patterns of american urbanism
TRANSCRIPT
ERIC MUMFORD
Washington University in St. Louis
This article examines how a shift toward decentralized and automobile-based patterns of American
metropolitan development was a major aspect of the national defense buildup that took place just
before Pearl Harbor. It suggests that the continuing and seemingly permanent clash between what
are now standard contemporary suburban development practices and the ideas of architects about
the design of cities and metropolitan areas can be traced back to that pivotal time.
National Defense Migrationand the Transformations ofAmerican Urbanism, 1940–1942
IntroductionArchitecture and urbanism in the United States are
now usually understood as standing between the
opposed categories of urban versus suburban and
modernist versus traditional. Architects and others
concerned with the physical environment usually
favor the urban and the modernist, yet the main-
stream stubbornly prefers the traditional and,
sometimes, the more or less suburban. New
Urbanists try to revive American urbanity by turning
to traditional forms, and American architects con-
stantly move among these opposed categories.
How did this situation, which is relatively unique to
North America, arise? There is remarkably little
scholarship that addresses this important question.
Before the Depression, most American archi-
tects worked in urban environments, and their
professional education and working methodology
typically were informed by the Beaux-Arts tradition,
centered on the replication and transformation of
canonical historic buildings. By the 1930s, the
craftwork involved in producing such buildings had
become prohibitively expensive, and elaborate
decorative motifs had begun to seem anachronistic.
Between 1930 and 1945, the architectural situation
in America began to shift, and by the postwar
period, American architects generally favored
modernism for commercial and corporate work. Yet
by then, they no longer had much influence on the
form of larger metropolitan environments.This shift
normally is attributed to the introduction of
Bauhaus-derived design methods into American
architectural education by Walter Gropius at
Harvard and by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Neither former
Bauhaus director was able to implement any large-
scale urbanism in the 1940s, however, except for
Mies’ IIT campus in Chicago and one little-known
defense housing settlement near Pittsburgh,
Aluminum City Terrace in New Kensington,
Pennsylvania, by Gropius and Breuer. While the
open site planning of IIT became an influential
model for urban slum clearance, copied almost
immediately at Wayne State University in Detroit
and elsewhere, it is difficult to maintain that these
projects single-handedly provoked the transforma-
tion of both American cities and the profession of
architecture at this time.
A generally overlooked historical moment that
may shed some light on this changing mid-century
context of American architecture is the short period
just before the United States entered the Second
World War in December 1941. At that point, which
in American historical memory is now normally
joined with the war years themselves, the nation’s
urban patterns began to be reorganized to foster
decentralization, both within metropolitan areas
and across the country. The Federal government
located new war production plants in the poor and
rural south and southwest, greatly increasing
regional populations and raising local standards of
living. At the same moment, older industrialized
cities began to be defined as problem areas. Their
relatively high densities, aging, rail-based infra-
structures, and increasing traffic congestion were
seen by planners and many ordinary Americans as
‘‘obsolete.’’ It was precisely at this same moment
that large numbers of African Americans began to
move into these long-established industrial cities in
search of jobs in war plants and shipyards. Under-
standing the long-term effects of this little-noted
historical turning point, which also coincides with
the end of the Beaux-Arts tradition, may help
explain some of the current environment within
which American architecture now operates.
While there have been many social upheavals
in the United States since then, the ambiguous
legacy of this time—the point at which the New
Deal morphed into a kind of permanent defense-
oriented state—is still recognizable. Yet, most
architectural historians have failed to examine it in
any detail. Perhaps this is because many of its
conflicts remain unresolved. It was at this time that
once-grand (and then mostly white) American cities
in the north and east increasingly began to ware-
house the poor and nonwhite, and it was also when
increasing numbers of upwardly mobile Americans
began to eagerly move to suburban housing
designed to avoid the overcrowding and lack of
sanitation then typically found in poor urban areas.
25 MUMFORD Journal of Architectural Education,
pp. 25–34 ª 2008 ACSA
This demographic shift prompted more Americans
to travel to work by car on new efficient modern
highways instead by streetcars, which were
removed in most American cities by 1960. At the
urban level, a major outcome of this time was to set
the pattern for the creation of sprawling and seg-
regated metropolitan areas that ultimately became
the postwar norm. Few then regretted the aban-
donment of old working-class industrial areas, as
this was a period of unprecedented egalitarian
expansion of opportunity for the majority of
Americans workers, one seldom replicated since.
