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.
@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.
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*
Completely agree. I'm always struck with the utter disregard for what actually goes on in the real world - Jan Gehl's famous, but positively banal concept of "life between the buildings". In my studies with urban planning, I've yet to find a real life example of the material qualities of a house or even a district trumping the immaterial qualities of how people live there. Collectives, associations, even HOAs or municipalities tend to have a large influence on how people shape their day-to-day, and the collective consciousness that permeates it all is usually so much more influential than any given physical structure. Sure, material factors such as cars (noise, pollution, physical danger) can have a strong impact, just as ugly buildings can have an impact, but curiously, these things are very rarely what architect's attempt to treat. It's almost always lofty ideals of decentralization or optimization that are completely divorced from the lived and living reality of the people who would inhabit these worlds. If architects were meant to be planners, they would be taught to focus on humility, empathy and analysis, rather than creativity and bombastic egos.
You say that, and yet city planners have done nothing be insultingly bad jobs ever since it was an actual career with a name. Literally every city worth a damn are only like that because the designs are over 500 years old and therefore everything has had to work within those frameworks instead of being made by city planners who would have undoubtedly ruined them if given the room
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."
The reason we have poor people is because of bad architecture. Yeah, right. Architects have delusions of grandeur… in terms of their limited intellect.
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?
I always forget the difference between a profesional and a professional that does TH-cam until you get a nice shot with professional audio instead of a zoom call recording
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.
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 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.
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
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..
@yanikkunitsin1466 literally all government choices except Bogota, and Rio Brazilian government brought in cheap labor turned out to be an eternal money sink
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
“Maybe you can’t know who you want yourself to be until you imagine it.” What an amazing line! … Thank you for this thought, it comes at a point where I really needed it.
I loved the video, but I have to confess that the segment with the car was properly funny. How in the world you were able to handle it tactfully was an architectural editing feat in and of itself, respect.
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.
@@PhilEdwardsIncYou're welcome. Incidentally, the fantastic TH-camr Jay Foreman has done a series called Unfinished London all about the development of the British capital.
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.
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.
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....
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. ❤
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. 🤓
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very interesting, I like the link with Le Corbusier who had similar ideas as you pointed out. I'm also intrigued by the reference to the fact that Wright wanted to reshape the city of London after the Second World War, which reminds me of similar remarks of certain architects after 9/11 (no more high rises of steel and glass), plans that lead to nothing because they're still constructing like this. Maybe this is also the conflict that we often see between a more technocratical vision on the one hand and the executive powers /society at the other?
Great fun informative video! Phil Edwards sure gives me a lot of vibes that really resemble *Ray Delahanty (CityNerd).* I hope you get to do a collaboration with him one day because you two really seem to share a lot in common especially the facial/age resemblance😀👍💯
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
"This city is a masterpiece and a disaster. A Utopia and a Dystopia." I like this overview so much. A Utopia designed in the image that I want right now will not be a pleasant place to live even for myself 10 to 20 years into the future, let alone other people. Just like when Plato coined it in Ancient Greece, Utopia is maybe the most useful and the least atrocious when it is exclusively kept as an illustrative tool or a thought experiment. I won't want to live in such a sparse neighborhood myself, I am a Korean and I need to go out and buy a six-pack at 3 A.M. from a 24-hour convenience store within 3-minute walking distance. But I can still be fascinated and intriuged by an architect's preferences and values by looking at a his own version of a perfect city.
I'm still less than half way through. When it mentioned the Wright was adding all of this stuff to a small city like a zoo, aquarium, baseball stadium, etc. It sounds like he was just fucking around. That sounds very much like me in my childhood designing my own city. I'm goin to gues that he was just flexing.
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 TH-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 TH-camrs
When videographer can’t stand that low res webcam and laptop mic😂
A Phil Edwards, Stewart Hicks crossover? You just made my weekend even better!
This!
It's the Deadpool vs. Wolverine of TH-cam documentarians.
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
Completely agree. I'm always struck with the utter disregard for what actually goes on in the real world - Jan Gehl's famous, but positively banal concept of "life between the buildings". In my studies with urban planning, I've yet to find a real life example of the material qualities of a house or even a district trumping the immaterial qualities of how people live there. Collectives, associations, even HOAs or municipalities tend to have a large influence on how people shape their day-to-day, and the collective consciousness that permeates it all is usually so much more influential than any given physical structure.
Sure, material factors such as cars (noise, pollution, physical danger) can have a strong impact, just as ugly buildings can have an impact, but curiously, these things are very rarely what architect's attempt to treat. It's almost always lofty ideals of decentralization or optimization that are completely divorced from the lived and living reality of the people who would inhabit these worlds. If architects were meant to be planners, they would be taught to focus on humility, empathy and analysis, rather than creativity and bombastic egos.
You say that, and yet city planners have done nothing be insultingly bad jobs ever since it was an actual career with a name.
Literally every city worth a damn are only like that because the designs are over 500 years old and therefore everything has had to work within those frameworks instead of being made by city planners who would have undoubtedly ruined them if given the room
@@AmitGupta-lx4gu if you are in car lol
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!
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
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 😅
It's all part of him being a visionary
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’.
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…
That's what I was thinking. Like they wanted to be able to look down and see what everyone was doing.
I always forget the difference between a profesional and a professional that does TH-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
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.
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 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.
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
This reinforces the idea that modern planners must use evidence based research and not design places upon the personal whims of mad geniuses.
The inner monologue about the car is gold. Love it.
