welcome To Suburbia

___________________

In March of 1999, we leave Ohio and move west to Santa Rosa, California. There are a few reasons for our decision to move but the main one is that I want to be closer to my two sons who live in California. There is also the feeling that life is passing us by in Ohio.

Rather than immediately buy a home, we decide to rent to get a feel for the area before buying. The house we rent is a modern one story home painted white on the inside with white carpets and white fixtures. It is in a new tract development called Pine Creek built around a little creek that winds through the development. There are three different styles of homes in Pine Creek. Each style a different color and different name probably invented by the developer's advertising firm. Our house is wedged between our neighbors' homes fifteen feet on both sides of us. Up and down the street, construction continues at a feverish pace to complete the final homes in the development before the slower summer months. Rock music from the workers' radios blares during the warm days of early summer as cement mixers and huge cranes come and go from seven in the morning until six in the evening.

The Pine Creek area is one of a number of housing developments pushing east of Santa Rosa into the northern part of the Valley of the Moon which Jack London made famous around the turn of the century. It is a medium sized development of fifty homes on the Sonoma Highway, the main road into Santa Rosa from Sonoma Valley. Skyhawk, the largest tract development in Santa Rosa with five hundred homes, is just half a mile down the road. It is built into the sides of the valley hills and from a distance it looks like the hills around Hong Kong. Banners cheerfully wave around the entrance to the development and big ads in the local newspaper proclaim a new type of country living in the wine country.

____________________________

The Refuge Of An Island Park

____________________________

There are trade-offs to leaving Ohio and moving to Santa Rosa. We are close enough to San Francisco for weekend trips into the city and the surrounding Sonoma wine country is still mostly rustic farmland and vineyards, untouched by the crowded sprawl of Marin County just south.

For me, the real benefit to living where we are is the five thousand acre Annadel Regional Park a mile away. It is a wilderness of rolling hills, intermittent streams, meadows, a small lake and woodland unmarred by modern intrusions. It rises above the tract housing developments of Santa Rosa like an island of nature out of a sea of suburbia. The long-time citizens of Santa Rosa are adamant about protecting it from development. A number of years ago they stopped a plan to run Sonoma Highway past it. A few weeks ago, seven hundred of them showed up at a meeting about changing the trails in Annadel Park.

I have taken to long hikes in Annadel and have been fortunate to meet old timers and learn about hidden trails of the park. They remember a time when Annadel wasn't an island in the middle of suburbia but was indistinguishable from the Sonoma countryside. We often walk together for awhile and I tell them what a beautiful city they have and they always shake their heads and tell me its too bad I couldn't have seen it when it was really beautiful before all the big developers came in.

In the park, there is an unspoken equality between the hiking old timers, the new joggers in fancy sweat suits, the horse people and the mountain bike riders. But down the hill and out of the park in the surrounding suburbs the equality disappears in an uneasy tension. You can feel the tension in the crowded supermarkets and on the congested streets. There is a distinct feeling that new arrivals to the area like us are invaders, little more than locusts besieging the land.

____________________________

The Disappearance of Mystery

____________________________

The feeling of tension in Santa Rosa is not difficult to understand. The tract developments snake around the old farms leaving them like tiny islands of nature in the middle of a sea of asphalt and concrete. The effect creates a jarringly brutal juxtaposition similar in ways to how the suburbs of Orange County encompass the California Disneyland.

Our own development Pine Creek surrounds a little farm with horses and pigs and beat up cars in front of a run-down old house with paint peeling off and a garden of jumbled plants tended by a little woman with a straw hat. The development abruptly rings her piece of land with a six foot fence. I drive by the little farm each day on my way to hike in Annadel Park. There is something to admire about the woman who most likely has held out from selling her farm to the developers for an outrageous price.

At first, there is the excitement of arrival at a new home in a new city, the beginning of a voyage. The excitement wears off with the constant construction all around us. Neighbors keep to themselves. New people move into the development but their arrivals are met with silence from the rest of us. Given the strange sterile environment of Pine Creek, this is not all that surprising. Still, it is disappointing.

