For half a century, the expression ‘urban design’ has designated a field of practice and knowledge, particularly in the United States, under which title numerous universities grant Master's degrees. Less than a decade ago, articles began to trace it back to its origins and showed that this field was ‘born’ through different genealogies. The most important and coherent one, and one of the most documented now, is the translation of the European Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) discourse on urbanism into the American higher-education context.Footnote ¹ This translation happened through the Urban Design Conferences that occurred at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD) between 1956 and 1970. Another genealogy, less documented and much less coherent, is the ‘rationalization’ of the American discourse on urban forms through programmes granted by the Rockefeller Foundation's (RF) Division of Humanities.Footnote ² These programmes began in the early 1950s and eventually led to a broad RF research programme entitled ‘Studies in Urban Design’ (SUD) in 1962.

As the first genealogy clearly appears to be transnational, the second one may appear to belong strictly to a national context. But among the different roots of SUD and the programmes that preceded it, one of the most important came also from overseas: from the famous ‘Townscape’ editorial policy of the British Architectural Review (AR) that began towards the end of the 1940s. Indeed, several programmes granted by the RF were, partly, attempts to translate a journalistic discourse often seen to be very British and conservative into an American scientific one. But if the translation of the CIAM discourse on urbanism in a new discipline can be considered as quite direct, the translation of the British ‘Townscape’ discourse into US research programmes and actions was very chaotic, including zigzags, U-turns and dead-ends. Although this translation was not direct nor articulated by a single and coherent historical object or actor, it did happen. Thus it exemplifies how complex some transnational relationships can be.

This article will try to trace carefully the different fragments of this last translation. First, AR's ‘Townscape’ editorial policy and GSD's Urban Design Conferences will be placed in the context of CIAM's history not only to describe their content but also to link them. Through the debate surrounding post-war CIAM, it is possible to show how both were parallel productions of the same new historical context in the architectural and planning sphere. Next, two different kinds of translation of the ‘Townscape’ discourse in a US context directly linked with the RF will be described: the use of its content in two research programmes and two attempts to launch a similar editorial policy. A last moment of translation will then be described: the erratic involvement of the two main ‘Townscape’ authors in a RF programme to study US cities. Finally, the context of the RF's SUD programme will conclude and extrapolate out to an explanation of this particular moment in the Anglo-American planning dialogue.

The ‘Townscape’ discourse and the field of urban design as parallel productions

CIAM was founded in 1928 by avant-garde architects who appealed for a ‘rationalization’ and an ‘industrialization’ of architecture, i.e. a ‘modern’ architecture. The idea was to build a worldwide lobby that used its own energies to promote this ‘modern’ architecture against mainstream historicist architecture.

CIAM was modelled after numerous international organizations founded to discuss many different topics during the first half of the twentieth century. In the book Can Our Cities Survive?, which summarized the production of the pre-war CIAM, a scheme depicted congresses as general assemblies of an organization framed by national chapters and headed by a ‘committee’ associating delegates from each national chapter.Footnote ³ But despite the attempt to follow this model, CIAM remained above all a lobby and the national chapters had no real independent life as their heads were actually co-opted by the central ‘committee’.

The topic of urbanism quickly became central to the debates inside the organization and the focus of the discourse produced for its external audience. The 1933 congress and the publication of the Athens Charter established the main discursive elements of ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’, i.e. ‘modern’, urbanism through the concept of the ‘functional city’. This gave the appearance of a consensus on the move of the field towards a scientific discipline. But while this new discipline began to differentiate itself from architecture, pre-war CIAM cultivated the architect-planner ideal as a tool for a revolutionary avant-garde that aimed to change not only architecture, but society itself.Footnote ⁴

