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Three Big Ideas

Town planning in America began auspiciously in the eighteenth century with colonial settlements such as New Haven, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Williamsburg, and the sublime Savannah, all laid out according to precise rules, with carefully ordered streets, avenues, squares, and town greens. Who planned these cities? The author of New Haven’s unusual nine-square plan, like a tic-tac-toe diagram, with space for a market in the center square, is unknown; it may have been Theophilus Eaton, one of the leaders of the group of Massachusetts settlers who founded the town (originally called Quinnipiac), or John Brockett, the group’s surveyor. While the entire plan of New Haven measured only half a mile square, the ambitious plan of Philadelphia covered one mile by two. The streets were laid out in a regular grid divided into four quadrants by two intersecting major streets, with a public square in each quadrant and one in the center. The planner was the Pennsylvania colony’s surveyor general, Captain Thomas Holme, who is generally described as an engineer and may have learned that skill in the military, although William Penn, the colony’s governor, almost certainly contributed to the plan. Farther south, the governor of Maryland, Francis Nicholson, devised the exceptional plan of his new capital, Annapolis. The urbane arrangement included four open spaces: two circular squares (which predate John Wood’s Circus at Bath by more than thirty years)—Public Circle and Church Circle—a residential square, and a marketplace. Streets radiated diagonally from the circular squares in a miniature version of baroque Rome.

Nicholson had an opportunity to plan a second city when he was appointed governor of Virginia. The result was Williamsburg, which one historian has called “the most successful essay in community planning of colonial America.”1 While the plan of Annapolis leaned heavily on European antecedents, Williamsburg is more original, a wide main street forming the chief axis of the plan. The College of William and Mary stands at one end, and the Capitol at the other. Midway between them is a market square, originally also the site of the courthouse and a powder magazine. The other major building of the town is the governor’s palace, which Nicholson sited at the head of a tree-lined green that extended at right angles to the main street. The plan has two striking features: the houses are on generous lots surrounded by gardens, and the lots along the main street are interrupted by shallow ravines. The result, architect and planner Jaquelin T. Robertson writes, is a plan that provides “a clear American order of things, elegantly canonizing the format of our public buildings, streets, houses, trees, yards and natural terrain.”²

The planner of Savannah was James Oglethorpe, founder and governor of the Georgia colony. Oglethorpe, who had been a successful general in the English army, was also a social reformer, settling the new colony with “working poor” and banning slavery. His remarkable town plan was based on a standardized “ward” consisting of forty house lots surrounding a central square fronted by public buildings. As the town grew, new wards were added in an orderly fashion. This sounds mechanical, but the ingenuity of the plan was that major and minor streets were an integral part of the expansion, creating continuous, treed avenues that connected the wards. Of all the colonial plans, this was not only the most sophisticated, but also the most long-lived, since Oglethorpe’s pattern guided the city’s growth from its founding in 1733 until the Civil War.

Most colonial towns lacked the finesse of Savannah and Williamsburg, however. Alexandria, Virginia, founded in 1749, was typical. Eighty-four identical half-acre lots were arranged four lots per block, with the streets forming a simple grid that was inelegantly truncated by the irregular shoreline of the Potomac River. This no-frills subdivision was laid out by John West Jr., a surveyor, and his assistant, seventeen-year-old George Washington. Forty years later, President Washington had to decide on a plan for the nearby federal capital. His secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, a recognized expert on all matters architectural, suggested an Alexandria-like grid and even submitted a rough sketch. Washington forwarded the drawing to one of his advisers, who responded with a withering critique: “Such regular plans indeed, however answerable they may appear upon paper or seducing as they may be on the first aspect to the eyes of some people must even when applied upon the ground the best calculated to admit of it become at last tiresome and insipid and it never could be in its origin but a mean continuance of some cool imagination wanting a sense of the real grand and truly beautiful only to be met with where nature contributes with art and diversifies the objects.”3 The author of this rant was a young Frenchman, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant. He had come to America to fight in the Revolutionary War and served on Washington’s staff, rising to the rank of major. On the strength of his artistic abilities (he remodeled New York’s Federal Hall, where Washington had taken the oath of office), the president commissioned him to prepare a topographic drawing of the site of the future federal city. Impressed with L’Enfant’s evident enthusiasm and convinced by his argument that the new capital should be “grand and beautiful,” Washington subsequently entrusted him with the planning of the capital city.

L’Enfant is sometimes described as an architect or a military engineer. He was neither; immediately before leaving France he had been an art student. But he could draw, he had an innate understanding of city planning, and he was immensely ambitious. His plan for the federal capital had three chief characteristics: it took advantage of the topography by locating the Capitol on one hill, the President’s House on another, with a Grand Avenue (today the Mall) leading to the Potomac; diagonal avenues, clearly influenced by French garden design, linked the prominent civic buildings and created many rond-points at the intersections for commemorative statues; and a matter-of-fact grid of secondary streets was superimposed on the diagonal avenues. The plan was, as one historian has put it, an “American balance of precedent and innovation.”⁴

During the early years of the nineteenth century, L’Enfant’s plan influenced a number of new cities. Buffalo, New York, then called New Amsterdam, was laid out with long diagonals radiating from a public square near the shore of Lake Erie by Joseph Ellicott, the brother of Andrew Ellicott, who succeeded L’Enfant as the planner of the federal capital. The plans of cities such as Indianapolis, Baton Rouge, Cleveland, Madison, Wisconsin, and Sandusky, Ohio, all show L’Enfant’s influence, as do many smaller settlements whose layouts historian John Reps wittily characterized as “backwoods baroque.”5

The most novel post-Washington city plan was undoubtedly that of Detroit, laid out by Judge Augustus Woodward in 1807. Woodward knew L’Enfant and devised an unusual variation of the radiating-avenue plan: an octagonal pattern of streets and avenues resembling a honeycomb. Woodward’s scheme is barely discernible today; however, for within a decade of Detroit’s founding, the city fathers had abandoned the octagonal plan in favor of a rectilinear grid. Throughout the nineteenth century, as settlement moved westward, and as established cities grew larger, despite the early experiments, the grid became the preferred American planning model. The grid-planner required no artistic training and simply imposed his plan without regard for topography, as San Francisco and Pittsburgh demonstrate. All that a budding city-builder needed was to decide on street widths and the distance between intersections; the rest followed automatically. Blocks were filled in by private builders—an office building here, a tenement there, manufacturing lofts, public libraries, department stores, places of worship, playhouses, warehouses—whatever was needed at the time. The sentiments fueling this pragmatism were a combination of democratic egalitarianism—the proverbial level playing field—an emphasis on entrepreneurship rather than aesthetics, and a kind of laziness.

