NEW HAVEN, CONN.
A Field Guide to Sprawl Yale University
Through Oct. 19
Proponents use a neutral term—exurban development—to explain the phenomenon of suburb creep. But Dolores Hayden, Yale professor and architect, describes the outer ring as a disastrous combo of “privatopias” on “pork chop lots” in “zoomburbs.” Hayden imparted this new, acid-tinged vocabulary in her 2004 book, A Field Guide to Sprawl, which was accompanied by dozens of aerial photographs by Jim Wark.
An exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture takes its name from the book and its spirit from Hayden. But it began with a gentler exploration by the Hudson River Museum of Westchester County, N.Y., as the quintessential American dream burb. The Westchester show was redesigned and installed by Dean Sakamoto in the future home of the Yale sculpture department, which the architecture school will inhabit for the next year.
Nostalgia can make the tough lessons go down more easily, but fond memories of The Dick Van Dyke Show, featured in the Hudson River Museum project, won’t take the sting out of unbridled growth or eliminate the need to ask what the progeny of Henry Ford and Levittown are doing with the nation’s green acres.
In Hayden’s lexicon, “C” is for car glut. It is a fact of life captured in a Jim Wark flyover of a Montana auto graveyard (right) that is just as big and as densely planted as the surrounding wheat fields. www.yale.edu
NEW YORK
Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York
Municipal Arts Society
Through Jan. 5, 2008
Given the current rapid pace of development in New York City, it makes sense for the Rockefeller Foundation to sponsor an exhibition devoted to the legacy of Jane Jacobs, 20th century heroine of human-scaled urban neighborhoods and walkable streets. Few gargantuan planned mini-cities have scored high for long-term desirability. But developers and their architects keep trying to improve on that record. Whether their efforts will succeed with a new generation of urban dwellers is a question the Municipal Art Society (MAS) now asks.
Through January, the MAS is staging an exhibition aimed at reintroducing Jacobs and her values to New Yorkers too young to have lived through the 1960s battles for the Village (shown at right) and SoHo and against the city’s powerful planner, Robert Moses, who wanted to drive an expressway through Lower Manhattan.
It is often said that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. The MAS found in a recent poll that 58 percent of respondents worried that their neighborhoods would be adversely affected by projected redevelopment in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC2030. It is not known how many of the survey respondents had read Jacobs’ seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, or whether they would, as Jacobs did, take their angst to the streets.
The MAS seems to urge dialogue with today’s power brokers, though the exhibition can help those who choose to “take immediate action” to ensure the city remains livable. A website (futureofny.org) and a book of essays (Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York) promise to raise Jacobs’ voice long after the exhibition closes. www.mas.org