Architect criticizes Salt Lake, West for sprawl

In writing the text of this fine-press publication, author William McDonough, a noted architectural designer, is succinct and eloquent. He directs his attention to the cities of the American West, suggesting that his progressive approach to urban design is a good fit for a region known as "radical . . . unstable, reformist, revolutionary."

Specifically, he refers to Salt Lake City, Seattle, Denver, Phoenix and Las Vegas as Western cities that "have boiled over and poured across the landscape like fresh lava."

McDonough is critical of Las Vegas, the "fastest-growing city in the United States," for the way it is handling its growth. It needs, he says, "a thoughtful response to the Western landscape." Instead, he writes, "we see housing tract after housing tract planted with irrigated turf, each lot projecting onto the desert the grassy, pastoral world of another time and place."

When Brigham Young proclaimed, "This is the place" after he entered the Great Basin desert, "he immediately began to change it." Quoting Marc Reisner's book, "Cadillac Desert," McDonough asserts that as the Mormons used shovels to divert water and convert desert land to fields, they "laid the foundation for the most ambitious desert civilization the world has seen."

But McDonough credits the grid system adopted by Young to Thomas Jefferson because he believed that "small landowners are the most precious portion of the state." It was the key to Jefferson's agrarian thinking in which he encouraged the continued success of the American farmer.

Today, according to McDonough, flying across the American West reveals "a checkerboard grid" that is not only "part of the landscape" but "deeply cultural. The grid system is a way of seeing, a habit of mind. When the grid . . . is the lens through which we see the world, the map becomes the territory, and the land itself remains unseen."

Unfortunately, in the opinion of McDonough, "developers tend not to see a living place. . . . They see a wasteland overlaid with blueprints for one-stop megastores." The predictable result McDonough sees is the development of urban sprawl, "dehumanizing housing projects, lifeless urban plazas, and the one-size-fits-all office building, no more native to Phoenix or Seattle than it is to Shanghai."