10:20 Honestly I look at that design and think "Oh hey someone made a motorcycle helmet for rats."
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!
I think you are right on. If you want to understand a person, ask them to design a utopia.
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!
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
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
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.
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.
Lol, that car 🤣
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!!
This is the team up I am so fucking pumped to see! Two of my favorite TH-camrs together at last!
Love how your production quality is steadily increasing. This is super nice fidelity. Feels good to watch.
I recently discovered your channel and I’m completely hooked on your content. Thank you very much for all these videos!
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.
One question: have you ever researched Brasília?
i haven't but this video made me want to!
@@PhilEdwardsIncalso look into Chandigarh, India
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
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.
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.
“Maybe you can’t know who you want yourself to be until you imagine it.” What an amazing line! … Thank you for this thought, it comes at a point where I really needed it.
Love the car segment
Phil's thumbnails always get the message across in a hilarious manner.
I loved the video, but I have to confess that the segment with the car was properly funny. How in the world you were able to handle it tactfully was an architectural editing feat in and of itself, respect.
Ace and Gary called. They want their car back.
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 TH-camr Jay Foreman has done a series called Unfinished London all about the development of the British capital.
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.
True, but how many would be willing to live in such a low density setting while also paying for the true cost of utilities and infrastructure?
One wonders why cities don't tax the suburban dwellers so as to cover the infrastructure costs. It seems like all city governments do this.
Yeah but most people need to live in cities, for work. So why not make them better, since majority of ppl live in urban places.
I definitely suggested this collab when you first started your channel.
Well done, Phil! 👍
I never knew that the design of Ace and Gary's car from the "The Ambiguously Gay Duo" was stolen.
Phil excellent vid, love your channel. Keep it up
Amazing how two TH-camrs that I've been watching for a long time, now appear together in a video!
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*
Two of my favorite TH-camrs ❤
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
I love your channel so much Phil! Keep up the great work!
Ah, Phil and Stewart are two different people! So much learning has occured. Lol
The internal converation is the best thing that I saw on the 'tube this week. :D Keep up the good work 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!
A utopia is something to strive for while also acknowledging it is extremely unreachable. Especially cause the world is a chaotic mess.
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....
Your video popped up abd im hooked on your channel. I laughed way too much during the car interlude in the middle 😂
FLW: You’re a waste of space
Tall person: Well I wasn’t designed by an architect
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. ❤
That aside about the car got me good. Thanks for another informative and entertaining video
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. 🤓
It was so great when you showed us the Philcar and debated what to call it. So cute!
The crossover episode I've been waiting on!
The aside in your mind about the car…😂 absolutely fire.
Holy moly, a Phil Edwards - Stewart Hicks colab. I had no idea i needed that
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.
Stuart Hicks collab FTW! Love his channel.
"Maybe you can't know who you want yourself to be... until you imagine it" good one Phil!!
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.
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
Favorite twins collab on a video?! Glad I didn't skip!
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 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.
Great episode!
The concept car. Cool video. 👍👍👍
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.
Thank you for your work 🙏🏻
Ebenezer Howard worked on something similar. This vision was influential in my city with a street even named ‘Ebenezer’.
this one was exceptionally well edited
I worked for Oneida Ltd . They started out as a religious Utopian community that practiced perfectionism and communalism .
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
I'm glad you touched on LeCorbusier - he was the first thing that came to my mind when the video started
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.
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.
The cars kinda look like bird skulls.
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
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!
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.
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.
Honestly I think I mixed you and Phil up, there's something very similar with both of you and the content you both put out is great!
Very interesting, I like the link with Le Corbusier who had similar ideas as you pointed out. I'm also intrigued by the reference to the fact that Wright wanted to reshape the city of London after the Second World War, which reminds me of similar remarks of certain architects after 9/11 (no more high rises of steel and glass), plans that lead to nothing because they're still constructing like this. Maybe this is also the conflict that we often see between a more technocratical vision on the one hand and the executive powers /society at the other?
Seize the car of the future firmly but gently.
The collaboration I always knew would happen, I've always felt you and Stewert Hicks had a very similar style in some way.
These days nobody wants to live in a utopia that isn't a something-punk dystopia. Wright may as well have been living in ancient Greece.
yeah, need cool silver spiky hair imho to be a true utopia
Great fun informative video! Phil Edwards sure gives me a lot of vibes that really resemble *Ray Delahanty (CityNerd).* I hope you get to do a collaboration with him one day because you two really seem to share a lot in common especially the facial/age resemblance😀👍💯
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
"This city is a masterpiece and a disaster. A Utopia and a Dystopia."
I like this overview so much. A Utopia designed in the image that I want right now will not be a pleasant place to live even for myself 10 to 20 years into the future, let alone other people. Just like when Plato coined it in Ancient Greece, Utopia is maybe the most useful and the least atrocious when it is exclusively kept as an illustrative tool or a thought experiment. I won't want to live in such a sparse neighborhood myself, I am a Korean and I need to go out and buy a six-pack at 3 A.M. from a 24-hour convenience store within 3-minute walking distance. But I can still be fascinated and intriuged by an architect's preferences and values by looking at a his own version of a perfect city.
haha i like your 6 pack at 3 am example
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.
God, I love this channel
I'm still less than half way through. When it mentioned the Wright was adding all of this stuff to a small city like a zoo, aquarium, baseball stadium, etc. It sounds like he was just fucking around. That sounds very much like me in my childhood designing my own city. I'm goin to gues that he was just flexing.