DecentralizationThe decentralizing tendencies of American cities
were not new in the late 1930s, and ‘‘sprawl’’ and
the development of Anglo-American suburban
patterns are pre-twentieth century phenomena.1
What was significant about the defense buildup
that began in 1939, undertaken in response to the
likelihood that the then-neutral United States
would be drawn once again into a European war,
was the massive national effort to decentralize
defense-related industry. Peter Galison argues that
American assessments of the effects of Allied
bombing operations in Germany and Japan during
the war led directly to the postwar effort to
decentralize defense plants in the United States. He
interprets this ‘‘war against the center’’ as a ‘‘new,
bizarre and yet pervasive species of Lacanian mir-
roring’’ of the Fascist enemy.2 I would suggest that
the actual situation was even stranger: instead of
American defense-related industrial decentraliza-
tion being the consequence of applying the lessons
of the militarily successful Allied bombing cam-
paigns in destroying Nazi Germany, industrial
decentralization of American defense industries in
fact preceded the entry of the United States into
the war. An internal war against the center as an
industrial location was well underway before Pearl
Harbor, and it continued long after the war was over.3
This war against the center began with the
largest peacetime defense buildup in American
history (Figure 1). This led to the commissioning of
hundreds of new industrial plants throughout the
country, many of them designed by the premier
industrial architect of the twentieth century, the
Detroit-based Albert Kahn. It is not difficult to see
in their siting the application of the ideas of Kahn’s
patron Henry Ford, who had been advocating
industrial decentralization since the 1920s, and
these converged with the similar views of his
political opposite, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The president had written to Ford in 1934 that he
too was thinking about getting people out of the
cities and into the country by relocating industries
into small towns.4 At first, the majority of these new
defense plants were sited in outlying areas of
existing industrial cities, the places now generally
known as the ‘‘Rustbelt,’’ extending from the
northeast to the Great Lakes. By April 1941,
however, according to a member of the Federal
Plant-Site Committee, efforts were underway to
encourage wider distribution of plants across the
country. Factors in the siting decisions included
closeness to raw materials, particularly steel and
coal, and proximity to supplies of labor. The United
States was then still a predominantly agricultural
country, and considerable efforts were made not to
site plants near where ‘‘specially trained farm labor
is needed.’’ Instead, many new plants were located
in ‘‘the southern and southwestern states,’’ where
unemployment had remained high.5 In all regions,
the plants were usually located at the urban
periphery, producing the decentralizing effects1. Chart of monthly government expenditures. (Source: Architectural
Forum 75 [July 1941]: 6.)
2. Sketch of Glenn L. Martin Plant expansions. (Source: Architectural Forum 75 [July 1941]: 337.)
National Defense Migration and the Transformations of
American Urbanism, 1940–1942
26
strongly advocated by both Ford and Roosevelt and
by planners and architects at this time of both
modernist and classicist inclinations.
The monuments of this new industrial devel-
opment were based on earlier innovations already
evident in projects like Albert Kahn’s Chrysler Half-
Ton Truck Plant (1937) in Warren, Michigan. They
reached new levels of technical sophistication at
Kahn’s 1937 and 1939 additions to the Glenn L.
Martin Aviation Plant in Middle River, Maryland,
just outside Baltimore (Figure 2). A photo of this
300# � 450# clear span airplane production space
was used by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the
background to his famous 1940s concert hall pho-
tomontages, the prototype images of postwar
Miesian ‘‘universal space’’6 (Figure 3). Similarly, the
curtain wall at Kahn’s Chrysler Tank Arsenal (1941),
also in Warren, was the inspiration for Mies’ first
building on the IIT campus, the Metallurgical
Research Building (1943).7 Many of the plants,
however, described by a participant in the 1942
Harvard Conference on Urbanism convened by
Joseph Hudnut and Walter Gropius as ‘‘character-
istically large and suburban,’’ often still had
Streamlined Moderne or neoclassical detailing.8
The ‘‘National Defense Migration’’ that
resulted from the siting of these plants is one of the
least studied turning points in American urban and
architectural history. Seven million workers, many
of them poor and unemployed, began to move to
new centers of defense production, transforming
the demographics and the form of American met-
ropolitan areas and whole regions of the country.