Yet, ideas—and even ideals—were never entirely absent, as the parks movement of the nineteenth century demonstrates. During the first half of the twentieth century, cities came under the sway of three big ideas: Charles Mulford Robinson’s national crusade for urban beautification; Ebenezer Howard’s notion of the Garden City; and Le Corbusier’s image of towers in a park. These men were unlikely urban visionaries: an upstate New York newspaperman who wrote the first American book on city planning; a British parliamentary stenographer and failed Nebraska homesteader, whose ideas gave birth to an international movement; and a Swiss-born artist-architect who fancied himself a city planner and, against all odds, changed the face of cities in a country that he barely knew. To understand the way we live—and plan—today, it is necessary to appreciate the extent to which these three visionaries influenced American ideas of city life.

CHARLES MULFORD ROBINSON AND CIVIC ART

A great awakening of civic awareness took place in America during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The most obvious surviving artifacts from this creative period are the magnificent public buildings, constructed of marble and granite and decorated with monumental art, that adorn most major cities. Daniel H. Burnham’s imposing Union Station in Washington, D.C., is a model of the type, combining solidity and urbanity with an unparalleled self-confidence. It’s not just that the train station is substantial and clearly built to last, with white granite walls, gold-leaf decorations, and bronze fixtures. Whenever I walk through the tall, vaulted waiting room, beneath the somber statues of brooding warriors, and out into the arched loggia across from the Capitol dome, I have the distinct impression not only of arrival, but also of a shared sense of civic engagement.

Charles Mulford Robinson, godfather of the City Beautiful movement, c. 1915.

The public celebration of urban beauty, as demonstrated by Union Station, was in large part the idea of a man who was neither an architect nor a planner. Charles Mulford Robinson was born in 1869, not in a city but in a small town, Ramapo, New York. He grew up in a well-to-do family in Rochester, where he went to university and worked as a journalist and freelance writer on a wide range of topics: a history of the city, a privately published biography of his great-grandfather Judge Augustus Porter, as well as the libretto of an operetta based on Robin Hood. In 1899, he published a three-part series in the Atlantic Monthly, simply titled “Improvement in City Life.” The improvement that Robinson described was chiefly artistic, but he approached his subject broadly: “When one speaks of the aesthetic side of American cities, one thinks at once of their public buildings; of their parks, statues, and boulevards. But in any right conception of urban loveliness these would be only the special objects of a general and harmonious beauty.”6 He might have been writing about Philadelphia, where he later worked as associate editor of the Public Ledger, the city’s largest daily. Although Philadelphia had a monumental new city hall and a large park along the Schuylkill River, as well as a recently built fountain dominated by an enormous equestrian statue of George Washington, its tight Colonial grid was being overwhelmed by commercial buildings and factories, and its business center was disfigured by the elevated tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In the Atlantic series, Robinson took the broadest possible view of what he called civic art and discussed practical ameliorations such as limiting the height of buildings, removing advertising, cleaning streets, planting trees, improving lighting, and installing public art. He cited numerous examples of civic improvements in various American cities: a Chicago ordinance restricting billboards adjacent to boulevards and parks; a New York initiative to keep city streets clean; a successful public effort in Boston to preserve the historic façade of the state capitol. In other words, he described how cities could be made more attractive. He emphasized that while city governments sometimes took the lead in these improvements, a variety of private organizations, such as municipal art societies, park associations, and civic clubs, also had roles to play, in a way that anticipated today’s park conservancies and downtown business-improvement districts. Robinson observed that although these various efforts were diversified, widely scattered, and lacking in harmony, there were also attempts to treat conditions in a manner that was more “scientific.”7

The following year, William Dean Howells, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, invited Robinson to write about city beautification in Europe. Robinson visited Paris, Brussels, and London and produced another three-part series.⁸ Like many Americans who traveled to Europe, he was impressed by the beauty of its cities and realized that despite America’s wealth and growing world influence, its cities did not really measure up. In 1901, he assembled his urban essays in a small book, The Improvement of Towns and Cities, and followed it two years later with a detailed study of the subject, the masterful Modern Civic Art. What makes the latter so compelling is a combination of close observation and common sense; sixty years later, even the demanding urban historian and critic Lewis Mumford considered Robinson’s book “an excellent book in its time and still worth consulting.”⁹

Robinson was interested in aesthetics, but his view of the city was not that of an aesthete. “Cities are not made to be looked at, but to be lived in,” he wrote.¹⁰ “The wish for a beautiful street will remain always visionary until the want is felt of a good street and a clean one.”¹¹ He emphasized the importance of establishing the architectural character of a city and called for more attention to be paid to city halls and courthouses—“people’s houses,” he called them. He wrote that outlying residential neighborhoods should have “broad streets and narrow streets, straight and curving ways, and regularly built up districts sprinkled through with open spaces, where there may be playgrounds for children or gardens for the delight of all.”12 Nor did he ignore those parts of American cities that needed the most improvement.

In the wealthier portions of the city there may be imposing plazas, broad avenues, and noble sites crowned with worthy structures; public architecture may reach a high level of good taste and luxury, and domestic architecture may be fittingly expressive of the spirit of the time, revealing, under professional guidance, at once variety and harmony; but until the spirit of aesthetic renaissance descends into the slums and gives play to artistic impulse there, the conquest of beauty in the city will be still incomplete.¹³

Robinson’s articles and books are the first in twentieth-century America —certainly the first addressed to a wide audience—to argue the need for city planning. “We shall not attain to cities really beautiful, then, until we learn artistically to plan them,” he wrote.¹⁴ This was an implicit criticism of the nineteenth-century laissez-faire attitude that had been adopted by American city-builders, who had forgotten—or ignored—the achievements of an earlier generation. Even the great Olmsted, who pioneered the idea of vast city parks, assumed that they would be surrounded by distinctly unlovely cities. That was not good enough for Robinson.

Robinson wrote with a wide readership in mind, and his ambition came to fruition as his ideas were taken up and propagated by an array of national organizations, including the American Civic Association, the American League for Civic Improvement, and the American Park and Outdoor Art Association, in all three of which he was an active board member. Civic beautification was also promoted by various professional associations, including the newly founded American Society of Landscape Architects, and by scores of local groups, chambers of commerce, businessmen’s clubs, and municipal societies. Some of these groups acted out of a sense of civic duty, others responded to Robinson’s economic argument—familiar to modern ears—that beautification would attract businesses to their city.

