Artist Project / 65-Point Plan for Sustainable Living

From Le Corbusier to Levitt, the idea that strategic modes of housing design (and their deployment within carefully calibrated socio-spatial contexts) could provide refuge from the ills of the world has long tantalized architects and urban planners. If the age of the large-scale modernist housing block seems to have run its course, the model of the suburban subdivision—an island of artificial order, often vividly out of sync with the surrounding physical landscape—remains very much operational, particularly on the outskirts of North American cities, where both land and the resources for infrastructural development are readily available. Excerpted from a larger project, Jeremy Drummond’s slyly manipulated images on the following pages gesture toward both sides of the suburban dream: the utopian promise of insulation and its dystopian double, isolation.