I wonder why our neighbors have so little interest in us and why we have so little interest in them. My wife and I think about it a lot because we feel so different out here in this new development than we felt in our community back in the Ohio countryside. We come to a tentative hypothesis that it centers around the mutual belief in the lack of mystery about all of us in the development. We live in the same types of houses, our carpets and walls are all white, our yards the same postage stamps of grass abruptly marked off by wire mesh fencing.

___________________

The Church Of Kmart

___________________

In the aftermath of the Columbine High School tragedy, fingers of blame are pointed in a number of directions - at Hollywood, at the gun industry, at the internet, at the school system.

While one can argue all of the above have some responsibility for the tragedy, it seems to me that the finger of blame should be pointed back at us and where we live - the tract housing developments like Littleton, Colorado, and yes, Santa Rosa's Pine Creek and Skyhawk developments - rather than at other elements outside our communities.

In the May 2, 1999 issue of the Washington Post, Lakis Polycarpou, a 1990 graduate of Columbine High School, writes about her high school town of Littleton, Colorado. "The absolute interchangeability of place is at times stretched to more absurd proportions," she notes. "Not five minutes from Columbine is a closed Kmart that was converted into a church; the giant K was simply replaced with a neon cross. Thousands of people move through this world every day without a trace of irony, unconscious of the underlying world view that produces such a culture, a literalism that marks the ultimate separation of form and content. The ideology of extreme utilitarianism permeates everything."

Ms. Polycarpou recalls the growth of the suburbia of Littleton, Colorado out of the Colorado prairie. "The area where Columbine is located was empty prairie before 1970. When I graduated in 1990, much of it was still prairie, but the unrelenting growth of the metro Denver area has rapidly eaten away at that. Every time I return to visit my parents, it seems that there is another new strip mall or clump of tract housing going up. Wadsworth Boulevard, the major street near the high school, has become an endless series of chain stores that extends all the way to north Denver, some 30 miles away. Driving the whole road is unremitting deja vu; every so often the stores repeat themselves, and one discovers yet another Office Max, Best Buy or Red Lobster."

The words of Ms. Polycarpou are echoed by a growing number of others today who believe the core problem of modern life surrounds us in the architecture of suburbia. It is a difficult problem to see because it provides a surrounding context of life rather than the contents of products within this context. It is not something a finger can point at but needs the wide sweep of an arm which encompasses the surrounding suburbs we live in.

______________________

The Medium Of Suburbia

______________________

The reaction to the modern architecture of suburbia is embodied in a movement among architects and urban designers most commonly known as New Urbanism. Its ideas are argued by a loose collective of architects, social reformers and urban planners. Its leading proponents are people like Peter Katz, James Kunstler, Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs.

In The Geography of Nowhere, James Kunstler observes that the building of suburbia as a replacement for towns and cities was a self-destructive act, the living arrangement Americans feel as normal, bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically, and spiritually. He argues that the familiar physical setting of suburbia - the cartoon landscape of cars, clogged highways, strip malls, tract houses, franchise fry pits, parking lots, junked cities, and ravaged countryside - may be more than merely a symptom of our troubled culture. Rather, it may be the primary cause of these troubles.

Kunstler and other critics of modern suburbia see the area we live in as a powerful medium, influencing our lives to a much greater extent than the television shows we watch, the video games our children play, the hours we spend on the internet, the movies we watch, the products we buy. In an era of an equality of homogenized experience, it may be the commonality of the dull architecture of everyday life - rather than the electric medium of the internet - that is the real "culprit" in creating our increasingly virtual world.

