Femmes, architecture, ville et paysage

Journée d’étude doctorale en histoire de l’architecture, le 5 juin 2015

Salle Benjamin, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Galerie Colbert, Paris

Paola Zanotto

Eclectic Networks
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and three episodes of successful cross-disciplinary collaboration

This work is part of a wider investigation I'm carrying for a PhD at the University of Venice. The purpose of this paper
is to illustrate three episode of interdisciplinary collaborations that involved three experts in different fields (a
geographer, a sociologist and an economist) with a main character on which my research is focused on: the town
planner, educator and editor Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. In the traditional historiography of planning and architecture
Jaqueline's name haven't been quoted for years after her death in 1983, and only recently researchers started to quote her
work(Mark Wigley, 2001; Volker M. Welter 2001-2007; Michael Darroch, 2009; Annie Pedret 2013). Today the only
research completely dedicated to her figure has been carried by the Professor Ellen Shoshkes from the Portland
University, US, (2004, 2009, 2010) with the first book Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: a Transnational Life in Urban Planning and
Design published in 2013.

First of all I would like to introduce Jaqueline and give a brief picture of her life. She had a natural talent for
eclecticism, due in part to the various nature of studies she did during her education. After her diploma in horticulture in
London, a planning course in Berlin, and a course at the London School of Economics, she started to work as a garden
designer, then served as Director of the Association for Planing and Regional Reconstruction (APRR) and led the war
correspondence course in Town Planning, run to prepare planners for the reconstruction phase afetr the end of the
conflict. In 1941 she started her activity in the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS group), the English
section of Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). In 1949 she became Assistant Director to Maxwell
Fry, Director of the MARS group, in organizing the first CIAM summer school. She played a central Role in CIAM 8,
held in Hoddensdon, and then she became Acting Secretary until the end of the organization. In 1952, she published and
edited with Dean José Louis Sert and Ernesto Nathan Rogers The heart of the City: Toward the Humanization of Urban
Life. She worked as visiting lecturer at Yale and Toronto, where she also established a program in City and Regional
Planning. In 1954 she started an inter-faculty study on communication, together with Professor Marshall McLuhan, the
anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, and the economist William Thomas Easterbrook: this team founded the Seminar on
Culture and Communication (1953–1959) and created their co-edited periodical Explorations. From 1956 to 1969 she
taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University as Professor of Town Planning. In the meantime her long
term collaboration with the Greek architect Costantinos Doxiadis began, and in a very short time she devoted herself to
his research commitment and the foundation of the science of human settlements, known as Ekistics. In the Centre of
Ekistics, in Athens, where Jaqueline moved in 1962, she played a leading role, organizing for ten years the Delos
Symposia, an international forum for discussion and debate on the studies of human settlements, which was held each
June from 1962 through 1974. She worked as editor for the Ekistics journal until her death in 1983.

She has been an extraordinary figure with a very humble approach for her profession and a noble mission: introduce
new techniques, researches and theories in a standard, common method of work for all architects and planners interested
to learn how to deal with the transformation of the urban pattern and the built environment in cities. She was never keen
to reach opportunities to build, but to get involved in contexts where she saw opportunities to advance the architectural
knowledge and spread it through lectures, publications, and conferences.

Even if she didn't sign any project, if not minor ones at the very beginning of her career, Jaqueline tended to maintained
an operative kind of approach and she kept an active and passionate interest for landscape architecture. She remembered
what she learned from her years studying horticulture when she planned her garden at Sparoza in 1962 on a Greek
hillside, today still a beautiful well-maintained garden, headquarters of the Mediterranean Garden Society.

Even though Jaqueline Tyrwhitt never raised the topic as a problem, the kind of tasks she was assigned to were related
to the fact that she was a woman. Along her career she had the opportunity to come across notable scholars and
professionals who were pioneering with their personal commitment gender equality in their fields. She started from a
male-dominated world in a moment when important changes started to occur, starting from the exceptional condition of
the war. Certainly Jaqueline's life was affected by the women condition at the time she grew up in her country and
started her training.

