[Music] ford Landia In the 1920s Henry Ford built a city in the Amazon called Fordia This isn't an April Fool's Day joke It's not April Fool's I'm recording this on April Fool's Day but it's not it's this is not an April Fool's Day joke If I had made that up I would have chosen a better name This is a true story The draw of utopia runs deep in the early 20th century It inspires industrial and product design and informs their aesthetics It inspires visual art and it also inspires the design of cities naturally How can a city be built into an ideal form so the reason Ford Landia came into existence is because the British colony in Sri Lanka produced most of the world's rubber They had a monopoly on it So to save money Ford wanted to produce their own tires by producing their own rubber and they had found a source of rubber in the Amazon in a region that was receptive to Ford because they were struggling economically at this time period So that's the economic reason for why Ford pursued this project Henry Ford was an international celebrity He introduced the assembly line and revolutionized car manufacturing in America But beyond just the making of cars Ford was very interested in using capitalism to change society to create better citizens in the industrial era by paying them like an above average wage and cultivating an environment where workers were proud of the work they were doing Ford thought of industrial capitalism as being the key to utopia It worked in America in his factories So he wanted to take it somewhere where he could sort of start from scratch So he could use the same philosophy at the level of building civilization So Ford purchased a track of land from Brazil called it Ford Landia and literally operated it as a separate state So they colonized it Did you all know that Ford colonized the Amazon in the 1920s it's not on their website Their website goes straight from 1919 to 1922 The history section on their website literally skips right over this time period Probably because it was an absolute unmitigated disastrous failure in the sense that it didn't produce industrial capitalism utopia Who could have seen that coming interestingly he originally wanted to build it in Alabama along the Tennessee River but then he decided to just put a little accent above the A He built it in the Amazon instead Ford Landia had a lot of problems Ford built factories along rivers for obvious reasons but the river that he built Ford Landia on was a tributary of the Amazon River and was too rocky for ships to pass through until like the rainy season Combine that with the fact that Ford paid a lot more money than this land was actually worth because Ford had money and Ford wanting the land increased the demand for the land Even before materials arrived for construction to begin the city saw a revolt of its initial inhabitants because of poor living conditions And of course it was all super racist I mean it's a 1920s era colony created by a wealthy American industrialist and notorious anti-semite There's no getting around the racism White Americans lived in a district that was something like a suburb with running water and relatively modern amenities And a lot of it was pretty modern There were schools hospitals mills taverns even a movie theater by the 1930s The Brazilian laborers on the other hand lived in their own separate districts with unfinished housing and basically just wellwater So eventually the laborers revolted and riots broke out But Ford Landia kept chugging along It produced cars It produced military vehicles during World War II But the problem was the whole rubber tree thing never really worked out that way like they had intended it to Rubber trees actually originate in the Amazon But the reason they were grown in Sri Lanka so successfully by the British is because they're invasive in Sri Lanka In the Amazon their original environment they're highly susceptible to blight which is what happened They were just really hard to grow and they just kept dying When Henry Ford died his son killed this hu hugely unprofitable project They ended up selling the land back to Brazil at a huge loss and a lot of the town was left abandoned Damn Capitalist utopia seemed like such a good [Music] idea I mean in Henry Ford's defense designing cities is hard Cities that are designed are called planned cities and these are actually relatively uncommon I mean all cities are planned to a degree City planning is a profession but a lot of the time this is referring to sort of the wrangling and pruning of a city or the redesigning of a city uh that's already been built like in the housemonization of Paris rather than designing a city before it's ever even built And this unplanned city approach is kind of a natural way for things to work Cities grow out of settlements that were established kind of naturally usually based on economic viability as well as environmental and climate factors and like access to waterways and you know stuff like that So most cities are unplanned cities which means cities that sort of sprung up and grew naturally That's the interesting thing about cities They they're kind of living things in a way which is why some cities need to be wrangled and pruned in the first place Cities have arteries literally called arterial roads They have a sort of circulatory system They have different organs in the form of districts with different zoning different functions that are necessary to keep the city healthy Residential areas versus industrial areas versus mostly commercial areas Yes I grew up playing a lot of Sim City But even further cities have a kind of consciousness in the form of their unique cultures Music City the Big Apple Hollywood I grew up in Rocket City And all of that kind of emerges naturally organically over time And then there are cities like Fordia or Epcot City You may have heard of the Epcot Center It's part of Disney World but Epcot is an acronym that stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow Just like Fort Landia Epcot City was the pet project of a rich eccentric uh also notoriously anti-Semitic billionaire This time Walt Disney and also like Fort Landia Disney was super serious about this endeavor This was intended to be an actual city planned out and designed to be a sort of utopia Walt Disney literally died on his deathbed planning out this city but after he died the project was basically just turned into a theme park at Walt Disney World Resort So once again Utopia lives up to its name So what's interesting about Epcot City is that it really is sort of the perfect American city I mean what is a city it's a place where people live and work But first and foremost it's a place where people live I mean if nobody lives there nobody can work there right conversely you