Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano were the foremost spatial designers of the American century. Their vast portfolio of public landscapes propelled the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux into the motor age, touching the lives of millions and changing the face of the nation. Designing the American Century recovers the forgotten legacy of Clarke and Rapuano, whose parks and parkways, highways and housing estates helped modernize—for better or worse—the American metropolis.
With the patronage of public-works titan Robert Moses, Clarke and Rapuano transformed New York over a span of fifty years, revitalizing the city’s immense park system but also planning expressways, public housing, and urban renewal projects that laid waste to entire sections of the city. In this groundbreaking work, Thomas J. Campanella describes how Clarke and Rapuano helped create some of the metropolitan region’s most iconic landscapes, from the Central Park Zoo and Conservatory Garden to the Henry Hudson Parkway and Riverside Park, Jones Beach, the Palisades and Taconic State Parkways, and the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. He shows how they left their mark far beyond Gotham as well, with projects as diverse as Yellowstone’s Mammoth Hot Springs, the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, site plans for the Pentagon and CIA headquarters, and Montreal’s Olympic Park.
Richly illustrated with a wealth of previously unpublished drawings, plans, and photographs, Designing the American Century fills one of the last major gaps in the history of American urbanism.
“Despite often being associated only with green places and parks, landscape architecture firms such as Clarke and Rapuano’s designed much of the core infrastructure—expressways, housing projects, and civic spaces—that comprise the American city. This book urges us to more fully interrogate how landscape architects have shaped the contemporary city.”—Thaïsa Way, author of Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century
“Clarke and Rapuano redefined the American urban landscape for the twentieth century. Campanella brilliantly reveals the untold story of their partnership, which brought royal pleasure grounds to working people in New York City and across the nation during the Great Depression—leaving a legacy that still uplifts our lives almost a century later.”—Adrian Benepe, President, Brooklyn Botanic Garden
“This is a tale of talent and ambition, of instrumentality in service of commerce, class, and power, and of problems stemming from ideology and ethics. It is a remarkable work, one that needs to be read by the current generation and shared with the next.”—Laurie Olin, FASLA, landscape architect
“Designing the American Century is the book for which I have been waiting, and it is a great ride. The depth of Campanella’s research is matched only by his gifted storytelling.”—Charles A. Birnbaum, President and CEO, The Cultural Landscape Foundation and coauthor of Experiencing Olmsted
“This is a prodigious piece of scholarship, covering vast swaths of urban America and a large number of the most conspicuous developments in twentieth-century urban planning, architecture, engineering, and landscape design. Thomas Campanella has done a splendid job analyzing the multidisciplinary nature of Clarke and Rapuano’s extraordinary practice.”—Robert Bruegmann, author of Sprawl: A Compact History
“Clarke and Rapuano produced more public open space in the United States than anyone else in the twentieth century, and yet today are largely unknown. Thomas Campanella masterfully fills that void, enabling us to see the region’s public areas through a fresh perspective.”—Frederick Steiner, author of Human Ecology: How Nature and Culture Shape Our World
“Broad in scope, impeccably detailed, here find a genuinely profound and clairvoyant analysis of magisterial twentieth-century design.”—John R. Stilgoe, author of What Is Landscape?
“Designing the American Century expands the history of architecture and urban planning. From the parks and parkways of the 1920s to the interstate highways and urban redevelopment schemes of the 1950s and 1960s, the firm of Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano led the way. Readers will relive the designers’ finest moments as well as their worst fears about what automobility might mean for the American landscape. Highly recommended.”—Dolores Hayden, author of Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000
“Campanella has unearthed a vital history of a landscape hiding in plain sight. Clarke and Rapuano helped define the northeastern United States as we experience it today. As we grapple with climate change and a legacy of spatial and racial inequities, this book helps us understand the challenges of the future through the lens of the past.”—Vishaan Chakrabarti, author of The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy
