Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: a Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design

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Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: a Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design Ellen Shoshkes JAQUELINE TYRWHITT: A TRANSNATIONAL LIFE IN URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN To Sy Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design ELLEN SHOSHKES Portland State University, USA © Ellen Shoshkes 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Ellen Shoshkes has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Shoshkes, Ellen. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt : a transnational life in urban planning and design. – (Design and the built environment series) 1. Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline. 2. Women city planners–Great Britain–Biography. 3. City planners–Great Britain– Biography. 4. City planning–Study and teaching– History–20th century. 5. City planning–History–20th century. I. Title II. Series 711.4’092-dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Shoshkes, Ellen. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt : a transnational life in urban planning and design / by Ellen Shoshkes. pages cm. – (Design and the built environment) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-1778-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4094-1779-8 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-4094- 7374-9 (epub) 1. Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline. 2. City planners–Great Britain–Biography. 3. Women city planners–Great Britain–Biography. 4. City planning–Great Britain–History–20th century. 5. City planning–History–20th century. I. Title. HT169.G7T977 2013 711’.4092–dc23 [B] 2012039503 ISBN 9781409417781 (hbk) ISBN 9781409417798 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781409473749 (ebk – ePUB) V Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, UK. Contents List of Figures vii Preface and Acknowledgements xi List of Acronyms xiii Part I 1905–1940 1 Foundations 3 2 New Landscape, New Society 13 3 Studying Regional and Town Planning 29 4 Serving on the Land 37 Part II 1941–1945 5 Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction 51 6 Composite Mind: Planning for Post-war Reconstruction 61 7 Training Planners for Post-war Reconstruction 71 Part III 1945–1949 8 Trans-Atlantic Shift 83 9 Geddes as a Guide 97 10 Trans-Atlantic Post-war Planning 109 Part IV 1949–1956 11 Planning for Real and Ideal Cities 123 12 The Core of the Community 141 13 Inter-relations: Communications, Culture, and Urbanism 165 vi Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design Part V 1955–1972 14 Urban Planning and Design Education 1955–1960 179 15 Synthesis: Urban Design and Ekistics 197 16 Epilogue. Tyrwhitt’s Utopia: A Garden on a Greek Hillside 225 Bibliography 231 Index 253 List of Figures 1.1 Thomas Tyrwhitt with Jaqueline as a child, ca. 1906 5 2.1 From Jaqueline’s journal 1934, photos of Burg–El–Arab, Egypt 20 4.1 Jaqueline with friends at Linwood in the early 1940s 43 5.1 A page from APRR Broadsheet No. 4 “Consumption of Fresh Food” (1941) exemplifies the Association’s effort to visualize information, an abiding concern 58 6.1 An example of APRR’s innovative technique of mapping complex social statistics 63 6.2 Tyrwhitt devised this map of cookery customs to investigate cultural regions 65 6.3 APRR proposal for reuse of a wartime site integrating agriculture and industry 69 7.1 For the War Office Correspondence Course in Town Planning Tyrwhitt had to create lessons on topics on which few current textbooks were available 75 8.1 Trees were symbolic of the spirit of optimism that inspired post-war reconstruction in Britain: the building of a new, modern, healthy environment 92 8.2 Tyrwhitt promoted ecological planning based on fresh food distribution systems 94 8.3 Former soldiers trained by Tyrwhitt assumed leadership roles throughout Britain, as well as in the Crown Colonies and in the Dominions 96 9.1 Tyrwhitt’s edited collection of Geddes’s writings presented material that was not previously available outside of India 100 9.2 Tyrwhitt selected photographs by Anthony Denney that capture the civic beauty Geddes admired in India 101 9.3 Geddes’s Notation of Life diagram models a process of urban evolution 107 viii Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: A Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design 10.1 In 1948 Giedion relied on Tyrwhitt to be his “eyes and ears” in the United States 110 10.2 Buckminster Fuller inspired Tyrwhitt to develop a model for a de-centralized metropolis based on a hexagonal grid 115 10.3 Tyrwhitt’s method for using transparent thematic map