by David Brussat

I had planned to take the bus to work on Tuesday morning, lugging the new book “Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City” in my trusty Penguin bag, hauling it in from our house in the suburbs — well, it’s still in Providence, but it feels suburban compared with my “commute” as a resident of downtown for a decade.

But “Paradise Planned” feels like a ton of bricks (12.3 pounds: Amazon), so by car we go. The prize for making fun of its size goes to Architectural Record’s reviewer Justin Davidson, whose “first instinct was to set the volume down on its own half-acre lot, give it a peaked roof, and simply move in.” Davidson says he worked out at a gym to acquire the strength to lift the book onto his “insufficient lap.”

Heavy-duty pages give the book a massiveness even beyond its 1,072 pages. Over 3,500 mostly color photographs, plans, maps and diagrams, many small but printed at high resolution, testify to the luxury achieved by designer Pentagram and publisher Monacelli Press.

Truly a château among books.

And so readers of the book, by Robert A.M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove, will have a very long commute to reach its end (toll, $95), but its conclusion is right up front.

The forward notes that the late architecture critic Lewis Mumford, in “The City in History” (1961), felt that “[s]o charming was the physical environment of the better suburbs that for long it drew attention away from their social deficiencies and oversights.” Mumford regretted that a “historic monograph” describing the garden suburb “has still to be written.”

No longer. Most of the hundreds of “better suburbs” pictured so profusely and described at length in gracious prose by Stern & Co. are truly glorious. The allure of the solitary home reigns supreme. Having lived in my “suburb” now for over three years, I still regret that I no longer have a four-minute commute (on foot) to work, but I sure don’t regret having my car parked right outside my house instead of in a downtown garage some distance away.

The suburbs, continues the forward, “satisfy the hunger of the very many who wish to be Hamiltonian by day and Jeffersonian by night, that is to say, to combine the material and cultural advantages of city life with the restorative powers of dwelling amidst nature.”

Of course, what happened since Mumford deplored their “social deficiencies and oversights” is that they have drastically metastasized. Instead of trolleys conveying a sliver of the more genteel masses between home and work we have mass motorized migration twice a day between city and suburb, with degraded destinations at both ends of the commute.

This problem is not overlooked in “Paradise Planned,” but the focus is on the history of the garden suburb. Described in detail are the Royal Crescent in Bath designed by John Wood the Younger, built in 1767-75, which “turned its back on the town, facing instead the distant horizon”; the landscaped estates of Lancelot “Capability” Brown outside London; the theories of British suburbanists Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin; and the trolley suburbs designed in America by, among others, Frederick Law Olmsted. Then, after 1940, came a swift decline, widely recognized and thus described in less detail, plops readers amidst the plight of suburbia today. The book’s authors blame it, correctly and not without a commendable asperity, on modern planning and design.

Throughout its length, the book notes, or at least hints at, the role of modernism in dragging society aesthetically and functionally from nature and a human scale toward a sterile and auto-centric “machine for living.”

In the last two decades, the garden city has staged a revival via such projects as Seaside, in the Florida panhandle, the first New Urbanist community; Celebration, a Disney town in Orlando, Fla.; Prince Charles’s Poundbury, in Britain; Kentlands, Md., in suburban Washington; and — by now — hundreds more walkable villages. To create habitats that people can love, the developers of these places had to subvert conventional zoning and ignore the architectural establishment’s disdain for traditional patterns of living and design.

“The evocation of vernacular styles,” argue the three authors with considerable panache, “is more than a matter of packaging; it is an essential ingredient in the place-making process, helping to speed up the establishment of a sense of community by rooting ‘instant’ developments in an evolving tradition.”

In their epilogue they proclaim that “[a]t the core of modern town planning lies a tragically interrupted 150-year-old tradition, that of the garden suburb … the best template yet devised to achieve a habitable earthly paradise.”

“Paradise Planned” maps the road laid out in its many pages to paradise regained, even if it might not fit into a stocking.

> via providencejournal.com