Connecticut Architecture. Christopher Wigren

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FIGURE 3. Charles Sheeler, On a Connecticut Theme #2 (Bucolic Landscape #2), 1958. New Britain Museum of American Art; copyright estate of Charles Sheeler

      In today’s world we divide the work of creating places into a number of separate disciplines—architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, planning, and interior design—but all these really are aspects of this single activity of making places. In practice, it is not always easy to draw firm dividing lines among these disciplines. Architects design landscape settings for their buildings. Landscape architects design habitable buildings or structures like dams or bridges. Engineers create buildings such as sports arenas or aircraft hangars. Interior design affects exteriors. Architects and landscape architects alike plan neighborhoods or large developments, and planners draw up architectural guidelines for buildings in their projects, if not the actual buildings.

      Calling all this “architecture” might feel like co-opting the work of interior designers, planners, landscape architects, and engineers in favor of architects. What is needed is a single, straightforward term that encompasses all those fields. “Placemaking” might work, although it seems to have become the property of tourism marketing boards. For the moment, with apologies to the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Planning Association, the American Society of Interior Designers, and the American Society of Civil Engineers, I’m sticking with “architecture.”²

      Why is architecture important? I’ll focus on two brief points that grow out of my definition of architecture as making places: humans are place-based beings, and humans are beings that create.³

      Humans have bodies, and those bodies occupy space. The nature of that space makes a difference to us: it can be comfortable or uncomfortable, it can further our activities or frustrate them, and it can ennoble us or debase us. How we design and build places, then, can affect the quality of our lives in them—sometimes in ways that are crucial to our well-being. See the description of the Connecticut Hospice (place 67), which was carefully designed to shelter people at a particularly difficult and traumatic time not only for patients but for their friends and families. Similarly, the urban renewal programs of the mid-twentieth century were grounded in the confidence that architecture could solve social ills, a belief that was tragically overstated, to the ongoing distress of cities like Hartford or New Haven (places 46, 99). Even that failure, though, demonstrates the power that places have to affect our lives. How we shape them matters.

      Humans also have an innate need to create, to make things. Our reaction to place is not passive; we need to manipulate and alter the environment and materials we find about us. If a place is uncomfortable or hinders a desired activity, people try to make it more comfortable or more conducive to the activity. Or they may just try to make it more attractive.

      Creating refers to more than artistic achievements like painting or sculpture. It might mean doing carpentry or setting up a classification system for a library or writing an instruction manual. Whether it involves physical or mental activity, it is still the remaking of one’s world. All humans do it, even the toddler who delightedly smears food on a wall and calls it “painting.” How we shape the physical world around us, how we create places, says much about what we want our world to be, how we want to live in it, and, in some cases, how we want others to think we live in it. Making places lies at the very heart of what it means to be human.

THE LAND

      Connecticut architecture begins with the land, the given which its settlers first encountered, beginning with Native Americans who arrived more than ten thousand years ago and, later, the Europeans who started coming at the beginning of the seventeenth century.⁴ The land provided materials with which to build. Its topography influenced where people settled and how they communicated between settlements. As far as they were able, the people who lived here shaped the land. Where they have ceased to maintain the land in its altered state, the land has reasserted itself, undoing much of their attempts to dominate nature.

      Thrust up by geological upheavals, scraped down by rain and rivers and glaciers, flooded and uncovered by sea waters, the land of Connecticut as we know it emerged from the ice ages about ten thousand years ago as a gently hilly territory, abundantly watered by rivers and streams draining southward to Long Island Sound, with fertile soil that supported thick forests (figure 4).

FIGURE 4. Geological regions of Connecticut. Map from Michael Bell, The Face of Connecticut, 1985. Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection

      Running through the middle of Connecticut is a broad valley that begins in Massachusetts and meets Long Island Sound at New Haven. As far south as Middletown, the Connecticut River runs through this central valley (figure 5), but then the river breaks through the valley wall and turns eastward to finish its run to the Sound through a narrower passage. North of Rocky Hill, the valley was the bed of a prehistoric glacial lake, whose silted deposits of alluvial soil provide fertile farmland. This level land—rich, easily worked, nearly free of stone, and easily built upon—attracted the first Europeans, who built prosperous agricultural communities like South Windsor (place 2). Flourishing farms, along with easy transport, both on the level ground and along the Connecticut River, fostered the rise of cities: Hartford and Middletown on the Connecticut River, plus New Haven at the mouth of the Quinnipiac River on Long Island Sound.

FIGURE 5. Connecticut СКАЧАТЬ