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Panel 2: Urban Renewal Re-Evaluated

With the Housing Act of 1949 providing Federal funding to cities to cover land acquisition costs for areas perceived to be “slums,” the “urban renewal” program that would reshape American cities took hold from coast to coast. Perhaps no area is more symbolic than the then future site of New York’s Lincoln Center, as forever captured in the Oscar‐winning Best Picture, West Side Story (1961). As part of the first wave of modernism, corporate and cultural campuses provided work for such celebrated architects and landscape architects as SOM, Philip Johnson, and Morris Lapidus, not to mention, Lawrence Halprin, Daniel Urban Kiley, and John Ormsbee Simonds. Today, these mid‐century modern sites are being remade though the leadership of visionary developers, civic leaders and, perhaps most challenging (unlike the first time around), within a broad public process. Projects to be revisited during this panel include the Lincoln Center Campus, New York City; the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, Saint Louis, where different values have been placed on Dan Kiley’s earlier contributions; and Miami’s Lincoln Road Mall, which originally was closed to traffic in 1960 and today is one of a very small number of pedestrian malls from this era that is still commercially and socially successful.

Moderator: Thaisa Way

Speakers
Elizabeth K. Meyer
Charles Renfro
Raymond Jungles
Michael Van Valkenburgh