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The Writings of Clarence S. Stein: Architect of the Planned Community K.C. Parsons (Ed.)
Baltimore, MD The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, 717 pp. 49.50, ISBN 0 8018 5756-2
First impressions of this book place it alongside Banerjee & Southworth's (1990) painstaking collection of Kevin Lynch's writings. Its size (over 700 pages), cover design, production and presentation quality, and comprehensiveness are all similar to that key work. But there are also key differences because this collection of writings excludes Wright's substantive works. Instead it presents 530 letters, short reports and lecture synopses written by Stein between 1903 and 1968 that collectively provide a fragmentary, one-sided, but still insightful 'biography' and context for his community designs and his writings.
Clarence Stein is best known for his contributions to housing layout, neighbourhood and new town design, and for his book Towards New Towns for America, originally published perversely as a double issue of The Town Planning Review when Stein was in his sixties. Parsons summarizes his contribution as the champion of "green-centred, pedestrian friendly, dispersed residential communities" and charts his influence across North America and into Britain and Scandinavia.
Stein lived most of his life in New York City, but he was educated in Paris in the Ecole des Beaux Arts and spent four years on sketching trips in Europe before joining a New York architectural practice. From the outset he had twin interests in architecture and civic reform, and he wrote for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects before becoming an associate editor in 1921. In the early 1920s he became a founding member of the Regional Planning Association, along with the...