Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis

Constantinos Apostolou was a Greek architect and town planner. He became known
as the lead architect of Islamabad, the new capital of Pakistan, and later as the
father of Ekistics. He graduated in architectural engineering from the Technical
University of Athens in 1935, obtaining a doctorate from Charlottenburg University
(today Technical University of Berlin) a year later. In 1937 he was appointed Chief
Town Planning Officer for the Greater Athens Area. During World War II he held the
post of Head of the Department of Regional and Town Planning in the Ministry of
Public Works.[1] He took part in the Greek resistance and was decorated by the
Greek and British governments. He distinguished himself as Minister of
Reconstruction at the end of the war and it was this experience that allowed him in
the 1950s to gain large housing contracts in dozens of countries.
In 1951 he founded Doxiadis Associates, a private firm of consulting engineers,
which grew rapidly until it had offices on five continents and projects in 40
countries. In 1963 the company changed its name to DA International Co. Ltd.
Consultants on Development and Ekistics.[1]
One of his best-known town planning works is Islamabad. Designed as a new city it
was fully realised, unlike many of his other proposals in already existing cities,
where shifting political and economic forces did not allow full implementation of his
plans. The plan for Islamabad, separates cars and people, allows easy and
affordable access to public transport and utilities and permits low cost gradual
expansion and growth without losing the human scale of his "communities".
Doxiadis proposed ekistics as a science of human settlement and outlined its scope,
aims, intellectual framework and relevance. A major incentive for the development
of the science is the emergence of increasingly large and complex settlements,
tending to regional conurbations and even to a worldwide city. However, ekistics
attempts to encompass all scales of human habitation and seeks to learn from the
archaeological and historical record by looking not only at great cities, but, as much
as possible, at the total settlement pattern.
In the 1960s and 1970s, urban planner and architect Constantinos Doxiadis
authored books, studies, and reports including those regarding the growth potential
of the Great Lakes Megalopolis.[2] At the peak of his popularity, in the 1960s, he
addressed the US Congress on the future of American cities, his portrait illustrated
the front cover of Time Magazine, his company Doxiadis Associates was
implementing large projects in housing, urban and regional development in more
than 40 countries, his Computer Centre (UNIVAC-DACC) was at the cutting edge of
the computer technology of his time and at his annual "Delos Symposium" the
World Society of Ekistics attracted the worlds foremost thinkers and experts.
His influence had already diminished at his death in 1975, as he was unable to
speak for the last two years of his life, a victim of multiple sclerosis. His company
Doxiadis Associates changed owners several times after his death, the heir to his

computer company remained but without any links to planning or Ekistics. The
Delos Symposium was discontinued, and the World Society of Ekistics is today an
obscure organisation
CHARLES ADAM
Charles Adams Platt, the son of John Henry Platt and Mary Elizabeth Cheney Platt,
was born in 1861. Although best remembered today for his landscape and country
house designs, he was also nationally known for his etchings, landscape paintings,
commercial architecture, and institutional projects. He was largely self-taught in
each of these disciplines, building his success on his ability to reconceive the
classical tradition in architecture for the needs and desires of his wealthy, powerful
clients.
Platt was a member of the group that gravitated to the Cornish Art Colony which
formed around Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Cornish, New Hampshire. His own garden
in Cornish, made between 1892 and 1912, exemplifies a new style, essentially
an Arts and Crafts setting forBeaux-Arts Neo-Georgian and Colonial
Revival architecture.
Platt designed a grand country estate for Edith Rockefeller McCormick at "Villa
Turicum" in Lake Forest, Illinois (1912, demolished).[2]
In 1907 he designed a townhouse for Sara Delano Roosevelt on East 65th Street in
New York, now a historic landmark, the Sara Delano Roosevelt Memorial House.
Eleanor Roosevelt called Platt "an architect of great taste" who with the townhouse
had "made the most of every inch of space." The building currently houses
the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College.
In 1912 he designed "The Causeway", Washington DC, a Neo-Georgian house in an
extensive wooded landscape setting.
Platt also designed a large manor house and grounds, built in 1915 in the City of
Little Falls, New York (extant, in private ownership) for Mr. J. Judson Gilbert, owner of
the Gilbert Knitting Company and several other than very prosperous factories in
the Mohawk Valleyregion of Upstate New York.
The MIT Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts is another Platt-designed
mansion built for H. Wendell Endicott in 1934, in use today as a conference center
forMassachusetts Institute of Technology.
His more visible public commissions include the Italianate palazzo he designed for
the Smithsonian Institution's Freer Gallery of Art (1918) in Washington, D.C. and the
campuses of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1822 and
1927), Connecticut College, Deerfield Academy, and Phillips Academy Andover,
where he designed the chapel and library and their settings.

