 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Edmund Bacon" architect – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(October 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Edmund Bacon | |
|---|---|
.jpg) | |
| Born | Edmund Norwood Bacon (1910-05-02)May 2, 1910 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | October 14, 2005(2005-10-14) (aged 95) |
| Alma mater | Cornell University Cranbrook Academy of Art |
| Occupation(s) | Urban planner, architect |
| Children | 6, includingKevin andMichael |
| Relatives | Sosie Bacon (granddaughter) Kyra Sedgwick (daughter-in-law) |
Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005) was an Americanurban planner, architect, educator, and author. During his tenure as the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, his visions shaped today'sPhiladelphia, the city of his birth, to the extent that he is sometimes described as "The Father of Modern Philadelphia".[1][2] He authored the seminal urban planning bookDesign of Cities. He was the father of actorKevin Bacon.
Bacon was born inWest Philadelphia, the son of Helen Atkinson (née Comly) and Ellis Williams Bacon.[3] He grew up in thePhiladelphia suburbs and graduated fromSwarthmore High School inSwarthmore, Pennsylvania in 1928.
He attendedCornell University, where he studied architecture. His senior thesis at Cornell made the case for a new civic center for Philadelphia that included an urban park whereLOVE Park was ultimately built.
After college, while traveling the world on a small inheritance, Bacon found work as an architect inShanghai, China in Henry Murphy's office. He was responsible for designing theNanjing Dajiaochang Airport. With Murphy, he visited Beijing, a city that exerted a deep influence on his thinking. After a year in China, he returned to Philadelphia where he worked for architectWilliam Pope Barney.
He soon was awarded a scholarship to theCranbrook Academy of Art, inBloomfield Hills, Michigan, withFinnish architect and plannerEliel Saarinen, who Bacon revered and whose theories about the city as a living organism as expressed in Saarinen's bookThe City were a basis for Bacon's later work.
Saarinen sent Bacon toFlint, Michigan to guide aWPA traffic survey. This project transformed into a permanent position for Bacon at the Flint Institute for Planning and Research. Bacon became very active in civic life in Flint, helping to establish the Flint Housing Association and reforming the city's Planning Commission. During his time in Flint, Bacon witnessed the 1936-37Flint Sit-Down Strike, and felt empathetic to the workers.
Bacon gained close contacts with individuals who were active in establishing the Federal Housing Authority, such as Catherine Bauer andLewis Mumford. Through these contacts he helped secure federal housing dollars for Flint. Bacon convened a housing council that brought together business, labor and civic interest groups in hopes of funding a public housing project. However, the local real-estate industry came to see this Federal funding for public housing as a threat to their business of selling converted garages to workers as homes, as was the case in several cities early in the history of the FHA, and the automobile unions helped kill the initiative. Bacon and other members of the council who remained in support of the project werered-baited, the funding was turned down, and Bacon was effectively run out of Flint in 1939.[4]
From Flint, Bacon returned toPhiladelphia to serve as managing director of the Philadelphia Housing Association. He served in theUnited States Navy aboard theUSS Shoshone in thePacific inWorld War II. In 1947, he joined the staff of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission under executive director Robert Mitchell, and served as co-designer to the 1947 Better Philadelphia Exhibition in collaboration withOscar Stonorov andLouis Kahn. Bacon was also an early member of the City Policy Committee, a grassroots movement of young Philadelphians, established by future civic leader Walter M. Phillips, that was instrumental in Philadelphia's political reform movement. Members of the Committee went on to become leaders in Philadelphia government after 1952, when the reformDemocrat and later (U.S. Senator)Joseph Sill Clark was electedMayor,Richardson Dilworth became District Attorney, and a new Home Rule Charter was instituted.
In 1949, Bacon succeeded Mitchell as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Serving under MayorsSamuel, Clark, Dilworth, andTate, his work brought him national repute along with his counterpartsEdward J. Logue in Boston andRobert Moses in New York City during the mid-century era ofurban renewal. His face appeared on thecover ofTime magazine in 1964, and in 1965,Life magazine devoted its cover story to his work.[5][6]
That same year, Bacon was appointed byPresident Johnson to serve as a member of theWhite House's Conference on Recreation and Natural Beauty. In 1967, he wroteDesign of Cities, still considered an important architectural text. It’s a seminal work on urban design that illustrates the relationship between historical and modern principles as well as practices of urban planning, applied particularly to Philadelphia.[7]
It was during his tenure at the City Planning Commission that Bacon and his staff conceived and implemented numerous large and small-scale design ideas that shaped today's Philadelphia. These design concepts becamePenn Center,Market East,Penn's Landing,Society Hill,Independence Mall and theFar Northeast. TheCenter City Commuter Connection, a seemingly radical idea at the time, was conceived during the 1950s by Planning Commission staff member, R. Damon Childs, who succeeded Bacon as executive director.
