Could it be that feet, inches, acres and all the imperial dimensions shape America and make the country and its architecture actually look different? The writer and historian Andro Linklater certainly thinks so, at least on the large scale:
"Like most visitors to the United States, it was the shape of the place I first fell in love with - the spectacular grid of city blocks, the squared-off, American Gothic farms, and the long, straight, section roads that caught the imagination of Kerouac and every drive-movie director you can think of. During the time I lived there, I never questioned why this should be so, it simply seemed American. Since then, however, I have returned frequently as a visitor and each time I came back, it always struck me as utterly astonishing that such a coherent pattern could have occurred across a 3000 mile-wide continent. How did it happen? Who shaped this gigantic land?" Andro Linklater, Measuring America.
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| Linklater book cover (Amazon) |
Of course, typically the issue of imperial versus metric dimensions isn't discussed in terms of its physicality but in terms of functionality for use in manufacturing, science or design. Although some disagree, it is almost universally understood that for functionality metric works better. By now just about everybody has heard of the terminal mishap that destroyed the NASA Mars Orbiter because it was programmed with a mix of metric and imperial units. That gave the whole world a good laugh, because we are globally about the only holdout not using the metric system comprehensively.
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| The map speaks for itself |
As an architect and planner who immigrated from overseas, this fact was certainly not lost on me.