Due to the political changes of the 1930s and the war, the CIAM structure changed drastically. Important national chapters of CIAM, such as the German and the Spanish ones, were dissolved. Many CIAM members emigrated, such as core committee members Walter Gropius and José Luis Sert who finally went to the US. During this period, CIAM's English chapter, the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) group, obtained a core position in the organization by being in charge of the first and third post-war CIAM congresses. But members from this chapter, since its foundation in 1933, came from many different national origins because the ‘modern’ architectural milieu in England was very cosmopolitan.Footnote ⁵ Thanks to these events, CIAM's organization evolved from an international framework to a transnational one, i.e. from an organization framed by nationalities to an organization that crossed nationalities. In 1947, at the first post-war congress held in Bridgwater, England, CIAM officially renounced its international structure and adopted a new transnational one. A new council became the governing body of the organization, piloted by a small permanent bureau that brought together José Luis Sert, now CIAM's president, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and the art historian Siegfried Giedion, while the former ‘committee’ – composed of the chapters’ delegates – became less and less important. The chapters were no longer national, but ‘local’, i.e. structured around one person or institution and not a nationality.Footnote ⁶

But the CIAM discourse about the city also changed significantly with World War II: the issue of urban forms and aesthetics came back, after being ignored by the pre-war discourse about the ‘functional city’, in order to lend to it a more techno-scientific aspect. In the US, this theme corresponded to a plea for a ‘New Monumentality’ that debuted in 1943 as the combination of Giedion's aesthetical focus and Sert's focus on planning.Footnote ⁷ In the UK, as the war came to an end, this theme expanded in parallel through the AR. This journal was Britain's main support for the ‘modern’ architecture and a ‘rationalist’ approach to planning in the 1930s. Once the war was over, AR's editor James Maude Richards became the MARS group leader. At the first post-war, and 6th CIAM congress, in 1947, held in Bridgwater, England, the convergence between Giedion and Sert's plea for a ‘New Monumentality’ and Richards’ and AR's interest for ‘architectural expression’ became evident and began to redirect the CIAM discourse.Footnote ⁸

Hubert de Cronin Hastings, founding member of the MARS group and the co-owner and co-editor of the AR, was behind the new editorial policy. The same year of the Bridgwater congress, Hastings – in order to support this editorial policy – appointed a young architect art editor for the review, Gordon Cullen, whom he had met before the war while Cullen was a draughtsman for MARS group's exhibitions and the firms of some of its members.Footnote ⁹ Articles belonging to this editorial policy became labelled as articles about ‘Townscape’, but the shift from a simple editorial policy into an attempt to build a coherent discourse did not happen until December 1949. In this issue of AR, Hastings published an article simply entitled ‘Townscape’ under the pseudonym Ivor de Wolfe, followed by another article from Cullen entitled ‘Townscape casebook’.Footnote ¹⁰ In his article, Hastings proposed an explicit theory for a regional version of CIAM's ‘modern urbanism’ based on homologies with the eighteenth-century English aesthetic debate about landscape gardening. The principles and criteria of this theory were illustrated by sketches and pictures in Cullen's article. Both articles discussed the visual quality of urbanism.

Until his departure in 1959, Cullen was the main author of the ‘Townscape’ articles. Cullen analysed the visual qualities of urban spaces for pedestrian observers through drawings in a very personal manner. They contributed greatly to the ‘Townscape’ articles’ renown. His contributions were eventually collected in a book of the same title in 1961.Footnote ¹¹ In 1954, Hastings recruited a new journalist, Ian Nairn, who quickly co-wrote articles with Cullen. Nairn was not an architect but a skilled writer whose ‘Townscape’ articles made him famous. He left AR in 1969 but continued to write about architecture for newspapers and guidebooks.Footnote ¹² The ‘Townscape’ editorial policy lived beyond Nairn and Cullen, who was replaced as art editor by Kenneth Browne, and ended only in the beginning of the 1970s. As it had many sympathizers in both the professional milieu and amongst the public, it became the core of a movement that was a driving force in the British urban debate of the 1950s and the 1960s.