can have modern towns that are mostly residential provided they are near an economic center So the philosophy of the home is something that plays a large role in how we think about where we live the history of the home I'm going to focus on America in this lecture because partially because that's where we are right now and partially because it's just an interesting case study because America was a nation that was very much designed from the ground up I mean there are plenty of examples of settlements being established naturally based on the factors that I talked about earlier but overall the nation of the United States was intended to be designed and they were using enlightenment pr principles to do so There are not that many other examples of this that have survived for as long So when I'm talking about cities I'm talking about cities as a kind of ambassador of a society a microcosm of that society's values The modern American notion of the home or the house and the architectural philosophy of that structure can largely be drawn back to two major influences and these are major cultural influences also and these are Jamestown and New England If there is one thing that the New World had a lot of that Europe kind of didn't anymore it is land and timber The Puritans came for the land and the Jamestown settlers came for the timber The Puritans and the pilgrims who landed in Massachusetts were escaping commercial exploitation from Holland where they went because they were escaping religious prosecution in England So they were looking for a new home They were pretty much in it for the long haul The Puritans were called the Puritans as sort of a joke because their beliefs were pure meaning literal relative to other Christian denominations in Europe Their early settlements were established under commercial contracts also But far more important to them was their religious practice The Puritans believed in the literal events of the Bible So they probably saw the wilderness of North America as part evil because in some Hebrew folklore the wilderness is this kind of den of evil and demons And they probably also saw it as part Eden These two contradicting notions were essential parts of how these Christian fundamentalists saw the wilderness of North America They probably increasingly saw the wilderness as something that could be Eden that could be paradise but it was their responsibility to tame it to transform it into that garden Either way this is one important cultural pillar upon which America is designed Although the towns were built in that medieval European model and English customs and laws carried over to the new world these were the first Christians to call North America home And they were like very Christian They were super Christian and they were the first settlers to really start the pattern of ideologically separating from England even going so far as to mint their own currency which really pissed off the English overlords Speaking of King James the other cultural pillar of the primordial America is the commercial colony of Jamestown The settlers at Jamestown were mostly traders or in the employ of traders There weren't really many families Young men outnumbered women like 20 to1 They were coming over from Europe staying for a few months or years but they generally knew that they were heading back home eventually They were sort of stationed in North America but they weren't looking for a home not necessarily They knew that they would be heading back to Europe eventually They were there to get rich It was a gold rush on timber fur tobacco and eventually on slavery And the settlers at Jamestown did not care about the structural integrity of their buildings They built everything out of wood There was plenty of wood There was no code really It just had to basically work for a few months or years and then it was someone else's problem Both the Puritans and the traders at Jamestown built medieval wooden houses in a style that was not really intended to last even one human lifetime Jamestown just took that to like a whole new level of shoddiness Their houses were temporary because their existence there was temporary And because timber was in abundance in Europe everything was made out of stone A lot of stuff was made out of stone Wood for new construction was kind of a luxury good I mean Europeans have been deforested in Europe for centuries at this point So that's one thing we get from Jamestown But more broadly we get the notion that land is a commodity and should be used for capital gain like the entire state of Jamestown was This is key to American property law from the American Revolution onward subdividing land up into parcels for sale And going along with that we also get the sense of freedom from the ancient accumulation and centralization of wealth and land ownership that existed in Europe For the early settlers it was like a reset button on social mobility and you get the freedom to move wherever you like I mean obviously this is problematic as is the idea the general idea of abundance of land because really there were already people there Indigenous humans had already been in America from probably something like 13,000 years before this point These two colonies are representative of the two categories that most of these early European colonies fell into Something like New Amsterdam which became New York was more like Jamestown for example But all of these settlements were chartered for economic purposes The nation was literally built on the foundation of consumerism Timber beaver pelts and other furs land tobacco etc The Puritans had a much more socialist-like system early on but ultimately private property dominated from nearly the very start in both Jamestown and New England These two colonies embody the seeding of the idea of what America would become Religion and capitalism That's America in a nutshell from like a foundational perspective On top of that also enlightenmentfueled individualism becomes a huge part of the character of America The idea of owning land that no monarch or lord could take away without due cause and compensation was like a really important idea in establishing the original idea of American freedom I mean this is an obvious contradiction what with the slavery and all but at least at the time these were pretty much the most liberal land ownership laws on earth And to the Puritans the Garden of Eden was a garden It was nature under control If nature is left in its wild state it's something to be feared So the control of nature is necessary The abundance of land divided into parcels for sale that anyone with enough money can freely own without some kind of weird ancient inheritance system and all the wood that you need to build with Eventually you would get the structure