The truth about Utopias
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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2024
- They're not just a plan. (with @stewarthicks !)
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Thanks to Matheus Rudo on Sketchfab too!
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Fantastic video and insight! Thanks for including me in the process. It was a great conversation that sparked a fury of new questions and ideas that I'm excited to pursue. It was also just cool to meet one of my youtube idols! Great work as always.
thanks for being my guide!!
Aw man! Cool UA-cam dads collab!
I thought l these were the same ppl
Hahahahahahaha @@Latexasends
@stewarthicks is the barbican in London utopian in its essence do you think? I wonder if when the project was built, it may have subscribed to the kind of fantasy that FLW was proposing with his idea of the decentralised city.
i really like the way you have filmed yourself talking to the laptop when on a video call rather than cutting to grainy screen capture 👌
stewart was nice enough to offer it without my even asking!
Same! I noticed this as well
@@PhilEdwardsInc the benefit of working with other UA-camrs
When videographer can’t stand that low res webcam and laptop mic😂
Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre and Le Corbusier's plan for Paris should be a prime example of never let an architect perform city planning. Personally, I think their plan should be taken as self-expression of Architect's personality and world view. But never shall be taken as something literal. Also, there seems to be a trend for famous architects to have this grand vision of "Utopia" in their own top-down view with little to no regards to actual human living, and how a society functions. *cough cough Brasillia*
@@jarupongch as a city planner: this, this so so much. Architecture is a different discipline for a reason
Chandigarh is pretty nice
It looks like Wright made a laundry list of personal gripes with modern cities (wires, traffic, streetcars) and made a plan to get rid of all of them
I think you nailed it. He focused on changing things he didn’t like without much regard for why they were that way in the first place. "Slums? Just don't have them."
@@nicrule4424 Flank Lloyd Wright: "Just don't be poor lmao"
The reason we have poor people is because of bad architecture. Yeah, right. Architects have delusions of grandeur… in terms of their limited intellect.
@@mfaizsyahmi or tall
I love the awkward segment about what comment on to make on the {interesting] car design
Subreddit r/theyknew is fitting, because of course he knew how the car looked like
I mean, the design looks... distinct.
I dub it the "Overcompensator 3000"
That thing looks like "The Ambiguously Gay Duo" car.
That was the first time I've ever full on belly laughed at a phil edwards video. I usually come here for insight and analysis, not world class comedy
I constantly click on Stewart's videos thinking it is one of yours. Now I click yours and it is still Stewart Hicks! My brain can't handle it.
I knew I wasnt the only one!
The car bit killed me 🤣🤣
big dana carvey energy
FLW built a reputation for being ahead of his time... could it be that he satirized SUV drivers, before there were even SUVs?
Oh my God, me too
That inner monologue sounded like my anxiety 😅
Me: I’m not sure I’m interested in this topic.
My brain: it’s Phil. You’ll like it.
Me: in we go….
🫡
It’s like ‘Inside Out’.
A Phil Edwards, Stewart Hicks crossover? You just made my weekend even better!
This!
It's the Deadpool vs. Wolverine of UA-cam documentarians.
Let's just say, there's a reason why Frank Lloyd Wright is the top most famous architect, and not the most famous city planner.
Also, is it just me, or does the central government skyscraper looming over rural neighborhood feel really like a panopticon style watchtower?
that's definitely how it felt to me! especially cause in some of his writings he basically acts like it'd be one person in charge.
@@PhilEdwardsInci wonder who he would put in charge…
I always forget the difference between a profesional and a professional that does UA-cam until you get a nice shot with professional audio instead of a zoom call recording
my new favorite minute of youtube: phil grappling with frank lloyd wright's *interesting* looking car
I don't know why you had such a problem describing what that car looked like. It's a hotdog in a hamburger bun. Nothing wrong with that...
yeah! exactly!
This is an epic crossover. I first clicked on one of your videos a few years ago because I thought from the thumbnail that it was a Stewart Hicks video LOL.
I think you are right on. If you want to understand a person, ask them to design a utopia.
This reinforces the idea that modern planners must use evidence based research and not design places upon the personal whims of mad geniuses.
The thing is….
Not everyone wants the same thing.
Some people *LOVE* living in dense cities. For them, an ultra dense city filled with easy public transit is utopia.
Other people *HATE* dense cities, for them, Broadacre may very well be a utopia.
For others, a cabin in the woods nowhere near anyone else is utopia.
1:52 "No slum. No scum" well hello LA skidrow, SF campings, Bagota and Rio favellas, fentonyl avenue in Vancouver. It's not a choice.
