The rhythm of Chad Freidrichs' documentary "The Experimental City" (2017), about a legendary city of the future that was never built, may be described as dichotomic.
The documentary – part of the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF) currently on at the historic Los Angeles Theatre Center (514 S. Spring Street) – will be on tomorrow and Sunday (you can check out the full programme here) – starts indeed in a very optimistic way, with close ups of the colourful pages of the comic strip "Our New Age", written by scientist and technocrat Athelstan Spilhaus.
Published every Sunday, the strip gave the chance to readers to dream about the future with its monorails, flying machines, robots, rockets and other assorted futuristic and rather bizarre inventions.
Spilhaus was actually a sort of 20th century Da Vinci (though he would have preferred to be called "the" 20th century Da Vinci…) being an oceanographer, a cartographer, a mechanical engineer, a meteorologist, a toy maker, a World Fair's commissioner and many other things. He was first and foremost, though, a visionary who loved tinkering and inventing things like the bathythermograph, a device that, dropped into the ocean, compares temperature with depth.
Interested in reducing waste and pollution while accomodating America's growing population, in the mid-'60s Spilhaus came up with an ambitious plan, a futuristic experimental city that was also supposed to be a laboratory for urban technology.
Freidrichs shows the early plans for the Minnesota Experimental City (MXC) and the life of its pioneering inhabitants through fascinating retro film clips.
The city would have had reusable components that could be assembled and disassembled according to the needs of the population, it would have been powered by clean energy, while cars would be mounted on a rail system controlling the driving, though vehicles could have been driven independently when the drivers needed to turn off the road. Besides, a series of subterranean "utilidors" would have hidden in the bowels of the city services and pipes, delivery routes, sewage and waste management systems.
The retro clips also show a man sitting in front of a computer screen assorted in a video-conference, a young boy using a computer to study and a woman flipping through different ensembles on a screen and enjoying some early online shopping – predictions that became real in our times.
The project became more and more ambitious as other people got on board: Spilhaus and newspaper publisher Otto Silha put indeed together a team of experts, among them also architect and designer Buckminster Fuller and civil rights pioneer Whitney Young and the project had the support of Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Little by little, plans started getting more real: the experimental city would have been a domed metropolis for 250,000 inhabitants, it would have costed around $10 billion (in 1967 dollars; mostly to be funded by private industry and partially paid for by the war surplus saved by ending war in Vietnam) and would have been completed in 1984. 
A rural site was selected in Swatara, Minnesota, and planning began, but here's where the documentary takes a negative turn: Vice President Hubert Humphrey failed in his 1968 presidential bid; residents of Swatara started protesting against the city, its energy-saving dome becoming a symbol of doom for them, and, in 1973, the MXC lost state support and the plan, though noble and exciting, was forgotten. Spilhaus died in 1998; Silha passed away a year later.
The most fascinating thing about the documentary is the fact that Freidrichs – better known maybe for his previous documentary "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" about a St. Louis housing project – managed to find some rare materials in the University of Minnesota's Northwest Architectural Archives, such as recordings of the steering committee meetings and workshops, and employed them to tell this forgotten story. The documentary also features quite a few interviews with surviving members of the committee and previously unreleased audio interviews with Spilhaus conducted by his friend Louise O'Connor.
From the materials it emerges that the city was never built for different reasons, the main one being that the project seemed a constant and endless work-in-progress. Spilhaus and his collaborators kept indeed on proposing a series of ideas, but never came up with a definite one.
Yet Spilhaus' vision remains intriguing as he had understood the importance of facing challenges such as climate change. Some of his greatest ideas are actually becoming a reality in our times: the underground corridors and modular units of the Experimental City may indeed be resurrected in Sidewalk Labs' (the unit of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc) Toronto-based smart neighborhood with its tensile structures, solar panels, robotic vehicles taking away the garbage in underground tunnels, self-driving cars and maybe even the possibility of personal short-range flight.
The problems behind such ambitious modern projects are the same ones of the MXC (watch the Sidewalk Labs video here and you will realise that this modern utopia is not too different from Spilhaus' dream…), so maybe Chad Freidrichs' documentary may help planners and architects avoiding some of the issues that marked the Experimental City with the stamp of forgotten legend and filed it under the label "technological chimera".
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