The architecture of Raymond Unwin represents one of Letchworth’s small triumphs.  Unwin’s working class cottage rows used the modest materials at their disposal with great economy while still maintaining a craftsman’s eye for detail and natural elements.  Unwin, as part of the 19^th century arts-and-crafts movement in architecture, idealized the 14^th century medieval village as “the truest community that England had ever known” (Robert Fishman), where social stability had manifested itself in a unified style of architecture that organically graced the land’s natural contours.  It expressed neither modern confusion nor the “calculated prettiness” (Fishman) of symmetrical layouts.  It also failed to accomplish any of the social changes which Ebenezer Howard had envisioned.

It is a strange irony that Barcelona’s ‘Park Guell’, planned as a gated aristocratic community of 60 houses in the first decades of the 1900s, was also commissioned as a kind of ‘Garden City’.  The park, designed by Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi, though it failed as a housing development (only 2 houses were built, one of which Gaudi lived in, and it is now a public park), represents the zenith of an architecture of natural contours.  Indeed, far more than a mere complement to natural forms, it fuses with them while it flips them on their heads; it’s the aesthetic benchmark for (surrealist) utopian medieval arts and crafts villages.

But the irony of Letchworth’s aesthetic triumphs too, as has been pointed out in class, is that Howard saw the Garden City as a vehicle for social change far more than a path to pretty parks.  Unwin’s ingenious designs remained unaffordable to the poorest workers, showing that under existing conditions, truly affordable housing required government intervention.  When the government did get on board with public housing after WWI, Unwin, to whose influence they often deferred, had abandoned Garden Cities in favor of commuter satellites, which upon completion rarely lived up to his standards.  Instead, they morphed into the thoughtless and oppressive urban sprawl which has been so well documented in the songs of the Kinks.**  One can’t help but wish that Unwin and the British government had preferred garden cities to satellites; though government-funded Garden Cities might also have ignored Howard’s social principles, their aesthetic qualities would still have trumped sub-par ‘garden sprawl’.

As for Howard’s social goals, it is interesting to note that the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921, whose ideas of “free co-operation and communal ownership”, according to Alan March, were integral to Howard’s ideas), like Unwin, idealized the European medieval village, stating that “never, either before or since, has mankind known a period of relative well-being for all as in the cities of the Middle Ages.  The poverty, insecurity, and physical exploitation of labor that exist in our times were then unknown.”*  But March points out the historic failure of modern communes under Kropotkin’s authority-jettisoning model, instead praising Howard’s well-considered, democratic compromise between communitarianism and individualism at the municipal level.  Of course, as we all know, Letchworth’s liberal-capitalist shareholders paid little heed to Howard’s democratic solutions.

Howard’s Garden City never received the support from philanthropists, radicals, or the co-op movement, which might likely have made it a success, so he compromised with his financiers, believing that the snowballing success of the Garden City was imminent.  To my mind, Howard was something of an anarchist, in that his plans implied at least a subtle erosion of authority, and at best an almost entirely cooperative city reminiscent of the “vital society of communes and free cities created by brotherhoods, guilds, and individual initiative,”* which Kropotkin believed had characterized medieval Europe.  So perhaps he would have been comforted by Herbert Read’s assertion that “the task of the anarchist philosopher is not to prove the imminence of a Golden Age, but to justify the value of believing in its possibility.”*

*These quotes are from Richard A. Falk’s essay, “Anarchism and World Order.” In Anarchism: Nomos XIX. Edited by J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman.  New York: New York University Press, 1978.

**Ray and Dave Davies from The Kinks grew up in the London suburb of Muswell Hill:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muswell_Hill … The spiritual malaise of suburban London was an oft-recurring theme in their songs, especially on the albums Muswell Hillbillies, and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), which make excellent companions when one is studying British urban planning.  The song ‘Shangri-La’ is a favorite example.

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Guell