Wright, Henry

Educated in architecture and trained as a landscape architect, Henry Wright (1878–1936) devoted his career to refining innovative site plans to realize a more aesthetic, efficient, and economical approach to land subdivision and housing development for working-class residents. Initially, Wright's talents were engaged by wealthier clients, such as the residents of his Brentmoor Park subdivision near St. Louis, Missouri. In 1918, however, like several of his future colleagues in the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), Wright went to Washington, D.C., to work for the federal government designing war-worker housing in communities with significant housing shortages. In partnership with architect Clarence S. Stein, he experimented with site and building layout during the 1920s and early 1930s. His affiliation with the RPAA, his consulting work as town planner at the local and federal levels, his numerous articles for real estate and architecture journals, and his book Rehousing Urban America (1935), provided venues to promote his communitybuilding strategies, while various teaching positions allowed him to inspire the next generation of architects.

As town planner for the federal Emergency Fleet Corporation during World War I, Wright became convinced that continuing to relegate the subdivision design process to the real estate industry diminished quality of life while needlessly increasing the cost of housing. Considered an innovator in site design by his contemporaries, Wright advocated grouped and attached housing with the broad side parallel to the street, resulting in units only two rooms deep, which facilitated better lighting and air flow in the home and created opportunities to amass significant open space for interior courtyards. His first project with Stein, Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, adopted this design strategy, combining single-family, duplex, town-house, and apartment development within two- and three-story buildings distinguished by architectural features that identified distinctive units while creating a cohesive whole. Collaborations with Stein on the unfinished new town of Radburn, New Jersey, and the ingenious hillside development at Chatham Village in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, followed—as did work with architects Allan Kamstra, Albert Mayer, and Henry Churchill on the unrealized, federally sponsored greenbelt town of Greenbrook, New Jersey.

Also known for his technical expertise, particularly his cost studies, Wright offered his skills as a researcher on President Hoover's 1931 Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, formed the Housing Study Guild in 1933 to research housing, including slum clearance issues, and consulted on the early federal public housing program. He also embraced a regional balance between urban areas and the wider landscape informed by economic, social, and physical conditions. This ideal was most evident in his analytical diagrams for the groundbreaking 1926 report to the New York Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, in which a coordinated approach to statewide planning was outlined. During the last years of his life, he operated a series of summer schools, ultimately securing an architecture professorship at Columbia University.