Community Architect

The Life and Vision of Clarence S. Stein

Kristin E. Larsen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501702464
• eBook ISBN: 9781501706691
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Clarence S. Stein (1882–1975) was an architect, housing visionary, regionalist, policymaker, and colleague of some of the most influential public figures of the early to mid-twentieth century, including Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye. Kristin E. Larsen's biography of Stein comprehensively examines his built and unbuilt projects and his intellectual legacy as a proponent of the "garden city" for a modern age. This examination of Stein's life and legacy focuses on four critical themes: his collaborative ethic in envisioning policy, design, and development solutions; promotion and implementation of "investment housing;" his revolutionary approach to community design, as epitomized in the Radburn Idea; and his advocacy of communitarian regionalism. His cutting-edge projects such as Sunnyside Gardens in New York City; Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles; and Radburn, New Jersey, his "town for the motor age," continue to inspire community designers and planners in the United States and around the world.Stein was among the first architects to integrate new design solutions and support facilities into large-scale projects intended primarily to house working-class people, and he was a cofounder of the Regional Planning Association of America. As a planner, designer, and, at times, financier of new housing developments, Stein wrestled with the challenges of creating what today we would term "livable," "walkable," and "green" communities during the ascendency of the automobile. He managed these challenges by partnering private capital with government funding, as well as by collaborating with colleagues in planning, architecture, real estate, and politics.

1. THE GARDEN CITY IDEA

Throughout Stein's life, his excitement about the promise of the Garden City radiated from his manuscripts, letters, publications, and lectures and illuminated his housing philosophy. What struck Stein about Ebenezer Howard's proposal was its spirit of cooperation and community, the balance between open spaces and development, and the notion that distinctive planned new towns served as the building blocks of the region. Rechristened the Regional City by Stein and his colleagues in the RPAA, this network of complete communities was achieved by effectively applying planning tools that engaged the expertise and resources of entrepreneurs and the government to create places that integrated living, leisure, and work.

Early in his career through a series of lectures with the first Garden City of Letchworth near London as the exemplar, Stein promoted this “ideal system” for neighborhood preservation, housing reform, traffic congestion mitigation, and park design.¹ For the next forty years, his commitment to the Garden or Regional City remained constant as he designed, developed, and reframed the concept. This commitment was most evident in his formation of the RPAA to refine these ideas; his founding and investment in the development arm of the RPAA, the City Housing Corporation (CHC); his leadership roles promoting statewide regional and housing policy and advocating for these at the federal level; his promotion of these ideas to a broader public through the documentary film The City, which premiered at the World's Fair of 1939; his postwar publication of Toward New Towns for America; and his subsequent consultations around the world to make the message of the Garden City known. The conceptualization, translation, and transition of the Garden City into the Regional City emerges more clearly when examined through the critical junctures of Stein's career. Stein's central role in these broader discussions and initiatives reflect his efforts to highlight and elucidate this vision, which remained a preeminent facet of his life's work.

The Garden City Becomes the Regional City

Many scholars have documented the translation and evolution in the United States of Ebenezer Howard's Garden City principles as outlined in 1898's Tomorrow, a Peaceful Path to Real Reform, reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow.² A British stenographer and inventor from a modest background, Howard envisioned an alternative to the atrocious living and working conditions of the crowded late nineteenth-century industrialized city. His Garden City offered a balance between free enterprise and cooperative commonwealths as much as between the city and the countryside. Essential principles included land reform with a public trust owning all land, local management and self-governance, and a greenbelt to bound and buffer each self-sufficient community beyond which other distinctive Garden Cities existed, separated, but within an easy train commute. Consistent with this spirit of cooperation and community, the town architects, planners, and engineers designed the Garden City as a team, locating housing, shops, schools, parks, and other amenities within easy proximity to each other. While embraced in Great Britain as a new town development concept, it did not catch on in the United States until the 1920s when two very different regional planning groups appropriated this vision to propose radically distinct models for future settlement patterns in New York.

To promote his vision, Howard formed the Garden City Association in 1899, which expanded by 1901 to include many professional men and influential supporters, such as George Cadbury who had financed the development of Bournville near his chocolate factory in Birmingham just six years earlier. W. A. Harvey, first estate architect and planner of Bournville, described Cadbury's motive for developing this model industrial village: “[A]lleviating the evils which arise from the insanitary and insufficient housing accommodation supplied to large numbers of the working classes, and of securing…the advantages of outdoor village life, with opportunities for the natural and healthful occupation of cultivating the soil.”³ Cadbury also supported a mixture of income groups from the “factory-worker to the brain-worker” in the same district.

As an architecture student at the École des Beaux-Arts, Stein visited the model industrial village with his roommate and fellow student Henry Klaber in 1908. He admired Bournville as a pragmatic reflection of Garden City principles employed to improve the housing conditions of the working class. With the support of progressive businessmen such as Cadbury and W. H. Lever who funded the development of the model industrial village of Port Sunlight, the association formed a company in 1903, shortly after the reissuance of Howard's book. This company developed Unwin and Parker's design for Letchworth. Critical missing elements included the lack of a cooperative community and land reform necessary to support housing for the working class and an insufficient mixture of land uses and infrastructure to accommodate self-sufficiency.

