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.These planners managed to findvarious public and private sponsors and situations to rehearse their tech-niques, and, finally, the logistics of sponsorship and financing would oftenprove to be among the most powerful means of formatting the entireorganization.Two studies, one sponsored by a private municipal organization, the 1913Chicago City Club competition, and the other sponsored by the federalgovernment, the President s Conference on Home Building and Home Own-ership, provide a comparative sampling of their early twentieth-century at-tempts to optimize subdivision planning.The graphics accompanying thesetwo studies, one before and one after the war-town projects, also marked atendency within the profession to record very complex spatial relationshipswith a planimetric notation.Although this kind of notation was often notsimply plan but rather a graph of subdivision data registered as plan, thesegraphs did not necessarily convey the functional, temporal expressions thatwere critical instructions in the organization.In their design prototypes, the new subdivision technicians typically or-ganized residential fabric by establishing limited design controls within the 137default protocols of real estate development.Most municipal subdivisionswere developed with a grid of streets platted for incremental lot sales.Theplanners typically established a few simple functional relationships that cre-ated not comprehensive control but selective interdependence between sepa-rate sets of residential elements.The tree-lined street was one of the primaryfunctional expressions or organizing agents against which other variableswere balanced, and it was at once durable and fragile.Planners often de-signed a graduated set of tree-lined streets extending from the smaller scaleof individual residential lots to the larger scale of public territory.Specializedin this way, the network was to create private areas and filter traffic volumes.The streets were differentiated by many components, including housing, in-frastructure, and vegetation as well as the circumstantial contributions ofmany individual designers and owners over time.Many of the new subdivi-sion and community planners were trained as landscape architects and soknew how to design mixtures of tree species and vegetation that would resistdisease over time.Another complex of constraints involved housing aggregates.Amongplanners of the day, group housing was a practical science unto itself, a hous-ing puzzle that inspired a number of inventive solutions.The group housewas a cross between apartment house and row house.Units could be stackedor interlocked across what would have been row-house party walls, andmultiple entries replaced the corridors and stairs of an apartment building.Houses were grouped in multiples as mixtures of double houses, row houses,or stacked apartments, and they might form a continuous wall along thestreet or create a series of detached groups.The group house was used incombination with specialized street formations and architectural controls asa means of timing and phasing growth.The grid often deformed into closesor special residential squares to accommodate the denser grouping, and thehousing was usually styled to reference some quaint historical tradition.For-mations like these were typically built in the initial growth phase as specialarchitectural assignments, and they might contain properties for sale or rent.These special groupings were used as promotion for lot sales, since they werebelieved to provide the necessary domestic imagery and density to create arecognizable place around which the rest of the less intensely developed lotswould gradually crystallize.|Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science 138Metropolitan SponsorsIn 1913, as part of its larger metropolitan planning vision, the Chicago CityClub held a competition for the subdivision of a quarter section of residentialproperty.The competition attracted Garden City designers, designers of ro-mantic suburbs, urban reformers, and even visionaries like Frank Lloyd Wright.The neighborhood-sized quarter section of land provided an identical palettefor comparative study of the prevailing practice in subdivision design.Wright s late entry rehearsed Broadacre City arrangements of suburbia.An-other entry, by a physician, demonstrated important factors in solar orienta-tion.All of the entries were evaluated according to careful tabulations ofsuch things as housing density, infrastructure costs, and open space.Thoughsome of the entries may have exercised slightly different subdivision options,most contained no new organizational protocol but were rather street-pattern compositions that looked something like obsessive subdivision man-dalas.One exceptional entry, however, by William Drummond proposed newprotocols for developing networks of neighborhood units
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