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<\/a>The plan of New Haven exemplifies the early New England township. Credit: James Wadsworth. A Plan of the Town of New Haven With All the Buildings in 1748. Lith. by C. Currier<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n Good cookie-cutter design is ingrained in the urban fabric of America, enabling the rapid settlement and expansion of the United States. In New England the repeated \u201ccookie\u201d is the 6-by-6 mile square township<\/a> administered by a central village. These townships were organized around the quintessential church, meeting house, and commons. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 took inspiration from those New England townships to spur settlement of the Midwest: Congress mandated surveying the new territory into 6-by-6 mile townships and dictated a formula<\/a> for distributing the individual lots to settlers. Ultimately western cities of the plains came to be defined by their endless grid pattern<\/a>, an efficient approach to quickly creating parcels for development.<\/p>\n Today we are experiencing a mass movement back to urban areas and to first-ring suburbs, and Montgomery County planners forecast a need to accommodate an additional 200,000 people over the next 30 years. This growth will be housed in our urban centers, along corridors, and through the retrofitting or repurposing of existing buildings. The same ethos of speed, efficiency, and quality control of cookie-cutter construction is needed, especially in light of the region\u2019s affordability crisis<\/a>.<\/p>\n Jacob Riis iconic photograph, Bandit\u2019s Roost, 59 \u00bd Mulberry Street, revealed the conditions of urban slums. Credit: Jacob Riis. Bandit\u2019s Roost, 59\u00bd Mulberry Street. 1888.<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n Condemnation of suburbia and, in particular, cookie-cutter architecture is not only about mass-building and repetitive fa\u00e7ades, it is also a dig at neighborhood design and the perceived local lifestyle. This is fitting because the subject of the critique, the post-war suburban exodus, was itself a response to far more than architecture. Jacob Riis documented<\/a> the overcrowded and unhygienic conditions in the cities at the end of the 19th century. Post-war, for-profit tract developments such as Levittown, N.Y., set aside the explicit utopian ideals, but heavily promoted the space and the leisurely lifestyle each family would enjoy.<\/p>\n Criticisms of cookie-cutter design didn\u2019t exist until middle-class America moved to those tracts and became a suburban society: Malvina Reynold\u2019s \u201cLittle Boxes<\/a>\u201d (a 1963 hit<\/a> for Pete Seeger) exemplifies those earliest criticisms, coining the famous phrase about \u201cticky-tacky\u201d houses that all look the same. The song, however, is much more about the homes\u2019 occupants and their lifestyle than it is about the houses. Modern attacks on the suburbs frequently conflate and merge discontent with the indistinct and disorienting physical form (like Kunstler\u2019s Geography of Nowhere<\/a>, and Hayden\u2019s A Field Guide to Sprawl<\/a>) with the separate distaste for the suburban lifestyle itself (like Little Boxes or JD Salinger\u2019s \u201cThe Catcher in the Rye\u201d). The cookie-cutter cry conveys the sentiment that dull suburban architecture and the suburban lifestyle suppresses vibrancy and creativity. While defenders of the suburbs may agree the architecture isn\u2019t daring, they reject charges that life there is uniformly \u201csoul deadening, boring, and anonymous<\/a>,\u201d accurately observing that such critiques are born of urban elitism and snobbery.<\/p>\n \u201cTicky-tacky houses, all the same.\u201d Credit: David Shankbonel, 2008<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n Understanding the benefit of good cookie-cutter design starts with addressing the valid criticism of the physical suburban form:<\/p>\n In sharp contrast to the deficiencies in post-war suburban design, high-quality cookie cutter urbanism starts with an attractive kit of parts that gets used repeatedly. These parts are characterized by simple building types with slight variations in fa\u00e7ades; connected networks of tight streets; intermixing of different types of housing; and businesses within walking distance. Sameness and repetition have a long history among the best examples of urbanism and architecture. What follows are a few examples:<\/p>\n The Spanish plan for Manila with its uniform blocks emanating from a central plaza and church. Credit: Pedro Murillo Velarde. Map of Intramuros. 1734<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/li>\n Oglethorpe\u2019s plan for Savannah. Credit: Peter Gordon. A View of Savannah as it Stood the 29th of March 1734<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/li>\n The Royal Crescent\u2019s famous facade. Credit: Christophe Finot. 2006<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/li>\n San Francisco\u2019s Postcard Row. The builder of the six identical Victorians lived in the distinct green home on the left. Credit: Bernard Gagnon. 2008<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/li>\nThe Criticism: Cookie-Cutter Design Is Boring<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/a>The Response: Cookie-Cutter Construction Is Efficient, Effective, and Time-Tested<\/h3>\n
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