Henry Wright

Henry Wright (1878-1936), was an architect and major proponent of the garden city, an idea characterized by green belts and created by Sir Ebenezer Howard.

Born in Lawrence, Kansas, Henry Wright's family was Quaker and he based many of the ideas for his communities on Quaker ideas. In 1902 Wright helped architect George Kessler design the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri when he was only 23 years old. By the early 1920s Wright became one of the core members of the Regional Planning Association of America, along with Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, and Benton MacKaye, and it was this association that led to Wright's most well-known work.

unnyside Gardens

Wright and Clarence Stein designed Sunnyside Gardens, in the Sunnyside neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens, was one of the first developments to incorporate the "superblock" model in the United States. The complex was constructed from 1924 to 1929.

The residential area has brick row houses of two and a half stories, with front and rear gardens and a landscaped central court shared by all. This model allowed for denser residential development, while also providing ample open/green-space amenities. Stein and Wright served as the architects and planners for this development, and the landscape architect was Marjorie Sewell Cautley. These well-planned garden homes are listed as a historical district in the National Register of Historic Places, and are also home to one of the only two private parks in New York City.

Recently, on Tuesday, April 17, 2007, there was a hearing for landmarking on Sunnyside Gardens.

Radburn

Wright and Stein later collaborated on the design of the Radburn community in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Radburn, founded in 1929, was intended to be the "town in which people could live peacefully with the automobile-or rather in spite of it". Radburn was designed in such a way that thoroughfares had a specialized use; main roads linking traffic at various sections, service lanes to allow direct access to buildings, and express highways. The desire was also to have as complete a separation of automobile and pedestrian as possible. Pedestrian crossways were designed at differing levels than that of autos, and were directed differing places than autos. These largely residential areas were termed “superblocks”.

Radburn was also intended to become a garden city characterized by surrounding greenbelts, and the careful design of residential, industrial and agricultural land. Residential areas were designed to face inwards towards gardens and nature rather than out towards traffic. Unfortunately, the depression proved the end of the "Radburn idea". Only a minute section was completed before the operation was forced to stop. The originally-planned manufacturing area never materialized, so the town became a commuter city, despite the planners' best hopes. The other main problem to appear were extremely high costs of developments of this type, as well as the large amout of land that it consumed. However, the city did achieve a very high level of pedestrian walkability.

External links

* [http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM02736.html Guide to the Henry Wright Papers]
* [http://www.answers.com/topic/harry-wright Henry Wright at InfoPlease]