The ‘Townscape’ discourse was fed by different pre-war English discourses on planning.Footnote ¹³ Globally, it proposed a ‘new art of relationship’ between the elements of the urban environment to obtain ‘the excitement and drama [which cannot] be born automatically out of the scientific research and solutions arrived at by the technical man’.Footnote ¹⁴ Between 1947 and 1959 it evolved, focusing successively on three different topics and progressively becoming an organized discourse. The policy's first period, from 1947 to 1953, is associated with post-war rebuilding plans. The ‘Townscape’ policy began through proposals made by the review itself and studies on different types of urban spaces.Footnote ¹⁵ From October 1948 on, this heterogeneous series of articles was understood by the label ‘Townscape’ that appeared on its pages. During the second period, from 1953 to 1955, the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy began to include pointed critiques of the first ‘New Towns’. To feed this critique and some counter-proposals, the analysis in the articles became more systematic and led to town studies.Footnote ¹⁶ During the third and final period, from 1955 to 1959, the main target of the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy became suburbanization and its destruction of rural and urban visual qualities. This critique, at times very vehement, led to the publication of two special issues: Outrage, a survey of the visual effects of suburbanization, and Counter Attack against Subtopia, proposals to curb these visual effects.Footnote ¹⁷

During the third post-war congress, and 8th CIAM, held in Hoddesdon, England, in 1951, the convergence between CIAM's bureau and MARS on urban aesthetics contributed greatly to the congress’ theme: the ‘city cores’. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, who helped to shape it, joined the bureau that same year.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1953, Sert became the new dean of Harvard's GSD and invited the members of CIAM's bureau who were closest to him, Tyrwhitt and Giedion, to teach at the GSD. With their help, he transformed the idea that underlay the GSD. In 1936, its founding father Joseph Hudnut merged Harvard's three Schools of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture in one single body. By doing this, he tried to gather the three disciplines of the built environment into one unique discipline as a tool for modernizing architecture. Hudnut recruited Walter Gropius to lead the Department of Architecture and also welcomed many former Bauhausians and Gropius’ long-time friends and collaborators. Despite Hudnut's determination to fuse the three disciplines, the disciplines became more and more separated, and they struggled to preserve their autonomy at the GSD.Footnote ¹⁹ Sert, with Giedion and Tyrwhitt, changed Hudnut's project from a merging of the disciplines to the building of a platform for a dialogue between them.

They began in 1955 with an experimental seminar. In 1956, while CIAM was ending, they organized a conference on ‘urban design’ at the GSD. They invited to this conference not only architects, planners and landscape architects who were leading professionals and/or academics, but also a mayor and a critic to discuss the physical shaping of the contemporary city both in general terms and through US case studies. The main objectives of the conference were very clear: ‘This invitation conference is intended to be exploratory, not didactic, and to try to find a common basis for the joint work of the Architect, the Landscape Architecture and the City Planner in the field of Urban Design’; ‘In fact, in late years, the scientific phase has been more emphasized than the artistic one. . .Urban design is that part of city planning which deals with the physical form of the City. This is the most creative phase of city planning and that in which imagination and artistic capacities can play the most important part.’Footnote ²⁰

This conference was the first of a series of twelve which ran through 1970. This series could be seen as pursuing the debate and research stopped by the end of CIAM, but it also grounded the development of a new field of practice and research. Indeed, in 1960, it led to the creation of an experimental academic programme at the GSD and finally to new Master's degrees in ‘Urban Design’.Footnote ²¹ To renovate their curriculum, other US universities recruited during the same period former students of the GSD, or other professionals close to it in their schools of architecture. At the same moment, in the same schools, the planning discipline became increasingly scientifically grounded, dealing with flux, quantities, data, etc. The growing gap in approaches and scales between architecture and planning led to the creation of autonomous departments of planning and to the recruitment of academics from the social sciences. To make room for their urban approach, new teachers who were modern architects launched in the 1960s urban design programmes as at the GSD.Footnote ²² In numerous cases, it was a renovation of the old ‘Civic Design’ curriculum that was strong enough to give ‘birth’ to a new field of practice and research which is now well established across the US but also in other English-speaking countries.

