By almost any account, North Carolina has undergone dramatic changes in the past half-century. What was once a slow-growing, largely rural state is now a fast-growing, increasingly urban one. While the state used to be known for textiles and tobacco, it is now a center for banking, technology, and medicine. This transformation was not accidental. Rather, it was the result of decades of regional planning that was focused on the counties around some of the state’s biggest cities—Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham, and Raleigh. In a little-known 1968 film made by the state of North Carolina, The Piedmont Crescent, planners presented their vision for the future of growth in the state, using cutting edge ideas, innovative graphics, and electronic music to build support for plans that have fundamentally changed the state, and how it is perceived by residents and non-residents alike.
When we see an exit sign on the interstate, we don’t just read the words; we intuit its green color, the well-spaced lettering of its sans serif Highway Gothic font, and the rectangular shape of the sign itself, all reminding us to slow down as we leave the highway. This idea—that the “architecture” of information matters—was first put forth in 1975 by Richard Saul Wurman, the architect and polymath best known as one of the founders of the Technology, Entertainment, and Design, or TED, conference. Although road signs, maps, diagrams, and other forms of public communication are often thought of as means to communicate textual information, Wurman and his co-writer, designer Joel Katz, argue in their seminal essay, “Beyond Graphics: The Architecture of Information” that “our interaction with our environment is largely sensory rather than intellectual.” Through better design, architects help create “informed, self-informing citizens,” able to participate in the planning process, in part, because they learn to see like a planner.1
One of Wurman’s first attempts to show the relationship between information, design, and architecture came in the form of a 1967 experimental film made on behalf of the state of North Carolina. The film, titled The Piedmont Crescent, was designed to boost state regional planning efforts that began in the 1950s. Intending to help planners, elected officials, and ordinary North Carolinians imagine a megaregion that, more than fifty years later, is now the core of the state’s economy and population, The Piedmont Crescent is an early illustration of Wurman’s interest in linking architecture, urban planning, and techniques of visualization. The film is both pragmatic and experimental, equally interested in giving the past its due and imagining a future. While the film was a small part of a multifaceted planning effort, it anticipated a world in which North Carolinians thought of themselves as citizens of an abstract region (e.g., “The Triangle”—Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), not just a town or county.
Although The Piedmont Crescent was not completed until 1967, work on the film began much earlier, as part of a broader initiative to use cinema as a tool for government. In January 1961, Terry Sanford, an ambitious liberal Democrat, was inaugurated as the governor of North Carolina. Because governors were limited to a single four-year term, Sanford wanted to build broad public and institutional support for his agenda in hopes that his initiatives would continue after he left office. Like other politicians of the era, Sanford was particularly interested in using film and television to persuade the public to support his ambitious political program.
In September 1962, after prodding by John Ehle, one of his top aides, Sanford started a state-based film production agency, the North Carolina Film Board. Modeled after the National Film Board of Canada, the NCFB was the first state-based film agency in the United States and was tasked with documenting the state’s social, cultural, and economic life. John Grierson, who is widely credited with popularizing the term “documentary” to describe nonfiction films, agreed to serve on the NCFB’s advisory board. Two other prominent filmmakers from North Carolina, George Stoney and Borden Mace, joined Grierson on the board, which made it easier to recruit top talent. Sanford hired James Beveridge, who helped establish the National Film Board of Canada and was previously supervising film production for the Burmah Shell Oil Company in India, to head the NCFB. Over the next three years, the NCFB produced more than a dozen films, including documentaries on the state legislature, historical reenactments of well-known events in the state’s history, frank discussions on the state’s schools and racial climate, and promotional films on the state’s economic prospects.
