The 1958 Penn - Rockefeller
Conference on Urban Design Criticism
Peter L. Laurence
The 1958 University of Pennsylvania CONFERENCE ON URBAN DESIGN CRITICISM was part of an urban design research program initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation in the early 1950s to transform city planning and urban theory, and to help shape the new discipline of urban design. Seeking to address deficiencies in postwar urban redevelopment, foundation directors supported research in the new field with the belief that urban design could address a neglect of aesthetic and humanistic concerns and have a “direct impact on the quality of human life.”
The 1958 Conference on Urban Design Criticism sought to answer these concerns by convening a group of the most respected and innovative architects, city planners, landscape architects, and architectural critics to discuss the future of US cities. While mindful of related problems beyond city centers, together they considered ways of turning the destructive Urban Renewal paradigm to more humanistic ends by criticizing its deficiencies in the public and professional press, and by developing new understandings of the city and city life.
Approaching the built environment in a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary manner, the 1958 conference galvanized new ways of thinking about the city. In the years preceding and soon after the conference, participants Kevin Lynch and David Crane developed fundamental theories of urban design and city form. J. B. Jackson and Grady Clay pioneered the study of vernacular and everyday landscapes. Ian McHarg would soon revolutionize the field of landscape architecture by proposing an unprecedented ecological urbanism. And in the weeks immediately after the conference, Jane Jacobs began writing her canonical book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) with the support of a foundation grant, answering the challenge of criticizing existing approaches to city planning and developing a new urban theory that emphasized the human ecology of the city.
Re-imagining the city and the urban landscape at the dawn of the environmental movement, participants of the 1958 Conference on Urban Design Criticism laid the foundation for contemporary thinking and problem solving. Today, as we face challenges of global proportion, their paradigm shifting work inspires us to begin the critical task of re-imagining cities for the next fifty years.
Peter L. Laurence
Co-Director, Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil
Ph.D. Program in Architecture, University of Pennsylvania School of Design
Clemson University School of Architecture
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Left to right: William L.C. Wheaton, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg, J.B. Jackson, David A. Crane, Louis Kahn, G. Holmes Perkins, Arthur C. Holden, [Assistant to Dean Perkins], Catherine Bauer Wurster, Leslie Cheek, Jr., [Chadbourne Gilpatric, behind Mr. Cheek], Mrs. Eric Larrabee, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Gordon Stephenson, Nanine Clay, and I.M. Pei. (Photo Courtesy of Grady Clay)
