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37
Figure 2.6
Ebenezer
Howard’s Garden City
diagram (detail).
(Diagram courtesy of
M.I.T Press)
Figure 2.7
Housing at Letchworth Garden City,
Parker and Unwin, 1904. Parker and Unwin
progressively refined their techniques of
housing design and layout. Note the attention to
three-dimensional composition with a gable
form terminating the visual axis while the street
curves away to the right.
Walters_02.qxd 2/26/04 7:12 PM Page 37
architecture is always in tension with the conser-
vatism of public taste and the realities of community
politics.
As important as Letchworth was in giving urban
form to ideas of a new social and cultural order,
Parker and Unwin’s subsequent commission, Hamp-
stead Garden Suburb, designed in association with
Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1905, has proved more
influential in the practice of urban and suburban
design (Barnett: p. 73). By the early years of the
twentieth century, the area north of Hampstead in
north London remained a pocket of rural landscape
threatened with suburban encroachment on all sides.
With the extension of the London Underground
railway to nearby Golders Green, the site was ripe
for development. The client, Henrietta Barnett, a
prominent social reformer, conceived a community
comprised of people of different incomes, while the
architects saw the opportunity to develop further
Howard’s ideas of a managed synthesis of town and
country. The combination of concepts created a coali-
tion of urban and arcadian environments designed to
assist in the breaking down of rigid class barriers.
Once again, these social ideals prefigure New
Urbanist ambitions to bring order to the suburbs, and
to create diverse communities, open to different sec-
tors of society, in direct opposition to the segregation
by income so prevalent in conventional American
suburbia.
By the time they began their work on Hampstead
Garden Suburb in 1905, Parker and Unwin had
become aware of the theories of Camillo Sitte, and
Unwin’s own 1909 book,
Town Planning in Practice: an
Introduction to the art of designing Cities and Suburbs
,
contained significant sections on the design of public
spaces and streets that incorporated many of Sitte’s
ideas. Unwin was probably familiar with the first
French edition of Sitte’s writings published in 1902
under the title of
L’Art de Batir les Villes
, because there
was no full translation in English until 1965
(although passages were approvingly quoted by
Hegemann and Peets in their influential
The
American Vitruvius: An Architect’s Handbook of Civic
Art
, published in America in 1922). Indeed Unwin
refers almost exclusively to Sitte’s medieval prece-
dents, to the exclusion of classical, Renaissance, and
Baroque examples. This purely medieval bias was not
one contained in Sitte’s original publication, but one
which dominated the 1902 and 1918 French editions,
and which stemmed from bizarre editorial decisions
by his translator, Camille Martin. A medievalist
by training and preference, Martin substituted French
and Belgian examples for the German and Austrian
precedents used by Sitte, and eliminated all reference
to Baroque urbanism. The Frenchman’s motivations
have been discussed by George and Christianne
Collins in their extensive introduction to the 1986
critical edition of Sitte’s original text.
As we discussed briefly in Chapter 1, Sitte’s
approach to urban design was not based on the logic
of abstract geometries, but rather on what a pedes-
trian would see and experience when walking through
the spaces of a city. This approach was validated by
Unwin in his work, and later in the 1960s by Gordon
Cullen, whose concept of ‘Serial Vision’ was formu-
lated from similar principles. This emphasis on the
pedestrian has caught the attention of contemporary
urban designers, who stress, particularly in America,
the reactivation of public space and the creation of
‘Walkable Communities’ as an alternative to car-
dominated sprawl.
The idea of the city comprehended as a series of
pedestrian views was close to the idea of the English
landscape picturesque garden, where follies would be
located to terminate vistas and for other visual effects,
and at Hampstead, Parker and Unwin used this sensi-
bility to create a plan of greater conceptual clarity
than had been evident in their previous work. Despite
a disappointingly weak design by Sir Edwin Lutyens
for the central area, which isolated monumental
buildings in space in a manner at odds with Unwin
and Sitte’s precepts of urban enclosure, Parker and
Unwin developed a residential layout that was archi-
tecturally stronger and urbanistically tighter than
Letchworth. It included a pair of very fine Germanic
entrance buildings on the main Finchley Road, incor-
porating shops and housing in a dynamic interplay of
symmetry and asymmetry (see Figure 2.8).
The influence of Letchworth and Hampstead
Garden Suburb crossed to America almost immedi-
ately with the design of Forest Hills Gardens, a model
streetcar suburb of New York City, started in
1909 using designs by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr
and Grosvenor Atterbury (Barnett: p. 76). Around
the railway station, Atterbury created an attractive
enclosed urban space as the entrance to the
community and the beginning of a sequence of
spaces that were organized as, in the opinion of one
critic, ‘a metaphoric journey from town to country’
(Stern: p. 34).
The next most vivid manifestation of garden city
concepts also took place in America as a direct result
of the nation’s entry into World War I in 1917.
This created an immediate demand for housing for
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
38
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the dramatically increased population of industrial
workers around manufacturing locations. Federal
agencies supported design and construction pro-
grams for 25 000 homes, and Charles Whittaker, edi-
tor of
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