building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Charles Lane founded a village named Fruitlands (1843 Harvard, Massachusetts). It
was a community experiment lasting barely a few months and was inspired by the
Shakers’ ideals of life and influenced by the diffusion of the theories of the utopian
socialists, which were also rather widespread at the time. However the Shaker
villages differed from the lay communities and from the utopian attempts, both for
the finished quality of their architecture and for their attempt to form a relationship
with nature according to a precise scheme [Figure 35]. This was underlined by the
care, with which the members of the sect cultivated their gardens and fields and
manufactured items of daily use and pieces of furniture 70 .
These typical forms of settlements rarely copied the European, aggregative
schemes, since they privileged the distance between buildings and their relationship
with the road [Figure 37‐38]. The documents, which have been handed down to us
regarding their planning activities are very few, and just as little is known about the
architects and carpenters, such as Moses Johnson (1752‐1842) or Micajah Burnett
(1791‐?), who designed and constructed some of the buildings of various villages.
The functional town planning scheme adopted in the first settlement of Mount
Lebanon [Figure 36], together with the typical shape of the rural buildings with a
curb roof, were the elements which were repeated in all the Shaker villages.
The meeting house, a building of central importance for the life of the community,
was built along the road. It featured a rectangular floor plan with two separate
entrances for men and women, situated on the long side of the building.
The service buildings, such as the laundry, a barn, various workshops, the school,
and the office were built around the meeting house, which represented the first
"family", usually called the Church or Center Family. When the community
expanded, they built a different group, separated from the first and called Second
Family or South Family, using the remaining compass points in case of further
expansions.
70 Joseph Rykwert wrote: “[…] the fine, spare buildings and the equally spare but very well made
furniture and household objects are testimony to a century and a half of productive activity. Their
conviction that each believer is a , and their practice of ,
show the importance they attached to the formal discipline of their designs as a part of religious
practice”, published in RYKWERT, Joseph, The seduction of Place. The History and Future of the City,
New York, p. 55 (Italian translation by Duccio Sacchi, La seduzione del luogo. Storia e futuro della
città, Torino, Einaudi, 2003, p. 70)
40