The origin of the surprising resurgence of urban aesthetics in CIAM that preceded the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy and the field of ‘urban design’ seems to belong, at least partly, to the cultivation of the architect-planner ideal by its actors while they confronted a new relationship between architecture and planning in the US and the UK. In those countries, these disciplines became more and more separated as two different academic curricula and two professional organizations.Footnote ²³ The continuing pursuit of the architect-planner ideal which was strongly anchored in the minds of CIAM actors who lived in the UK and the US and who faced a reality structured on another scheme, seems to explain the search for a ‘third way’ that drove the ‘Townscape’ movement and the urban design field. This specific Anglo-American issue inside the CIAM movement also probably explains a large part of the growing distance between the first generation, now mainly expatriated, and the second generation. For this new generation which was still in continental Europe, academic and professional organizations kept the ideal of the architect-planner still possible. The distance and misunderstanding finally caused the end of CIAM in 1959.Footnote ²⁴ The common origins and parallel development of the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy and the field of ‘urban design’ created of course an opportunity for exchanges. We will see that these Anglo-American exchanges were of different kinds and for different purposes.

The use of the ‘Townscape’ discourse to feed the field of urban design

AR's attempt in the 1950s to build a new, coherent discourse relating to urban aesthetics echoed two different issues in the current US urban debate: urban renewal and suburbanization. Each of these issues called for research programmes in which the journalistic discourse about the ‘Townscape’ could be translated into a more academic one. Both were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and led to the publication of two major works of this period: The Image of the City and Man-Made America: Chaos or Control?.Footnote ²⁵

The first research programme was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and entitled ‘The perceptual form of the city’. It was managed by two professors, Kevin Lynch and Gyorgy Kepes, between 1954 and 1959 in order to build a preliminary body of research for MIT's new Center for Urban and Regional Studies. This new programme proposed to take a more scientific approach to the issue of urban aesthetics and forms and opened a new field of research on which Lynch's students and collaborators worked until the 1980s.

This research programme clearly belonged to the building of the new urban design field. By focusing on Boston's urban core, it was closely linked to the city's urban renewal that, during this period, led to the rebuilding of entire parts of the city.Footnote ²⁶ Kepes participated in the first Harvard Urban Design Conference and Lynch went to the others. Lynch was recruited by MIT in 1948 in order to keep a link between the two departments of Architecture and City Planning, which had just separated. During three decades he repeatedly criticized the use of the expression ‘urban design’ and the ‘immaturity’ of the field, but he simultaneously remained a leading figure in that field.Footnote ²⁷

The origin of this research programme was closely linked to the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy. The programme was the result of an experimental seminar organized by Lynch at MIT in 1951– during which he discussed the issue of ‘The visual form of cities’ – and one third of the seminar's bibliography was composed of articles that showed a ‘treatment of an urban area in the manner of the magazine’.Footnote ²⁸ The programme was also the result of several experiments in methodology done during Lynch's Ford Foundation fellow research travel in Italy (1952–53). In his travel diary he used visual sequences that may have been inspired by AR's first town studies.Footnote ²⁹

But if this programme was rooted in the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy, it showed a clear attempt to render the discourse more scientific by exchanging the word ‘vision’ for ‘perception’ and by using analytic tools from social sciences, such as psychology of perception and anthropology. Despite these differences between the ‘Townscape’ journalistic discourse and the research done by Lynch, the last publication produced by the programme, The View from the Road published in 1964, still made clear references to Cullen's book Townscape.

The second research programme was managed by a professor at Yale University, Christopher Tunnard, with one of his students, Boris Pushkarev. Between 1957 and 1961, they focused on ‘problems of aesthetic design in the urban–rural fringe areas’. This programme was actually the outcome of investigations led by Tunnard at Yale's Graduate Program in City Planning on the subject of urban regions since 1950. It attempted to develop new design standards regarding urban sprawl and, in particular, the development of ‘urban strips’ in formerly rural areas.