William Hamilton echoes this idea in an article from the June 12, 1999 New York Times. "Invented as a solution to the sociological ills of cities," Hamilton observes, "suburbs now stand accused of creating their own environmental diseases: lack of character and the grounding principles of identity, lack of diversity, lack of attachment to shared, civic ideals. Increasingly, the newest, largest suburbs are being criticized as landscapes scorched by unthoughtful, repetitious building, where, it has been suggested, the isolations of larger lots and a car-based culture may lead to disassociations from the reality of contact with other people."

In view of these serious accusations about the effects of suburbia on all of us but particularly our teenage children, one would think that there might be efforts under way to address the problem. But are there? William Hamilton thinks not. "Designers of the new American suburbs which were created as havens, say they have largely ignored or avoided one volatile segment of the population - teenagers."

William Morrish, Professor of Architecture at the University of Minnesota, agrees with Hamilton's observations about the relationship between suburbia and alienation of young people. "They're (teenagers) basically an unseen population until they pierce their noses," Morrish notes. "They have access to computers and weaponry. The sense of alienation that might come from isolation or neglect will have a much larger impact than it might have before. And there are no questions coming from the design community about what we can be doing about this. We don't invite them."

________________________

The Evolution of Suburbs

________________________

In his most recent book Home From Nowhere, James Kunstler recalls a 1994 meeting in Florida where some of America's leading architects of the New Urbanism were present - Christopher Alexander, Andres Duany, Witold Rybczynski, Paul Murrain and Peter Calthorpe. The meeting was in the home of Leon Krier, the architectural theorist and godfather of the movement to repair damage done to our world by Modernism. The group was sitting around the attic porch of Krier's house swapping theories as to why the everyday world in America had become such an abysmal mess.

Peter Calthorpe, a leading California architect and planner, had the floor and was in a "humorously expansive mood." He proposed two theories. The first was the Stroke Theory and the other was The Stupor Theory.

Calthorpe first talked about the origination of the architectural mess of modern America in The Stroke Theory. "World War Two was so traumatic that it had caused the same kind of damage to western civilization that cerebral hemorrhage can wreak on a human mind," Calthorpe observed. "It had made the advanced nations of the world lose some of their most important abilities, to forget their own history and culture, as a stroke victim loses his powers of speech, his memories, the particulars of his education. All the ghastly office buildings, banal dwellings, crappy commercial structures, and other common architectural garbage of our everyday world...were like the inchoate squawkings and bleatings of a stroke victim who had lost the ability to express himself."

The second theory, The Stupor Theory, did not result from a traumatic event during the war but rather from the boredom of returning soldiers after the war. "All these American men in the full bloom of youth had marched off to a terrible war against manifest evil and won a decisive victory for democracy and decency. In the process, many of them had the adventures of a lifetime." These young men were immediately absorbed into postwar corporate life, fitting well into large hierarchical organizations. Corporate life was familiarly regimented like the army, where so many of them had lately enjoyed their heroic exploits.

Yet Calthorpe notes that the downside of the return of American soldiers to everyday life was that their greatest adventures were now over. "That life on the commuter platform with hundreds of other guys in gray flannel suits was in some elemental way an awful comedown. What was there to look forward to? Selling ten million units a month of Oaties breakfast cereal for decades to come? How did this compare to drinking seventy-year-old cognac in an Alsatian castle with a pistol strapped to your leg and a seventeen-year-old French cutie in your lap, having spent all day slaughtering Nazis?"

Calthorpe argues the realization that "flipping hamburgers and wieners in a joke-bedizened apron and a clownish chef's hat" was all life had to offer after the stupendous adventure of World War Two, caused a whole generation to slip into "a permanent semicoma, soothing their boredom and anomie with heavy does of hard liquor - their beloved martinis - and living out the rest of their days in an alcoholic fog." Calthorpe notes this "explained why the world they built for us - the suburban sprawl universe - was so incoherent, brutal, ugly, and depressing: they didn't care about what they were building. They were drunk most of the time, in a stupor."

Calthorpe's ideas about the evolution of modernism are meant to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. At the same time, there seems to much truth in what he says. His version of modern history may be fantastic and funny but can anything be funnier than the modern suburban landscape of Jack-In-The-Boxes and Taco Bells we have created?