The social effects were so unprecedented and
controversial that a long series of Congressional
hearings were held at various locations based on
House Resolution 113: ‘‘A resolution to inquire
further into the interstate migration of citizens,
emphasizing the present and potential conse-
quences of the migration caused by the National
Defense program.’’ At the Washington DC hearings
in March 1941, the committee was told that there
were basically four kinds of ‘‘migration points’’:
3. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and IIT students, concert hall collage,
1942. (Museum of Modern Art, New York.)
4. Map of defense housing settlements in San Diego, 1941. (Source:
Architectural Forum 76 [May 1942]: 272.)
27 MUMFORD
army bases; munitions plants, generally in rural
areas; shipbuilding and aircraft centers; and ‘‘old
centers’’ of steel production and other heavy
manufacturing.9 All four types were experiencing
massive in-migrations ‘‘like boom towns of the
past,’’ leading to a ‘‘great shifting of the popula-
tion.’’ There was ‘‘evidence that the whole country
is on wheels.’’10 The effects included housing
shortages, rising rents, crowded schools, and the
‘‘decentralization of vice’’; these were among the
conditions that led to the lengthy series of hear-
ings, which continued into 1943. All sorts of places
were affected, ranging from old industrial cities
such as those in upstate New York or Connecticut to
new high-tech manufacturing centers such as
Wichita, Kansas, or West Coast defense magnets
such as Seattle, the Bay Area, and San Diego. The
latter was described at the hearings held there in
June 1941 as ‘‘fast becoming, because of extensive
Federal involvement here, a second District of
Columbia’’ (Figures 4, 5). In most places such as
these, the new growth was not near the old
downtown or even in the newer streetcar-based
areas of the 1920s but at the metropolitan
periphery. It was noted that ‘‘commuters come and
go for incredible distances’’ by car and that ‘‘family
hopes center around the automobile’’ (Figure 6).
The new pattern was the culmination of two
decades of American car-centered development,
and it had no precedent in previous urbanized
societies. It was also closely linked to new devel-
opment practices encouraged by the Federal
Housing Administration (FHA) founded in 1934.
Greg Hise has examined the interrelationships
between the growth of the aerospace industry in
Los Angeles and the large FHA-backed home-
builders there in the late 1930s. Many of these big
employers precipitated the construction of
immense new single-family house subdivisions on
bare land in places such as Toluca Wood in North
Hollywood, Westchester, and Westside Village.
These were all located in close proximity to new
defense plants and are indistinguishable from
postwar suburban developments. Their gridded
layouts and emphasis on racial exclusion continued
Southern California real estate practices of the
preceding decades, but their distance from street-
car lines reshaped the residential geography of the
region. Technologically, they pioneered the use of
preassembled wood framing and plumbing com-
ponents, along with the Taylorized assembly line
construction methods later often associated with
the postwar Levittowns built near New York City
and Philadelphia.11
The racially exclusionary element of this new
decentralized pattern was undeniable, yet at the
same time these developments for war workers
made eventual home ownership possible for mil-
lions. Although racial discrimination in defense
industries had been declared illegal by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 in
1941, the practices of the FHA remained as set out
in the 1939 publication The Structure and Growth
of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities.
These practices forbade Federal mortgage insur-
ance in areas that were over fifty percent nonwhite,
leading to racial segregation in new defense set-
tlements even in areas where it had not previously
been practiced. In Richmond, California—one of the
fastest growing centers of defense production—
black and white migrants from Texas, Arkansas,
Oklahoma, and Louisiana streamed into the area for
high-paying work in the Kaiser shipyards. To deal
with the influx, the FHA ‘‘gave priority ratings to
white defense worker settlements protected by
racial covenants’’ built by private developers,12
while at the same time, the Richmond Housing
Authority designated only eight of twenty new
public housing projects it began building on
swampy flatlands for African-American residents.13
In many places, official practices such as these
set racial boundaries that have implicitly remained
in place.
DesignAlthough the prewar defense buildup took place
during a period when the planning profession had
considerable prestige, the physical results were for
the most part makeshift and not admired even at
the time. The emphasis was on rapid production
and crisis management as defense priority areas
5. Persina and Sanders, three thousand rental houses for the Public
Buildings Administration, San Diego, 1941. (Source: Architectural
Forum 76 [May 1942].)