The emerging national interest in civic improvement that Robinson described and actively promoted is generally referred to as the City Beautiful movement.15 Although Robinson himself coined the term in his Atlantic series, he used it sparingly and preferred civic art, which carried with it a sense of public-spiritedness.^* Nevertheless, it was city beautiful that stuck in the popular imagination, not least because it captured a particular aspect of civic art—beauty—that had recently come to the fore, thanks to two well-publicized national events.

The first was the World’s Columbian Exposition, which took place in Chicago in the summer of 1893. Although the fair, planned by Frederick Law Olmsted, included a gaudy carnival midway and a naturalistic lake and island, its showpiece was the Court of Honor, a large water basin surrounded by a group of monumental buildings designed by half a dozen of the country’s leading architects. Popularly known as the White City, because of the uniform white color of the architecture, this part of the fair resembled an urban civic center. Robert A. M. Stern has called the Court of Honor “the first effectively planned complex of public buildings built in America since the Jeffersonian era” (referring to Jefferson’s University of Virginia campus), and for the 27 million visitors to the fair it was an eye-opener.16 The unmistakable message of the White City was that American cities could be planned—beautifully and grandly. Robinson wrote an illustrated guide to the fair, in which he recognized its national significance. America was growing wealthier, he wrote, people’s horizons were being expanded by travel, and what he called the “provisions of the essentials of life” had been vastly increased for the majority of the population.¹⁷ All these changes would be felt in the city.

The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 showed Americans their urban future.

Although the Chicago fair included an eclectic collection of pavilions, from the Colonial Revival Pennsylvania Building, which resembled Independence Hall, to Louis Sullivan’s poly chrome Transportation Building, the architecture of the Court of Honor itself was uniform. The buildings that surrounded the huge reflecting pool were in a style loosely based on the Italian Renaissance. Several of the architects—Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, and Robert Peabody—as well as the sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick MacMonnies, had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the world’s leading center of Classical teaching. These men, and the fair’s chief architect, Daniel Burnham, believed that the Classical tradition, adapted to American circumstances, was an appropriate model for cities in the burgeoning republic. Burnham and his colleagues, like many American architects and artists, saw the arrival of the United States on the world stage as analogous to the rebirth of European culture during the Renaissance. In any case, as historian Vincent Scully points out, it is hardly surprising that American architects adopted the grand manner of Beaux Arts city planning, since it represented the “only model for complete, or almost complete, urbanistic form” available to them.18 A later generation would characterize the Beaux Arts architecture of the fair as retrograde, but that misses the point; the Chicago exposition publicly and convincingly demonstrated the merits of planning and urban beautification, both distinctly novel concepts at the time.

The era of civic landmarks: Union Station in Washington, D.C.

The second national event that paved the way for the City Beautiful movement occurred seven years later. In 1900, the U.S. Senate established a commission to prepare a comprehensive plan for the monumental core of the city of Washington. The members of what is often called the McMillan Commission, since it reported to Senator James McMillan, had all worked together on the World’s Columbian Exposition: Daniel Burnham, the young Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (son of the famous, now retired, landscape architect), Charles McKim, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. In 1902, they unveiled a new plan for the nation’s capital, described in a series of dramatic watercolor views and two giant scale models of central Washington, illustrating conditions “before” and “after.” The McMillan Plan reconfigured and expanded the Mall, consolidated the Federal Triangle, and established sites for Union Station and the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.19 Although Burnham, Olmsted, and McKim claimed L’Enfant’s plan as a precedent, their design was solidly in the grand Beaux Arts tradition, with geometrical axes, symmetrical building arrangements, monumental public sculpture, and stylistic consistency. The new center of Washington, D.C.—now truly a White City—is the most prominent achievement of the architectural epoch that came to be known as the American Renaissance.

Although the popular successes of the Chicago exposition and the McMillan Plan linked the City Beautiful idea to Classical architecture in the public’s mind, Robinson did not discuss architectural style in his writing. He was catholic in his taste (although he disliked skyscrapers), asking only that architects exercise self-restraint. “The need is that [the architect] should realize that his problem is not that of a building only, but of a city,” he advised.20 Always good advice. However, while Robinson sensibly recommended variety in urban architecture, what the leading architects of the day generally delivered was uniformity—Classical buildings with Classical ornament and uniformly grand Classical colonnades. Thus, in practice, the city beautiful became the city monumental, which somewhat compromised Robinson’s balanced vision of a heterogeneous urbanism—and provided fodder for later critics.

Thanks to his writing, Robinson became a national figure and was engaged as a planning consultant by a number of cities, including Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Fort Wayne, Denver, Des Moines, Omaha, and Honolulu. He was part of the team that designed a “Model City” for the popular 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair; served on planning commissions in Rochester, New York, and Columbus, Ohio; and was appointed professor of civic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two universities in the United States to offer courses in city planning (Harvard was the other). He continued to write and in 1916 published the well-received City Planning, recommended by the New York Times in its list of “leading spring books.”²¹

Robinson’s whirlwind activism was cut short in 1917, when he died of pneumonia, only forty-eight years old. Earlier that year he had written a new preface for the fourth edition of Modern Civic Art. “Many of the hopes (or possibly visions) expressed in the First Edition have become actualities,” he wrote, “some observed tendencies toward better things are now established movements; and many specific conditions, which then were criticized, now have been corrected.”22 His optimism was entirely justified, for the decades immediately before and after his death were a time of great accomplishments in urban beautification. In 1910, Congress created the Commission of Fine Arts to oversee the implementation of the McMillan Plan, and in the next decade some of the plan’s key elements, such as the rebuilt Mall and the Lincoln Memorial, were realized. A series of national fairs, in Saint Louis, San Francisco, and San Diego, continued the Chicago exposition’s example of complete urban ensembles, exposing the American public to city-planning ideas. Burnham’s ambitious master plan for San Francisco was short-circuited by the great 1906 earthquake and fire, but John Galen Howard’s design for a new civic center complex followed the City Beautiful model. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett’s Plan of Chicago was the most detailed master plan for any American city to date, although it was in some ways theoretical. Even larger in scale was a study of recreational areas in Los Angeles, prepared by Olmsted Jr. and planner Harland Bartholomew. Covering fifteen hundred square miles, the far-thinking forty-year regional plan called for acquiring several hundred million dollars’ worth of land for parks, playgrounds, and beaches.²³ The proposal is distinctive for recognizing the particular character of Southern Californian urbanism: people lived mainly in individual houses, and their chief means of transportation—this was just 1930—was the private automobile.