The Piedmont Crescent, North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
While Sanford’s administration was particularly energetic, North Carolina politicians had long been invested in planning the state’s economic and population growth. North Carolina was historically a rural state with very few cities. Even in 1960, its largest city, Charlotte, with a population of 200,000, represented less than five percent of the state’s population of 4.5 million, a sharp contrast to neighboring states, such as Georgia, where 12 percent of its residents lived in Atlanta, or Virginia, with 8 percent of its residents in Norfolk. (By comparison, in 1960, half of New Yorkers lived in New York City.) North Carolinians already thought of their state in regional terms, but these regions were tied to geography and landscape, not interconnected economic and social systems. Starting in the 1950s, state planners conceived of the Piedmont Crescent, an eighteen-county region connecting the growing cities of Charlotte, Greensboro, and Raleigh, as a potential “megaregion,” similar to the urban belt between Washington, DC, and New York City. The idea of a megaregion was popularized by the French geographer Jean Gottmann, whose 1957 article, “Megalopolis, or the Urbanization of the Northeastern Seaboard,” identified the Boston-to-Washington, D.C., corridor as a “continuous stretch of urban and suburban areas,” the first of its type in the world. Government officials and planners in North Carolina took notice of Gottmann’s analysis, hoping to avoid the unchecked urban sprawl that was already established elsewhere.2
In May 1963, Richard Saul Wurman, a twenty-seven-year-old faculty member in the School of Design at North Carolina State University, wrote James Beveridge, head of the NCFB, with a proposal to make a film that would help planners visualize the future of the Piedmont Crescent. Wurman started teaching at the university a year earlier and had already worked with his students on an ambitious series of illustrated books intended to demonstrate the underlying design of historic buildings, reducing cathedrals, castles, and tombs to modernist floor plans. While these projects were intended to show our connections to the distant past, Wurman was proposing to consider the state’s future. Beveridge approved Wurman’s plans, and production on the film, with the working title Piedmont City, began. Wurman had his students develop maps of North Carolina, turning the state’s scattered hamlets, mill towns, county seats, small cities, highways, forests, mountains, rivers, and other environmental features into a patterned mosaic of blue, orange, and green lines and boxes. Meanwhile, the North Carolina State Archives collected photographs and other illustrations of the state’s past from museums and libraries, as if to counter Wurman’s abstract maps with concrete representations of its past. Wurman commissioned or located other elements, including aerial footage and films of traffic-choked streets, that would help show what the region looks like now and, if growth went unchecked, could become in the future.3
Unfortunately, by the time planning for the film moved forward, the Film Board itself was running out of funding, and the incoming governor, Dan Moore, had little interest in sponsoring a state film unit. Wurman’s project, now titled The Piedmont Crescent, was seen as the last film likely to be completed under the auspices of the film board. According to a memo written on November 16, 1964, in the waning months of Sanford’s term in office, George Stephens, Jr., a planning professional in the state, was “chasing” funding for the film’s production, but with no success.
In January 1966, Luther Hodges, head of the Research Triangle Foundation, which guided the development of the 5,000-acre Research Triangle Park wedged between Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill, wrote Governor Moore on the need to revisit the Piedmont Crescent project. As Hodges argued, the “concept of regional thinking” was uncommon among the general population, who were accustomed to thinking in terms of town and county governments, not regions.” To win public support for regional planning, Hodges argued, planners needed to use what he called the “technical phase” of planning to “‘sell’ the facts and needs to the public” by using the “press, radio, television, and movies.” On March 8, 1966, Governor Dan Moore formally announced the Governor’s Advisory Committee of the Piedmont Crescent, reviving Sanford’s initiative. Later that year, the Institute of Government proposed completing The Piedmont Crescentfilm, seeing it as a key element of the planned conferences on the subject. Now using federal funding made available by the Higher Education Act of 1965, The Piedmont Crescent was characterized as a “training film dealing with the emerging governmental problems of the piedmont,” a reference to the numerous counties, municipalities, and other entities charged with governing the region. In an application for the film’s production, the UNC-based Institute of Government called for a motion picture of “unusual visual excitement and wide appeal,” noting that the “availability of such a film could play a significant role in broadening the horizons of local decision-makers and in lending encouragement and direction to their efforts to make local decisions within a broader, regional context.”4
According to the proposal, the film’s objectives were two-fold: first, to “illustrate the impact of rapid urban development in the Piedmont” and, second, to “encourage sober reflection about these problems, hopefully to instill in the viewer a feeling of personal or professional investment in their solution.” The Institute called for the use of graphics to “give an overall, accelerated, optically-stimulating and puzzling, impression of rapid, ungoverned GROWTH.” Archival photography and visualizations, including the maps created by Wurman’s students, would be used to convey a sense of regional development, purposely decentering historical narratives that focused on the growth of individual cities. In effect, the film would use modernist visual cues to argue for both regional planning as a concept and the Piedmont Crescent—a name more popular with planners and government officials than the public—as an actual region with economic, social, and ecological ties. Even though Wurman had left North Carolina for Philadelphia, where he was partner in an architecture firm, he agreed to complete the film, adding electronic music by Morton Subotnick and animated versions of the maps his students made years earlier.
