Frederick Law Olmstead: “If a house to be used for many different purposes must have many rooms and passages of various demensions variously lighted and furnished, not less must such a metropolis be specifically adapted at different points to different needs.” (20) A relational system based on distance rather than proximity. The systematization of human consciousness which began in the corporate structure (and on the factory floor) is extended into each man’s physical space. Houses are internally arranged beginning in the cities, and things are needed to make the space “complete”. But in cities one has very little control of the arrangement of the house itself, in distal relation to those around it. A building may be renovated or re-purposed, but it’s physical structure and its geographical arrangement were already fixed. Only in the suburbs could the systematization extend to the earth itself. To nature: We create our natural environment as we like it. We plant trees or we cut them down (or more likely, both). We grow and continually cut the grass. What we don’t want to see, we put up fences to block. We choose our neighborhood, and so position ourselves in distal relation to one another in a manner of our choosing.

(Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.)