National Defense Migration and the Transformations of
American Urbanism, 1940–1942
28
were quickly overwhelmed, first with large new
populations of workers and then by the American
entry into the war itself. What planning there was
tended to be loosely based on Garden City prece-
dents, as filtered through the experience of the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the immense and
largely successful New Deal effort to use the pro-
vision of hydroelectric power to transform a previ-
ously poor and isolated section of the country. In
addition to standard small house developments,
TVA architects and technicians had developed
various types of trailers as shelter options, which
then set international standards.14 Trailers based on
the TVA model and other kinds of prefabricated
shelters were then used as temporary housing in
war-devastated parts of Europe, notably in Britain,15
and even Le Corbusier offered his services to design
some on his American visit in 1946.16 Trailer camps
became an important part of the defense housing
effort and remained after the war as an essential
part of the postwar American vernacular landscape.
The whole regionalist conception of the TVA based
on creating a harmonious balance between
human settlement, agriculture, and industry
became a key reference point for subsequent
international planning in Latin America, India, and
elsewhere in the postwar decades.
Modernist and regionalist ideas similar to
those used by the TVA had also been put forward
by housing activist Catherine Bauer. Her book
Modern Housing inspired both advocates of urban
public housing like the Philadelphia architects
Oscar Stonorov and Louis I. Kahn as well as more
rurally oriented ‘‘housers’’ (as advocates of better
housing were then called) like Vernon DeMars, an
architect for the Farm Security Administration’s
(FSA) West Coast office in San Francisco from 1937
to 1941.17 FSA design teams, led by the African-
American architect Burton D. Cairns, fostered col-
laboration between architects, engineers, and
landscape architects. These teams designed dozens
of government-sponsored camps for migrant
workers in the West Coast states and in Arizona18
and were then responsible for some thirty percent
of all the defense housing built in California during
the war. Garrett Eckbo, an FSA landscape architect
and site planner and later the founder of the firm
EDAW, explained his approach as seeing the ‘‘total
site space as one operation’’19 (Figure 8). Accord-
ing to Eckbo, this kind of landscape design practice
made clear ‘‘the futility and obsolescence of the
present carefully established and maintained pro-
fessional boundaries.’’20 Instead of more traditional
definitions of architecture, Eckbo advocated that
the design of what he called the ‘‘human environ-
ment’’ be based on the ‘‘four basic elements’’ of
‘‘people, space, materials, and specific conditions.’’
While this now sounds familiar, DeMars, Eckbo, and
the other FSA designers were among the first to
attempt this synthesis of architecture, landscape,
and planning. Their work paralleled and, in Eckbo’s
case, overlapped with Dean Joseph Hudnut’s
efforts to create a Graduate School of Design at
Harvard by combining the formerly separate
Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture
and Planning in 1936.21
Although the innovative practices used by the
FSA and taught at Harvard after 1936 never
became the official government planning policy
that their proponents hoped for, a number of large
defense settlements were designed along these
lines by well-known modern architects such as
Gropius and Breuer, Richard Neutra, Stonorov and
Kahn, Antonin Raymond, and Frank Lloyd Wright.22
Younger practitioners also received some of these
commissions, including Gropius’ assistant Hugh
Stubbins of Boston, Kelly and Gruzen of New York,
and Mitchell and Ritchie of Pittsburgh (Figure 9).23
These projects were all commissioned by Clark
Foreman, the director of the Division of Defense
Housing, an agency that was created within the
Federal Works Administration in April 1941 by the
Lanham Act.24 Their site planning was derived from
that of the West Coast FSA settlements and the
slightly earlier Greenbelt towns (1936–1938).25
Like the FHA subdivision layouts of the same time,
these new automobile-oriented settlements were
completely based on auto transportation. Unlike
the ubiquitous FHA subdivisions of small, white
Cape Cod houses on gently curving streets, how-
ever, defense settlements also included a range of
multifamily housing types, as at Neutra’s Channel
Heights in San Pedro, California, and Avion Village
in Grand Prairie, Texas, or Vernon DeMars and
William Wurster’s defense projects at Vallejo,
California, which were the largest ones built.
Many of these projects included landscape
6. TVA, defense housing as exhibited by the Office for Emergency
Management, 1942. (Source: Library of Congress.)
29 MUMFORD
designed to relate to local topography and climate,
as well as innovative architecture, planning, and the
use of experimental construction technologies.
Although the results were widely publicized and
praised in the architectural press and in publications
such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Built in USA,
1932–1944, they do not seem to have been partic-
ularly well received by the war workers themselves.26
Their European modernist-inspired focus on collec-
tive living and efficient minimal dwellings was only
attractive to a relatively small minority. As new
planning models, they also had little appeal to the
mainstream subdivision developers who built
eighty percent of the defense settlements with FHA
backing. The skepticism of developers about
large-scale planning that arose at this time
continues to shape American development prac-
tices today.