The Italian Renaissance styled Russell A. Alger House, at 32 Lakeshore Drive,

designed by Charles A. Platt now serves as the Grosse Pointe War Memorial.[3] Platt
also designed the Lyme Art Association building in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
He also designed The Leader-News Building in Cleveland, Ohio at the corner of
Superior and Bond Street (now East 6th Street) which reportedly was fitted with
elevator cabs designed by Tiffany Studios. The Building was completed in 1912 and
per the Architectural Record, "Cleveland is to be congratulated upon the possession
of one of the handsomest and most distinguished buildings in the country." - H.D.C.
In 1919 he became a trustee of the American Academy in Rome. He became
president of the academy in 1928 and served until his death. [5] He served on
the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 1916 to 1921, and as vice chairman from
1920 to 1921.[6]

LEWIS MUMFORD
Internationally renowned for his writings on cities, architecture, technology,
literature, and modern life, Lewis Mumford was called the last of the great
humanists by Malcolm Cowley. His contributions to literary criticism, architectural
criticism, American studies, the history of cities, civilization, and technology, as well
as to regional planning, environmentalism, and public life in America, mark him as
one of the most original voices of the twentieth-century.
His first book, The Story of Utopias, was published in 1922, and his last book, his
autobiography, Sketches from Life, was published sixty years later in 1982.
Mumford preferred to call himself a writer, not a scholar, architectural critic,
historian or philosopher. His writing ranged freely and brought him into contact with
a wide variety of people, including writers, artists, city planners, architects,
philosophers, historians, and archaeologists. Throughout his life, Mumford sketched
and painted his surroundings, visualizing his impressions of people and places in
image, as his ever-present notepad visualized them in words.
Given the range of Mumfords scholarly work, it is all the more interesting that he
did not have a college degree, having had to leave City College of New York after a
diagnosis of tuberculosis. But if whaling was Herman Melvilles Harvard and Yale,
Mannahatta, as Mumford put it, was my university, my true alma mater. From
childhood on, Mumford walked, sketched, and observed New York City, and its
effects can be felt throughout his writings.
He was architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over thirty years, and
his 1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book Award. In 1923
Mumford was a cofounder with Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, Henry Wright and

others, of the Regional Planning Association of America, which advocated limitedscale development and the region as significant for city planning.
By 1938 he was an ardent advocate for early American entry into what was
emerging as World War Two, a war which claimed the life of his son Geddes in 1944,
and was an early critic of nuclear weapons in 1946 and of U.S. involvement in
Vietnam in 1965. In 1964 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Lewis Mumford's work underwent a continuous series of transformations as he
broadened and deepened his scope. From his American studies books in the 1920s,
such as The Golden Day (1926) and Herman Melville (1929), which contributed to
the rediscovery of the literary transcendentalists of the 1850s and The Brown
Decades (1931) which placed the architectural achievements of Henry Hobson
Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright before the public, through the
four-volume "Renewal of Life" series published between 1934 and 1951, which
outlined the place of technics, cities, and world-views in the development of
Western Civilization, to his late studies of the emergence of civilizations and the
place of communication practices in human development, he boldly denied the
utilitarian view while evolving his own vision of organic humanism.
Despite what he saw as a likelihood of catastrophic dehumanization on the
horizon, he argued for the hope that the organic depths of human nature, of the
fibrous structure of history, might provide the basis for a transformation of
megatechnic civilization. Mumford argued passionately for a restoration of organic
human purpose in the larger scheme of things, a task requiring a human personality
capable of primacy over its biological needs and technological pressures, and able
to draw freely on the compost from many previous cultures.
DANIEL BURNHAM
Daniel Hudson Burnham, (September 4, 1846 June 1, 1912) was an
American architect and urban designer. He was the Director of Works for the World's
Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Burnham took a leading role in the creation of master plans for the development of
a number of cities, including Chicago, Manila and downtown Washington, D.C. He
also designed several famous buildings, including the Flatiron Building of triangular
shape in New York City, Union Station in Washington D.C., the Continental Trust
Company Building tower skyscraper in Baltimore (now One South Calvert Building),
and a number of notable skyscrapers in Chicago .
At age 26, Burnham moved on to the Chicago offices of Carter, Drake, and Wight,
where he met future business partner John Wellborn Root (18501891).
Burnham and Root were the architects of one of the first American skyscrapers:
the Masonic Temple Building[3] in Chicago. Measuring 21 stories and 302 feet, the