The connection between this programme and the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy was Tunnard himself. A Canadian landscape architect, he worked in England during the thirties with the avant-garde members of the Modern Movement and the MARS group and, as a result, became a friend of Cullen very close to the whole board of the AR.Footnote ³⁰ He published several articles in the AR that were collected in the book Gardens in the Modern Landscape, published in 1938.Footnote ³¹ In 1950, teaching at Yale, he made an important contribution to AR's special issue, Man-Made America, in the form of an article conforming to the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy that addressed the current urban-planning scene.Footnote ³² Finally, while presenting his programme to the Rockefeller Foundation, Tunnard stated he was ‘encouraged’ that there was public desire for work on this subject ‘by the success of the recent campaign to improve British landscape launched in the pages of the Architectural Review’.Footnote ³³

While less involved than Lynch, Tunnard participated in the birth of the urban design field in two ways. First, because of his collaboration with Gropius in England, he was recruited in 1939 to Harvard's GSD to teach landscape architecture. Second, after military service, he taught city planning at Yale's School of Architecture but remained for decades the only professor exclusively devoted to this programme in a school clearly dominated by the discipline of architecture and by a discourse of aesthetics. This last point, combined with his landscape background, made his discourse on planning less abstract and more formalist.

Despite using the ‘Townscape’ articles in the building of their research in urban design, Lynch and Tunnard produced discourses very far from the discourse of the Architectural Review. The ‘Townscape’ articles came from the register of criticism – architectural criticism – and not of research. Indeed, for a US discourse to have been closer to that of the ‘Townscape’ articles, it would have had to be produced under the same conditions; i.e. as an editorial policy that criticized the poor quality of the contemporary environment.

Two attempts for a US ‘Townscape’ campaign and the role of the urban design field

By the end of the 1950s, the first attempt to launch a campaign similar to that of the AR came not from a professional magazine but from the renowned magazine Fortune. This campaign consisted of a series of articles that were edited by William ‘Holly’ Whyte, senior editor of Fortune at a time when the magazine still allowed for a very broad interpretation of business journalism.Footnote ³⁴ This series of articles followed a previous one written entirely by Whyte, about the new, white-collar society and later collected and re-edited in the 1956 book The Organization Plan. In the last part of this book, Whyte criticized the post-war ‘New Surburbia’, the home of the ‘organization man’. Interested in developing this last topic, he published a new, short series of six thematic articles about ‘The exploding metropolis’ between September 1957 and April 1958.Footnote ³⁵ All of the texts were written by Fortune staff members except for the last one.

This last article about urban renewal was written by the young and then-unknown Jane Jacobs from Fortune's sister review at Time Inc.: Architectural Forum (AF). Since 1956, Jacobs had championed AF's criticism of urban-renewal policies. That same year, she made a great impression on many participants at the first Harvard Urban Design Conference by giving a talk on the topic. Whyte discovered Jacobs while attending this first conference. Following their meeting, he asked her to write an article in his series about urban renewal. She used an article which was intended for AF and that announced the main themes of her future masterpiece, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities.Footnote ³⁶

Her brilliant ‘Downtown is for people’, along with other articles in the series and in the magazine, was carefully illustrated. As a luxury publication, Fortune commissioned skilled photographers and painters as regular collaborators or freelance artists for one-off works related to article topics. While regular collaborators were asked to illustrate most of the articles in the series,Footnote ³⁷ the first and last publications were occasions for special commissions. For Jacobs’ concluding article, Whyte commissioned Cullen and Nairn, who ‘produced two critiques on the English landscape and townscape, Outrage and Counter-Attack, that have provoked so much attention – and second thoughts – from architects, planners, and citizens that a Counter-Attack bureau has been set up to handle the flood of inquiries’ to produce a series of illustrations entitled ‘Scale of the city’.Footnote ³⁸

Normally, Cullen made the drawings and Nairn wrote the captions for their work for AR's special issues. But Cullen was unable to travel by plane, a problem that obliged him to take a ship for overseas destinations during his entire life. So, for this special issue, Nairn worked alone in the US, walking the streets and taking photos of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Antonio, Louisville and San Francisco. Cullen stayed in the UK and made the drawings from Nairn's photos after his return. This practice of drawing from photos was quite typical for Cullen's ‘Townscape’ articles.Footnote ³⁹

Figure 1:

Jane Jacobs’ Fortune article ‘Downtown is for people’. First page of Jacob's landmark article with an illustration by Gordon Cullen showing San Francisco's Union Square as ‘the city at its best’. Fortune, 57 (1958), 133.

