Design First Walters fm qxd 2/26/04 7: 50 pm page I

The Journal of the American Institute of
Architects
lobbied to ensure that these new homes
were not designed as barracks – but as permanent
communities. Whittaker strenuously publicized the
work of Raymond Unwin, who was in charge of the
British war-housing program, and who had argued
forcefully for the British construction effort to be
considered a permanent investment in housing provi-
sion (Barnett: p. 78). Frederick Law Olmsted Jr was
given control of the American planning effort, and in
the endeavor to create permanent communities of
good quality, he appointed talented designers to lay
out the new communities. Among them was John
Nolen, a great admirer of Parker and Unwin, and
whose reputation as a rising star in American plan-
ning was enhanced by his design of a fine new town
at Kingsport, Tennessee.
During the nineteenth century it had been the rail-
way that exerted most influence on urban and subur-
ban form, but around the time of World War I the
private automobile began to make its impact felt. As
the next major technological development in trans-
portation, even relatively primitive cars brought about
a dramatic increase in personal mobility. The suburbs
no longer had to be located at railway stations or
along streetcar lines. The notion of designing urban
space as a function of walking distance to and from
town centers or transit stops began to fall into disuse,
to be replaced by new planning concepts scaled to the
dimensions and speed of the car.
A pair of early twentieth-century suburbs, Beverly
Hills, Los Angeles (commenced 1906) and the
Country Club District in Kansas City, Missouri 
(commenced 1907 with its famed commercial core,
Country Club Plaza dating from 1922), indicated the
impending spatial revolution heralded by the automo-
bile. These layouts included facilities such as up-
market shopping centers accessible by road rather than
rail, broad boulevards and longer blocks. Larger block
sizes reduced the cost of constructing intersections and
cross-streets, but they also eliminated the very features
that provided a more intimate scale and choice of
route to the pedestrian. As one of the few planners of
the period to recognize some of the impacts the car
would have upon the layout of towns, John Nolen
made a significant contribution to this evolving form
of urbanism. In his 1918 design of Mariemont, out-
side Cincinnati, Ohio, he dispensed with any railway
connections to the larger city, attempting instead to
integrate the car into a garden suburb layout.
Despite these precursors, a new form of suburban
development specific to the automobile age did not
arise until 1928, with plans for an American new town
at Radburn, New Jersey. Conceived as an American
counterpart to Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City
(Britain’s second Garden City, begun in 1921), only a
fraction of Radburn was completed (one neighbor-
hood) due largely to the onset of the Great Depression
in 1929. Nonetheless, the plans of its designers,
Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, proved immensely
influential. At a stroke, Radburn turned suburban
design on its head, using multiple dead-end streets
within a long, curving arterial loop road in place of a
connected network of streets and smaller blocks.
While Parker and Unwin had invented cul-de-sacs
and used them to good effect at Hampstead Garden
CHAPTER TWO
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CITIES, SUBURBS AND SPRAWL