The clear turning point for modernist planning,
and perhaps for American suburban master plan-
ning in general, came in 1942 at the Willow Run
Bomber Plant in Michigan. The Ford Motor Com-
pany had built the Albert Kahn–designed plant to
produce long-range bombers on a remote site near
Ypsilanti, thirty miles west of Detroit, to avoid the
massive unionization drive then going on there. In
response, the Federal Public Housing Administra-
tion (FPHA) proposed a new defense settlement to
address the labor shortages said to be slowing
down production. This new ‘‘Bomber City’’ was to
be an entire new town composed of five neigh-
borhood units, each designed for 1,200 families,
located on a site between Holmes and Geddes
Roads. However, Henry Ford saw the influx of so
many likely union members as threatening his
political control of then-rural Washtenaw County,
and he was ultimately able to keep the settlement
from being built.27 During the Washtenaw County
controversy, the original master plan was scaled
back from five to three residential neighborhoods
of 750 units each, which were to be designed by the
firms of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Stonorov
and Kahn, and Mayer and Whittlesey (Figure 7).
All the neighborhoods would focus on a Town
Center designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen, whose
design strongly prefigures postwar pedestrian
shopping centers.28 The design of the Willow Run
Town Center, which included neighborhood-
oriented shopping, city hall, post office, police
station, bus station, hotel, and high school, was
also typical of the Saarinens’ urban design work for
the Detroit area at this time, although very little of
this was actually built.29 Despite the initially posi-
tive reception of the entire new town plan by the
United Auto Workers (UAW), whose President
Walter Reuther was a friend of Stonorov, by June
1942 the UAW housing commission began to
oppose the plan on stylistic grounds. The project
was canceled in October 1942 after a few roads had
been constructed. Instead of a model community,
the FPHA built some temporary dormitories for
single workers, some of them designed by the
Saarinens, and a variety of ‘‘tar paper shacks, tents
and trailers’’;30 eventually, more expensive private
subdivisions covered much of the site.The defeat of
modernist Greenbelt town–type planning at Willow
Run was arguably a key turning point for American
urbanism. Following the Willow Run project, archi-
tects, because of their allegiance to modernist
planning ideals, would not be allowed to shape the
form of the new decentralized American city.
Instead, both labor and management would agree
that subdivisions of single-family houses of vaguely
traditional styling should be the normative Ameri-
can housing form. Neither would be much con-
cerned with how the subdivision layouts fit
together to create the larger metropolitan pattern.
Several other large FPHA defense new towns
would be built after Willow Run, including Vanport,
Oregon, designed by planner J.M. Moscowitz with
architects Wolff and Phillips near Portland. During
the war, Vanport was the second largest city in
Oregon, and its most notable feature was the
extensive day care provisions for the large number
of its women defense workers.31 The FPHA also
issued guidelines for shopping center design in
1942, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed
what may be one of the world’s first strip malls for
‘‘Aero Acres,’’ adjacent to the Glenn L. Martin Plant
in Middle River, Maryland.32 A larger town center,
also designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,
7. Mayer and Whittlesey; Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill; Stonorov
and Kahn, Willow Run Master Plan. (Source: Architectural Forum 78
[March 1943]: 41.)
National Defense Migration and the Transformations of
American Urbanism, 1940–1942
30
that consisted mainly of similar strip malls with
plentiful parking, was part of the then-secret
‘‘Atom City’’ of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, designed
with TVA planner Tracy Augur33 (Figure 11).
Unfortunately, SOM’s winding arterial road network
and their efforts to preserve the picturesque natural
areas in their Oak Ridge plan did not become
a planning model for the postwar urban transfor-
mation of the United States.
Instead of the redesigned metropolitan areas
and master-planned regions sought by architects
and planners, the broad outlines of the urban
transformations wrought by National Defense
Migration in 1940–1942 are now familiar every-
where in the United States. The shift from mixed-
use streetcar cities to single-family house and auto-
based communities greatly increased in response to
the rapid relocation of industrial jobs from older
industrial centers to the new metropolitan areas. By
the late 1950s, most of the older industrial cities,
some of them boomtowns during the war years,
began to rapidly lose population. Others, like
Chicago and St. Louis, grew in population with the
arrival of African Americans forbidden to move to
the new suburban areas, setting the stage for the
‘‘urban renewal’’ efforts of the 1950s and the urban
crises that followed.34 During the early 1940s, the
long-term implications of these new patterns of
postwar metropolitan development were not obvi-
ous: most professional and office jobs remained in
old rail-based downtowns and the long-distance
express highways were then just beginning to be
built, starting with the Pennsylvania Turnpike,
a defense-preparedness effort begun in 1941.
