The “tower in a park” in America: Theory and practice, 1920-1960

This paper examines the history of widely-spaced, high-rise “tower in a park” housing in America in the middle decades of the 20th century. While acknowledging the influence of the urbanism of Le Corbusier, it is focused on the development of this housing type in the United States, where other influences also played a role. I look at how European modernist ideas were received into the tradition of housing reform centred in New York, and discuss the 1934 study of the Housing Study Guild (Henry Wright, Lewis Mumford, Albert Mayer and Carol Aronovici) which argued that cruciform-plan high-rises were the most economical form of rental housing in areas of high land values. I then examine the projects produced after this realization, notably the New York City Housing Authority’s Red Hook Houses and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s Parkchester, both opened in 1940, the models for scores of other, similar projects such as Stuyvesant Town, Metropolitan Life’s second tower project opened in 1948. The largely negative reaction to these projects from advocates of modern architecture, however, meant that a new design direction emerged after the Second World War. Instead of red brick towers with variations on the cruciform plan, architects like Serge Chermayeff, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe advocated high-rises in the form of slabs with open access galleries and duplex apartments served by “skip-stop” elevators, ideas that had been proposed but seldom realized in prewar Europe. The first of such projects in America were built by the Chicago Housing Authority in the late 1940s, but these ideas were most notoriously implemented, in a severely curtailed form, at Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis. With the Federally-mandated cost constraints of 1949, however, most 1950s high-rise housing was built instead in the form of double-loaded corridor slabs which lacked most of the design features advocated by modernist architects. As early as 1957 the design of such projects was being questioned and by the early 1960s Jane Jacobs had opened the attack on the “tower in a park,” heralding its end as an urbanistic strategy.