While the Los Angeles recreational plan was stillborn, thanks to a lack of political will and the Great Depression, other planning projects were realized. John C. Olmsted, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.’s older half brother, laid out a citywide park system for Seattle. Monumental groups of government buildings appeared in state capitals in Colorado, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In an early—though more successful—version of what would later be called “urban renewal,” downtown beautification schemes were undertaken in Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. A host of new urban college campuses—Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Rice in Houston, Southern Methodist in Dallas, California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, the University of Colorado in Boulder, and the Army War College in Washington, D.C.—were planned along City Beautiful lines. Monumental train stations were built in New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Even as late an urban project as Rockefeller Center in New York, despite its Art Deco style, owes a debt to the City Beautiful. All told, the movement left an extraordinarily rich legacy of urban improvement.

Robinson’s ideal of civic art dominated American city planning and architecture for three productive decades, until the twin disruptions of the Great Depression and the Second World War.* Rare is the American city that does not have at least one example of Robinson’s civic ideal: a grand museum or train station, a park or a parkway, a monumental urban square. Indeed, subtract the City Beautiful achievements of 1900–1930, and most American cities would be vastly diminished. In New York City, for example, there would be no Columbia University or New York University campuses, no U.S. Post Office on Eighth Avenue (still impressive, though bereft of its grander twin, Pennsylvania Station), no Municipal Building in downtown Manhattan, no Grand Central Station, no New York Central Building straddling Park Avenue, and no New York Public Library. The library, a paragon of how a civic building should take its place in the city, is a reminder that while planning theories come and go, their built expressions survive for a long time. Not many people remember Charles Mulford Robinson today, but anybody who sits on the broad library steps under the marble lions Patience and Fortitude, the casual passerby on Fifth Avenue, and every lunchtime visitor to Bryant Park is experiencing Robinson’s vision of civic art.

The era of civic landmarks: The New York Public Library.

EBENEZER HOWARD, THE GARDEN CITY GEYSER

Although Charles Robinson referred to “the science of modern city-making,” city planning is not a science but a practical art, and it developed in fits and starts. No one was a more unlikely contributor to this haphazard process than Ebenezer Howard. Born in 1850 in London to a family of modest means and apprenticed as a clerk, he decided to immigrate to the United States and become a farmer. He and two friends chose Nebraska, but the hard conditions quickly brought an end to their naive experiment, and Howard found himself stranded in Chicago, forced to work as a court reporter to earn his passage home. It was the early 1870s, and the city was just recovering from the Great Fire, so Howard had the rare opportunity to see entire urban neighborhoods being built from scratch. Not that Chicago was rebuilding itself in a particularly unusual way. As often happens after urban disasters, the old street plan was maintained and new buildings simply took the place of the destroyed ones. The skyscrapers that would make Chicago a world leader in tall buildings were still a decade off, but the frenzy of reconstruction that gripped the city must have made a strong impression on the young Englishman.

The most important lessons that Howard drew from his four-year American experience were that cities not only could be built anew, but also could be built differently than in the past. In 1868, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had planned a new residential community nine miles west of the Loop. Riverside, as Olmsted named it, was one of the first—and certainly the largest—planned suburban communities in the United States, probably in the world: twenty-five hundred individual building lots on sixteen hundred acres of Midwestern prairie. “The idea,” according to Olmsted, “being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility.”24 By the 1870s, Riverside was in its infancy, but it already exhibited the environmental qualities that set it apart from conventional American cities and towns: individual houses on spacious half-acre lots, winding country roads instead of gridded streets, thousands of newly planted trees, and many public green spaces. The development gave the impression of a vast park rather than an urban neighborhood. There is no direct evidence that Howard visited Riverside, but it seems likely that he was aware of the project, and it would have pointed him in the direction of a new type of urban living, dispersed and bucolic.

When Howard returned to London, he got a job as a parliamentary stenographer, married, started a family, and began what promised to be an unremarkable life. Small indications of the adventurous spirit that had taken him to the American frontier were his hobbies: he dabbled in new inventions, especially typewriters; was interested in spiritualism; was fluent in Esperanto; and was an active member of a local debating society, where he met the socialist Sydney Webb and the young George Bernard Shaw.

The Remington Company was a leading manufacturer of typewriters, which Howard occasionally visited in the United States. During one trip he came across Looking Backward, a novel written in 1888 by Edward Bellamy, a Massachusetts lawyer. The plot concerns a Bostonian who falls asleep and wakes up in the year 2000 to a dramatically transformed society. Bellamy came from a family of socialists, and in his futurist Utopia all human needs were benignly filled by state-owned industries. Bellamy’s vision of Boston in the year 2000 was in stark contrast to the industrial cities of his day: “Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings . . . stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun.”25 Looking Backward was enormously popular, selling a million copies, and more than 150 “Bellamy clubs” sprang up nationwide, and the political impact of the book has been compared to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bellamy spent the last ten years of his life promoting his version of socialism and helping to found the Nationalist party, which advocated state capitalism.

Although Howard did not share Bellamy’s somewhat authoritarian views on how society should be organized politically, he was attracted to the author’s reformist urban vision, particularly the notion of public ownership of land. Indeed, Howard was so taken by the book that he arranged for a British edition and personally distributed a hundred copies to friends. But while Bellamy advocated wholesale political change on a national scale, Howard, whom Lewis Mumford once described as a “practical idealist,” started thinking about how a community organized along the lines that Bellamy described might actually be implemented—not in some vague Utopian future, but at that very moment, in Britain.

During the late 1880s Howard collected his ideas in a small book that was published as To-morrow!: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Howard’s book is a detailed blueprint for a new city that combines the advantages of town and country. His detailed economic calculations rested on three assumptions: first, that all the land in the city would be owned by a public corporation; second, that the corporation would buy cheap agricultural land, improve it, and reinvest future profits in the new city; and third, that the size of the city would be limited to thirty-two thousand inhabitants. He called the community Garden City, perhaps inspired by Chicago’s motto, Urbs in Horto—City in a Garden. In 1902, when the book was reprinted, he changed the title to Garden Cities of To-morrow.

Although Howard was not an architect, he included a schematic plan of his proposed city. Garden City strongly resembles an exercise in civic art, and American influences are plentiful: there is a Central Park, and a linear green avenue resembling Chicago’s Midway; broad boulevards recall the parkways that Olmsted laid out in Brooklyn; and the avenues are numbered, just as in New York City. The most original architectural feature was the Crystal Palace, a continuous glass-roofed, arcaded mall that contained the commercial district of the town. Because of its small size, the city was walkable—the only mass transit was a municipal railway connecting it to neighboring garden cities.

One of the streets in the plan was named Edison Street, and Garden City is very much the work of a solitary inventor: a curious mixture of quirky innovation, pedantic analysis, and detailed calculation. Howard, an unprepossessing man, was an unexpectedly effective public speaker and a tireless proselytizer—Shaw called him “Ebenezer the Garden City Geyser”—and to promote his ideas he organized the Garden City Association, whose membership soon spread across Britain.26 In 1902, he helped found a company that acquired a tract of land and built the first garden city, named Letchworth. Letch worth was planned by Raymond Unwin and his partner Barry Parker. Unwin, the son of a Nonconformist Oxford tutor, was a follower of William Morris and a committed socialist. He and Parker were both early members of the Garden City Association and had already planned an industrial village when they won an architectural competition to design Letchworth. Like the City Beautiful architects, Unwin, who became the leading architect and planner of the Garden City movement, believed that beauty was an indispensable part of town planning. But, although he studied large cities such as Paris and Berlin, his model was not baroque Rome but rather the domestic architecture and haphazard plans of medieval towns and villages.²⁷

Sir Ebenezer Howard, inventor of the Garden City.

The function of Letchworth and the garden cities that followed —indeed, their chief attraction—was to serve as alternatives to the crowded industrial city. However, none of the garden cities that were built achieved the economic autonomy that Howard envisioned. Instead they invariably depended for employment on a nearby metropolis. Hampstead Garden Suburb, planned by Unwin and Parker in 1905 and connected to London by an underground railway, has been described as a “glorious composition of buildings, streets and landscape as complex and subtle as any in the history of architecture” and is the prototype Garden City suburb.28 The entire development, which is next to Hampstead Heath, ultimately covered more than seven hundred acres, with innovative housing quadrangles designed by Unwin and Parker, as well as groups of houses by such leading British architects as M. H. Baillie Scott and Edwin Lutyens. Hampstead was suburban in location but townlike in appearance, with a mixture of houses and apartment buildings, as well as a town center with a central square. The community roughly followed Unwin’s rule of “twelve houses to the acre,” which was much less dense than industrial cities at that time.

The model Garden City suburb: Hampstead Garden Suburb, near London, c. 1909.

Howard died in 1928. Knighted by King George V, celebrated as Britain’s leading exponent of city planning, he lived long enough to see Garden City associations spring up across Europe, where the terms Gartenstädte, cité-jardin, and ciudad-jardín entered the lexicon. Garden City developments were built in Germany, France, and Holland, and even as far away as Palestine. And, not least, in America. By a curious historical coincidence, the Garden City idea was introduced to the United States by the son of the very man whose suburban planned community—Riverside—had influenced the young Howard in Chicago. By the early 1900s, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. had achieved a prominence in the profession of landscape architecture that rivaled his father’s. He established the country’s first landscape architecture program, at Harvard, was a member of the Commission of Fine Arts, a founder and president of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the first president of the American City Planning Institute. His firm, Olmsted Brothers, which he ran with his half brother John, was the largest and best known in the country, responsible for not only landscape architecture but also town planning. The latter interest took Olmsted, in 1908, to Germany, Holland, France, and Britain, on a three-month tour of Garden City developments. While he was in Germany, he received a letter from a prospective client. “We are proposing to go into housing on a fairly large scale, in the suburban district of New York,” wrote philanthropist Robert Weeks de Forest, on behalf of the Russell Sage Foundation. “Our plan is not merely to give houses but to lay out these tracts in some way different from the abhorrent rectangular city block, and to make our garden city [emphasis added] somewhat attractive by the treatment and planting of our streets, the possibility of little gardens, and possibly some public spaces.”29 Olmsted responded immediately, “Nothing could interest me more than such a problem as you have on hand.”³⁰ Thus began America’s first Garden City, Forest Hills Gardens.

The 142-acre site of Forest Hills Gardens was in the borough of Queens, linked to Manhattan by the newly electrified Long Island Rail Road. The projected population of five thousand was to be housed largely in detached single-family homes, but also in apartment buildings, row houses, and twins. Although Olmsted was influenced by what he had recently seen in Germany and Britain—and by the picturesque principles he had learned from his father—what he produced was entirely original. Opposite the railroad station, he laid out a town square to serve as a commercial center. Behind the square he placed a village green, and leading away from it two so-called greenways, which snaked their way through the community to terminate in a large existing park. The plan was thus a subtly orchestrated transition from urban to pastoral. Although the residential streets connected to the surrounding New York grid, they were anything but gridlike; Olmsted created a variety of crescents, internal circles, lanes, and closes, laid out with all the design artistry that a talented and experienced planner could bring to bear.³¹

Forest Hills Gardens is only a fifteen-minute ride from Penn Station. Getting off the train and descending an outdoor staircase into Station Square, I find myself in a cobblestoned place surrounded by buildings with deep arcades, half-timbered walls infilled with patterned brick, and steeply pitched red-tile roofs topped by clock towers and turrets. The overall effect recalls a medieval Bavarian town, perhaps Rothenburg, which was much admired by Garden City planners and architects. Behind the arcades are shops, restaurants, and professional offices; above, apartments. Most of the buildings have three or four stories, with one section rising to nine stories. The towerlike building was originally the Forest Hills Inn, which functioned as the social heart of the community, a sort of vertical country club.

A garden suburb in the city: Station Square, Forest Hills Gardens, in New York.

The inn and the other buildings around Station Square are the work of Grosvenor Atterbury, an established New York architect who was a friend of de Forest’s and had built a summer house for him at Cold Spring Harbor.32 At Forest Hills, Atterbury designed not only the buildings around Station Square but also the train station, a church, a new home for the West Side Tennis Club (where the U.S. Open was held until 1978), and a number of house groups and individual houses. The ornamental iron streetlamps and street signs that dot the community are also his work and attest to the Arts and Crafts sensibility that he brought to the project. The German medieval style of Station Square was unusual for Atterbury, but like most of his contemporaries, the Beaux Arts-trained architect was able to work in a variety of styles, depending on the commission. At Forest Hills, the West Side Tennis Club is Tudor, the church is Norman, and some of the houses are Elizabethan.