_________________________________

The Effect Of Landscape And Light

_________________________________

The flurry of construction in the Pine Creek development continues into the summer months. There is a anxious push to complete the project as the need for new homes in Santa Rosa continues to rise bringing all time high premium prices for tract housing in the area.

New people continue to move in to the Pine Creek development and the project is able to sell all of its homes by early July. My two children make a few new friends - the children of a couple who recently moved out here from Boston. Like us, they are also a long way from home and a way of life they remember. The children spend a lot of time playing down by the creek behind our house. There is no place to play in the dirt and weeds of the backyard or the tiny deck off the kitchen.

We continue to look for older homes to buy in Santa Rosa in neighborhoods away from the tract developments. But they are increasingly hard to find, an architectural "endangered species." Still we continue to search for that special neighborhood which reminds us of Ohio. Its frustrating but we continue to hold out hope.

I continue to take long hikes in Annadel Park. It is the best therapy possible at the present time. One of my favorite hikes is on Rough Go Trail. It winds up the side of a large sloping hill, meandering between boulders and through meadows and small patches of woods. One day while hiking and feeling particularly upset about the possibility of escaping the sea of suburbia, there is a great flurry in one of the trees by the trail. A huge bald eagle rises out of the tree and hovers motionless in the warm summer air for a moment and then soars out of sight behind the hills. It immediately lifts my spirits and I take it for a sign not to give up the search for a new home and community.

Half an hour up Rough Go there is a spot overlooking the interior wilderness of the park. Now days, there are few things more enjoyable than stopping here for awhile and contemplating the scenery with a bottle of Mouton Cadet wine, a wedge of cheese and hunk of sourdough bread. The tract developments of Santa Rosa are out of view and one can make believe for a few brief moments that time has been pushed back hundreds of years to the period when Southern Pomo and Wappo Indians inhabited the park.

The great English novelist John Fowles once wrote about the nexus of his famous novel The Magus. Fowles relates how it developed from a walk he took to the top of a mountain on a Greek Island. On the top of the mountain he had a type of epiphany. "Perhaps ancient Greece was only the effect of landscape and light on a sensitive people," Fowles says. "It would explain the wisdom, the beauty, and the childishness. Wisdom lies in the higher regions, mountains over the plains; beauty in nature in every corner, a simplicity of landscapes, a purity which demanded a similar purity and simplicity."

Sitting in Annadel and looking out over the peaceful wilderness, I have an understanding of what Fowles means. At the same time, I wonder if future civilizations may one day look back on our period like Fowles looked back on Greek culture. The observation they might make would be a little different from what John Fowles came up with. "Perhaps the insensitivity of late twentieth century America," they might ponder, "was created by the effect of landscape and architecture on a people who had lost their feeling for the simplicity of beauty."

Bibliography

____________

Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Boyer, Christine. Cybercities. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.

Calthorpe, Peter. The Next American Metropolis:Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993

Duany, Andres; Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth; Krieger, Alex; Lennertz, Will. Towns and Townmaking Principles. New York: Rizzoli, 1991.

Langdon, Philip. A Better Place to Live. University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage, 1993 (reissue)

Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House, 1970.

Jacobs, Jane. Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life. New York: Vintage, 1985.

Jacobs, Jane. Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics Politics. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Katz, Peter; Scully, Vincent. The New Urbanism. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

Kunstler, James. The Geography of Nowhere. New York: Touchstone, 1994.

Kunstler, James. Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Touchstone, 1998.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Effect Of Electronic Media On Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Mitchell, William. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Mumford, Lewis. The City In History. San Diego: Harcourt, 1961.

© Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 John Fraim - Greathouse Company
All Rights Reserved

© Copyright 2002 MacDonald Ventures, LLC, All rights reserved.

ExpertsOn™ is a trademark of MacDonald Ventures, LLC