Just after its publication in Fortune, the The Exploding Metropolis series was collected and published as a book. In the book, however, almost all of the illustrations disappeared. Whyte decided to take Cullen's drawings and Nairn's captions and give them special attention by separating them from Jacobs’ article and compiling the work into a portfolio that concludes the book.Footnote ⁴⁰ Jacobs found her life changed by the series of articles in Fortune, as did Whyte. By the time of his death, he had written four books about planning – a continuous advocacy against urban renewal and for pedestrian urban spaces.

Five years later, the connection between AR's ‘Townscape’ editorial policy and the AF reappeared through the publication of a book by AF's managing editor, Peter Blake. An architect who was an AF editor when Jacobs wrote her articles, Blake wrote in 1961 and 1963 two articles he later expanded upon in God's Own Junkyard. This book implicitly referred to the AR by attacking ‘“the mess that is man-made America” as a British magazine has called it’.Footnote ⁴¹ A reference that was picked up in a very positive book review in the AR, ‘Counter junk’.Footnote ⁴²

The second attempt was linked to the series of articles published by Fortune but came from a very different side: from a university and a foundation. Even before the publication of Jacobs’ article, a Department of the Humanities officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, Chadbourne Gilpatrick, was intrigued by it. Years earlier Gilpatrick had managed several grants for research in urban aesthetics, including Lynch's and Tunnard's grants. As he was searching for a new Lewis Mumford – someone capable of criticizing current urban developments – he asked Jacobs to leave the Architectural Forum and write a book based on her articles: The Death and Life of Great American Cities.Footnote ⁴³ In her book, Jacobs explicitly acknowledged Nairn and Cullen for their ‘two remarkable books’ Outrage and Counter-Attack.Footnote ⁴⁴ On the other side of the Atlantic, the AR editor de Cronin Hastings acknowledged in 1963, under his ‘Townscape’ pseudonym Ivor de Wolfe, the ‘warm but high wind [that comes] across the Atlantic and (one hopes and believes) a hot handshake for the Ian Nairns, Gordon Cullens and Kenneth Brownes of this continent in the shape of a book which is a must’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Gilpatrick's interest in criticism and design led him to propose that the University of Pennsylvania create a new grant programme. During the 1950s, the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania was in the midst of rebuilding its curriculum. This process led, in particular, to the recruitment of a large part of the new faculty. Numerous new professors were former students and professors of Harvard's GSD during Gropius’ tenure, such as Dean G. Holmes Perkins and the head of the Department of City Planning, William L.C. Wheaton.Footnote ⁴⁶ During this process, the Rockefeller Foundation played a pivotal role by providing generous grants. In 1958, Gilpatrick asked Wheaton for a programme on urban criticism and Wheaton proposed ‘to hold a small, one-day conference of the persons who have contributed most in recent years to this field’.Footnote ⁴⁷ This above exchange made it clear that the field in discussion was urbanism in journalism, and the question of improving the quality of production in the US urban environment.

David Crane, a young member of the faculty and Lynch's former research assistant, was chosen to organize the conference.Footnote ⁴⁸ Crane graduated from the GSD in 1952, and worked for modern architects Marcel Breuer in 1953–54 and José Luis Sert in 1954. In 1957, he joined the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded an urban design studio. While working on the conference, he made it clear that his main reference was the ‘British ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW’ and ‘its editorial policy [that] is clear, militant, and unequivocal’.Footnote ⁴⁹ He also proposed, among other things, ‘an American “Counter Attack Bureau”‘.Footnote ⁵⁰ Crane's main source for this paper was Grady Clay, real estate editor of the Louisville Courier and clearly a great admirer of AR's editorial policy as his column, one of the few in US newspapers which specialized in planning criticism, was entitled ‘Townscape’.Footnote ⁵¹

Figure 2:

The University of Pennsylvania's Urban Design Criticism conference organized by David Crane, taken from the first pages of Grady Clay's article with a picture of some attendees. Left to right: William L.C. Wheaton; Lewis Mumford; Ian McHarg; J.B. Jackson; David Crane; Louis Kahn; G. Holmes Perkins; Arthur Holden, architect and writer; Perkins’ secretary; Catherine Bauer Wurster; Leslie Cheek, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Mrs Eric Larrabee, wife of American Heritage's editor; Jane Jacobs; Kevin Lynch; Gordon Stephenson, British planner and architect; Mrs Grady Clay and I.M. Pei. Photo by Grady Clay. AIA Journal, 31 (1959), 24–5.

