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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
It may be unfair to expect a $400,000-per-home planned community to meticulously replicate the Kinkade vision, what with all that stonework and lush landscaping. And despite the heavy "building the vision of Kinkade!" emphasis in marketing material, the public relations team is certainly aware that "vision," in this case, is a loose term. To the press, Hiddenbrooke flacks describe the community as being merely "inspired" by Kinkade. Says Fran Leach, marketing director for Taylor Woodrow: "We couldn't build a Thomas Kinkade home because it'd be priced prohibitively; when we had to pick and choose [Kinkade-like details] we chose gabled roofs, dormers, white picket fences. We really tried to incorporate a 1920s look; an older feel, a slower time, those types of things."
Perhaps the greatest losses in the translation of the Kinkade fantasy to real life are the church with its familiar steeple, and the ever-present village square. No matter what you might think of Kinkade's artistic merits, his celebrity suggests that he's tapped into a collective longing among Americans for real community. Some would argue that Kinkade's idealized vision of America is a Frank Capra/ Norman Rockwell fantasy. But no matter how gauzy Kinkade's vision, there is no question that the current suburban aesthetic makes us want it -- bad.
For decades, planners and sociologists, following Jane Jacobs' 1961 classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," have been decrying the devastation wrought by the loss of vital urban living centers to suburban sprawl. "The suburban build-out of the last 50 years has been a fiasco for our culture, because it destroyed our most important civic communities -- it impoverished the public realm, and in so doing, it impoverished our public life," says James Howard Kunstler, author of "The City in Mind."
"The idea of 'country life' as embodied in suburbia becomes more and more of a cartoon," he says. "That's part of the great unexpressed agony of our time -- that almost nowhere does suburbia deliver what it promised. You're living on top of people and stuck in traffic all the time, but there is no cultural or civic amenity that goes with it."
In the 55 years since Levittown, America's first standardized community, was built, countless planned communities, housing subdivisions and tract homes have sprouted, creating new visions -- bigger, cheaper, fancier, cheesier -- of the American dream. Sprawling infinitely, the communities banish the old concept of neighborhood with zoning that allows homes, the occasional country club and nothing more. With names like "Tranquility," "Inspiration" and "Aura," the newest tracts attempt to make the best of increasingly cramped locations on disappearing open space far from town by touting peace and privacy.
In the last two decades, the new urbanist movement has spawned an alternative, the planned town -- designed to reduce suburban sprawl and create community centers. These experiments, such as the Florida settlements of Celebration (the infamous Disney village) and Seaside (as seen in "The Truman Show"), consist of clustered neighborhoods in which central shopping areas are within walking distance and cars are unnecessary. The planned town is, in its way, perfectly Kinkadeian: A community of distinct architectural design in which residents might actually walk a picturesque Dalmatian to the little grocery store to pick up some fertilizer for a colorful garden.
The planned town has been a slow starter -- only a few hundred communities have applied its principles -- largely due to laws that discourage the mixed-use zoning of new-urbanist developments. Meanwhile, plans for conventional developments tend to sail through planning commissions eager to increase tax revenues, despite some distant, but growing, grumbling about sprawl.
"Thomas Kinkade and new urbanism are parallel universes," says Kunstler dismissively. "This development in Vallejo is an exercise in conventional suburban development with a sentimental marketing gimmick. Kinkade represents the gift shop solution to the problem; the new urbanists are serious people. "
Yet the Village at Hiddenbrooke is, in a way, a lesson in lost opportunities. Imagine if the enormously famous Kinkade had brought his "artistic sensibilities" to a new-urbanist architect and an enlightened group of town planners instead of an enormous profit-seeking development conglomerate, and matched his cutesy aesthetics with their concepts of a new American suburb: He could have built something responsible and meaningful, and helped promote a community-building movement that is still struggling for widespread recognition.
Even if you loathe Cotswold kitsch, there's something to be said for building tree-filled towns with hidden gazebos and public meeting places. But the vision needs to go deeper that the paint on a Thomas Kinkade "original."
