Robert A. M. Stern
David Fishman
Jacob Tilove
The Monacelli Press, New York, 2013, English
Nonfiction, Architecture; Nonfiction, Landscape Design; Nonfiction, Urban Design
12.3 x 10.4 x 2.9 inches, hardcover, 1,072 pages
ISBN: 9781580933261
Suggested Retail Price: $95.00

From the Publisher. Paradise Planned is the definitive history of the development of the garden suburb, a phenomenon that originated in England in the late eighteenth century, was quickly adopted in the United States and northern Europe, and gradually proliferated throughout the world. These bucolic settings offered an ideal lifestyle typically outside the city but accessible by streetcar, train, and automobile. Today, the principles of the garden city movement are once again in play, as retrofitting the suburbs has become a central issue in planning. Strategies are emerging that reflect the goals of garden suburbs in creating metropolitan communities that embrace both the intensity of the city and the tranquility of nature.

Paradise Planned is the comprehensive, encyclopedic record of this movement, a vital contribution to architectural and planning history and an essential recourse for guiding the repair of the American townscape.

Also see review in December 2013 Notable Book Reviews

On 1 book list
Witold Rybczynski

A few years ago, when I heard that Robert A. M. Stern was compiling a book about garden suburbs, I imagined that it would be an elaboration of his and John Massengale’s The Anglo-American Suburb, a slim 96-page monograph published by AD in 1981 (now hard to find—my copy is a xerox). Instead, Stern and his co-authors, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove, have produced a 1,072-page behemoth, beautifully designed by Pentagram, that is a global Baedeker to the long and interesting history of the planned suburb.

Garden suburbs—as opposed to sprawling subdivisions—are only a part of the topic, for the book also covers the garden city movement, industrial villages and company towns, and resort garden suburbs. In fact it is a comprehensive history of suburban planning between 1900 and 1940. The scope is international. Every European language has a term for “garden city”—cité jardin, gartenstadt, città giardino, cidade jardim, tuindorp, miasto-ogród—and the book documents projects all over Europe and North America, and also ranges as far as Brazil, Israel, Japan, and Australia. There is no doubt that Paradise Planned will become the prime source on the subject.

The book is carefully researched and provides ample information about the backgrounds of scores of projects, many today forgotten, most rarely published. It shows how deeply the idea of the garden suburb was embedded in the public consciousness, and how it influenced not only garden city advocates, but architects and planners worldwide, including modernist pioneers Eliel Saarinen in Finland, Lewerentz in Sweden, Dudok in Holland, and Le Corbusier in France.

The authors include such early prototypes as John Nash’s Blaise Hamlet and Regent’s Park, but chiefly the book confines itself to the 20th century, with World War II as the cut-off date. Stern the polemicist could not resist an epilogue, however. “The Fall and Rise of the Garden Suburb” updates us to the present-day: Seaside, New Urbanism, Poundbury, and the traditional town planning movement. It also includes Stern’s own contributions such as his seminal 1976 project, Subway Suburb, and the Disney community of Celebration. Stern and his co-authors describe the 150-year-old tradition of the garden suburb as “the core of modern city planning.” A provocative claim, but then this book can be seen as a gauntlet flung—if a 14-pound tome can be flung—in the face of modernist urban theory. “Suburbs will not go away nor should they,” Stern and company write. “Planned as part of the metropolitan city, the garden suburb is the best template yet devised to achieve a habitable earthly paradise.”

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