John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner

Winner, J. B. Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape StudiesJohn Nolen (1869-1937) studied economics, philosophy, and public administration at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where his keen intelligence and remarkable administrative abilities were immediately recognized. In 1903, at the age of thirty-four, Nolen enrolled in the new Harvard University program in landscape architecture, studying under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Arthur Shurcliff. Two years later, Nolen opened his office in Harvard Square.Over the course of his career, Nolen and his firm completed more than 400 projects, including comprehensive plans for twenty-nine cities and twenty-seven new towns, all of them in the United States. Like other reformers of the Progressive Era, Nolen looked to Europe for models to structure the rapid urbanization defining modern life into more efficient and livable form. Nolen's mutually influential relationship with Raymond Unwin, England's preeminent garden city planner, typified the "Atlantic Crossings" that produced a host of intensely interesting planning experiments in England, Europe, and the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century.In this insightful biography, Bruce Stephenson analyzes the details of Nolen's experiments, illuminating the planning principles he used in laying out communities from Mariemont, Ohio, to Venice, Florida. Stephenson's conclusion discusses the potential of Nolen's work as a model of a sustainable vision relevant to American civic culture today. "The long overdue and definitive biography of one of America's most prominent and influential urbanists. . . . Stephenson effectively positions Nolen between the classical practitioners of the nineteenth century and the modern ecological focus of the twentieth century (which he helped to establish)."--Keith N. Morgan, coauthor of Community by Design: The Olmsted Office and the Development of Brookline, Massachusetts