With the opening of Letchworth, the promotion of Garden City principles in a variety of reform and professional publications, and the widespread circulation of Howard's reissued book, leading reformers in New York established the Garden Cities Association of America in 1906. Felix Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture Society, which played such a large role in Stein's education and early career, and Elgin R. L. Gould, president of the City and Suburban Homes Company, among the earliest to specialize in large-scale limited dividend residential projects in the United States, were among the founders of the organization. Despite ambitious plans to develop Garden Cities in a variety of places, primarily in the northeastern United States, the organization did not initiate development of a single Garden City and officially shut down in 1921.⁴

Another civic reformer and philanthropist, Margaret Olivia Sage, launched the Russell Sage Foundation (Sage Foundation) in 1907, funded with her late husband's considerable fortune to “improve social and living conditions” across the country. Based in Manhattan, the Sage Foundation invested one year later in the planned community of Forest Hills Gardens in Queens with Grosvenor Atterbury as architect and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. as town planner. Initially intended as a limited profit development based on Garden City design and land use planning principles, by 1920 Forest Hills Gardens was promoted as “a high-class suburban residential community.” While not a Garden City, Forest Hills Gardens still made quite the impression with its balance of commercial, residential, and recreational land uses; its “self-contained and garden-like neighborhoods” appealed to residents like Clarence Perry, who lived in the community and worked for many years at the Sage Foundation. In fact, Perry's conception of the neighborhood unit with its centralized school serving also as a community center and with residences defining a cohesive, walkable community owes much to Forest Hills Gardens. In this way, certain elements of the Garden City movement were initially adopted in the United States.⁵

Connecting the Garden City more tangentially to broader planning initiatives, the City Club attracted reformers like Stein and fellow Ethical Culture Society members who sought improved living conditions through the development of decent housing, quality neighborhoods, and new towns. Founded in 1892 as part of the good government movement to fight political corruption and introduce objective and scientific methods into city management, the organization had several thousand members by 1911 when Stein returned to New York City from his studies in Paris.⁶ The City Planning Committee of the City Club specifically focused on the emerging profession, including comprehensive zoning, adopted by New York City in 1916, and neighborhood surveys and plans, which Stein drafted for his former community of Chelsea. Despite initiatives such as these, planning practice in the United States in general was embryonic and fragmented.

While the nascent Garden City movement languished in the United States during this time, the association remained active in Great Britain, promoting passage of the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909. Yet the leadership of the British organization increasingly embraced more mainstream ideas, such as the so-called “garden suburb,” that diluted and obscured Howard's more radical socioeconomic message of land reform and cooperative, self-contained communities. Even Unwin, who in 1912 published his seminal Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! with the subtitle How the Garden City Type of Development May Benefit Both Owner and Occupier, bowed to a more moderate approach when he focused on “garden city design principles” that intended to foster desirable lower-density housing while incorporating efficiencies to maintain affordability.⁷ His role as a government official during and after the war continued to focus on promoting these Garden City principles for improved working-class housing communities.

During the interwar era in the United States, the Garden City movement became reenergized primarily due to the efforts of Stein and his colleagues in the RPAA as well as Thomas Adams through his work on the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs (RPNY) funded by the Sage Foundation. Adams had done much to advance the Garden City movement in his native Great Britain when he was appointed secretary of the expanded association in 1901 and shortly after development commenced, estate manager at Letchworth. At the same time, his pragmatic approach and promotion of various design elements also evident at Bournville and Port Sunlight diffused the more radical components of Howard's vision. Elected in 1913 to Great Britain's newly formed first professional planning organization, the Town Planning Institute, Adams left for Canada the following year to become town planning advisor to the national government until 1921. By that time, his reputation as an expert on Garden Cities and town planning was well recognized. The following year he relocated to the United States as a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, upon Charles Dyer Norton's untimely death in 1923, was appointed general director of plans and surveys for the RPNY. Some of the most prominent planners, architects, landscape architects, economists, and social scientists were employed to consult on the RPNY, and work had begun in 1921 to gather the data necessary to assess development challenges and opportunities in the New York City metropolitan region. In his encyclopedic history of American planning, Mel Scott attributes the roots of the RPNY in part to a 1917 conference held by the City Club to address regional cooperation, which attracted representatives from fifty area cities and towns to participate.⁸

With its roots also in the City Club, the membership of the RPAA, formed by Stein in 1923, connected Garden City principles, housing reform, and regionalism together to offer an alternative not only to the dinosaur cities, as Stein called them, but also to the garden suburb. Unlike the typical planner's focus on zoning and managing land subdivision, the RPAA promoted a vision of modern communities that combined a carefully controlled command of open space networks and circulation systems with regional planning and cooperative living for a rapidly modernizing country.

Charles Whitaker, the reformer, architect, and editor who made the new monthly Journal of the American Institute of Architects (JAIA) a center for exchange regarding innovations in site design, housing, and planning, fostered the connections and provided an initial forum for the writings of Stein and many of his colleagues who played a central role in the RPAA.⁹ These colleagues included architect Frederick Ackerman, landscape architect Henry Wright, urban critic Lewis Mumford, and the conservationist Benton MacKaye.

