The Washington Post reports today:

Canberra, Flip Side to Washington
By Roger K. Lewis
Saturday, November 15, 2003; Page F05

Canberra, the capital of Australia, and Washington, the capital of the United States, have several things in common. Both occupy federal districts near the coasts of their respective continents. Both were planned from scratch on farmland in locations determined by political compromise between existing cities. Both new capitals were designed by men living in America who were relieved of their planning jobs soon after their plans were conceived. And during the start-up decades, when both capitals were inhabited primarily by civil servants, few citizens wanted to live there.
But there commonalities end.
Washington, established two centuries ago, has evolved into a relatively urbane, moderately dense, demographically diverse metropolis where government, while still the dominant activity, shares its territory with other industries. Canberra, a century younger, is still a one-company town. Among the American capital's most notable physical characteristics are its monumental Mall and many tree-filled urban parks, parks typically framed or surrounded by buildings.
Canberra is not a city containing parks, but rather one giant park encompassing widely dispersed bits of a city.
Visualize a verdant, very gently rolling landscape with a long, man-made lake winding through its center. Superimpose on this landscape an elaborate network of circular and radial roads based on polar and axial geometries.
Then scatter throughout this vast park assorted buildings, most short and spaced so far apart that they disappear behind the trees. Finally, surround the city's government and commercial heart with dozens of low-density enclaves of single-family houses served by unfathomable tangles of discontinuous, dead-end or looping streets. That's Canberra. Most of the city's architecture is inoffensively bland, with a few notable exceptions. One is the recently opened, geometrically playful, multicolored National Museum of Australia, perched on a peninsula projecting far into the lake. Another is the world-famous Parliament House on Canberra's Capital Hill, completed about 15 years ago, the result of a design competition won by the Philadelphia-based architectural firm of Mitchell/Giurgola & Thorp.
Unlike the U.S. Capitol, clearly sitting symbolically on top of and dominating its hill, Canberra's modern Parliament nestles into its hill. It's barely visible from many vantages. But like the U.S. Capitol relative to the Mall and Lincoln Memorial, the Parliament building anchors one end of Canberra's most symbolic and monumental visual axis. This two-mile-long north-south axis crosses the lake's east-west axis and is anchored at its other end by the austere, vaguely neoclassical Australian War Memorial with its intimate, beautifully proportioned courtyard.
Despite the grand scale of its plan, Canberra gives new meaning to the term "suburban." It makes Reston and Columbia look almost citified. Australians routinely joke about quiet, pastoral, lifeless, out-of-the-way Canberra and wonder why either Australians or foreign tourists ever bother going there.
Yet for American planners and architects, Canberra has always been a subject of great interest, one of the world's premier examples of a planned new city shaped by a designer. Among others are Pierre L'Enfant's Washington, as well as Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia and Le Corbusier's Chandigarh, capital of the Indian state of Punjab.
Walter Burley Griffin, a young Chicago-born architect and landscape architect who had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright, designed Canberra. Assisted by his talented wife, Marion Mahony, he won an international design competition in 1912 after competing with more than 130 designers, including Eero Saarinen's father, Eliel, who was runner-up.
Griffin dreamed of an ideal city and clearly was inspired by urban design theories of the age, the "Garden City" and "City Beautiful" movements prevailing during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Envisioning a utopian, anti-industrial environment dominated by parks and gardens rather than smokestacks and tightly packed rowhouses, Griffin responded to and exploited the site's existing topography, a broad river valley flanked by hills. He imposed on this landscape a complex yet systematic geometry of broad avenues, boulevards, streets and traffic circles while designating general land-use zones and sites for significant public edifices. The original plan anticipated a population of 75,000. Several hundred thousand now live in greater Canberra, although the city's overall density has
changed little.
Griffin's original plan was never fully carried out, but many of its essential elements were realized. And today you can readily see similarities between Griffin's 1912 Canberra plan and L'Enfant's 1793 Washington plan.
You can also see the limitations and pitfalls of two-dimensional urban plans when they are finally implemented in three dimensions.
Washington enjoys a healthy balance between building mass and open space, between solid and void. It might have been otherwise if public policy and regulations governing land use, density, building heights and setbacks had been different. Many of the blocks shown in the L'Enfant plan, intended for subdivision and sale, could have been occupied by parks instead of buildings. Many of Washington's parks could have succumbed to development pressures and been covered with buildings.
Likewise, Griffin's plan could have been built out differently, especially given the amount of infrastructure the plan provides. As I walked and biked around the city's many roads, I kept thinking how retrofitting Canberra by filling appropriate portions of its 10,000 acres of parkland, without any changes to its street pattern, could be a challenging urban design thesis.
The pattern of Griffin's plan on the landscape is complex and difficult to navigate, but the layout itself is not the main problem. Canberra's status as the sleepiest burg on the planet is attributable in part to naively utopian land-use policies embraced many decades ago. Today it needs less parkland and more buildings, more density and more people.
Fortunately for Australia, still a very young and growing country, it may not be too late to draw inspiration once again from Washington and revisit Canberra's out-of-date land-use policies.

Roger K. Lewis is a practicing architect and a professor of architecture at the University of Maryland.


Hell, I should have written this, with appropriate invective added. I could note that in fact a neutron bomb dropped sometime in the 70s, and no-one noticed (except me, and a few others), so that today when one walks those gum-tree-lined streets, one sees virtually no human beings moving at all, until one happens on a street of minimal activity, all taking place at the same odd, somewhat zombified pace. The traffic all moves with phenomenal uniformity and speed, thanks to astonishingly wide streets and traffic-law enforcement that makes cruise control essential to avoid tickets for going, say, 42kph in a 40kph zone. The city has not "several hundred thousand" people, but only 350, only half of whom, at last count, work for the government, so it's not exactly a one-company town any more. He fails to note it's (and Australia's) use of this kind of design to further its relatively egalitarian ethos - everyone gets a house with 3 gum trees and the local government, at least until recently, threw in 35 or so free shrubs from government nurseries, to help along the arboreticization of the city. The bird and animal life is impressive, but that only adds to the sense that one is strolling through some odd sort of hallucination or dream, one that for youths growing up there, or trying to, is closer to a nightmare. The buses cruise out the valleys to the distant suburbs with virtually no-one on them, which increases this sense. I wasn't sure if he was praising or rubbishing the new Parliament House, but he might have noted that it has a huge pyramidal flagpole that stands like a daddy-longlegs over the whole complex, and brings to mind a megalomaniacal project drawn up personally by the dictator of a central African republic. It is remarkably "livable," which is why I'm not there, but in its defense, one would have to say that it has successfully accomplished many of the goals that middle America sets for itself but fails miserably to achieve, such as provision of well-landscaped and attractive schools and playgrounds, and sidewalks, and village centers. It has never, ever, had an abandoned gas station, which suggests that socialist planning (because that is what really shaped Canberra, with avenues that brought a tear to the eye and a curl to the lip of an East German friend of mine who visited) is not all evil.