| Clarence Stein |
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Information AboutClarence Stein |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT CLARENCE STEIN | |
| american architects | |
| stein, clarence | |
| 1882 births | |
| 1975 deaths | |
| american urban planners | |
| stein | |
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EARLY WORK Stein studied in San Diego, California , the company town of Tyrone, New Mexico , and the master plan and individual buildings for the California Institute Of Technology in Pasadena. In 1919 Stein started his own practice in New York, and in 1921 began his long association with fellow architect Henry Wright . In 1923 Stein also co-founded the Regional Planning Association Of America to address large-scale planning issues such as affordable housing, the impact of sprawl, and wilderness preservation. Other founding members included Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye ; the RPAA helped MacKaye develop his vision for what would become the Appalachian Trail . From 1923 to 1926 Stein also served as chairman for the New York State Housing and Regional Planning Commission. URBAN PLANNING Beginning in 1923 Stein and Wright collaborated on the plan for Sunnyside Gardens , in the Sunnyside neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens . The 77-acre low-rise pedestrian-oriented development was constructed from 1924 to 1929, funded by fellow RPAA officer Alexander Bing, and taking the garden city ideas of Sir Ebenezer Howard as a model. This neighborhood has retained its special character and has been listed on the National Register Of Historical Places . In 1929 the partners collaborated on the plan for the Radburn community in Fair Lawn , New Jersey , roughly double the area of Sunnyside. The vision for Radburn was of an integrated, self-sustaining community surrounded by greenbelts, specialized automotive thoroughfares (main linking roads, service lanes for direct access to buildings, and express highways), and a complete separation of auto and pedestrian traffic. This grand vision was informed by the lessons of Sunnyside, and by the comparable city-planning work of Ernst May in Germany (researched by a young Catherine Bauer ), but the experiment failed under the economic pressures of the Depression. In the 1930s Stein and the other members of the RPAA saw their social housing cause adopted by the government, at least for awhile. They lobbied for the creation of government-sponsored planned communities, under the short-lived , Greendale, Wisconsin and Greenhills, Ohio . The others were halted when the Resettlement Administration was dissolved in 1936. Among Stein's other urban-planning credits are the five-city-block Hillside Homes in Williamsbridge, the Bronx, as a Public Works Administration project in 1935; part of the massive wartime labor-force housing at the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene, Brooklyn; Baldwin Hills Village (now the Village Green) in Los Angeles, California in 1941; and his only postwar commission, the re-planning of Kitimat, British Columbia , in 1951. Stein wrote ''Toward New Towns for America'' in 1951, and received the AIA Gold Medal in 1956. He died in 1975 at the age of 93. SOURCES
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