temple held claims as the tallest building of its time, but was torn down in 1939.
Under the design influence of Root, the firm had produced modern buildings as part
of the Chicago School. Following Roots premature death from pneumonia in 1891,
the firm became known as D.H. Burnham & Company.
Initiated in 1906 and published in 1909, Burnham and his co-author Edward H.
Bennett prepared "The Plan of Chicago", which laid out plans for the future of the
city. It was the first comprehensive plan for the controlled growth of an American
city, and an outgrowth of the City Beautiful movement. The plan included ambitious
proposals for the lakefront and river and declared that every citizen should be within
walking distance of a park. Sponsored by the Commercial Club of Chicago,
[4]
Burnham donated his services in hopes of furthering his own cause.
City planning projects did not stop at Chicago though. Burnham contributed to plans
for cities such as Cleveland (the Group Plan), San Francisco,
and Manila and Baguio in the Philippines, details of which appear in "The Chicago
Plan" publication of 1909. His plans for the redesign of San Francisco were delivered
to City Hall on April 17, 1906, the day before the 1906 earthquake. In the haste to
rebuild the city, the plans were ultimately ignored. The Plan for Manila never fully
materialized due to the breaking out of World War II and relocating the capital to
another city after the war. Components of the plan which came into fruition include
the shore road, which became Dewey boulevard (now known as Roxas boulevard)
and various neo-classical government buildings around Luneta Park, which very
much resembles a mini version of Washington D.C.
In Washington, D.C., Burnham did much to shape the 1901 McMillan Plan, which led
to the completion of the overall design of the National Mall. The Senate Park
Commission, or McMillan Commission, established by Michigan Senator James
McMillan, brought together Burnham and three of his colleagues from the World's
Columbian Expositionarchitect Charles Follen McKim, landscape
architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Going
well beyond Pierre L'Enfant's original vision for the city, the plan provided for the
extension of the Mall beyond the Washington Monument to a new Lincoln
Memorial and a "pantheon" that eventually materialized as the Jefferson Memorial.
This plan involved significant reclamation of land from swamp and the Potomac
River, and the relocation of an existing railroad station on the site, which was
replaced by Burnham's own design for Union Station.[6] As a result of his service on
the McMillan Commission, in 1910 Burnham was appointed a member and the first
chairman of theUnited States Commission of Fine Arts, helping to assure the
implementation of the McMillann Plan's vision. Burnham served on the commission
until his death in 1912.
JANE JACOBS

Jane Jacobs CC OOnt (born Jane Butzner; May 4, 1916 April 25, 2006) was
an American-Canadian journalist, author, and activistbest known for her influence
on urban studies. Her influential book The Death and Life of Great American
Cities (1961) argued thaturban renewal did not respect the needs of most citydwellers. The book also introduced sociology concepts such as "eyes on the street"
and "social capital".
Jacobs was well known for organizing grassroots efforts to protect existing
neighborhoods from "slum clearance" and particularly for her opposition to Robert
Moses in his plans to overhaul her neighborhood, Greenwich Village. She was
instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway,
which would have passed directly through SoHo and Little Italy, and was arrested in
1968 for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on the project.
Jacobs saw cities as integrated systems that had their own logic and dynamism
which would change over time according to how they were used. With an eye for
detail, she wrote eloquently about sidewalks, parks, retail design and selforganization. She promoted higher density in cities, short blocks, local economies
and mixed uses. Jacobs helped derail the car-centred approach to urban planning in
both New York and Toronto, invigorating neighborhood activism by helping stop the
expansion of expressways and roads. She lived in Greenwich Village for decades,
then moved to Toronto in 1968 where she continued her work and writing on
urbanism, economies and social issues until her death in April 2006.

A firm believer in the importance of local residents having input on how their
neighborhoods develop, Jacobs encouraged people to familiarize themselves with
the places where they live, work, and play.