Not all of the concepts that Bacon supported materialized. One proposal that he inherited from Robert Mitchell was to encircleCenter City with a series of expressways, including the so-called "Crosstown Expressway" (I-695) and the Vine Street Expressway (I-676) linking theSchuylkill Expressway (I-76) with theDelaware Expressway (I-95) viaSouth Street. Three of the four expressways were built, however the Crosstown Expressway faced significant local opposition and was never built, while a scaled-down expressway was built at Vine Street.[8]
As anunintended consequence, the Crosstown Expressway proposal depressed property values and rents in the South Street corridor, leading to a turnover of the neighborhood's character from largely Jewish-owned garment shops to the thriving commercial and nightlife center that it is today. Other concepts conceived during Bacon's tenure, such as Schuylkill River Park, included in the 1963 Center City Plan, came into being many years later.[9]
After Bacon's retirement from the Planning Commission in 1970, he served as vice president for the private planning firm Mondev U.S.A., was an adjunct professor at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, from 1950 to 1987, and narrated "Understanding Cities", an award-winning series of documentary films describing the history and development of Rome under PopeSixtus V, Paris underGeorges-Eugène Haussmann, Regency London underJohn Nash, American cities, and cities in the future post-oil era. He vociferously but unsuccessfully opposed the development of skyscrapers inCenter City Philadelphia taller thanPhiladelphia City Hall, which until 1984 set the informal height limit for downtown at the hat of the statue ofWilliam Penn. That custom, known as the "Gentlemen's agreement", was broken by developerWillard G. Rouse III'sOne Liberty Place.The New York Times correctly noted Bacon's opposition to the project, but it was incorrect in saying that "in opposing the skyscraper One Liberty Place, Mr. Bacon refused to attend the tower's 1986 groundbreaking and stopped speaking to his friend Willard G. Rouse III, who built it. 'I think it's very, very destructive that he and he alone has chosen to destroy a historical tradition that set a very fine and disciplined form for the city,' Mr. Bacon said at the time." Bacon was present at the groundbreaking, which took place in May 1985. Of course, Rouse was not capable of single-handedly changing the custom, even if it was not formally legal. Rouse's enormous project had the support of MayorW. Wilson Goode, Philadelphia City Council, and the City Planning Commission, which was forced by the announcement of Rouse's plan to admit that it had no up-to-date plan of its own for the future of Philadelphia's downtown.
Bacon continued to assert his vision for Philadelphia's future actively in his later years. During the 1990s, he proposed new concepts to improve Independence Mall, Penn's Landing, and theBenjamin Franklin Parkway. During the same period, he promoted a design competition for North American cities to design the best "Post-Petroleum" city. Only one municipality, in Ottawa, Canada, committed to it. In 2002, at age 92, he skateboarded inLOVE Park, the plaza he founded and designed atCornell University in 1932, as a protest against the city's ban on skateboarding in the park.[10]
In 2003, he appeared in the documentaryMy Architect aboutLouis Kahn, a Philadelphiaarchitect. In September 2006, at the northwest corner of 15th Street and J.F.K. Boulevard, by LOVE Park, The Ed Bacon Foundation and thePennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission dedicated a state historical marker honoring Bacon's memory and commemorating his work.
Bacon was awarded theFrank P. Brown Medal in 1962, theAmerican Institute of Planners Distinguished Service Award, thePhiladelphia Award, and an honorary doctorate from theUniversity of Pennsylvania. In 1983, Bacon was elected into theNational Academy of Design as an associate member, and became a full member in 1994. From 2004 until his death at the age of 95 the following year, Bacon helped found and served as an honorary director of a foundation that bears his name, the Ed Bacon Foundation, whose programs are now managed by the Edmund N. Bacon Memorial Committee at thePhiladelphia Center for Architecture.
Bacon was the father of six children, including two sons, actorKevin Bacon, musicianMichael Bacon, and four daughters, Karin, Elinor, Hilda and Prudence (later Kira). His wife was Ruth Hilda Holmes, a teacher and liberal political activist. His friends includedBuckminster Fuller,Steen Eiler Rasmussen,James Rouse, andKonstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis.[11]
