John Nolen's Legacy in Cambridge: God's Art, Ecumenical Profit and the Harvard GSD

As a new resident of the Pearl District, I had intended to blog on Living New Urbanism but a brewing controversy over John Nolen's legacy in Cambridge drew my attention.  

In Cambridge, Massachusetts controversy has arisen over St. James Church’s decision to allow the construction of 46 condominiums on Knights Garden. Designed by the preeminent town planner John Nolen in 1915, the idyllic green testifies to Nolen’s skill in ordering the urban environment on artistic lines. Besides bringing an aesthetic balance to a busy commercial district, Knights Garden buffers St. James from Massachusetts Avenue and highlights the vestibule’s beauty. It came to fruition through support from parishioners and neighbors, who want to preserve a special space that defines their surroundings. http://www.nolensknightsgarden.org With property rights and profits at play, it is difficult to price a work of art that honors God and embellishes a community. 

       

   Knights Garden

Knights Garden exemplifies the artistry Nolen championed.  A semester at the University of Munich studying Italian Renaissance Painting and Camillo Sitte (author of the iconic City Planning According to Artistic Principles) convinced the aspiring reformer to enroll in Harvard's landscape architecture program. Mentored by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Nolen, in 1905, published the first significant assessment of Olmsted's work. Olmsted Sr. set the foundation for landscape architecture, but Nolen wanted practitioners to extend their craft into the civic art of city planning. Civic Art not only highlighted pubic structures and spaces, it united the city with "nature which has happily been called God’s art.”

                                            Hampstead Garden Suburb, Prototype for Nolen

By World War I, Nolen and Olmsted Jr. stood at the forefront of the novice city planning profession. Nolen’s most prescient book, New Ideals in the Planning of Villages, Towns, and Cities (1919), proposed using World War I's "peace dividend" to build cities "more fit for democracy." During the war, the federal government employed planners to house workers crucial to military industries in compact neighborhoods modeled on the English Garden City, and with easy access to transit, shopping, parks, and civic institutions.  Despite the program's success, it was terminated.  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20911617-new-ideals-in-the-planning-of-cities-towns-and-villages  Crestfallen by the decision, Nolen persevered and regrouped his Harvard Square office to confront the the nation's unprecedented suburban expansion. 

With the rush of new development, Nolen secured clients eager to invest in the blueprint presented in New Ideals. In the 1920s he designed a series of model new towns, employing the principles of civic art in comprehensive fashion. His most complete commissions, Mariemont, Ohio and Venice, Florida (both listed on the National Historic Register), exemplify how nature and urbanism produced what Nolen called, "permanent beauty," the essence of Knights Garden. 

                                           Mariemont Sister City of Hampstead Garden Suburb

When Nolen’s practice faltered during the Great Depression, he took up teaching at Harvard’s School of City Planning.   He was a longtime associate of Henry Hubbard, the school’s director and former chair of the landscape architecture department.  Nolen encouraged students to view the city as a biological organism and plan it to reproduce life.  “Humans are organisms, not machines,” was a constant refrain in Town Planning, a course devoted to designing pedestrian-oriented communities.  Students utilized a range of archetypes including Classical Athens, Renaissance Florence, American new towns, and Cambridge, where they assessed components of human scaled neighborhoods, such as St. James Church and Knights Garden.

In the 1930s, Nolen concepts were challenged by a Modernist vision that venerated the machine. Aligning urban elements with formulaic precision and quantifying the human experience became the new modus operandi.  City planning, according to Modernists such as James Hudnut, Harvard’s Dean of Architecture, was a social science not an art.   Despite protests from Hubbard and Nolen, Hudnut convinced the administration to close the School of City Planning.  In 1937, it reopened as a department in the new Graduate School of Design (GSD).  Walter Gropius, the renowned Modernist architect, was the GSD’s first hire and he waged a war for Modernism with military ambition.  City planning was torn from its mooring in landscape architecture, leaving it the forlorn stepchild of another profession. 

Nolen died in 1937, wondering if he left a legacy.  He remained largely forgotten until Mariemont and Venice inspired the plan for Seaside, Florida, the prototype pedestrian-oriented New Urbanist community.  Nolen is now closely studied, and New Urbanism has moved from novelty to policy. 

It is hardly surprising that the GSD, especially Charles Waldheim, chair of the landscape architecture department, is dismissive of New Urbanism. Waldheim’s “postmodernist” critique is difficult to decipher, but the civic art Nolen pioneered is foreign to his vocabulary.  Knights Garden defines the practice of landscape architecture before the GSD, but does it resonate in Gund Hall? An answer could have far-reaching results. https://www.newsociety.com/Books/L/Landscape-Urbanism-and-its-Discontents 

The John Nolen Medal honors contributions to New Urbanism in Florida