Unfolding the City

It is generally believed that order is preferable to unplanned development. The first villages to emerge with agriculture developed without any plan or structure. In time, people would learn to plan towns on a grid of streets and this became the normal way to develop a town or city, along a rigid grid of streets. But we know better now, after observing the formation of towns for over two hundred years in America, according to city planners, that street plans which emerged organically from the seemingly haphazard choices of many individuals over many years, produce the most efficient street plans which help alleviate and avoid gridlock.

If you look at an English countryside village, you can see how the streets and paths are laid out efficiently to follow the activities of actual people. The preexisting activities and their most efficient paths determine the layout of streets. This also interestingly creates a plan of homes and buildings that people find pleasing, or "picturesque." I believe this is due to the streets and structures following an organic plan, similar to nature and the choices going into the making of the plan represent "chaos" or fractal patterns, which emerge and are made visible in the placement of streets, alleys, and structures giving the town the same pleasing pattern as mountains or other pleasing natural forms. It appears the planned, rigid, rectangular street plans are the least pleasing, the least human scale, the most prone to gridlock, traffic and efficiency problems of movement in the city. Sometimes a controlled randomness, a "natural anarchy" of chaotic processes, organically unfolding the city are preferable to order.

I knew this long before city planners began to discover it. My father before me knew it without understanding why or what it was that made driving Arlington easy. That made it easy to avoid "Rush Hour" so well known to Arlingtonians living so close to the big city and experiencing the daily rush to work and rush to home in the bedroom communities. My father always taught me how he had a dozen different ways to get from here to where we were going. There were always four or five back roads, small arteries, little curving streets that cut off corners, like the maze of arteries and veins in the human leg, there was always a way to get from there to there efficiently without blockage. The organic nature of Arlington's streets was known to him without him ever thinking the world "organic" or describing it in formal town planning terminology. I absorbed this by osmosis riding with him in the family car, and would use this knowledge myself when it came time to drive.

Like the weather, like the soil, the streets of the city are at their best when allowed to unfold organically, understood as complex phenomena, not reduced to simplified models. Neither they way nature works or the way human society works is rational. Although we can understand many things by simplifying nature, reducing it to its constituent parts for analysis, and many beneficial things come from a scientific rational study of nature, in the final analysis nature is irrational. The universe is not ordered like the precise gears of a watch, but ordered in complex, organic ways, like the weather. Rationality is a phenomena of the human mind, a way of comprehending and organizing what it knows about the world and is an imperfect match with reality. It is influenced by the reliance of the human mind on narrative for explaining, organizing, comprehending and remembering the confusing and overwhelming sense perceptions flowing into it continuously from all directions through a number of senses.

What is Brandymore Castle?

What is Brandymore Castle?

Brandymore Castle (also spelled Brandimore) is a limestone outcrop in Arlington, Virginia rising above the flood plain of Four Mile Run. In the eighteenth century, it was used by surveyors as a visual reference, although today the castle is worn down by time and vandalism, hidden in a small forest behind some homes. It once stood proudly and was probably the highest point on the surrounding flood plain of Four Mile Run when the forest had been cleared and farms filled the area. Today, the trees have grown back as farming ceased in Arlington beginning in the Great Depression and continuing as the suburbs grew and agriculture became the business of large corporate farms. When Interstate 66 was came through Arlington, a sound dampening wall was placed very near to the landmark, which now hems it in further. Brandymore Castle now sits crumbling and hidden, buried in a forest, surrounded by homes, wedged between the route 66 noise barrier and a basketball court with nothing more than a historic marker. The stream bed of Four Mile Run still flows by at the foot of the castle, as if the "moat" of the surveyor's imagination is still protecting the site.

What attracts me to Brandymore is the imagination of the eighteenth century surveyors, who imagined a castle out of a pile of limestone. It must have looked very much like a castle, since limestone was used (or imitated) historically as the outer coat of castle (and other buildings in the ancient world) walls. Limestone can be impressively brilliant. I am attracted to the imaginary quality of the castle, emphasized by the juxtaposition of a concrete (not cement, but the solid reality of) form with the product of the imagination. It captures the essential quality of imagination, or what the dictionary defines as "the power of the mind to form images, especially of what is not present to the senses." In a sense, if you go looking for Brandymore Castle, you will never find it, for the castle only exists in the imagination.

This is the view from Brandymore Castle.