One man's vision for the suburban future

"We look at things differently in the upper Midwest, where I live, than even in Chicago, where I grew up. There is a huge diversity in how people feel about the suburbs and in the way these places look and function."

Martinson says he doesn't renounce New Urbanists, but he believes their developments are "detached from a lot of America," expensive, and no more sensitive to regional dynamics than any other development style. So while New Urbanist concepts work wonderfully for a small number of people, in his estimation they are only a tiny part of a big solution.

They get a lot of attention, though, because New Urbanists have succeeded in building communities such as Seaside and Celebration in Florida, and the Kentlands in Maryland.

"People always want to walk into a model house," Martinson observes, and these projects are essentially large-scale models.

Other than New Urbanism, Martinson doesn't observe a lot of visionary thinking being brought to bear on suburban planning and design. He attributes the paucity of ideas to a change in architectural attitudes that occurred midway through the past century.

Before World War II, he says, designing houses was considered an honorable and important undertaking. After the war, though, the rapid growth of the suburbs served to trivialize house design. Consequently, the best architects sought to make their mark in the more heroic commercial and institutional design environments, not in subdivisions.

Without giants like Frank Lloyd Wright around, building regulations, not genius, have shaped the suburban landscape - along with developers and builders.

Martinson is not thrilled by the results, a point he makes clear in "American Dreamscape" when he observes that "even million-dollar homes are routinely drawn up by contractors' plan services. This is astonishing and disheartening when you think of our trillions-of-dollars investments in postwar suburbs."

He is disappointed in the "McMansionization" of the suburbs, which finds people building big, but not graciously.

"What's different about this generation of affluent houses," Martinson says, "is how vapid they are. To me, they seem totally based on size. They have poor scale, no sense of elegance, and the building materials are used thoughtlessly."

And when they replace modest tear-downs, they not only make the neighborhood look strange, they also squeeze out ordinary people, he says.

These McMansions dot what Martinson describes as "gentry" suburbs, which are characterized by large, pretentious houses that overshadow the landscape.

As a populist, he prefers moving toward a suburban paradigm with roots in the past - what he calls "arcadian" suburbs: smaller, better-designed and -built houses that blend into the landscape.

In fact, beginning with landscape, not architecture, is what he advocates.

"What happens now is the landscaping comes at the end," he observes. "A civil engineer lays out the subdivision, an engineering draftsman does the houses, and then a garden service is brought in to throw around some foundation plantings.

"It's so mediocre compared to the norm 100 years ago, when you started out with somebody like [landscape architect] Frederick Law Olmsted laying out a subdivision."

Martinson says there are still examples of landscape-oriented developments to guide future development. One of his favorites is Riverside, an older suburb in Chicago that incorporates ornamental lakes, ponds, and streams as a form of natural plumbing, to help with drainage.

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