The conference held in Rye, New York, partly failed because Crane was too young and isolated in the preparation, but also because it revealed that US professional journals were unable to launch a campaign similar to AR's and the main actors in the field of urban design were not really interested in urban-renewal criticism in reality.

The impossible convergence between ‘Townscape’ and urban design actors

The last direct translation of the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy in the US context appeared through the direct involvement of Cullen and Nairn in an academic project. Again, the Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania were involved, but surprisingly the involvement of Cullen and Nairn was coincidental.

The Foundation also played a great role in the reopening in 1955 of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania after a lapse of about fifteen years. In the beginning, only one assistant professor, Ian McHarg, was recruited to this department and associated with the city-planning professors. Born in Scotland, McHarg came to Harvard's GSD in 1946 after his military service in the British army. McHarg followed not only courses in landscape architecture but also in city planning in order to obtain a Master's degree in each discipline. More importantly, McHarg participated in 1950 in one of the academic experimentations that took place during Gropius’ tenure and which prefigured the future academic programme in urban design during Sert's tenure: a collaborative thesis published in the CIAM 8 book. Through an urban renewal scheme for downtown Providence, Rhode Island, McHarg as a student in planning and landscape architecture experimentally collaborated with students in architecture. Between 1950 and 1954 he returned to Scotland to become assistant planning officer in the midst of the UK planning debate in which the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy took centre stage. He wrote two articles, one for the Architects’ Year Book, the organ of the post-war MARS group, the other for the Architectural Review.Footnote ⁵²

In 1954, he was recruited by the School of the Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania to rebuild the Department of Landscape Architecture. The School of Fine Arts asked the Rockefeller Foundation for a small grant for research on ‘significant developments’ in ‘modern landscape design’ in association with a bigger job on city planning.Footnote ⁵³ In 1957, McHarg tried to transform his small two-year programme into a broader four-year programme that would cover different subjects. Apart from the usual fare – playgrounds, sculpture in the landscape, gardens – the new curriculum addressed ‘the townscape’, which he described to Gilpatrick from the staff of the Rockefeller Foundation as ‘what the city appears to be to the human eye in the city, i.e., not from a distance as in the air or diagrammatically’.

While McHarg explicitly linked this topic to the Architectural Review in his explanation, he surprisingly did not name any of the ‘Townscape’ authors. Instead he proposed to recruit Peter Shepheard, ‘a young British landscape architect interested in city planning [who] has done excellent work on the staff of the Architectural Review’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Informed immediately by Gilpatrick of McHarg's proposal, Jacobs ‘expressed enthusiastic approval’ for the project, with one exception: she proposed that Nairn head the project.Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite Jacobs’ recommendation, McHarg continued to ask for Shepheard probably because he was much closer to his landscape-architect background.Footnote ⁵⁶ When Shepheard finally withdrew the proposal, McHarg continued to propose names other than those of the authors of the ‘Townscape’ articles. These authors – first Hugh Casson and then James Richards – were both members of the editorial board of the Architectural Review and related to the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy, but not its two main authors. Gilpatric met Cullen and Nairn in the beginning of 1959 on the way back to the US from a trip in Asia.Footnote ⁵⁷ But McHarg finally asked Nairn and Cullen because of James Richards, who ‘urged that [the University of] Pennsylvania commission’ them.Footnote ⁵⁸

