![]() Attendees learned about new garden suburbs that will be grafted onto existing cities in the U.K. The “Future of Suburbia” conference started with a keynote speech by Robert Bruegmann, a professor emeritus of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and wrapped up a day later after four wide-ranging panels. ![]() Stepping back to find a critical vantage point on this terrain isn’t easy. In other parts of the world, too, urbanization is now mostly suburbanization the outskirts of cities like Beijing and Istanbul are undergoing tremendous growth. America’s urban fringes include gridded streetcar suburbs, meandering golf-course subdivisions, trailer and RV parks, industrial estates, and “ethnoburbs.” Whatever form suburbia may take, it has become the American default, with more than half of the country’s population residing there. Two main challenges of framing critical discussions about suburbia are its diversity and its ubiquity. It couldn’t have come soon enough.ĭavid Rudlin/URBED A plan showing David Rudlin’s city-extension Garden City concept in the U.K. All in all, CAU is making a concerted bid to reposition suburbia as a serious subject of design inquiry. The culmination of the effort-which has involved a dozen MIT faculty and more than 100 experts from around the globe-will be Infinite Suburbia, a 1,200-page tome that Princeton Architectural Press will publish in fall 2017. The center’s biennial research theme is the “Future of Suburbia,” and in late March/early April it hosted an exhibition and a conference by that name at the university’s Media Lab. FAIA, announced that his studio was conducting long-term research on suburbia, the news was novel enough to be reported by NPR.Įnter the Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is determined to make designers think about the suburbs, and to think about them in a particular way. ![]() Unless they’re wooed by an Apple or a Facebook, top-tier architects rarely work in the ’burbs. Whether we are aware of it or not, even the most self-consciously curated “urban” lives are staged and supplied by the jumbled realm of suburbia.Īnd yet the bias against suburbia remains strong among designers and critics, whether it manifests as tirades against sprawl or utter indifference. The avocados mashed on whole-grain toast were probably grown in exurban San Diego or Monterey in California, and were sitting, just a few days before, in a wholesaler’s unit off the interstate. The iPhones that customers gaze at while sipping their macchiatos were likely assembled in the suburbs of Shenzhen. Other Architecture Offset House by OtherothersĪt trendy urban coffee shops, the kind where Edison bulbs float above the counter and vintage chairs line the concrete floor, the prized artisanal beans are, more likely than not, roasted in some suburban facility before they’re loaded on a truck and driven downtown.
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