First of all is necessary to introduce a biography note: Tyrwhitt's interest for other disciplines was triggered first by her
family. Her mother was a great supporter of Octavia Hill(1838-1912), an English social reformer and an early pioneer
in social welfare in urban communities. When Tyrwhitt started her curriculum, some of her mentors have also been
influential in her later choices: Jaqueline gained a diploma in horticulture, but she was also trained by Ellen Willmott
(1858-1954) a British accomplished botanist, gardener, horticulturist, musician and photographer, an influential member
of the Royal Horticulturist Society, and for years a leading figure in the field. When Jaqueline joined the first year at the
Architectural Association in London, in September 1924, she was one of eight among 30 students, after the university
had opened its doors to women just few years earlier in 1917.1 At the conferences she attended she was often the only
woman or one of few ones. Even is she had never raised a gender issue in an official way (except in her personal diary
where at the age of 19 she lamented the lack of opportunities due to not being a man2) Jaqueline Tyrwhitt lived an
important moment in history: in fact she witnessed important changes for equality within architecture and science. She
saw women started to be appointed in academic chairs for the first time in her country: the mycologist Helen Gwynne-
Vaughan in 1921, the geographer Eva Taylor in 1930, the archaeologist Dorothy Garrod in 1939, while in 1948 the
historian Agnes Headlam-Morley became the first woman appointed at Oxford. In architectural firms things moved
earlier: in 1928 Elisabeth Scott (1898-1972), graduated at the AA, won the competition for the Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre, the first important building designed by a woman in the UK. In 1932 the RIBA Women Committee was
established, reported in 1935 that 30 practices in the country were entirely run by women, although mainly specialized
in domestic architecture, among them the firm Norah Aiton & Betty Scott .3 Some institutions were born thanks to
women, for example the Housing Centre in London was co-founded in 1934 by Elizabeth Denby, Jocelyn Adburgham,
and Judith Lebedoer (1901-1990), a successful architect and a leading force in the post-war Britain, who helped
Tyrwhitt giving her office to run activities with the APRR. Ledeboer was the first woman employed at the Ministry of
Health, between 1941 and 1946, for the housing department.

Jaqueline established numerous collaborations with landscape architects, for example with Brenda Colvin(1897–1981),
a landscape architect who worked with Jaqueline Tyrwhitt for the book Trees for Town and Country in 1947, a sort of
rationalized catalogue for the planner to help him for the best choice of trees to plan in a landscape project. They met in
1941 at the Women's Farm and Garden Association, entering in “a new wave of young, professional women who were
revitalizing WFGA [Women's Farm and Garden Association] at a time of declining membership and financial
problems”.4 Colvin and Tyrwhitt shared different educational missions, such as a scheme for gardeners to grow food
during the war. Colvin had already set up her own practice in 1922 and became an important landscape architect, author
of seminal works at the time, and co-founder of the Institute of Landscape Architects in 1929.

Among other research projects Jaqueline ran during her career, the following three episodes are particularly important
for the progress of the planning and architecture disciplines, and all three, for some reason, haven't receive the credit
they deserve.

1
The Ground Plan for Britain in collaboration with Eva G. R. Taylor

As soon as she started to work for the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction, in February 1941,
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt supervised a small team with whom she made an agenda for the association, including education and
research projects. The research department was given a contract in 1941 to produce a series of maps for Britain. The
aim of that activity was to collect data on new subjects, as the maps “included regional planning; industry; agriculture
and nutrition; services; population; housing and recreation; health and education and uses of waste” 5. The innovative
aspect of the work was the elaboration of a standard for the graphic presentation of planning information; the maps were
therefore a sort of template to follow for future surveys. The series was programmed by Tyrwhitt and her mentor Eva
Taylor, geography Professor at the Birkbeck College in London. The set of maps produced by the APRR team were
much appreciated and a new set was ordered. The association was then, as Prof Ellen Shoshkes said: “in the forefront of
a broad movement to provide a scientific basis for planning by presenting facts in a visual, unbiased way” 6. The reports
and broadsheets published by the APRR were based on the basic needs of the British population, for example maps of
Consumption and Distribution of Fresh Food, working to draw up a network of co-operatives for a sustainable food
system.
Although the purpose of this particular survey was beyond the ordinary range of tasks that normally belong to the
planner, it was part of a series of experiments the association ran to construct a standard method of analysis and visual
communication. Survey techniques and design tools were introduced and tested: the purpose of the work was to
demonstrate that the well-conducted analysis of the urban context could only bring to a better understanding of the
urban context and to significant improvements. The set of maps the APRR published in 1942 with the title Ground Plan

