Patterns of American Urbanism

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].)



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.)



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].)



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.



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Documents

Patterns of American Urbanism