NOMOS OF THE LAWN

Two paradigms were transformative in building suburban America – Jefferson’s land survey system (1785) that standardised subdivision sizes and exclusively transferred land into private ownership; and the architect and developer Frank Scott's invention of financial and aesthetic rationales for a connected front lawn (1870) which afforded a growing middle class private gardens and formed an economic and social interdependency between neighbours, forging a need for an exclusive nomos to administrate the space of the private residential garden. The nomos of the privately owned, collectively sanctioned front lawn was used to execute a racially and economically stratified suburban geography throughout the 20th century. 
As both a planning strategy and spatial proposal for the North American suburban house and garden, Nomos of the Lawn pilots a model for cooperative ownership and an inclusive nomos, exemplified in two sites: Gary, Indiana, and El Centro, California. The project introduces collectively owned and individually maintained easement gardens along subdivision lines to definancialise the imperative for organising communities and to spur citizens’ led block club ‘garden banks’. This easement of land provides a context to develop reciprocal forms of care among neighbours rather than improvement for profit and segregation. 

Location: Gary & El Centro, US, Year: 2019-20, Program: Masterplan, Status: Proposal