Why Don't Cities Use Hexagon Blocks?

what if a city was designed around hexagon blocks imagine it an entire landscape filled with hexagons as far as the eye can see that's actually one of the beautiful things about hexagons you can continuously tile them and they fit together perfectly now that's also true with triangles and you can even do it with grids the typical square or rectangular grid but you can't do that with octagons or circles hexagons have another useful Advantage they create all three-way intersections instead of the normal four-way intersections found in orthogonal grids three-way or t intersections have been shown to

be far safer than four-way intersections as they eliminate a particularly dangerous type of Crash where one car blows through red light and hits a Crossing car even better but streets and hexagon system meet at 120° increasing visibility you might be saying that that would be annoying if you're trying to go straight from one point to another that's a lot of intersections and small zigs and zags to go where we need to go but if you're trying to go on a diagonal an orthogonal grid is pretty inefficient too and hexagons actually win hexagons also require less

Road per land area as a hexagon better approximates a circle than a typical Square found in a grid this means that there's more land available for development and it's just more affordable for development in the first place but maybe you want some parks well how about having one hexagon dedicated to a park with hexagons of development surrounding the park then repeat that pattern you're never more than two hexagons away from an open space I know you're waiting for the other shoe to drop if hexagons are so great why don't we have cities full of them

well let's uncover that mystery after the bike Bell okay I'm going to spoil the video right now why don't we have hexagon blocks the answer is more or less culde saacs and Loops as the suburbs started growing in the US we just defaulted to using cue sax and Loops but there was a dedicated group out there real hexagon heads who said that our block should have six sides and you won't believe how close the US got to having hexagon blocks in the suburbs perhaps the first person to sketch out a city based on hexagons was

New York architect Charles Lamb in 1904 he was living in Manhattan and basically hated the grid system there he said the artistic possibilities have been ignored and basically only like Broadway because it was a diagonal street that cut through the monotonous grid iron of streets and avenues he was a big fan of L font's plan for Washington DC with his diagonal boulevards terminating at important landmarks like the Capitol Building here's his hypothetical City design it's based on hexagons though the blocks themselves are not hexagonal negating some of the benefits I described earlier it's basically a

more rational and repeatable Washington DC land didn't succeed in making hexagons the new standard in the city design but maybe the Austrian Rudolph Mueller would have better luck in 1908 he used an efficiency argument to promote the concept here's his diagram where he's labeled where pipes and fire hydrants would go he believes cities would need less infrastructure if hexagons were used it's worth noting that like Lamb's Design This is not a pure hexagon plan Muller used the hexagon and triangle scheme the triangles in the center of the hexagons would be green space or feature public

buildings and churches the plan was criticized for not having streets where buildings occupied both sides of a block now sometimes one-sided streets work like Michigan Avenue in Chicago or the streets facing Central Park in New York but they're really the exception most places need that density of activity to ensure enough business the one benefit of the hexagon and triangle system was that you actually got parallel streets which made them easier to integrate into existing cities he drafted a proposal to fit hexagons into Vienna but it never got adopted still Muller's drawings looked cool and there

began to be some Buzz among Architects and planners in favor of hexagons the next person to pick up the idea and run with it was nulan koshan a Canadian planner and engineer I'm telling you hexagons are like catnip to efficiency-minded Engineers kachan had read an excellent critique of of lamb and Muller's designs that highlighted a simple fact those hexagon designs were just overly complex resulting in intersections that were a traffic nightmare by the 1920s when Coan was thinking about hexagons cars had begun to make their appearance on city streets and traffic flow became a top

concern the 120° angle of three streets meeting was great for all the reasons I already mentioned and kochan embraced these simplified intersections he created hexagon opoulos a hypothetical City designed around the shape he also showed how hexagon can integrate into existing cities like this diagram here hexagons gain some attaction just at the right time and if it had not been for Thomas Adams we might have had hexagons all over the United States so if there are any hexagon heads out there Adams is who you should be blaming Adams was also Canadian both he and kachan

are actually both from Ottawa in fact he was also interested in the most efficient pattern for streets because like I said the car was increasingly prevalent and suburbs began to creep across the countryside and most were poorly planned Adams went to Harvard and actually co-authored a book on this very topic he wanted to know which street pattern would be most cost-efficient to develop his initial analysis showed that indeed hexagons were the most cost-effective way of providing roads and services while maximizing land for sale but that's not what Adams published in his book because he wasn't

a hexagon head he was a culdesac he was like a culdesac comrade a cesac creep I don't know he's on team culdesac basically they were all the rage in the late 1920s especially after the influential plan for rbor New Jersey popularized the concept people like Adams loved how quiet the streets were and how they could be inserted just about anywhere even odd-shaped Parcels which made them very practical but hexagons were more efficient how did Adams deal with this he took kon's plan and essentially made it less efficient for his analysis it basically looks nothing like

coan's original plan and includes way more open space than necessary lowering its efficiency score in 1932 president Herbert Hoover held a conference on on homeb building designed to Spur new private home development which had basically stopped during the Great Depression Adams's book was highly influential and CeX won the hearts and minds of the thousands of Industry representatives there a later government committee on the topic would say although there is no doubt that the hexagon may be used in certain cases with Advantage the Practical difficulty of its application for lowcost developments is that it produces a

large number of odd-shaped lots basically the main problem home builders had with hexagons is that they created lots that papered toward the center of the hexagon so you ended up with big front yards and small backyards CeX created pie-shaped lots too but they were smaller near the street and wide in the back making them more attractive to home buyers you could combine cacs and hexagons in a way that created a really nice use of space but that never really took off either that's pretty much the end of the story the federal government would go on

to incentivize the use of cu- saacs and residential design and hexagon just never really made a comeback that's why we really only have three prevailing systems of Street designed today the organic pattern that typified old cities designed before the Industrial Revolution and before the car the efficient grid iron pattern and the Suburban culdesac pattern but there's a little bit more to this story yeah hexagon's never really caught on everywhere but they're around if you knowwhere to look here are a couple prominent examples the first is Cur the capital of the great nation of Australia it

was designed as a part of a competition by Walter Burley Griffin and Marian Mahoney Griffin in 1912 and once you know it there's a hexagon right here the original planet called for even more unique geometries but they were value engineered out but the hexagon survived the Griffins would likely have been aware of lam and Muller's hexagon ideas too and that could be where it came from the other prominent hexagon is in another plet Capital this time in New Deli India it's located right here at one end of an axis that starts with the presidential Palace

and ends at the India Gate new deli's design process began the same year the Griffins were designing canra and there are some obvious parallels including the hexagon the question question is will we see hexagons making a comeback anytime soon I mean they're so efficient right well I'm not a hexagon head but I say why not there are so many advantages associated with hexagons let's give it a shot do we need to start a movement here to make hexagons happen let me know in the comments well anyway hexagons won't solve all of our Urban problems but

there is a solution that might solve a few more problems it's a different approach to zoning that we're used to here in the United States and it's called form-based codes basically instead of regulating how a piece of land is used you just regulate the form of the building and don't worry so much about the use and unlike hexagons form-based codes have actually been adopted by communities I've been wanting to do a video on this topic for a while now and I finally did the cool thing is that video is live right now on nebula you

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