Stein, Clarence S. (1882–1975)

U.S. architect and urban planner

Clarence S. Stein was a major figure in twentiethcentury U.S. housing and community design theory and practice. Born in Rochester, New York, he received his professional training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in the office of architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. He combined his skills with a lifelong commitment to progressive social reform, devoting his career to social housing, community design, and regional planning. He referred to himself as a community architect, a design professional who aspired to improve living conditions for lower-and middle-income workers and to create communities, cities, and ultimately regions that would satisfy all human needs—economic, social, and physical.

Beginning in the 1920s, Stein influenced the fields of planning and design through his leadership in governmental and private organizations. From 1923 to 1926, he was chairman of the New York State Housing and Regional Planning Commission, which sponsored significant studies and legislation. In 1923, he gathered together a group of architects, planners, sociologists, economists, environmentalists, housing experts, and design critics and established the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), which was heavily influenced by the garden city movement of the British social philosopher Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) and by the regional planning theories of the Scottish urban biologist, sociologist, and intellectual Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932).

Through both writing and actual design work, Stein [Page 1345]promoted and furthered the group's visions of integrated physical planning. His efforts focused on the creation of low-cost, efficient, and attractive housing within planned communities of finite sizes that provided residents with healthful living quarters and easy access to shopping, day care and schools, and transportation. Ultimately, he envisioned these communities situated within regions planned to provide a balance of built, rural, and open space and a self-sustaining network of production and supply. Toward this larger framework, he collaborated beginning in 1921 with the forester and environmentalist Benton MacKaye (1879–1975) on the design of the Appalachian Trail. For much of his professional life, Stein focused on the design of housing projects and communities, primarily in collaboration with the architect Henry Wright (1876–1936).

The limited-dividend City Housing Corporation, formed by investors who supported the RPAA's planning theories, engaged Stein and Wright to design two important projects in the 1920s: Sunnyside Gardens, a community of 1,200 family units sited on approximately 56 acres of land in Queens, and Radburn, an entire town planned over two square miles in Fairlawn, New Jersey. Sunnyside (1924) featured perimeter buildings of varying sizes, interior spaces that accommodated both private and communal open spaces, and economies of construction and financing.

Radburn (1928) extended the Sunnyside experiment to community design. Its plan embraced modern life and the increasingly central role of the automobile through a complete revision of the relationship between streets, houses, pedestrian paths, and parks. Although Radburn fell victim to the Depression, its collection of architectural, landscape, and urban design strategies had broad influence in the United States and Europe.

Stein was also involved in the design of Chatham Village, Pittsburgh (1932); Hillside Homes, Bronx, New York (1935); the U.S. government's Greenbelt Towns program, especially Greenbelt, Maryland (1935); Baldwin Hills Village, Los Angeles, California (1941); and Kitimat, British Columbia, in Canada (1951).

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