The Methodical Plan to Erase Chicago

__Special Thanks__
+ Evan Montgomery: Co-Production, Editing, Motion Graphics
+ Allison Newmeyer: 3D Modeling of Hilberseimer's Schemes

__Description__
This video explores Ludwig Hilberseimer’s radical urban vision for Chicago in the 1940s and 50s that reimagined urban living. His plan was to transform Chicago into a city of decentralized, self-sufficient islands. This concept was based on the idea of functional zoning and accessible green spaces, and it sought to enhance the quality of life and ensure sustainable development. Hilberseimer's ideas were influenced by the Bauhaus movement, and his theories were partially realized in Detroit's Lafayette Park neighborhood.

__Membership__
Join this channel to get access to perks:

__About the Channel__
Architecture with Stewart is a YouTube journey exploring architecture’s deep and enduring stories in all their bewildering glory. Weekly videos and occasional live events breakdown a wide range of topics related to the built environment in order to increase their general understanding and advocate their importance in shaping the world we inhabit.

__About Me__
Stewart Hicks is an architectural design educator that leads studios and lecture courses as an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also serves as an Associate Dean in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts and is the co-founder of the practice Design With Company. His work has earned awards such as the Architecture Record Design Vanguard Award or the Young Architect’s Forum Award and has been featured in exhibitions such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Design Miami, as well as at the V&A Museum and Tate Modern in London. His writings can be found in the co-authored book Misguided Tactics for Propriety Calibration, published with the Graham Foundation, as well as essays in MONU magazine, the AIA Journal Manifest, Log, bracket, and the guest-edited issue of MAS Context on the topic of character architecture.

__Contact__
FOLLOW me on instagram: @stewart_hicks & @designwithco

__Special Thanks__
Stock video and imagery provided by Getty Images, Storyblocks, and Shutterstock.
Music provided by Epidemic Sound

#architecture #urbandesign

[exp]

If I had a dollar for every city planner trying to replace every form of movement exclusively with highways...

[JohnFromAccounting]

Cities should be partially planned, but partially chaotic. Individuals have a lot of influence over how cities evolve, but it should be the collective that has the final say. When everything looks the same, it feels isolated and inhuman. When everything looks different, it feels confusing. There is no "one size fits all" solution to how cities should be made, but we can all tell when a city is functional. Chicago's grid structure has been a success and play significantly into the city's feel. It's fortunate that Hilberseimer's plan was not implemented, or the world would have lost a great city for good.

[Fourtune]

Cities need to be human based. We aren’t robots. Look at nature.

[michaelimbesi]

The sort of planned, designed arrangement championed by Hilberseimer, with different uses segregated by zoning, is actually really inefficient. Not having various uses all intermingled together ensures that residents will always have to travel much further to get to work, stores, and recreational destinations. It ensures that most trips cannot be made on foot, and it also means that commuting traffic on whatever transportation corridors exist will always be heavily unbalanced, which requires twice the transportation infrastructure because in the reverse-peak direction the trains run empty and the highways have nobody on them, but they still need to exist. And of course, a decentralized city means that every supply chain is stretched much further, because individual nodes aren’t going to be able to have the entire supply chain for every single finished product. Especially because not every single activity can be accomplished everywhere. Marine transportation, existing ground transportation links, and every natural resource except air are unevenly distributed across earth, so you physically can’t build a self-sufficient city.

[craigbenz]

The hubris of planners can be absolutely staggering.

[johnathanclayton]

Why separate districts? Mixed residential and light shops seem very nice like in old town in Europe. Separating everything needs lots more transpiration, usually by cars, which split up everything badly.

[jeremyandrews]

I just had an interesting thought. Part of why our cities are so car-centric is because a lot of them were designed when the automobile was still a fairly new idea, and in their mind they were building the city of the future by designing everything around the car. Are we potentially repeating this mistake with the Internet, social media, and smartphones? Designing everything around the Internet and letting everything offline fall by the wayside, only to eventually realize decades from now that maybe making everything depend on the Internet was a bad idea with a lot of major social consequences we didn't anticipate because we were caught up in the opportunities to save money and bask in technological progress?

[rosezingleman]

Scratch any architect and you’ll find a frustrated philosopher.

[Dennis-vhtz]

Hilberseimer's plans are similar to those proposed decades earlier by Le Corbusier. The problem with such exercises in centrally planned micromanagement is that the planners are human and imperfect, and thus, their plans will inevitably overlook or undervalue some needs and groups. On it's own, Lafayette Park is a distinctive neighbourhood that suits some people well, while people who don't like it have other choices. But scale the plan to entire city, and it becomes a totalitarian dystopia where every neighbourhood is virtually identically, leaving no real choice, and forcing everyone to conform to the plan mandated by those in power.

[Bonserak]

Pretty sure a messy city is a more social one lol

[sandrahiltz]

It looks so dystopian to me, that would be the type of area I would never want to live.

[starventure]

This is what an architecture teacher of mine in college referred to as fascist style, and used to comment that the movie "Conquest of the planet of the apes" was filmed in a brutalist development to reinforce the overall theme of fascism. Planned cities, like Brasilia are intended to be organized but end up being soul crushing.

[eamonnca]

“Messy cities clog up social interaction.”

Tell me you don’t understand how cities work without telling me you don’t understand how cities work.

[reluginbuhl]

What a nightmare! The hubris that they thought that they understood the complexities of cities and their multiple problems! Their "solution" would have solved nothing and at the same time have ripped the soul out of Chicago. Just because you claim your design has solved all sorts of problems does NOT make this true.

[RockitFX]

I live in Detroit, and it breaks my heart that Black Bottom was demolished to build an extraordinarily boring neighborhood.

[christopherstephenjenksbsg]

I live in a neighborhood in Providence, RI, that was slated for "slum clearance" immediately after WWII. Fortunately, preservationists of the time, led by Antoinette Downing, prevented this from happening. The neighborhood is made up mainly of 18th century houses, most of which have been divided up into apartments. (The house I live in was built in 1837, and it's the newest house on the block.) But there is a considerable downside. The neighborhood has been gentrified within an inch of its life. Formerly a low-income, African American neighborhood, it is now a high-income neighborhood and almost entirely white. Most of the current residents are students at Brown University or the Rhode Island School of Design -- a notoriously transient group -- and the owners of these now subdivided 18th century houses rent out apartments to them (or their parents) at very high rents. There are no corner stores or community gathering places like those I grew up with in 1960s Manhattan, so there is little sense of community. Hilberseimer’s "diagrams" horrify me. I get the feeling he had never heard of Jane Jacobs. But I'm not thrilled with the gentrification alternative either. There's got to be a better way!

[adamkern]

I love the variety of architecture in Chicago! Ludwig's plans seem very akin to Soviet central planning architecture.

[tortosvideos]

probably the "simplest" step would be to reform the CTA - right now, it's only *really* useful if you're trying to get downtown because of the spoke network - if the community started building more loops scattered around the city, it'd allow those areas to reinforce themselves. If the loops overlapped, even beter

[edenicity]

I lived in a Lafayette Park townhouse as a young child in the late 60s and early 70s. It was wonderful! because the townhouses and buildings were arranged around a park, I could walk to school, a playground, a convenience store, a grocery store, and friends' places without ever encountering a car. This gave me a level of security and autonomy that no place I have lived since could possibly provide a child. BTW, the video doesn't mention this, but the parking was well interleaved into the neighborhood so that our family car was just a dozen or so steps from the door.

[lipingrahman]

I do swear architects seem just to hate the people that they are nominally trying to help.