Cities of the Future from the Past
Eugène Hénard's Street of the Future illustration from 1911. The vertical relationships of a city are drawn in wonderful detail.
It's always interesting to see how previous generations viewed the future of their cities. In particular, the early 20th century was a hotbed for this type of thinking due to the emergence of the skyscraper as a building type. the illustration above, by Eugène Hénard in 1911, shows a wonderfully complex street section, with the caption stating that his street 'is the present street unfolded vertically and adapted to modern scientific progress'. If you look closely, there's a clear vertical separation between uses, with industrial and infrastructural uses below ground, commercial uses at the ground, and residential uses above ground. Verticality is alive and well here, with human uses put high above the ground in the best spaces, and industrial uses put underground and out of sight. There's even a roof garden, complete with pergola and a terrace in order to re-create the green spaces of the ground up in the sky.
A 1913 idea for a future city by Harvey Wily Corbett. It includes a multi-layered city with myriad uses packed into a single street section.
Additionally, here's Harvey Wily Corbett's idea of a future city from 1913. A similar logic applies, but here the verticality is stretched to a level that the 'surface' isn't readily discernible. The city has become a panoply of terracing and activity, complete with sky-bridges that connect upper floors of buildings together. A similar separation logic applies with the first illustration, where the unsightly industrial and infrastructural uses are condemned to the underworld, while the surface is given over to vehicular traffic, and the terraces above are left open for pedestrian traffic. Such a clear vertical segregation of uses is well-worn territory in architectural history, with many Utopian visions for cities including a vertical separation of uses (see Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse for an example).
These visions beg the question: if they were built, how would the residents of the city react to them? To be fair, this is well-worn territory in urban planning circles. It has been at the heart of a great urban planning debate of our time, with figures such as Jane Jacobs passionately arguing for a vibrant mixture of uses rather than a separation. It seems to be more efficient to separate the uses vertically, but no doubt the vibrancy and interest of the city experience would suffer as a result.