The Garden and the grid

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Description

Villages may spring up but great cities are laid out by surveyors measuring out divisible grids to suit the visions of real estate entrepreneurs, designers of space or social policy. The effort to renew the aged, replace the obsolete or provide for growth, to connect business with residential centers and cities with nature, has provided a range of solutions that range from Colonial reconstruction to urban renewal, from the sublime to the disastrous. This program addresses the various solutions to the problem of bringing the garden into the grid. The program covers Detroit's Renaissance Center; the buildings and monuments of Washington; H.H. Richardson's embellishment of North Easton, Mass.; Concord, N.H.'s rediscovery of its past; Robert Moses' empire of landscaped highways and public parks; and the architectural legacy of the Rockefellers: Rockefeller Center, the Albany Mall, and the Colonial Williamsburg restoration, which seems like a suburb but is actually a city - the most compelling model for today.