Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, David Hockney, 1980
Toward the contemporary city
“Every citizen as he chooses may have all forms of production, distribution, self-improvement, enjoyment, within the radius of, say, ten to twenty miles of his home. And speedily available by means of his private car or plane or public conveyance. This integrated distribution of living related to ground…would be the Broadacre City of tomorrow. Democracy realized.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1946
“For me, the most visionary architect, the one who best understood the ineluctable disorder in which we live, remains Frank Lloyd Wright and his Broadacre City… the projects I have been working on have been situated in a territory that can no longer be called suburbia but must be referred to as the borders or limits of the periphery. The contemporary city, the one composed of these peripheries, ought to yield a sort of manifesto, a premature homage to a form of modernity, which when compared to cities of the past might seem devoid of possibilities, but in which we will one day recognise as many gains as losses.”
Rem Koolhaas, 1989
Learning from a democratic form
800 years ago King John signed Magna Carta, the Great Charter of Freedoms, in a meadow in Runnymede, at the geographical centre of the Thames Valley. By formally agreeing that his kingly power was subject to the common law of the people, John (of Robin Hood infamy) laid the foundations for contemporary democracy and established the political aspirations for the archetypal democratic urban form of the 21st century.
The Thames Valley today, defined by the river’s catchment area, is a 215 mile long town-of-towns, as diverse historically as it is demographically and home to 13 million people. Half of the population choose to live in its Greater London area, sharing each acre with twenty other people. For the other half, it’s an acre each, Broadacre City writ large.
We believe a careful documentation and non-judgemental analysis of the Thames Valley is as relevant today as were studies of Haussmann’s Paris, Renaissance Florence or ancient Greece to earlier generations.
Interrogating the parks of post-suburban production
Our particular focus will be the means of production – of ideas, myths, objects and energy. In the post-suburban Valley production (what might be described as work) occupies the multivalent park rather than the prescribed piazza. It occurs in business parks and parked cars, office villages and village greens, live-work networks and networked cottages.
The first term’s investigations will allow each student to interrogate the form, use and character of one of these productive parks. Through spectacular and revelatory representation each will develop architectural hypotheses – lessons learnt from TV.
As a studio we will tour throughout the Thames Valley and make comparative visits to Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. Seeking appropriate methods of representation we will read Charles Jencks, emulate David Hockney and workshop with photographers and illustrators.
Designing a productive architecture
The main project will engage with the contradictions of Valley life: the Arcadian Idyll vs the Capitalist Dream. Dispersed proximity vs intense introversion. Space for sufficiency vs consumption to travel. Quality of life vs quality of produce.
Developed from the lessons learnt, the final proposal will be a building, or collection of buildings, that forms a new centre of production, a prototypical place for work in the contemporary city. The architecture will be appropriate for the Valley’s democratic aspirations – popular and communicative, participatory and productive.