@yanikkunitsin1466 literally all government choices except Bogota, and Rio Brazilian government brought in cheap labor turned out to be an eternal money sink
When you mentioned marketing I wondered if architects design utopias like fashion designers do couture collections. They inform the design community of a studios design aesthetics. Then other studios borrow features, colors, and ideas to build the “Porte Perte” of every day housing, commercial structures etc..
that's a good analogy!
Broadacre City has been stuck in my mind ever since seeing a physical model of the idea as a teen back in the '90s, possibly at the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park, IL. As someone who had spent his life being shuttled around by parents in cars and wishing for a stronger sense of place and community, I saw that we did build something very similar in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Wright had a great talent for eye-catching building designs, but his ideas really fell apart at this sort of scale (though my architect uncle also didn't like Wright's roofs, which apparently get damaged and leak under Midwestern snow loads, so some degree of practicality was missing there too).
Wright wasn't alone, as you note, since Le Corbusier and others also had ideas of spread-out cities rather than more compact, walkable ones. There are many suburbs out there that lack any real center, and I hope we work harder on undoing that going forward. It's perfectly possible to have amenities like community gardens on a much smaller, more granular scale than what Wright was thinking about. I can certainly see how people wanted to get away from the pollution emanating from cities through Wright's lifetime, but we have managed to make cities far cleaner than they were at that time, and we don't need to waste all that space
There's a deep, cruel irony inherent in Wright's top down, fully vertically integrated plans for a city that he envisioned as "decentralized". Like, my guy, you didn't decentralize at all, you just made yourself and your specific lifestyle choices the keystone of it all.
The decentralization was physical, not political
The inner monologue about the car is gold. Love it.
If you want to look at the ideal city, you should look to his students. Walter and Marion Griffin did an amazing job with Canberra. Unfortunately our government got a bit arrogant and decided to do their own thing. So proud to be a Canberran all the same.
"A 20 minute drive everywhere? This sounds like hell on earth..."
Me, an Angeleno: "Hey, isn't 'everything is 20 minutes away if there's no traffic' a thing we've been saying about Los Angeles for decades......?"
hahah 20 minutes is the inevitable distance sometimes it seems
Where I live many things are at least a 20 minute drive, sometimes due to traffic and sometimes due to the way the area gruadually developed from farmland. For many people here, it's common to drive 30 minutes to an hour, one way, for work. 20 minutes to drive everywhere actually sounds OK to me.
@@PhilEdwardsIncliving in an European city for seven months and used a car only 3 times.
Can easily say a life with no need to drive everyday everywhere is absolutely better
The common error of Utopias is that they are narrowly conceived. The part FLW got right was decentralization, which can allow for a significant variety of innovations, but it can't be done without some common public spaces and regulations. We are not exclusively independent nor purely collective creatures, we are both.
having always lived in very old cities like London (that’s spent over 1000 years of overlapping old and new)…. its still kind of odd to think of someone building a city from the ground up-from nothing to complete, regardless of the ideas within them. some odd ideas in here too
Could be worth exploring Brasilia. That's a good example of a city being built from scratch using modern (at the time) principals of city planning. I don't know enough about it to say how successful it's been, but it's certainly interesting.
You have examples of newly built communities designed to take the pressure off London in your own country, like Milton Keynes.
@@AlRoderick Milton Keynes probably isn’t a shinning example
I currently live in a ~150 year old "planned city". The main difference between it and a comparable "organic" city is that it's laid out in a way that's easier to navigate, and the roads are overall much better.
Now I know where car from "Ambiguosly Gay Duo" came from.
ace and gary were big flw fans.
@@PhilEdwardsInc I wonder if the car for Ace n Gary was inspired by FLW but all but forgotten except for the subconscious mind.
Lol, that car 🤣
Love the car segment
Me in the first few seconds: "wow this would be a perfect video to feature Stewart Hicks"
Me, when @stewarthicks shows up: *di caprio point*
I wouldn't even have noticed that the car kinda looked like a you-know-what if it wasn't for that bit. To me at first glance it looked like a bicycle sit.
BTW it never occurred that the designers behind these utopic cities might not really wanted to see them come to fruition but rather just used them as promotional stunts, but it does make a lot of sense. I always assumed it was an exercise more along the lines of a "if I had infinite resources" kind of thought.
i was totally on that page too
One question: have you ever researched Brasília?
i haven't but this video made me want to!
