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The first book devoted to this landmark of architecture, urban planning, and social engineering Situated in the borough of Queens, New York, Sunnyside Gardens has been an icon of urbanism and planning since its inception in the 1920s. Not the most beautifully planned community, nor the most elegant, and certainly not the most perfectly preserved, Sunnyside Gardens nevertheless endures as significant both in terms of the planning principles that inspired its creators and in its subsequent history. Why this garden suburb was built and how it has fared over its first century is at the heart of Sunnyside Gardens. Reform-minded architects and planners in England and the United States knew too well the social and environmental ills of the cities around them at the turn of the twentieth century. Garden cities gained traction across the Atlantic before the Great War, and its principles were modified by American pragmatism to fit societal conditions and applied almost as a matter of faith by urban planners for much of the twentieth century. The designers of Sunnyside— Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Frederick Ackerman, and landscape architect Marjorie Cautley—crafted a residential community intended to foster a sense of community among residents. Richly illustrated throughout with historic and contemporary photographs as well as architectural plans of the houses, blocks, and courts, Sunnyside Gardens first explores the planning of Sunnyside, beginning with the English garden-city movement and its earliest incarnations built around London. Chapters cover the planning and building of Sunnyside and its construction by the City Housing Corporation, the design of the homes and gardens, and the tragedy of the Great Depression, when hundreds of families lost their homes. The second section examine how the garden suburbs outside London have been preserved and how aesthetic regulation is enforced in New York. The history of the preservation of Sunnyside Gardens is discussed in depth, as is the controversial proposal to place the Aluminaire House, an innovative housing prototype from the 1930s, on the only vacant site in the historic district. Sunnyside Gardens pays homage to a time when far-sighted and socially conscious architects and planners sought to build communities, not merely buildings, a spirit that has faded to near-invisibility
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.
Diversity and density in housing today Accomodation of diversity and the creation of urban density are a focus of world-wide building and planning activities today. This book combines the architectural and urban scales to demonstrate that it is a specific quality, urban intensity, which determines the success of housing. The authors provide a typology of housing according to the ways in which diversity and density are created. Comparisons with historical models and critical appraisals based on the authors’ unique standing give ample information on the pros and cons of major types of housing, their pitfalls and successful examples. Newly created sets of drawings, from floor plans to spectacular 3D aerial views of the buildings in their urban contexts, accompany each of the more than twenty case studies that are described and analyzed in detail. The approach taken here relates to many pressing issues in contemporary housing, including the avoidance of urban sprawl, the revival of city centers and the ongoing search for innovative housing types. A qualitative approach to diversity and density in housing A concept that unites architectural and urban design A wide range of original drawings of benchmark case studies