John Nolen and the Metropolitan Landscape by Jody Beck (review)

At age 34 John Nolen (1869–1937) entered Harvard’s landscape architecture program and, upon graduation, opened a practice in Cambridge. Committed to landscape architecture as a profession, Nolen is better-known today as a “city planner,” a term he popularized (and possibly coined). His practice (1905–1937) encompassed about 400 projects throughout America, widespread public lectures, published works (including six books, numerous articles, and planning studies), and active involvement in professional organizations, all of which contributed to his national reputation. Using urban analytics to guide urban form, Nolen’s practice involved the organization and planning of cities, residential developments, industrial housing, state and city parks, and regional planning, thereby increasing public visibility of planning and its relevance to urban issues.

Nolen is among the second generation of American landscape architects known today through their professional profiles and built works. Added insight into this generation’s members has come from The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s Pioneers of American Landscape Design (2000) and Shaping the American Landscape (2009), Thaïsa Way’s Unbound Practice (2009), and works from the Library of American Landscape History. Even with these publications documenting early twentieth-century professionals, opportunities remain for additional investigations and deeper analyses of these men and women. Such is the book at hand.

Beck’s study and two subsequent works not under review here (R. Bruce Stephenson’s biography John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planning, and the reissue of Nolen’s New Ideals in the Planning of Cities, Towns and Villages) bring Nolen’s career, biography, and professional contributions to American urban theories and practices into contemporary focus. Narrowly defined and apparently derived from his dissertation, Beck’s work examines writings, correspondence, and projects central to Nolen’s activities as a practitioner in Madison, Wisconsin; Mariemont, Ohio; Venice, Florida; and Penderlea, North Carolina; seeking to uncover the “social and political assumptions that grounded” his work.¹

While this work certainly has focus and depth, it appears to be more a re-configuration rather than an expansion of dissertation research and, as such, tantalizing threads of inquiry are identified but not fully explored. Beck’s text often employs lengthy, densely-written abstruse sentences requiring more than one reading and begging for a deeper elaboration that would tie these threads into whole cloth. Beck does make good use of the rich resource of Nolen’s papers at Cornell University. Included in the book are 60 plan images (eight are in color), and while this wealth of visual content serves the text and adds to its appeal, publication realities impose limitations. As such, Nolen’s original drawings, usually large scale, are reproduced in much smaller image formats, resulting in unavoidably limited effectiveness.

In the four communities given, Beck analyzes the situations that led to the projects’ development and discusses how certain issues—not necessarily design-related—impacted the projects’ development. A pragmatic technocrat, Nolen approached city planning as a profession that involved technical issues related to organizing growing urban conditions (including demographic, infrastructure, governance, technological, and industrial) and developing design strategies that respected prevailing social conventions and viewed land as a commodity to be exploited for economic gain. In his view, decisions about the organization of land were best left to “experts” such as himself, and the agendas of his clients—those in positions of power—based on the criteria they valued, which usually included appropriate financial returns on their investments (146–147). This approach failed to consider the possibility that the general public, even potential users, would have legitimate opinions or contributions to offer (an observation the author makes), or the potential environmental impacts of development, such as draining wetlands, considerations certainly more prominent today than in Nolan’s time (134, 149).

Altogether, this book is ideally suited for academic audiences in the fields of planning theory, landscape history, and urban studies. It occupies a scholarly space between an article...