@@PhilEdwardsIncalso look into Chandigarh, India
Ace and Gary called. They want their car back.
Jules Verne's Nautilus was supposed to be egalitarian. But most of the interior was taken up with Nemo's private suite. 19th century utopians couldn't seem to escape class.
The cars kinda look like bird skulls.
Ah, Phil and Stewart are two different people! So much learning has occured. Lol
Phil's thumbnails always get the message across in a hilarious manner.
A utopia is something to strive for while also acknowledging it is extremely unreachable. Especially cause the world is a chaotic mess.
Wow! Great video! I have been following both of you guys for a while and I'm so glad you colaborated together! I hope to see more of these in depth analyses in the future! :) Thank you both!!
I recently discovered your channel and I’m completely hooked on your content. Thank you very much for all these videos!
Favorite twins collab on a video?! Glad I didn't skip!
Shaft mobile lol those phone dial wheels
for the longest time i thought this was a new cell phone company i hadn't heard of haha
Love how your production quality is steadily increasing. This is super nice fidelity. Feels good to watch.
So great to see Stewart in this video. I love both of your channels for very similar reasons, so it was great to see you both work together.
What would you name your utopia, phil?
listen there's charm to philville but no need to fight philtopia. you?
Phil... opolis? Phil...bourghs? Phil...hill? For a touch of English, Phil-on-Tyme. But maybe my favorite might be Philadelphia; that sounds like a real place.
Philistine?
Philadelphia
@@AlRoderick this has a certain ring to it
This is the team up I am so fucking pumped to see! Two of my favorite UA-camrs together at last!
Broadacre reminds me of Brasília, capital of Brazil - a futuristic, car centric, spread out city built on a flat terrain in the middle of nowere in the 60's, with very similar concepts....
FLW: You’re a waste of space
Tall person: Well I wasn’t designed by an architect
It was so great when you showed us the Philcar and debated what to call it. So cute!
Oh, I see it now! The car looks like a snail! 🐌 😊
Also it’s so weird that he specified no landlords and no private ownership… but still has a mansion? For… presumably the guy who takes the place of the Mayor? As well as the Fancy Apartments and Workers Homes you mentioned.
My father was an architect, and before I got into graphic design, I considered going into architecture, I still have soft spot for architecture. Anyway, there used to be a good practice where, when designing large architectural layout like whole districts intended to be varied projects, one architect should not design everything-from the urban layout to the buildings, interiors, and even the details like furniture. Different people/teams should design the master plan and sample housing estates, while someone else should handle the main street layouts, and yet another architect should work on the further developments, and so on. The same goes for teams-everyone should do their part to avoid repetition. This was before the days of CAD.
The internal converation is the best thing that I saw on the 'tube this week. :D Keep up the good work Phil!
Amazing how two UA-camrs that I've been watching for a long time, now appear together in a video!
Ebenezer Howard worked on something similar. This vision was influential in my city with a street even named ‘Ebenezer’.
I worked for Oneida Ltd . They started out as a religious Utopian community that practiced perfectionism and communalism .
The aside in your mind about the car…😂 absolutely fire.
Ok, I'm 100% an idiot because, the entire time I'm thinking "He was an architect AND a composer?" I got Frank Lloyd Wright confused with Andrew Lloyd Webber.
his chandelier design was left wanting
Actually, FLW did compose some tunes in his twenties. No one knows what they sounded like, and FLW said it was better for his reputation that way.
Frank Lloyd Seuss designed that car full o' blindspots. The tires would be prohibitively expensive, not that there would be any way to power them in that design.
One aspect of city planning that I hope people take into consideration is the standardization of roads. It annoys me to no end to go down a two-way lane road with lines, a shoulder, and a side-walk on one side; to then go down another another two-way lane road with with lines, no shoulder, and no side-walk. There are multiple other combinations but that is indeed the problem. Along with what an avenue truly is? or what is a boulevard? or what is a street? and so on and so on.
Seize the car of the future firmly but gently.
Nice to see the two people I keep mixing up when they pop up in my recommendations in one place.
I definitely suggested this collab when you first started your channel.
Well done, Phil! 👍
Talking of rebuilding London, another great architect, Sir Christopher Wren wanted to redesign the city after the Great Fire in 1666. His ideas had broad boulevards radiating from his masterpiece, the new St Paul's cathedral. This would have given London a grid system which it never got - it was seen as too complex and expensive so Wren rebuilt St Pauls and 51 other churches but not London as a whole.