Though most of the elements of the older
models of American urbanism that many architects,
critics, and others admire (and that some still wish
to revive) were still present in 1941—passenger
rail systems, streetcars, dense neighborhoods full
of small stores, and a range of housing types—
this period is notable for its wholesale devaluation
and widespread elimination of all those elements.
Nearly all the new housing and infrastructure
8. Garrett Eckbo, ‘‘Site Planning,’’ Architectural Forum 76 (May
1942): 263.
9. James A. Mitchell and Dahlen K. Ritchie, defense housing at
North Braddock, Pennsylvania, 1941. (Source: Architectural Forum
75 [October 1941]: 221.)
31 MUMFORD
10. Privately built defense housing, 1941. (Source: Architectural Forum 74 [May 1941].)
National Defense Migration and the Transformations of
American Urbanism, 1940–1942
32
constructed at this time was based not on the
rational reuse of existing urban environments but
on an ambitious effort to create an entirely new,
auto-based urban pattern that would decentralize
industry and ensure that every defense worker had
adequate suburban shelter. Most of it was ulti-
mately built out in the form of small tract houses by
the private sector, constructed over the strenuous
objections of many architects and academics
(Figure 10).35 What was at issue between them
was not then about urban pedestrian vitality or the
preservation of older buildings and neighborhoods
but about the role of government in housing and
planning and about density, racial integration, and
architectural expression. These debates continued
into the immediate postwar years, but in the
1950s, in most suburbs, the real estate industry
had won the battle against planning, leading to
the seemingly permanent marginalization of
architects in American urbanism. A new kind of
metropolitan society began to emerge, one where
more urban ways of living were, for many, a nos-
talgic memory.
ConclusionsThe 1940–1942 period of National Defense
Migration was pivotal in the transition from the
older rail-based American society dominated by the
industrial cities to the auto-based American met-
ropolitan and regional patterns still evident today.
In terms of architecture and urbanism, this period
produced a series of design stand-offs rather than
a new design consensus. These involved both bat-
tles between classicist and modernist architects
over style and conflicts between architects and
developers over planning, as seen at Willow Run
and replayed many times since then. Perhaps as
a result of these conflicts, the postwar period was
dominated more by the application of bureaucratic
standards than by standards of communal design.
Elements of modernist design thinking about effi-
ciency and cost control were joined with reductive
approaches that emphasized uniform single-family
houses with vaguely traditionalist styling. These
then became standard development practices, and
there was little expectation that architects would be
part of the design process. While modernists like
Hudnut, Gropius, and others were able to transform
architectural and planning education, ending the
hegemony of the Beaux-Arts model in the nation’s
major architecture schools, they were unable to
make their alternative vision compelling to a broad
spectrum of American stakeholders such as devel-
opers, buyers, and politicians. The new design
methods and models were simply not embraced at
the societal level as their apologists had hoped they
would be, a considerable contrast to the situation
that would prevail in postwar Western Europe, Latin
America, and Japan. Instead, a combination of
ostensibly cost-driven pragmatism and the practi-
ces of the FHA would shape the postwar American
landscape.
Since the postwar period, when the funda-
mental element of postwar American urbanism
became the single-family house subdivision,
American architects have been largely unable to
implement their many design agendas for reor-
ganizing urban areas. These would require new
forms of land subdivision and the possibility of
more extensive pedestrian-accessible uses that are
simply no longer standard practices and are often
forbidden by zoning. With these options defined as
now beyond the norm in the postwar suburban
environment, stylistic conflicts have come to dom-
inate the narrowed world of architectural debate.
As a result, American architecture and urbanism still
seem permanently stalled in the year that the war
was to end, ‘‘194x.’’
AcknowledgmentsThanks as always to my family and to Elysse New-
man and Adam Drisin for their helpful editing of
this article.
Notes
1. A classic account of suburbanization is Robert Fishman, Bourgeois
Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987);
one more focused on the twentieth century is Rosalyn Baxandall and
Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York:
Basic Books, 2000).