1 Ellen Shoshkes, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: a Transnational Life in Urban Planning and Design(Burlington, USA: Ashgate,
2013): 7
2 Ellen Shoshkes, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: 9
3 Lynne Walker, “Golden Age or False Dawn? Women Architects in the Early 20th century”, URL: http://www.english-
heritage.org.uk/., accessed April 2014
4 Ellen Shoshkes, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: 54
5 Ellen Shoshkes, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: 52
6 Ellen Shoshkes, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: 55
of Britain was, in Prof. Taylor's mind, a draft of an informative basis for the post-war reconstruction, a National Atlas
that could collect thematic maps with a standardized notation system. The Ground Plan of Britain met admiration and
positive reviews from several authorities, included Sir George Pepler, president of the Town Planning Association, who
consider it a successful application of survey methods and an effective working approach. Pepler particularly
appreciated the survey was presented as a continuous process instead of a static representation. 7 From the lectures of the
war correspondence course at the APRR, Tyrwhitt extracted the contents to set a publication, titled The Country and
Town Planning textbook, published in 1950. She personally wrote a chapter: “Survey for Planning”. In that chapter she
“provides the first explicit discussion of 'the overlay technique.'” 8. The layering concept was introduced in the 19th
century in landscape architecture and planning, and most probably it was Eva Taylor, who at the time was teaching
Geography, the person who taught Tyrwhitt about the method, that consisted in the selection a defined area, of which
the surveyor draws several maps, each one representing a feature of the area surveyed, drawn on a transparent sheet of
paper. Visual data can, in fact, convey large amount of information about space in a concise manner, either if the data
concern an existing condition or a new proposal launched by a design process. The overlay technique constitutes now
the basis for all GIS softwares, as for Computer Aided Design (CAD) and graphically-oriented software such as Adobe
Photoshop. The overlay technique is widely used in all technical drawing, analogue or digital; it started just as a survey
method, but later became a design tool. Especially from the 1990s both geography and spatial planning have seen a
growing influence in using computational tools in spatial analysis and design 9. The layer technique is a system that
helps to organize data, and place them according to their spatial location.

Beyond the work they did together for the Ground map, Eva Taylor was a mentor and and a solid reference for
Jaqueline, and her supervision on the maps Tyrwhitt's team worked on was of major importance.

2
The Middlesbrough Survey and Plan with the sociologist Ruth Glass

Middlesbrough, an industrial city in the North of England, had suffered a great depression during the 1930s, and the
centre had several problems of social tension, poverty and housing shortage. In a moment of great forward thinking the
Corporation of the city of Middlesbrough commissioned a detailed survey of the city, three years before the Town and
County Planning Act of 194710. The field work started in April 1944 and the architect appointed to the survey and plan
was Max Lock, an active member of the MARS Group; by October 1945 it was submitted to the Middlesbrough
Council.
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt knew Max Lock since 1944 and for the project she put together a small team from the APRR, that
she was leading at the time as substitute director; the team was formed by Tyrwhitt herself, the sociologist Ruth Glass,
and the geographer A E Smailes. They went to live in Middlesbrough from April to October with other collaborators of
the same project, in order to have a closer contact with the local community. Jaqueline's role, in addition to data
collection for the survey and some map making, consisted in mediating the communication between Max lock and Ruth
Glass, who was considered one of the most important members of the team. Collaboration between planners and
sociologist has never been an easy task, in effect it represents an issue which often generated controversy still today.
Ruth Glass (1912-1990) with Griselda Rowntree carried out the social survey of Middlesbrough, and was Jaqueline the
person in charge to mediate their work with Max Lock. The social survey of the city, under Glass' direction, was
considered the most interesting part of the plan by the reviews, and constituted the core of the work also in Lock's mind.
The urban analysis was the basis of the project action, considered the foundation of the project proposal. In her work the
sociologist focused in the dynamics and the interactions that affect people in neighbourhoods: Glass coined years later
the term “gentrification” in Islington, London, in 1964.