Thanks for another interesting and expertly made video, Phil.
oh that's cool- thanks for that fact
@@PhilEdwardsIncYou're welcome. Incidentally, the fantastic UA-camr Jay Foreman has done a series called Unfinished London all about the development of the British capital.
This was definitely part of the inspiration for the story "The Giver"
I never knew that the design of Ace and Gary's car from the "The Ambiguously Gay Duo" was stolen.
The car diversion made me laugh really hard. One of your best bits in a while. The content was fantastic here also, I love learning about architectural pipe dreams. I wonder if something like this was ever tried in the real world. Also, Stewart Hicks?!? So awesome to see him here. ❤
I'm glad you touched on LeCorbusier - he was the first thing that came to my mind when the video started
Thanks for this short video essay! It makes so much sense to me that the conception of a utopia (as a creation) encompasses so many different purposes. I wonder if anyone has made a "utopia" model that uses AI to exaggerate the most "desirable" traits we would aspire to have in a city, if only as an exercise to identify what could be feasible amongst the mountain of requirements.
somebody train a simcity asap!
10:20 Honestly I look at that design and think "Oh hey someone made a motorcycle helmet for rats."
The crossover episode I've been waiting on!
Sidenote: Me personally I don't live in this dream world that thinks everyone should have the same. I've accepted that there will always be classes. I just want a place that at least provides a basic quality of living. If it can be well designed & done in creative ways, styles, aesthetics too then that will just add to it all in a fundamentally valuable way. I'd like to see a place commit to utilizing modern advanced nuclear energy options to power the grid, desalination plants, etc. but also use alternative energy options in collaboration alongside the rest of the system. These things seem like they would be an important foundation of a healthy living environment
It should be fun to have a Sims city of these utopia, so you could really experience what their ideas were. Nice video style again and a nice sequel to the FLW series
I love your channel so much Phil! Keep up the great work!
humans: evolved over thousands of years from nomads to dense city dwellers
architects: cities are clearly wrong. we must return to nomad because....
and then the cycle continues again....
I'm from a town close to Cloquet, Minnesota and have driven by that gas station many times. I knew it was a FLW designed building but never understood the context of why he would design a gas station of all things (before your video). It's crazy to imagine how grand he was thinking.
Reading material, "The Just City" by Jo Walton
It is indeed a very 'platonic' idea, going back to the Renaissance, as demonstrated in paintings like the 'ideal city'( of Urbino ?) formerly contributed to Pierro della Francesca.
Great video! I learned more about Wright and am thinking about utopias in an expanded view. I love utopia and utopias although they are problematic. But if we aim for perfect or at least far better, hopefully we'll end up at least a little better. If we imagine a better future, we can try to create it.
Phil excellent vid, love your channel. Keep it up
Stuart Hicks collab FTW! Love his channel.
The obvious problem is that they keep thinking they can *plan* Utopia. It's not going to happen if it's not some kind of spontaneous order. The best I think they could do is provide suggestions and possible a modular system that can start small and scale up to help people get started. Because planners never know exactly how all or even most people actually want to live.
If you want to know what would have happened if such "utopia" were allowed to be built, look no further than Brasilia.
I live in Brazil, and most Brazilians would curse if you dare say the biggest planned city of Brasilia is an utter failure in so many levels. It was built under a government who wanted to distance themselves from the "scums" of Rio de Janeiro (meaning they did not want to deal with protests from the commoners). They based every design on modernism with heavy use of what was so trendy at the time: tons and tons of concrete. Funny enough they needed the poor "scums" to build those heinous concrete buildings which would overheat in a tropical country begging for lots of air conditioning and ventilation.
Those poor scums ironically ended up building dozens of slums around the city because their employer would not offer anywhere decent to sleep, and today those slums keep growing around an architectural "utopia" where its denizens were eager to flee from poor people in the first place.
Some buildings keep begging for maintenance, modifications to modernize with todays living standards don't come cheap, and no one can live without an automobile.
Similar narcissistic attempts are in progress in Egypt's new capital and Saudi Arabia's The Line.
Cities are not meant to be drawn on a blank slate by child men. This doesn't mean we should not plan ahead, but any plan must take into account the real necessities of every citizen.
Holy moly, a Phil Edwards - Stewart Hicks colab. I had no idea i needed that
"Maybe you can't know who you want yourself to be... until you imagine it" good one Phil!!
I've been watching your videos for a while now and I have to say you're production quality has gone up so much recently
ah thanks i appreciate it!
I never realized Frank Lloyd Wright was a short king.
He wasn't short... everyone else was just ridiculously tall.