2. Peter Galison, ‘‘War Against the Center,’’ in Antoine Picon and
Alessandra Ponte, eds., Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging
Metaphors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003),
pp. 196–227.
3. ‘‘Building for Defense . . . Construction Expenditures Peak,’’ Archi-
tectural Forum 74 (1941): 6.
4. Walter Creese, TVA’s Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 20.
5. ‘‘Statement of M. Clifford Townsend, Director, Office of Defense
Relations, Department of Agriculture, and Member of the Plant-Site
Committee, Office of Production Management, Washington, DC,’’ in
National Defense Migration, Hearings before the Select Committee
Investigating National Defense Migration, House of Representatives, 77th
Congress, First Session, Part 16, July 15–17, 1941 (Washington, DC:
United States Congress, 1941), pp. 6545–73.
11. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Oak Ridge Town Center plan.
(Source: Architectural Record 83 [October 1945]: 106.)
33 MUMFORD
6. Phyllis Lambert, ed., Mies in America (New York: Harry Abrams,
2001), pp. 424–25; William Jordy, American Buildings and the Architects,
Volume 5: The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth
Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 223–25.
7. Lambert, Mies in America, pp. 282–91.
8. Edgar M. Hoover, ‘‘The Urban Economy of the Future,’’ in Guy Greer,
ed., The Problem of the Cities and Towns: Report of the Conference on
Urbanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), pp. 1–5. Hoover
was also a member of the National Resources Planning Board, whose
activities by Fall 1941 included ‘‘postwar planning.’’
9. National Defense Migration, Hearings before the Select Committee
Investigating National Defense Migration, House of Representatives, 77th
Congress, First Session, Part 11, March 24–26, 1941 (Washington DC:
United States Congress, 1941), p. 4255.
10. Ibid., pp. 4259–63.
11. Greg Hise, ‘‘The Airplane and the Garden City: Regional Transfor-
mations during World War II,’’ in Donald Albrecht, ed., World War II and
the American Dream (Washington, DC and Cambridge, MA: National
Building Museum/MIT Press, 1995), pp. 152–59.The Levitt firm had been
builders of prewar luxury developments on Long Island before turning to
less expensive housing during the war with the Oakdale Farms defense
housing community of 750 houses on two hundred acres in Norfolk,
Virginia (Peter S. Reed, ‘‘Enlisting Modernism,’’ in Albrecht, World War II,
p. 30). The fact that the inhabitants actually liked living in suburban
environments was first conveyed to architects and planners by the soci-
ologist Herbert Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in
a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon, 1967), who
studied Levittown, New Jersey, a Philadelphia area suburb begun
in 1952.
12. Marilynn S. Johnson, ‘‘Urban Arsenals: War Housing and Social
Change in Richmond and Oakland, California, 1941–1945,’’ Pacific His-
torical Review 60, no. 3 (August 1991): 297.
13. Margaret Crawford in Albrecht, World War II , pp. 98–108.
14. Carroll A. Towne, ‘‘TVA Experience Leads to Trailer-Houses,’’ New
Pencil Points (July 1942): 49; Creese, TVA’s Public Planning ,
pp. 287–304.
15. Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture
and Reconstruction in Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 2002),
pp. 174–75.
16. Le Corbusier, The Modulor 1 & 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1982), pp. 52–54.
17. Roger Montgomery, ‘‘Mass Producing Bay Area Architecture,’’ in
Sally Woodbridge, ed., Bay Area Houses (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith,
1988), pp. 232–34. The FSA was a division of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture.
18. On this effort, see ‘‘Farm Security Administration,’’ Architectural
Forum 74 (January 1941): 2–16. Two of Cairns and DeMars’ FSA projects
were published in Elizabeth Mock, Built in USA, 1932–1944 (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1944), pp. 60–63, and one was included by the
Swiss CIAM member Alfred Roth in his La Nouvelle Architecture/The New
Architecture (Erlenbach-Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture, 1940),
pp. 61–70.
19. Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 98–103.
20. Garrett Eckbo, ‘‘Site Planning,’’ Architectural Forum 76 (May 1942):
263–67.
21. Eckbo was a landscape architecture student at Harvard in 1936, along
with Dan Kiley and James Rose. Hudnut’s initial efforts in this direction
and the many complications that ensued are concisely described by Jill
Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius
and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard (Charlottesville and London: Uni-
versity of Virginia Press, 2007). On the history of design education at
Harvard in general, see Anthony Alofsin, The Struggle for Modernism:
Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2002).
