Hexagonal Housing

HEXAGONAL HOUSING
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
GENERAL
In the realm of urban design, hexagonal planning is today virtually an unknown
phenomenon, a mere oddity among a vast array of ideologies, theories and methods.
It regularly goes unnoticed by students of city planning and urban history. Yet, for a
period of almost 30 years, between 1904 and 1934, it caught the attention of various
planners, engineers and architects who saw in it a promising panacea for the city’s
planning ills and a replacement for the uniform rectangular street grid. Striving to
establish visionary and idealistic schemes for a perfect physical environment that
would also improve social conditions, these individuals advocated their ideas in
papers and professional presentations for over a quarter of a century. Yet none were
able to build their plans on a large scale. Why was this so? Was it because in reality,
as on paper, hexagons looked too far-fetched to be a workable solution? What about
the theory’s suggested cost-effectiveness and efficient land use pattern; were not
they an incentive for construction? Such idealized geometrical schemes for city
design often remained theoretical. There have been many more ideal cities on paper
than on the ground. When they were built, these ideal communities were often
short-lived in their pure state. They were overtaken by the reality of the way in
which people behave under normal conditions. As Lynch (1984, p. 48) suggested, ª
Settlement form is the spatial arrangement of persons doing things, the resulting
spatial wows of persons, goods, and information, and the physical features which
modify space in some way significant to those actions, including enclosures,
surfaces, channels, ambience, and objects.
Hexagonal Architecture is a form of application architecture that
promotes the separation of concerns through layers of responsibility.
Each layer of the application has a strict set of responsibilities and

concerns. This creates clear boundaries as to where certain logic or
functionality should sit, and how those layers should interact with each
other.
The most important aspect of Hexagonal Architecture is the inner core

application that captures the business logic of the organisation. The inner
core should encapsulate the business rules of the application in order to
meet the requirements of the organisation.
Outside of the inner core you have layers of ports and adapters that
capture messages from the outside world and convert them to appropriate
procedures to be handled inside of the application. The resulting message
from the application is then passed back through this layer of ports and
adapters as an appropriate response.
This means the inner core of the application has no knowledge of the
outside world and so the direction of dependency will only flow outwards.
Geometric plans emerged through a rational process unrelated to ideal-city

concepts. While we might view hexagonal planning as one of those fanciful
approaches to city design, we should not dismiss it entirely. The conceptual
framework that delineates hexagonal planning and design is outlined in this paper
through a review of professional publications, historical precedents and archival
research. The article mainly addresses hexagonal planning at the neighbourhood
and metropolitan scale, and largely ignores other interesting hexagonal schemes in
architecture (Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam; Le Mirail, Toulouse) or traf®c engineering
(Buchanan, 1963). Hexagonal planning’s key advocates and its historical context
are describe chronologically below. Geometric approaches to the planning of towns
and villages have many precedents in the form of ancient cities (Castagnoli, 1971).
The rectangular grid was by far the most prevalent design, with examples in China,
India, Rome and Greece (Kostof, 1991). Octagonal layouts were also popular for
ideal cities such as Palmanova, Italy (1593), and Hamina, Finland (1723) (Johnston,
1983). Wren’s proposal for rebuilding London after the Great Fire (1666) combined
grids with octagonal and hexagonal geometry, but it was not built (Figure 1). A
small portion of Woodward’s 1807 hexagonal/rectangular grid plan for Detroit was
built before the town abandoned the idea in the 1820s (Figure 2). The Edinburgh
New Town (1795) and Goderich, Ontario (1829), successfully incorporated a
rectangular grid and octagonal squares. These elegant diagrams were often the
exceptions to the rule of the rectangular grid. The gridiron plan was mandated by
ordinances in the Spanish Laws of the Indies, the French Bastille towns, the UK
bylaw housing estates and the 19th-century North American land surveys. In North
America, most towns from Edmonton to Mexico City were laid out in some form of
rectangular grid (Reps, 1969). When the modern urban planning movement began
around the turn of the 20th century, this grid was an obvious target for reform, since
it was regarded as monotonous, excessively paved and open to through traf®c
(Southworth & Ben-Joseph, 1997).

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HEXAGONAL HOUSING

Each layer of the application has a strict set of responsibilities and

The most important aspect of Hexagonal Architecture is the inner core

Geometric plans emerged through a rational process unrelated to ideal-city

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