Atterbury was an unusual architect—he designed country residences, mansions, and millionaires’ farms, but also model tenements, hospitals, and low-income housing. With the backing of the Russell Sage Foundation he developed a system for building small, inexpensive houses and designed about forty of them in Forest Hills. Just behind Station Square stands a charming group of fourteen attached houses whose picturesque appearance belies that they are built entirely of precast concrete. Atterbury was interested in prefabrication and invented a nailable concrete called Nailcrete. For Forest Hills, he devised an ingenious building system of hollow concrete floor slabs and wall panels, which were precast in a nearby factory; 140 panels were assembled into a house in only nine days.³³ Even more impressive, since this was the first successful use of precast panel construction in the United States—perhaps in the world—the houses, now almost a hundred years old, are in excellent condition.

I have a choice of two restaurants in the square for lunch. While there is also a beauty shop and a dry cleaner, most of the offices seem to be occupied by real estate companies. “I believe there is money in taste,” de Forest had written to Olmsted, and he was proved correct.34 When Forest Hills opened in 1911, houses sold for $3,000 to $8,000; today, houses regularly sell for more than a million dollars, frequently several million.³⁵ Three thousand dollars was a lot of money in 1911, and housing reformers such as Lewis Mumford criticized the project because it did not provide housing for blue-collar workers, but—the precast concrete houses apart—that was never the intention.³⁶ The Russell Sage Foundation wanted to demonstrate that good planning and design could be part of a successful business model, and the high cost of land in Queens meant that houses were targeted at well-off buyers.

Forest Hills was intended to demonstrate “how the thing can be done tastefully and at the same time with due regard for profit.”³⁷ The project, interrupted by the First World War, did not become a model for the suburban expansion of New York City, as de Forest had hoped, but its national influence was significant. Garden City ideas showed up in the design of a number of company towns, or “industrial villages,” as they were called: Olmsted planned Kohler in Wisconsin for the plumbing manufacturer; Atterbury laid out two industrial villages, one in Worcester, Massachusetts, the other in Erwin, Tennessee. During the First World War, Olmsted served as manager of a government agency that built housing for war-industry workers, and several of the new suburban worker communities built in 1918—Yorkship Village in Camden, New Jersey; Union Park Gardens in Wilmington, Delaware; and several projects in Bridgeport, Connecticut—clearly owe a debt to Forest Hills. The planner of Union Park Gardens was Olmsted’s talented student John Nolen, who went on to plan the garden suburb of Mariemont outside Cincinnati, where Atterbury designed one of the housing groups.

Robert A. M. Stern has described Forest Hills as “both a pinnacle and an end of a particular kind of suburb.”38 After the First World War, railroad suburbs began to be replaced by automobile suburbs, which were less concentrated, and less walkable, than their predecessors, but many of the planning ideas of Forest Hills, such as the seamless fusion of architecture, planning, and landscaping, continued. In addition to the automobile suburb of Mariemont, Nolen planned two full-fledged cities, Kingsport, Tennessee, and Venice, Florida, and the Garden City model influenced real estate developers such as the Van Sweringen brothers at Shaker Heights in Cleveland, Ohio, and Jesse Clyde Nichols at Country Club District in Kansas City, Missouri.³⁹ Olmsted was responsible for two large garden suburb communities founded during the 1920s: Mountain Lake Club, outside Lake Wales, Florida, and Palos Verdes Estates, south of Los Angeles, the first planned community designed explicitly for private-automobile use. In the late 1920s, planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright adapted Garden City ideas to Sunnyside Gardens in Queens and Radburn in suburban New Jersey. Their approach was influenced by the then current planning theory that “neighborhood units” should have their own recreation facilities and schools, a concept introduced by planner Clarence Arthur Perry. Perry, who had worked for the Russell Sage Foundation, developed his ideas while living on a shady street in Forest Hills Gardens. Radburn is generally described as an early example of modernist planning, but like all the earlier American garden suburbs, it owes a great debt to the reformist ideas of Ebenezer Howard.

LE CORBUSIER’S TOWERS IN A PARK

Ebenezer Howard was not the only foreigner to influence American cities. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret was born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Swiss Jura Mountains. He studied engraving at a local art school (the town was a watchmaking center), but after designing a house when he was only seventeen, he set out to be an architect. Over the next dozen years, he combined apprenticeships with two leading European practitioners—Auguste Perret in Paris and Peter Behrens in Berlin—with architectural travel in Italy, Greece, and Turkey, and a growing domestic practice in Switzerland. At age thirty, feeling constrained by his provincial surroundings, he left La Chaux for Paris.

Architectural commissions were slow in coming. Jeanneret proposed industrial buildings and mass-produced housing prototypes that he hoped would be used in France’s post First World War reconstruction, but none was built, and a concrete-block-manufacturing business venture ended in bankruptcy. Things went slightly better on the artistic front, for the aspiring industrial architect was also a painter. With his friend Amédée Ozenfant, he founded an art movement called Purism. The pair exhibited together, cowrote a manifesto, Aprés le Cubisme, which attacked both Cubism and Futurism, and briefly published a monthly magazine called L’Esprit Nouveau—The New Spirit—which billed itself as an “international review of aesthetics.” At this time, Jeanneret adopted the name Le Corbusier for his architectural writing (in part to hide that most of the articles in L’Esprit Nouveau were written by its two editors).

