John Nolen and Raymond Unwin: Garden City Collaborators

The English Garden City Movement, advocated by Ebenezer Howard and the associated town designs by Raymond Unwin were some of the earliest reactions to the environmental degradation and placelessness of the European Industrial City circa 1900. John Nolen (1869 - 1937) was one of the earliest American adopters of the Garden City ideals. Over the course of his career, Nolen designed fifty-five new towns and subdivisions across the United States. Most of these plans had elements that were adapted from Sir Raymond Unwin’s principles and spatial conditions to fit the unique cultural landscape of the emerging American middle class. Placemaking was one of the central goals of the Garden City. Places, at multiple scales, town, neighborhood, and street distinguished the Garden City from the monotonous and chaotic landscape of most cities. A unique characteristic of the planned communities and subdivisions by Nolen is that they demonstrate the potential of integrating landscape architecture, architecture and planning principles to construct an underlying infrastructure of placeanchors, to guide place-making during build-out phases, even when build-out occurred decades later. Plans designed by Nolen’s firm after 1920 characteristically included strong formal elements, central greens, axial boulevards and a hierarchy of spatial conditions extending from the town center to the thoughtful termination of a residential street. These post-1920 plans showed what I am calling “place anchors” that established landmarks at the scale of neighborhood, district, and town. This paper will present a comparative study of the “as designed” and “as built” conditions of two projects designed in the early 1920’s and “built-out” in the competitive post-depression economy of the late 1930’s. The projects, in Mariemont, Ohio and at Windsor Farms, Virginia, are the result of John Nolen’s unique transformation of Garden City principles to fit the landscape of the emerging American suburb.