The film premiered at the Piedmont Crescent Urban Policy Conference, held at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in June 1968. For conference organizers, The Piedmont Crescent film would help inoculate the region against “purposeless expansions of numbers of men and machines, crowded together for ill-defined reasons, working fiercely for less than well-defined goals, crossing each other’s aims without intent for lack of knowledge.” Toward that end, the uncredited voice-over narrator, providing a steady, even conservative tone to an otherwise experimental film, makes the film’s argument plain:
The old pattern of making local, independent, self-centered decisions no longer works. We need a new approach. How does each small community relate itself to the growing region all around it? The answers aren’t ready-made. There’s no book of rules. We only know that we can’t leave it all to chance.5
Speaking over images of the Piedmont’s foothills, four-leaf clover highway interchanges, and urban street scenes, the narrator simultaneously warns of the dangers of unchecked growth and the opportunities that will come with planning. By cutting between animated versions of the maps drawn by Wurman’s students, aerial footage that was commissioned for use in the film, and archival photography, Wurman is able to denaturalize the state’s geography, history, and people. By using experimental music, Wurman lends this film a feeling of futurity, as if we are witnessing the state being described by visitors from the year 2000. Richard Saul Wurman is credited as the designer and director of the film, evidence that he saw this film as connected to his work in what would come to be called the field of information architecture.
From surviving accounts, it appears that the film was only shown a handful of times, and there’s little information about whether audiences appreciated its aesthetic. Even so, the film accurately predicted the importance of the region: more people live in the Piedmont crescent today than lived in the entire state of North Carolina in 1960. However, much of the regional planning work done since then has been concentrated on the area’s subregions—Charlotte, the Triad, and the Triangle. But still, The Piedmont Crescent provides us a glimpse into a visual language in which the abstract becomes naturalized, reducing the gap between how we sense the world and how it appears on the screens that guide us through it.
Martin L. Johnson is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author of Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States (Indiana, 2018), he is currently completing a book on the history of American advertising and industrial films.
NOTES
- Richard Saul Wurman and Joel Katz, “Beyond Graphics: The Architecture of Information.” AIA journal (63:64) October 1975, 40.
- Jean Gottmann, “Megalopolis, or the Urbanization of the Northeastern Seaboard,” Economic Geography 3:33 (July 1957), 189.
- Letter from Richard Saul Wurman to James Beveridge. May 15, 1963. Folder: Design, School Of, 1960-1963. North Carolina State University, Office of the Provost General Records, UA 005.001, NC State University Libraries Special Collections Research Center; Wurman published several books with his North Carolina State students, including The City, form and intent; being a collection of the plans of fifty significant towns and cities all to the scale 1: 14400. University of North Carolina. School of Design, 1963; “North Carolina Film Board—March 23, 1964. Film Production Report.” Folder: Reports: Film production, Future programs, 1964-1965. Box 1. NCFB Collection.
- Letter from Luther Hodges to Dan Moore. January 10, 1966. Department of Administration Program File. Page 60, Item 2. Box 1. NC State Archives; Letter from Luther Hodges to Dan Moore. January 10, 1966; Film Proposal. Department of Administration Program File. Page 60, Item 2. Box 1. NC State Archives.
- “A Statement of Goals for the Piedmont Crescent.” Piedmont Crescent Urban Policy Conference. Department of Administration Program File; Richard Saul Wurman, The Piedmont Crescent. 1968.