In the built design world, we like to make fun of Architects (lovingly). Because theyre good at understanding buildings, but not the space in between
this one was exceptionally well edited
That car looks like the rotary telephone I grew up with.
To be fair to the man, he did design this city in the 30s. The population and their requirements were a bit different then than today, almost one hundred years later. Not that he ever actually intended to make it.
New york wouldnt build the first public subway until the year he first presented his plan for example.
it’s a blessing that wright didn’t design the elimination of tall people
Interesting look at a plan I had never heard of, and it does shed some light on its designer's world view. Also, I've always thought that you and Stewart could pass for siblings, especially when you were rockin' the 'stache. Similar vocal timbre and delivery as well. 🤓
I'm from the area FLW is from so I've been aware of him and this for a long time. He was born just after the Civil War and grew up in the later part of the 1800s. To someone with that lifespan the buildings he was designing by 1900 and the rest of his life I figure were super-futuristic and looked like how spaceships do to us--lots of glass, long horizontal hovering roofs. Those are futuristic if what you grew up in was buildings built in the mid-1800s.
It'd be like us trying to design what a city 50 years from now would look like. The big hot trend is work from home. Will it stay or is it passing? We can't tell what will happen. But then what if we then extrapolate that out and design a future "city" where most everyone works from home? It'd probably turn out strange and 50-100 years from now people would be living in cities that are very similar to what we have today thinking we went down a weird rabbithole designing super-spread out settlements.
I'm not defending him or anything. He was really sharp and forward-looking on architecture so it's always been weird to see that his "ideal city" is like a proto-suburb with the worst aspects cranked up. I figure at the time in the 20s and 30s, the big trend people realized is that cars and transportation freed people from having to live directly next to each other and that was the central idea he latched on to.
I don't think it's that bad a plan, though I haven't seen it in detail. Don't think we can hide the wires since it's easier to service them when they're exposed, maybe throw in some street cars, cycle lanes, some medium rise buildings... and I've ended up changing quite a lot already. Broadacre isn't really a city, but it is an interesting idea.
I really enjoyed this! A similar video on Buckminster Fuller’s “Old Man River’s City” project would be really interesting
oh i have been obsessed with figuring out a buckminster project
At first I thought: "Wow, Phil is going deep into a pricey, hardcore beer. What don't I know about this?"
if only!
What beer would you like?
@@ryanortega1511 Given the subject, I should say 'Utopias', but just can't bring myself to request it. It's expensive, but not among my favorites.
Damn never been this early.
🏆
I have always joked that Phil Edwards and Stewart Hicks look similar and should collab, lo and behold
I recently visited Wingspan (Racine, Wisconsin) andwas once again struk by Wright's shortcomings, such s the angles ofthe roof leading to chronic leaks, including rain pouring onto the dining room table during an event hosting the state governor.
While Wright's planned utopia was never built, there have been dozens of them that have come and gone throughout North Ameria. Often they are started by international or cross-continental emigrant groups and have some sort of cultural, social, or religious objective. I am quite familiar with two in my region; Freeland, Washington and Sointula, Briitsh Columbia. Both are on islands; Whidbey in the fomer case (~midway between Seattle and Vancouver) and Malcolm Island in the latter (very ysmall island off of the remote northern part of Vancouver Island). Both flourished around the turn of the last century. Sointula was founded by a Finnish group and older homes still exhibit some Finnish architetctural quirks. Little of the original design remains in Freeland. Thse two, and quite possibly most, utopias seem to only last a bit longer than a generation. Maintianing a utopia requires a stultifying amount of homogenity of behavior and norms which often alientates younger people once they begin to discover the wider world.
People seam to confuse building better cities, with building "utopias".
There is no expectation that the city will be perfect, only the expectation that it will be better than the current standard.
The argument that its not going to be perfect, also is not an argument that justifies avoiding improvements, which is another mistake people commonly make.
The problem with utopias, is easy to understand. We all long for the ideal, the "perfect" world; the difficulty lies in the fact that we all have a different idea of what is ideal and "perfect". Even if it was possible to assemble a group of people who have the exact same taste, over time, each person's idea of perfect will change, perhaps marginally, perhaps drastically. Before too long, there will be dissent. This is why the communes of the '60s and '70s were either flaming failures, or else, if they did survive for any length of time, they became like the establishment the hippies were rebelling against. Cult based communes last a little longer, depending on how charismatic the leader and how weak the personalities of the followers. Sad as it may be, human nature and ego will sabotage utopias every time.