Henry Wright was an American architect, landscape designer and planner of communities.
Background
Henry Wright was born on July 2, 1878, in Lawrence, Kansas, the eldest of three sons of Francis Alfred Wright and Mary Hulda Chace. His paternal and maternal grandparents were all English and members of the Society of Friends. Wright's father came to America around 1870 and settled in Kansas, where he is said to have become the first certified public accountant west of the Mississippi; Wright later showed a gift for statistical research which resulted in his pioneer studies in the cost accountancy of housing. While attending the University of Kansas, Wright's American-born mother met his father, to whom she was married in March 1876.
Education
When Henry was a small child, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and while still very young he was sent east to attend the Friends' School at Westtown, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Coming back to Kansas City for his high school education, he was graduated from Central High School with honors in chemistry in 1896.
Career
But architecture was his primary interest, and after serving as a draftsman in the office of Root and Siemens, Kansas City architects, he went to the University of Pennsylvania to take a special two-year course and was graduated in 1901. When plans were under way for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, the chief landscape architect, George E. Kessler, asked Wright's firm, to which he had returned, for help, and they sent Wright to assist him. Wright remained with Kessler after the Exposition and played a part in the design of parks, parkways, and boulevard systems in many cities, notably Kansas City, Denver, and Cincinnati. Through Kessler, who had worked for Frederick Law Olmsted, Wright came under the influence of one of the few seminal minds in planning that the nineteenth century had produced, and his own community plans establish him as perhaps Olmsted's most adept continuator. By arrangement with Kessler, Wright was permitted to do private work, chiefly in planning subdivisions; but by 1909 this work absorbed so much of his energies that, by friendly agreement, he set up his own office. Wright's work from the beginning was in both architecture and landscape design; and what he came to call community planning was the integration of all the necessary private and civic facilities into an orderly pattern: a kind of planning that called for cooperation and unified effort in both design and development. Wright's most characteristic work in this early period was in St. Louis — near Olmsted's Forest Park — where his subdivisions called Brentmoor, West Brentmoor, and Forest Ridge carried on the tradition established by Olmsted in Riverside, Illinois, and in Roland Park, Maryland, showing the same happy facility in adapting the plans to sites whose irregular topography prevented a more formal order of planning. In Brentmoor Park Wright departed from common practice by drawing the houses back from the main avenue to find seclusion and quiet by facing their own inner greens.
This separation of the residential quarter from the traffic artery became one of the dominant themes of his later Radburn plan. In 1918 Wright came east to work as planner and landscape architect for the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which built a series of wartime workers' housing communities near the expanded shipyards. The association that Wright then formed with Robert Kohn, the director of this enterprise, led to his later call to New York City in 1923 (after three years as architectural adviser to the St. Louis City Planning Commission) to join Kohn's architectural associate, Clarence S. Stein, in the planning of two new communities for the City Housing Corporation, a limited dividend company dedicated to this purpose. Working with Stein, Wright planned Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, a housing development for 1, 200 families, which served as a testing ground for many innovations, such as the provision of a common park and play space within every block and the grouping of garages at the periphery of the neighborhood. Wright's work as both planner and cost analyst on this project laid the basis for the even more radical innovations he introduced in Radburn, New Jersey. Some of these, like the separation of wheeled traffic and pedestrian traffic, the creation of superblocks, and the limiting of through traffic in residential neighborhoods by the systematic use of dead-end streets, had already been tried out by Olmsted and by Sir Raymond Unwin in England; and other innovations, like the neighborhood unit, with its own school, playground, and swimming pool, had been theoretically outlined by Clarence Perry. But to Wright largely belongs the credit for welding these ideas and purposes together in a unified design. Though Radburn itself, begun in 1928, was halted by the depression and only partly carried out, enough was built to make a powerful impression on the whole town-planning movement. Wherever new towns are built, from Chandigarh in India to Kitimat in British Columbia, Wright's influence remains active, though perhaps his greatest innovation, an internal park at the core of each superblock, forming a broad river of green flowing through the community, has still to be carried forward. After 1931 Wright worked again by himself. His site plan for the second part of Chatham Village, in Pittsburgh, is probably one of the finest examples of his art as site planner. While rich in practical experience, Wright was more the thinker than the artist, seeking for economies and simplifications that would make it possible for even the lowest income groups to enjoy the benefits of an aesthetically harmonious environment. Not the least accomplishment of Wright lay in the realm of education. This took many forms. As planning director for the New York State Housing and Regional Planning Commission he did the basic work on its classic report, A Plan for the State of New York (1926), the first report of its kind in the United States. Earlier, from 1921 onward, he had become one of the group of keen minds that made the Journal of the American Institute of Architects (of which he was a fellow) a center for the idea of planning and housing conceived as a public service; and in 1931, seeing the need for better trained planners than the few existing schools were then educating, he established a summer school for planning at his new home at Mount Olive, New Jersey. From its successive sessions came some of the most effective planners of the next generation.
In 1923 Wright helped to organize the Regional Planning Association of America (1923 - 1933); and in the depths of the depression, in 1933, he took the initiative, with Albert Mayer, in forming the Housing Study Guild to educate young architects and planners for the new tasks in housing. Even his work as official consultant, 1933-1934, for the housing division of the Public Works Administration was largely of an educative nature. More and more he saw the necessity for bringing together, in effective communication and working cooperation, all the different disciplines and vocations concerned with planning. To work toward this aim he accepted (1936) a special professorship in the School of Architecture at Columbia University. But these plans were cut short by his death on July 9, 1936, in the Newton Memorial Hospital, New Jersey, of arteriosclerosis. His body was cremated.
Achievements
Connections
In 1903, Henry Wright married Eleanor Niccolls, who bore him four children.