Patterns Of American Urbanism

ERIC MUMFORD Washington University in St. Louis

National Defense Migration and the Transformations of American Urbanism, 1940–1942

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.

Introduction Architecture 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 mainstream 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 constantly 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 architects 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

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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 largescale 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 transformation 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

Journal of Architectural Education, pp. 25–34 ª 2008 ACSA

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 infrastructures, 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. Understanding 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 defenseoriented 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 warehouse 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.

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 segregated metropolitan areas that ultimately became the postwar norm. Few then regretted the abandonment 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.

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

Decentralization The 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 mirroring’’ of the Fascist enemy.2 I would suggest that the actual situation was even stranger: instead of American defense-related industrial decentralization being the consequence of applying the lessons of the militarily successful Allied bombing campaigns 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

1. Chart of monthly government expenditures. (Source: Architectural Forum 75 [July 1941]: 6.)

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 effects

2. Sketch of Glenn L. Martin Plant expansions. (Source: Architectural Forum 75 [July 1941]: 337.)

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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.)

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 development were based on earlier innovations already evident in projects like Albert Kahn’s Chrysler HalfTon 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 photomontages, 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 ‘‘characteristically 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 metropolitan 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 consequences 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’’:

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5. Persina and Sanders, three thousand rental houses for the Public Buildings Administration, San Diego, 1941. (Source: Architectural Forum 76 [May 1942].)

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 population.’’ 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 hearings, 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 development 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 homebuilders 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 streetcar lines reshaped the residential geography of the

region. Technologically, they pioneered the use of preassembled wood framing and plumbing components, 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 millions. 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 insurance in areas that were over fifty percent nonwhite, leading to racial segregation in new defense settlements 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.

Design Although 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

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6. TVA, defense housing as exhibited by the Office for Emergency Management, 1942. (Source: Library of Congress.)

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 precedents, as filtered through the experience of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the immense and largely successful New Deal effort to use the provision of hydroelectric power to transform a previously 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.

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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 AfricanAmerican architect Burton D. Cairns, fostered collaboration 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). According to Eckbo, this kind of landscape design practice made clear ‘‘the futility and obsolescence of the present carefully established and maintained professional boundaries.’’20 Instead of more traditional definitions of architecture, Eckbo advocated that

the design of what he called the ‘‘human environment’’ 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, however, 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

7. Mayer and Whittlesey; Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill; Stonorov and Kahn, Willow Run Master Plan. (Source: Architectural Forum 78 [March 1943]: 41.)

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 particularly well received by the war workers themselves.26 Their European modernist-inspired focus on collective 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 practices today. The clear turning point for modernist planning, and perhaps for American suburban master planning in general, came in 1942 at the Willow Run Bomber Plant in Michigan. The Ford Motor Company 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 Administration (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 neighborhood 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 positive 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, architects, 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 American housing form. Neither would be much concerned 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,

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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.)

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 transformation 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 everywhere in the United States. The shift from mixeduse streetcar cities to single-family house and autobased 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 obvious: 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

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10. Privately built defense housing, 1941. (Source: Architectural Forum 74 [May 1941].)

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11. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Oak Ridge Town Center plan. (Source: Architectural Record 83 [October 1945]: 106.)

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 ultimately 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 nostalgic memory.

Conclusions The 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-

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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 battles 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 efficiency 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 developers, 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 practices of the FHA would shape the postwar American landscape. Since the postwar period, when the fundamental element of postwar American urbanism became the single-family house subdivision, American architects have been largely unable to implement their many design agendas for reorganizing 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 dominate 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.’’

Acknowledgments Thanks as always to my family and to Elysse Newman 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,’’ Architectural 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.

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 Transformations 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 sociologist 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 Historical 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: University 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 overseen 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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