Designing the American Century: The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rupuano, 1915-1965 by Thomas J. Campanella

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Designing the American Century: The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rupuano, 1915-1965 by Thomas J. Campanella

'Designing the American Century: The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rupuano, 1915-1965' by Thomas J. Campanella

Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano left their mark on many American cities. They trained as landscape architects and became urban planners, turning roadways into parkways, gracing New York City with jewel-like green spaces while playing a hand in bulldozing vibrant if economically poor neighborhoods, erecting Stalinist towers to shelter the displaced. In Milwaukee, a shriveled cost-cut version of their plan for a Civic Center survives as the unloved MacArthur Park. Like many of their latter-day projects, it was envisioned as a calm island amidst the noise and bustle of automobiles.

Cornell urban studies professor Thomas J. Campanella offers a carefully measured appreciation of their achievements in Designing the American Century. Lavishly illustrated with architectural drawings, watercolors, sketches and photographs, the book sits heavily on the coffee table for its assessment of the two men within the context of the hubris of Modernism, the deceit of institutions public and private and the enduring contradictions of the American experiment. The forces behind some of Clarke-Rupuano’s projects were racist and exclusionary—not only against Blacks but Jews and Southern Europeans. They worked for many years in tandem with Robert Moses, widely decried in his twilight for putting car before people and the future before history, levelling flourishing neighborhoods in the interest of the automobile industry.

But through much of their career together, Clarke and Rupuano sought architectural and environmental harmony, conserving the best of the past as they built for an imagined future. Did they hit as often as they missed? “The work of the first half of their careers was uniformly positive, even heroic, in scope and quality,” Campanella concludes. In their second half, “these skilled crafters of space became handmaidens to the urban renaissance juggernaut that devastated entire sections of urban America.”

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