Le Corbusier interpreted aesthetics broadly, and his articles dealt with furniture, mass production of houses, transportation, and city planning, as well as architecture. In 1922, he was invited to exhibit in the urbanisme section of the Salon d’Automne, an annual avant-garde art and design show that included the likes of Modigliani, Chagall, and Braque. Although Le Corbusier had been asked to contribute “a pretty fountain, or something similar,” as he put it, he displayed something much grander: a design for a hypothetical new city.40 Always immoderate, Le Corbusier covered ninety feet of wall with plans, drawings, and a huge painted diorama. “[My proposal] was greeted with a sort of stupor,” he later wrote, “the shock of surprise caused rage in some quarters and enthusiasm in others.”⁴¹ Of course, “A Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants” (which just happened to be the size of Paris) was intended to shock. The diorama showed a business center consisting of twenty-four identical, sixty-story office buildings—at a time when European cities had no skyscrapers at all and the Eiffel Tower was still the tallest structure in Paris. Equally radical was the absence of traditional streets. The towers were laid out on a widely spaced grid, surrounded by parkland crisscrossed by multilevel roads (trucks below, cars above) and elevated high-speed highways. A large train station stood in the center of the plan, its roof serving as a landing field for commuter aircraft. Residential districts consisting entirely of ten-story apartment blocks, a civic center, and a large park that recalls New York’s Central Park completed the plan. The city was surrounded by a greenbelt, and taking a page from Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier included a ring of suburban “garden cities” on the periphery (during his youthful travels he had lived in a Gartenstädte on the outskirts of Berlin). Although fully two-thirds of Contemporary City’s population was housed in the garden cities, Le Corbusier must have run out of time, for he did not include details of their design. Nevertheless, the proposal represented an extraordinary debut for a self-taught city planner who was basically a penniless Bohemian, living in a seventh-floor garret in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.*⁴²

Le Corbusier’s next public foray into city planning occurred three years later, at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. This was a much grander event, an international trade fair lasting six months and consisting of two hundred pavilions, spread over seventy acres from the Invalides to the Grand Palais. While many nations were represented by their top architects (the Austrian pavilion was designed by Josef Hoffmann, the Belgian pavilion by Victor Horta), the main purpose of the exposition was to promote French culture and industry. The French designers and architects who took part included up-and-comers such as Eileen Gray, Pierre Chareau, and Robert Mallet-Stevens, but the stars of the show were the glamorous Parisian furniture makers and ensembliers such as Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Paul Poiret, and Maurice Dufrêne. Their stylized geometrical pavilions, executed in exotic and lavish materials, gave rise to the style that would take its name from the exposition—Art Deco.

By this time, Le Corbusier had established a small architecture firm (in partnership with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret) and built several villas in and around Paris. He had also achieved a small notoriety with a book, Vers une architecture, a collection of his and Ozenfant’s L’Esprit Nouveau articles. But he was hardly in the same league as Ruhlmann and Poiret, and it is unclear exactly how he got into the exposition. “No funds were available, no site was forthcoming, and the Organizing Committee of the Exhibition refused to allow the scheme I had drawn up to proceed,” he later explained in his characteristically melodramatic fashion.43 Le Corbusier liked to portray himself as a reviled outsider. In fact, his pavilion was sponsored by the motor car company of a famous aeronautical pioneer, Gabriel Voisin, and while the exhibition organizers were distinctly unenthusiastic about his didactic display material, Le Corbusier had the backing of a government minister, Anatole de Monzie, to whom he had been introduced by Gertrude Stein.^*44 In other words, the Swiss architect was a rebel with social connections.

The Pavilion de L’Esprit Nouveau consisted of two parts: a full-size, furnished model apartment, and a city-planning exhibit. Le Corbusier called the large apartment, with two floors and an outdoor roof terrace, an “apartment-villa,” since it combined the attributes of a house with high-rise living. The planning exhibit included the material that he had displayed at the Salon d’Automne—drawings, models, a diorama—augmented by an even more radical urban plan. The so-called Voisin Plan applied Le Corbusier’s theories to the center of the city of Paris. His proposal covered six hundred acres of the Right Bank, including the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Les Halles, and the Marais, and called for demolishing all the buildings except for prominent historic landmarks such as the Madeleine, the Opéra, the Palais-Royal, and the Place Vendôme. “Imagine all this junk, which till now has lain spread out over the soil like a dry crust, cleaned off and carted away and replaced by immense clear crystals of glass, rising to a height of over 600 feet,” he pronounced.45 The “junk” was replaced by eighteen sixty-story skyscrapers; as in the earlier plan, highways took the place of streets, and green space surrounded the buildings. “The whole city is a Park,” he declared.⁴⁶ If anyone thought that “A Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants” was merely an intellectual exercise, the Voisin Plan made it clear that its determined creator was deadly serious.

The rather grim little L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion was in an out-of-the-way location at the northernmost extremity of the exposition. Despite its calculated provocations, not the least of which was Le Corbusier’s use of distinctly un decorative mass-produced objects to furnish the model apartment, the pavilion did not garner much public attention. The New York Times article on the fair did not mention it, nor did the lengthy coverage in Architectural Record, the leading American professional journal.⁴⁷ The official encyclopedia of the exposition cursorily referred to the L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion as merely an “oddity.”⁴⁸ This lukewarm reception did not discourage Le Corbusier, however, and the Voisin Plan signaled the beginning of two extremely productive decades of city planning. He began by publishing the Voisin Plan and “A Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants” in a book titled Urbanisme. An English translation appeared four years later with the title The City of Tomorrow, an obvious reference to Garden Cities of To-morrow. Le Corbusier never mentioned Ebenezer Howard, but he was critical of the sort of picturesque planning espoused by Raymond Unwin, which he derided as a “glorification of the curved line and a specious demonstration of its unrivalled beauties.”49

The Voisin Plan remade Paris in a new image.

An important caveat with respect to Le Corbusier’s theory of urbanism is that there was not one theory but many. Like Robinson and Howard, the energetic architect was a popularizer and a pamphleteer, but unlike them, he was also an artist. Although Cartesian and rational were Le Corbusier’s favorite words, he was an intuitive thinker who produced urban solutions at the drop of a hat, equally quickly abandoning them—untested—when something else came to mind. Thus, while garden cities played a major role in the Contemporary City proposal, they were roundly denounced in his 1935 urban tract, La Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City): “It is necessary to abolish the suburbs and bring nature inside cities.”50 The regular checkerboard of skyscrapers that featured prominently in his first two plans likewise disappeared in later projects. Instead, the buildings grew larger and larger. A plan for a suburb of Rome had four residential towers, each for thirty-four hundred people; a proposal for a new residential district in Barcelona had two mammoth apartment buildings; and a project for Algiers housed the entire commercial district in a single massive skyscraper. This was urbanism reconceived as giant architecture.

The 1930s saw a flurry of master plans. Le Corbusier visited Barcelona, Geneva, Stockholm, Antwerp, and Algiers, made a tour of South America, and en route produced urban makeovers for Montevideo, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro. Some of these plans were drawn in detail, some were competition entries, but most were merely sketches, made quickly after an afternoon’s flyover and a public lecture. Architectural historian Charles Jencks writes of this period, “[Le Corbusier’s] output of city plans is remarkable, not only in sheer size, but also in terms of futility. Few were commissioned, fewer still were paid for and perhaps none stood the slightest chance of being adopted.”⁵¹ Jencks observes that Le Corbusier’s urban writings were at this time increasingly characterized by repetition, bombast, and sloppiness, as if he were in a hurry to put his ideas down on paper. This is especially true of La Ville Radieuse, which is a combination of monograph, scrapbook, and hysterical manifesto.