The story of this commission is very erratic. Nairn and Cullen were initially commissioned to do one job: write a book provisionally entitled Townscape USA. But their work ultimately split into two parts as they did not work together on the same subjects. Nairn arrived in the US at the beginning of November 1959 and embarked immediately on a trip by car from New York to San Francisco, then to New Orleans and back to New York, and then returned to the UK in January 1960. Although McHarg requested a text about city cores, Nairn mainly wrote a critique of the suburbanization of the United States in the fashion of AR's Outrage.Footnote ⁵⁹ The work on city cores was done by Cullen, who finally came to the US by ship. Between his arrival in April 1960 and his return in June 1960, he visited New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Boston. McHarg commissioned Cullen for the whole design of the book that combined Nairn's and Cullen's texts. However, they remained separated into two volumes. Random House agreed to publish Nairn's book, The American Landscape, a Critical View by Ian Nairn, but they refused to publish Cullen's book because it was too expensive to produce.Footnote ⁶⁰

The ‘Townscape’ editorial policy as a given resource for urban design

Trying to reinforce the newly born field of ‘urban design’, Gilpatrick built inside the Rockefeller Foundation's Division of Humanities a wide research programme rooted in the Foundation's previous research grants for Lynch, Tunnard and even McHarg, and so partly by the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy: the broad SUD programme. By doing that, Gilpatrick at the Rockefeller Foundation followed the same line as the Ford Foundation. This last foundation, under the guidance of its Division on National Affairs officer Paul Ylvisaker, developed during the 1950s a very important grant policy on planning by supporting specific actions and research programmes to study the massive transformations of US cities and their urban-renewal projects in particular.Footnote ⁶¹ Like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation began providing grants for studies about this issue that became increasingly important in the US. But Ylvisaker was a former professor in political science, so he gave grants mainly to research in urban studies that focused on the social part of this issue. Gilpatrick and the RF's Division of Humanities naturally supported research programmes principally focused on the aesthetic aspect of this issue.

Just a little earlier, the UK faced tremendous changes in the urban environment – the pre-war urban sprawl and post-war reconstructions – which seemed similar to those of the US. As in planning the transnational Anglo-American dialogue has always been a core resource for the discipline in the US, so looking at the UK seemed natural. But the debate in the UK about the transformation of the urban environment was mainly aesthetic. So the ‘Townscape’ discourse greatly helped to ground the aesthetic part of the US debate on precedents in terms of questions and also answers. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not, actors such as Gilpatrick shaped the debate about the ‘unreadibility’ of the human environment in terms that were coined in a British, and even English, context which was far removed from the US's context.

In the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy, the debate was actually not about urban renewal but post-war rebuilding; not about Gottman's megalopolis but the destruction of the historical English landscape; not about shopping malls but new towns that were almost totally absent from the US context. The articles were written in a very English style of criticism rooted in an Oxbridge fashion so different from the scientific discourse that prevailed in US research universities since the 1920s. But despite that distance, the words and pictures crossed the Atlantic to be translated in a new fashion and then fed into a national debate. Despite a difference of context, the discourse travelled and changed successfully.

If the translation of this discourse seems easy, the translation of men, i.e. their acculturation, on the contrary, was a more difficult task. In the case of the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy, it failed. Gilpatric met Cullen and Nairn but the poor use of them at the University of Pennsylvania, although they were widely renowned thanks to their publications, underscored a frequent misunderstanding. This misunderstanding kept Nairn and Cullen, too truly English for a global service, away from an international career which was available to them thanks to their renown. The translation from CIAM into the Urban Design Conferences was in the end much more a people issue, and Jaqueline Thyrwhitt is a key example of this. The translation from the ‘Townscape’ editorial policy into a fragmented body of research was rather a discourse issue. Transnational people versus transnational discourse: two poles for a translation.

Ylvisaker's initiatives lasted more than a decade and played a core role in structuring the field of urban studies, for instance through the Ford Foundation's funded institutions such as Harvard–MIT's Joint Center for Urban Studies. On the contrary, the SUD programme stopped only two years after it began. Even if this last programme secured the funding of several projects, including Edmund Bacon's masterpiece Design of Cities, these projects were still too diverse for the building of a coherent theoretical discourse in urban design.Footnote ⁶² This last field did not became the place of a coherent discourse until the birth of the ‘New Urbanism’ movement. But this is the product of another transnational translation and another moment of the Anglo-American dialogue in US planning history.Footnote ⁶³