22. See E. Mock, Built in USA, 1932–1944. Wright’s planned Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, defense settlement remained unbuilt because he was an
out-of-state architect.
23. Architectural Forum 75 (October 1941): 221.
24. These projects have been described by Peter S. Reed, who called
attention to their innovative uses of prefabrication technologies including
stressed-skin plywood and cement-asbestos (Cemesto) panels. See Peter
S. Reed in Albrecht, World War II , pp. 8–21.
25. On this experiment in New Deal planned decentralization over-
seen by Rexford Guy Tugwell, later the wartime governor of Puerto
Rico and then the director of the University of Chicago’s short-lived,
sociologically oriented planning program, see Joseph Arnold, The New
Deal in the Suburbs: A History of the Greenbelt Town Program,
1935–1954 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971). Three of the
towns were built: Greenbelt, Maryland, sited between Washington DC and
Baltimore; Greenhills, Ohio, near Cincinnati; and Greendale, Wisconsin,
near Milwaukee.
26. Montgomery, ‘‘Mass Producing Bay Area Architecture,’’ p. 234;
Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism, p. 114.
27. William Jordy, ‘‘Fisaco at Willow Run,’’ in William H. Jordy, ed.,
‘‘Symbolic Essence’’ and Other Writings on Modern Architecture
and American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005),
pp. 127–34. The three neighborhood units and the Saarinens’ town
center project are illustrated in ‘‘The Town of Willow Run,’’ Architectural
Forum 78 (March 1943): 37–54, and the project is briefly described
by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht, eds., Eero Saarinen:
Shaping the Future (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2006), p. 141.
28. Morris Ketchum, Shops and Stores (New York: Reinhold, 1948),
pp. 267–70. In addition to the Saarinens’ project, Ketchum, himself
a shopping center pioneer, also mentioned two other precursors
for the shopping center. These were the one at the Linda Vista
defense settlement near San Diego by Pasadena architects
Earl F. Gilbertson and Whitney R. Smith (1942) and Pietro Belluschi’s
shopping center at the defense housing settlement of McLoughlin
Heights, Vancouver, Washington (1944). The Linda Vista and
Willow Run centers are discussed in detail in Richard Longstreth, City
Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing
in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997),
pp. 294–302.
29. ‘‘Forty Architects to Prepare Plans for Greater Detroit,’’ Detroit News
(September 19, 1943): 14 ff.; ‘‘Detroit Planning Studies,’’ New Pencil
Points 24 (December 1943): 50–63; 25 (January 1944): 58–66; 25
(February 1944): 60–67.This work was done mostly by his students at the
Cranbrook Academy of Art, who included Edmund N. Bacon, Carl Feiss,
and Gyo Obata.
30. Jordy, ‘‘Fiasco at Willow Run,’’ p. 131.
31. M. Crawford in Albrecht, World War II , pp. 120–27. During the war
years, thirty-one percent of the workforce at the adjacent Kaiser shipyards
in Vanport were women.The settlement was destroyed by a flood in 1948.
32. ‘‘Bazaar for Bomber Builders,’’ Architectural Record 92 (October
1942): 64–65.
33. ‘‘Atom City,’’ Architectural Forum 83 (October 1945): 102–16;
Creese, TVA’s Public Planning , pp. 304–14; Nicholas Adams, Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill, SOM since 1936 (Milan: Electa, 2006), pp. 24–25. SOM
developed a master plan for Oak Ridge in 1945 which then subsequently
transformed much of what had been built during the war. (George A.
Sanderson, ‘‘America’s No. 1 Defense Community: Oak Ridge,
Tennessee,’’ Progressive Architecture 32 [June 1951]: 21–84.) After the
war, Augur began to advocate the advantages of a decentralized urban
pattern as a response to the likely threat of Soviet aerial bombardment of
dense American cities.
34. On the thinking behind urban renewal, see American Council
to Improve Our Neighborhoods (ACTION), Urban Renewal Research
Program (New York, 1954). A detailed account of it can be found
in Mark Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and
Urban America, 1933–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1975), pp. 280–81.
35. Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth,
1820–2000 (New York: Vintage, 2003), pp. 129–53.
National Defense Migration and the Transformations of
American Urbanism, 1940–1942
34