Le Corbusier’s unrealized urban visions were unusually influential. This was partly a result of his unflagging energy: he wrote articles and books, organized exhibitions, lectured widely, and cofounded the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), which campaigned for modern city planning. His influence was also the result of his growing reputation as an architect. His practice expanded, and he built several remarkable houses, including the Villa Savoye, which Robert Hughes has called “perhaps the finest example (certainly the most widely published and poetically influential one) of what came to be known as the International Style.”52 In 1927, Le Corbusier was invited to build not one but two houses at an international housing exhibition in Stuttgart, which brought together the leading firebrands of the new architecture, including Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Le Corbusier was also a finalist in a prominent international competition for the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva. He won a competition to build the Centrosoyuz ministry building in Moscow and was later invited to participate in a competition for the Palace of the Soviets. By then Stalin had turned against modern architecture, and Le Corbusier’s design did not win. Nevertheless, the striking proposal cemented its maker’s reputation as the leading modernist architect in Europe.

In 1935, Le Corbusier visited the United States at the invitation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which had included him in its landmark Modern Architecture show three years earlier and was preparing a one-man exhibition of his work. New York, which Le Corbusier termed the “City of the Incredible Towers,” impressed him; after all, it was the first time that the creator of the Voisin Plan had actually seen a skyscraper. That did not stop him from pontificating. The day after his arrival he told the New York Herald Tribune that he thought Manhattan’s skyscrapers were too small and too close together, and that he did not like the “deplorably romantic city ordinance” that mandated setbacks. He spent two and a half months in the United States on a twenty-city lecture tour that took him to all the major universities and colleges of the Northeast and Midwest. Wherever he went, he talked about urbanism, illustrating his public lectures with on-the-spot drawings done with colored crayons on huge sheets of paper. His ideas were well received by his young audiences. Since the skyscraper was an American invention, the concept of vertical cities was familiar; Americans had the highest rate of car ownership in the world, so the notion of a city planned to favor driving made sense —more sense than in Europe, where the private car was still a luxury; and American downtowns, unlike their European counterparts, had always been commercial centers, so the separation of uses—a key ingredient of the Radiant City concept—was familiar, too.

Le Corbusier with a model of his Radiant City, c. 1930.

Although Le Corbusier was hoping for American commissions, none was forthcoming. But his influence was felt in the immensely popular Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Created by the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, the display represented the United States twenty years hence. Visitors were transported above a vast model in suspended seats, like a horizontal ski chairlift, which gave the illusion of flying over the continent, coast to coast.53 The model showed an urbanized landscape that included cities with extremely tall skyscrapers, elevated walkways, and underground parking garages. This was in many ways an adaptation of the Voisin Plan, but Bel Geddes’s vision of the urban future was far more expansive than Le Corbusier’s, and the cities in Futurama were surrounded by sprawling suburban communities, connected to one another by a network of superhighways. Since the exhibit was part of the General Motors pavilion, the model was equipped with thousands of tiny moving cars.

On leaving Futurama each visitor received a blue-and-white lapel button reading I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE. It didn’t take twenty years for the future to arrive, however. Only four years after the World’s Fair closed, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, encouraged by Robert Moses, started to build a series of unusual residential projects in New York City. Parkchester, Stuyvesant Town, and Peter Cooper Village have often been described as American versions of the Radiant City.⁵⁴ Stuyvesant Town, for example, designed in 1943 by a team led by Richmond H. Shreve, consolidated eighteen city blocks into one large parcel, housing twenty-four thousand people in thirty-five more or less identical apartment blocks. The spaces between the buildings included parks and playgrounds, as well as parking lots.

Equally influential as its parklike setting was the Radiant City’s separation of urban functions. Major American cities such as Los Angeles and New York had adopted zoning legislation before the First World War, but Le Corbusier gave zoning an aesthetic rationale. Henceforth, not only would residential and commercial uses be placed apart, but a variety of other functions would be isolated in self-sufficient “centers”—shopping centers, convention centers, cultural centers, government centers, sports centers, and so on. The modern city would no longer be a hodgepodge of activities; it would be ordered, logical, planned.

Le Corbusier died in 1965, in the middle of a decade that saw his urban vision realized around the world: in Europe, in South America, where his disciples built the new city of Brasília, and in India, where he designed the master plan for the city of Chandigarh. The Soviet Union, which had rejected his architecture in the 1920s, adopted his ideas of mass-produced housing and high-rise urbanism and exported them to its ally Communist China. In America, the designers of the public housing projects that were built in almost every major city also adopted Le Corbusier’s vision. The largest of the so-called projects, Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, designed in 1962 by the city’s leading modernist firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, consisted of twenty-eight identical apartment slabs lined up in lockstep precision on a two-mile-long superblock.

Only forty years had passed since Le Corbusier unveiled “A Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants” at the Salon d’Automne. Nothing would appear less likely than that urban theories dreamed up in a Parisian garret would take hold in America, but that is exactly what happened. By the late 1950s, the City Beautiful and Garden City movements were a distant memory, the giants of that period either dead, such as Nolen and Atterbury, or retired, such as Olmsted Jr. Forest Hills Gardens was only a few decades old, but to the new generation of architects and planners it already seemed stodgy and old-fashioned, especially when compared to the exciting novelty of the Radiant City.

*Although the term civic art has gone out of fashion, it was once widely used. One of the important reference books on city planning (published in 1922), The American Vitruvius, was subtitled “An Architects’ Handbook of Civic Art.”

^*The period 1900–1930 was blessed with an overabundance of talented designers interested in the city: not only giants such as Burnham and McKim, but also great landscape architects and planners such as the Olmsted brothers, Warren Manning, John Nolen, and Jacques Gréber, and architects of the caliber of Ralph Adams Cram, Thomas Hastings, Paul Philippe Cret, and Henry Bacon.

^*Le Corbusier acknowledged the support of Frantz Jourdain, the president of the Salon, who apparently paid for mounting the exhibit.

^*The following year, de Monzie’s estranged wife, Gabrielle, and Stein’s brother and his wife commissioned a large villa from Le Corbusier, the famous Les Terrasses at Garches.