Mon Oncle: A Lesson in Urban Design

This week, I went to see a screening of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) at MoMA. Mon Oncle focuses on the absurdity of the bourgeois' obsession with modern invention, which imprisons them as much as it sets them free. The film's main expression of this condition is the ultra-modern home of Monsieur and Mademoiselle Arpel, Monsieur Hulot's (Tati's cinematic alterego) sister and brother-in-law. The house (Villa Arpel) is strikingly sterile -- outfitted entirely in modernist furniture that no one finds comfortable, cabinets that open and shut with complex mechanical programming and a garden consisting of concrete stepping stones, steel edges and plants so manicured they hardly seem real.

There's a fantastic scene in Mon Oncle, where the Arpels host a garden luncheon. During this scene, Hulot's nephew, stifled by Villa Arpel and bored to tears by the shallow social display, rips down a portion of climbing vines, destroying the sad, manicured symmetry. The party rapidly deteriorates, ending in insult and injury (due in no small part to Hulot's bumbling navigation around the awkward "natural" space) and the nephew running around the garden in a Native American headdress. Later that night, when Hulot sneaks back to the house to finish tearing down the vines, the circular windows of Villa Arpel transform into patrolling eyes (the silhouettes of the Arpels' synchronized heads).

Obviously, I got a kick out of this battle enacted between the attenuated natural world and the anthropomorphized built environment. In reading Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York (as noted in a previous post, this study is also an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York), I learned that the Lenape, the Native American inhabitants of Mannahatta, created the structural beams of their wigwams by transplanting tree saplings in a circular plan and bending them inward. The contrast of the Lenapes literally building shelter from live nature with Villa Arpel's precise, tamed gardens brings me back to Anne Whiston Spirn, who posited in 1984 that to ensure the continued success in the urban environment, "nature in the city must be cultivated… rather than ignored and subdued." I think Tati would have agreed.

A New Perspective

I'm about 30 pages into the seminal text The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design by Anne Whiston Spirn. Spirn argues that, contrary to prevailing notions, the city is part of nature. She writes, "The city is neither wholly natural nor wholly contrived. It is not 'unnatural' but, rather, a transformation of 'wild' nature by humankind to serve its own needs." To Spirn, nature is a continuum, and its influence on how cities are designed is undeniable. One of her most striking examples of this so far is the Manhattan skyline. I have always thought it was strange how Manhattan's financial districts and their skyscrapers were located so far apart -- one at the tip of the island and the other in midtown. It seemed arbitrary, and I assumed money and influence gave rise to these two forests of steel 60 blocks apart. Not so! According to Spirn, these locations are particularly suited for building high because of the proximity of the underlying bedrock to the surface. There's something comforting about nature's power and endurance. As Spirn puts it, "Civilizations and governments rise and fall; traditions, values, and policies change; but the natural environment of each city remains an enduring framework within which the human community builds." Wise words.