overlays was widely adopted in Britain and became a standard feature of ecological planning methods 120 11.1 Le Corbusier gave Tyrwhitt this sketch. The inscription reads: Pour Valentine de Boston. La perle de vertus cardinales. Avec tout mon amitie. Lendemain de Hoddesdon, Juillet 1951 127 11.2 Tyrwhitt (center) and Giedion (left), ca. 1949 128 11.3 Tyrwhitt researched Geddes’s texts to explain how his concepts of the Valley Section and the triad Place–Work– Folk were inextricably connected 136 12.1 The MARS Grid, as illustrated in The Heart of the City (1952), provided a standardized presentation format to facilitate comparison of diverse projects 144 12.2 The core of the city was above all a place for spontaneous social interaction 145 12.3 Tyrwhitt was inspired by both the CIAM Core and Gandhi’s model village, Sevagram, in her design for the Village Center 159 12.4 The Village Center and model homes were the UN’s contribution to India’s International Exhibition of Low-Cost Housing. None of the model homes cost more than 5,000 rupees, the equivalent of a little more than 1,000 dollars 161 12.5 Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India with Tyrwhitt, visiting the Village Center 163 13.1 Giedion acknowledged privately his dependence on Tyrwhitt 170 14.1 The Shape of Our Cities discussion series (1957) informed the public about alternatives to the predictable problems caused by uncontrolled suburban sprawl 187 14.2 The Shape of Our Cities series endorsed Tyrwhitt’s concept of the basic “social unit,” which, when paired forms an “urban unit” organized around a high school, where “true social integration will become increasingly easy and normal” 188 14.3 In 1957 the monthly bulletin Tyrwhitt produced for Doxiadis was expanded, renamed EKISTICS, and “re- branded” with a dymaxion world map on the cover 191 List of Figures ix 14.4 Tyrwhitt supervised the work of students who prepared case studies for discussion at the urban design seminar and third Urban Design Conference in 1959 193 15.1 Tyrwhitt taught the first planning studio in Indonesia in which students applied survey techniques in the field. Students used their surveys of house plots in nearby villages to establish the plot sizes in the plans they made for those areas; assuming that all new houses would be built by the people themselves. These simple, down to earth techniques “are universal and fundamental to regional development everywhere in the world,” she wrote in an article about this project in Ekistics [E.19] 201 15.2 The cover of the report of the Fifth Urban Design Conference, held in April 1961, featured this photograph showing Tyrwhitt in her characteristic position, at the center of attention but behind the prominent man—Jose Luis Sert—in charge 203 15.3 Tyrwhitt’s contribution to the City of the Future project included a review of 20th c. utopian plans that incorporated possibilities of growth and change 205 15.4 Tyrwhitt addressing a meeting at ACE including Hasan Fathy (left at table) and Constantinos Doxiadis (right), discussing the City of the Future Project 206 15.5 Model patterns of urban form analyzed by a team of Japanese architects in an article on City Design in Kenchiku Bunka, that Tyrwhitt had translated for Delos I 209 15.6 Tyrwhitt and Giedion at the Delos Symposion, July 1965 211 15.7 Tyrwhitt and Martin Meyerson at Delos 2, July 1964 213 15.8 The Ekistic Grid features a logarithmic scale of settlements 215 15.9 Tyrwhitt convened a meeting of experts on computer science, documentation and information management to discuss alternative information processing procedures 216 15.10 Tyrwhitt studied ancient villages on the Greek island of Chios as models for a compact urban megastructure 217 15.11 Drawings of participants at Delos VI, 1967, as seen by Ruth Abrams, capture Tyrwhitt’s central position in this constellation of luminaries 223 16.1 Jacky’s annual seasons greetings card featured an image of Sparoza and an invitation to visit 227 16.2 Jacky’s book was published thanks to the Mediterranean Garden Society, which makes its home at Sparoza, and nurtures her garden for future generations 229 This page has been left blank intentionally Preface and Acknowledgements I first came across Jaqueline Tyrwhitt when, as a mid-career graduate student doing research in Japan, I was at the home of Catharine and Koichi Nagashima, in Zushi, a seaside suburb of Tokyo. “Have you seen this?” Koichi asked, handing me a copy of the issue of the journal EKISTICS dedicated to Tyrwhitt in memoriam; his wife Catharine, Jaqueline’s niece, had edited it. I had never heard of either Jaqueline Tyrwhitt or EKISTICS before and this discovery was the “aha” moment that brought my dissertation research into focus.
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