Ackerman, probably the most radical of the group, was a disciple of economist Thorstein Veblen who, like Howard, favored the single tax approach of Henry George to diminish the speculative value of land. Ackerman emphasized a restructuring of the economy through fundamental changes wrought by experts, or “technicians,” who would overthrow the current capitalist system and use their expertise to change land policy, and thus urban development, to equitably house the lowest income.¹⁰ His role as chief of housing and town design for the U.S. Shipping Board's Emergency Fleet Corporation during World War I, and his visit to England during that time to assess that country's efforts to address postwar housing needs, reinforced his advocacy of the Garden City as a tool to realize these goals, a tool that included land reform. Wright, also affiliated with the Emergency Fleet Corporation and with Stein's mentor Robert Kohn, who oversaw the federal community building program during its few months of implementation, combined site analysis and design skills with a housing reform sensibility.

Mumford and MacKaye contributed the broader, more theoretical, regional vision. Mumford engaged most notably with the regional ideals of Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist and geographer who advocated surveying and assessing areas before planning for them and encouraged a broader conception of the region—culture, climate, topography—to relate individual settlements with their function in daily life. While Mumford was an urbanist, MacKaye, trained as a forester, saw the region in a different though complementary way. Approaching the region with a focus on the rural, MacKaye drew on American pragmatism rather than Mumford's more urban and European foundations. Like his spiritual guide, Henry David Thoreau, MacKaye was intrigued with the relationship between people and the landscape. He called this “human ecology,” or the optimization of human “needs and welfare…in relation to environment.”¹¹ Thus, while a certain harmony with the landscape was important, so too was realizing what it had to offer. A central theme of his seminal book, The New Exploration, involved the need to conserve natural resources while strategically extracting and controlling their benefits and accommodating development where appropriate. His proposals for the Appalachian Trail and then the townless highway address these challenges. As such, he introduced critical elements for broader regional thinking among the group. Other RPAA members, such as the economist Stuart Chase, further refined these ideas to include the notion of market regions and transportation efficiencies.

A key component associated with the RPAA's reimagining of the Garden City involved Perry's neighborhood unit, which he first introduced at a national sociological conference in 1923 and fully articulated in the RPNY volume entitled—Neighborhood and Community Planning. While never an official member of the RPAA, Perry did participate in several key meetings that included discussions of the desirable elements of the neighborhood unit to foster community connections. Perry viewed the neighborhood primarily as a social unit with the school forming its physical and civic center shaped by the number of students that could be accommodated, the density of housing, and the walking distance to the school. His proposal for self-contained neighborhoods unified around a school and bounded by major streets also included an element of residential homogeneity, which RPAA members sought to diversify.¹²

Stein tied these concepts together, connecting site planning ideas under the rubric of Perry's neighborhood unit to new towns consisting of superblocks and linked by townless highways and interconnected open spaces to form the Regional City. As editor of Whitaker's community planning section of the JAIA, Stein directed the group's examination of these ideas.¹³ As the founder and informal sponsor of the RPAA, Stein often hosted their meetings in his Central Park apartment or nearby office, and he helped fund a number of their initiatives. In this way, he did much to bridge these distinctive and complementary philosophies.

While representing a variety of professions, the RPAA membership shared certain key viewpoints. They believed that through enlightened, collective action a distinct type of urban form could be developed in the middle ground between the industrial cities and the remote rural hamlets, founded on the attributes unique to each place and the opportunities afforded through new technologies. The essential issue then involved understanding and effectively utilizing environmental resources to shape the region consistent with a more fully realized community life. Their new American town reconnected people to place and to the land and was planned with reference to location, design, and function, incorporating the technological innovations of the new century. This small group, particularly Stein, Wright, Mumford, and MacKaye, advocated a communitarian regionalism that reflected and reinforced the “local character” of both the human and natural systems associated with the place to facilitate cooperation and community building. Stein argued that the community architect additionally needed to know, “How big must a city be to best do its work for human welfare and happiness (good living) and also how to develop it so as to locate home as close as practical to work and all the essentials for profitable leisure and human development.” While the group initially used the term Garden City, they increasingly referred to the “Regional City” as their proposal for interconnected new towns.¹⁴

Stein also sought a way to incorporate the RPAA's ideas into policy. As chair of the New York Housing and Regional Planning Commission (HRPC) from 1923 to 1926, he not only advocated for housing reform, but housing reform from a regional perspective and with government support. Because of this holistic approach, he believed that nothing less than a state plan was needed to guide efficient decentralization of the largest metropolitan populations into a healthful arrangement of Regional Cities. Gathering critical information on the geography, environment, climate, topography, and culture offered a starting point with the resulting report intended to guide a board of experts in its preparation of a state plan.

The report was o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Garden City Idea
• 2. Early Years and Architectural Training
• 3. A Thinkers’ Network and the City Housing Corporation
• 4. The Architect as Houser
• 5. The Radburn Idea
• 6. The Regional City and Town Planning
• 7. International Initiatives and Building a Legacy
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page