of the single family home that develops out of Greek revival styles from like the 17 1800s a sort of vernacular neocclassicism And with the ability to move around freely eventually you get like the automobile and the interstate system This is the narrative of America And it's partially true but it's also partially an illusion Jamestown was a lie I mean the town existed but its premise was a lie Jamestown was advertised in Europe as being a gold mining town And the initial settlers to Jamestown were there looking for gold Now you never if you've never heard of a Jamestown gold rush because there wasn't any gold The average European would have probably not been gullible enough to believe such advertising as they had seen it a million times before in Europe But a lot of people were And those were the people who ended up in Jamestown People that had a disposition towards dreaming big taking risks and buying into advertising Likewise the Puritans were basically a religious cult The Puritans kind of ruined their reputation when they started killing witches Remember pretty culty And cults also rely on a sort of gullibility The end of the world is happening on Thursday I meant Friday I meant next Friday That happens all the time with cults So you could make the argument as Kurt Anderson did in his very good book Fantasy Land: How America went haywire You could make the argument that in its initial form America specifically selected for gullibility among its population People that were willing to believe in a fantasy people that fell for the advertising of Jamestown as a literal gold mine and people who followed their kooky religious leaders around the world and eventually committing brutal homicide Those were the seeds of America of people whose descendants would go on to become the entertainment and advertising leaders of the world by the 20th century because fantasy is what advertising pedals The relationship between the population of America and nature is a good example of this fantasy People really love to like nature I mean when people actually have to live in nature and survive it's miserable But people love being in nature provided they can easily return to civilization with all of its modern amenities This love of nature becomes incorporated into America very early on And in some ways it's a part of the Japanese and Eastern thinking kind of metriculating through Europe uh through European culture The transcendentalists were probably the best examples of this in America The transcendentalists really loved to love nature They loved the narrative of nature of being a wilderness exploring self-sufficient American But even Henry David Thorough's famous Walden cabin was only about a 30-minute walk from his parents house in a city where he also lived which was only about 17 mi away from the biggest city in the United States at the time It wasn't in the middle of nowhere like it gets portrayed But the narrative of naturalism is what people love even if it's only ever a narrative that is being sort of bought into actually being being literally bought into So when provided with what the colonists thought of as a blank slate of North America these are the values that shaped how they built civilization And what do these guiding factors eventually lead to well as James Kler points out in his book Geography of Nowhere also a great book and one that I stole the title from to use in my Legacy of Bow House lecture a geography of nowhere See eventually this all leads to the modern suburban sprawl The ultimate tamed Garden of Eden parcel of land with sprawling houses made out of timber with big backyards This is a way for America to have its cake and eat it too The rusty individualistic Walden inspired monolithically ethnic transcendentalist wilderness living lifestyle but now with an easy driving distance of major economic centers That's how powerful those initial religious commercial and racial factors are in shaping the trajectory of society in America It defines a functionality that goes on to largely define the aesthetic The form follows the function You can follow the path from the first settlers in North America to the suburban sprawl of you know this place Actually don't know where this picture is from Who cares about 80% of the structures ever built in North America were built in the last 50 years You know since the bow house really defined what architecture should be if what you want to build is a sort of utopia That's why Epcot City is kind of the perfect American city because it was never actually built That's the only way to really accomplish utopia It's just an idea drawn on paper by a dying racist That's what European people mean when they say utopia Don't be fooled That's the joke Epcot City is just a theme park inside of a theme park in Florida I don't hate the suburbs I mean I was born in the suburbs I guess Molded by it Okay I can do I can do like a 100 takes I'm not going to get a good pain Not gonna get a good bane going I'll just use like whichever one was least bad I guess I was I mean I never really thought of these as suburbs when I when I lived there When I was growing up there I imagined the proper suburbs as being something like subdivisions like trackous like McMansions like neighborhoods with with names you know like where you pass through one of these signs to get there I mean my neighborhood didn't have anything like that It was just a house on a street My first job was as a janitor One of the places we cleaned was this office building Like 10 years later I made this print of that building as best I could remember it It's called the Landmark Building which I always thought was a pretty funny name since it's on a street with a bunch of other buildings that look pretty similar to it That's what you get when you have structures that are divorced from time and place An aesthetic of nowhere I don't really want to judge this aesthetic qualitatively I mean it's good that it's not disposable It's good that it's not nationalistic There was a time when this style looked radical Now it just looks boilerplate Why would a building be designed any other way the postworld war I world was optimistic about creating a sort of utopia from the accumulation of this aesthetic But in the grand narrative of history it's really just an aesthetic that was created as a reaction to all of the opulence ornamentation and nationalistic noise that had resulted in the war to end all wars I don't know if utopia actually needs to look timeless That sounds more like Oblivion Or maybe there's just a fine line between Utopia and Oblivion I called this print the geography of nowhere a reference to the book I mentioned earlier but also because in the geography of nowhere a landmark is just as meaningless as everything else