Making a Middle Landscape

Today’s suburban metropolitan development of single-family homes, shopping centers, corporate offices, and roadway systems constitutes what Peter Rowe calls a “middle landscape” between the city and the countryside. While others have written about this phenomenon from the point of view of sociology or cultural geography, Rowe looks closely at suburban America in terms of design and physical planning. He builds a case for a new way of seeing and building suburbia, complete with theoretical underpinnings and a basis for design.
The directions Rowe pursues are threefold: what has actually been built since 1920, as simple arrangements of land, buildings, and infrastructure have been transformed into complete multi-use centers; the mythic themes, metaphors, and attitudes driving the production of important cultural artifacts like the home and the workplace; and the definition of design principles for this new landscape.
Rowe looks first at how suburban expansion has altered the land, at the new spatio-cultural mosaic that has emerged and taken the place of the traditional city. He then examines four cultural artifacts-the house and its garden; the retail realm of roadside franchises and commercial strips, shopping villages and malls; the modern workplace of office parks and corporate estates; and the roadway that has become an essential link to all of these. Running throughout, he notes, is a story of technical planning and mass production where, paradoxically, rational excesses are often cloaked in romantic imagery. He concludes by proposing, and illustrating with numerous examples, a symbolic construct of “modern pastoralism” that juxtaposes the idea arcadian simplicity and value against the modern technical temperament.
Contents
PART ONE       Sub-Urbs in Rure 
1. Territorial Transformations 

From City to Suburb

 

 

A Tale of Two Towns

 

 

From Suburb to Urban Metropolis

 

2. Changing Attitudes 

Monolith or Diverse Social Entity?

 

 

Wasteful Fragmentation or Pure Democracy?

 

 

Private Commodity or Public Good?

 

 

Monotonous Conformity or Individual Comfort?

 

 

Placelessness or Place?

 

 

A Metropolitan Spatial Synthesis

 

 

 

PART TWO       Cultural Artifacts 
3. Houses in Gardens 

Housing Types

 

 

Spatial Trends and Variations

 

 

Form, Figure, and Future Function

 

4. Retail Realms 

Types of Retail Center

 

 

Spatial, Formal, and Functional Trends

 

 

Future Variations

 

5. Corporate Estates 

Types of Corporate Office

 

 

Design Themes and Trends

 

 

Society and the Corporate Image

 

6. Highways and Byways 

Highways

 

 

Subdivision Street Forms

 

 

Spatial Developments and Variations

 
PART THREE       Poetics and Making

7. Myths and Masks 

The Pastoral Perspective

 

 

The Modern Technical Orientation

 

 

Modern Pastoralism

 

 

Historicism and Utopianism

 

 

Critical Reality

 

 

Symbolic Function

 

 

Paradise and Pandemonium

 

8. Places and Poetics 

A Poetic of the Middle Landscape

 

 

Poetic Design

 

 

Poetic Expression

 

 

Poetic Operations

 

 

Making a Middle Landscape

 

MIT Press, 1991