The role of the social survey is illustrated by Ruth Glass in the book The Social background of a plan. A study of
Middlesbrough, publishes in 1948. The essential functions of the survey in this project are three:
• technical, because it can provide fact on which the planner can base his decision
• theoretical, as it can help formulate planning principles depending on different perspectives
• political, as it can be used as an instrument of democracy.
The method illustrated was conceived in this particular plan, but also presented as a model for a wider use. An accurate
survey helped to reduce the arbitrary aspects in planning decisions. Moreover, with the engaging strategy used by the

7 Sir George Pepler papers, drawer 13 Box 4 Folder 9, Archive and Special Collection at the University of Stratchlyde,
Glasgow
8 Carl Steinitz, Paul Parker, Lawrie Jordan, “Han-Drawn Overlays: Their History and Prospective Uses”, in Landscape
Architecture 66, no. 5 (1976): 444–55
9 Jeroen Van Schaick and Ina Klaasen, “The Dutch Layers Approach to Spatial Planning and Design: A Fruitful Planning
Tool or a Temporary Phenomenon?”, Department Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology,
paper downloaded form the author profile on academia.eu, accessed on 3rd February 2015
10 Victoria Brown, “Max Lock and the 1944 Middelsbrough Survey: The Social History of a Plan”, The School of Historical
Studies Postgraduate Forum E-Journal 7, (2009): accessed August 2013, http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/
Lock group, appointing citizens to take part to the survey made the impact of the plan more positive. Even though the
approach for the plan in Middlesbrough can't be defined a complete bottom-up strategy, it certainly moved towards that
idea and it constituted an important episode for the progress of the planning discipline. The survey required an high
number of collaborators to collect first hand opinions from the residents, and Max Lock's group involved principally
women. An initiative experimented for the first time at Middlesbrough was, for example, the “visitors centre”, a place
where the residents could find information about the new developments, consult drawings and models, find members of
the staff to ask questions about the plan. In 1944 this centre coincided with the headquarters of the Max Lock Group,
and was in the same building where the maps were elaborated; today similar centres are placed next to big
developments or building sites.
Tyrwhitt and Glass explored the social structure of the different parts of Middlesbrough and they elaborated a critic to
the concept of the “neighbourhood unit”. The neighbourhood unit consisted in a planning principle for residential
development in cities and metropolis, based on the idea that every area should constitute a self-contained community
with its own core, service and public space. It was theorized for the first time by Clarence Perry, and in the 1940s
became very popular; unless some critics had already emerged, it was still a widely accepted principle, applied in lots of
British New Towns. From the survey work Glass and Tyrwhitt did with the APRR, they deduced the neighbourhood unit
was not the best model to follow and it didn't reflect the social reality of the city: they both believed that the separation
of people with similar income and uniform lifestyle would drive, as consequence, the community to be excessively
static, and improve social conflicts between groups; for this reason Ruth and Tyrwhitt affirmed that the interdependence
of neighbourhoods should be emphasised.

The Middlesbrough episode represented a pioneering experience of interdisciplinary teamwork, where the complexity
of the urban reality was fully recognized and new methodologies were experimented to support planning decisions. As
Ruth Glass stated in her book about Middlesbrough: “... a new difficulty arises in the application of survey to plan.
Different specialists should be consulted, but while their methods are necessarily varied, their approach to the problems
of planning should be unified. Town-planners, architects, geographers and social scientist have yet to learn to synthesise
their specific points of view, and they can learn it only through the experience of the co-operative work”. 11

For some reason Jaqueline didn't get involved in the late stage of Max Lock's work, maybe because she felt her duty
accomplished with the APRR, maybe for Lock's choice. On the press she resulted just an assistant in a publication
“Middlesbrough replanned” but there's no mention of her name in the official book The Middlesbrough Survey and
Plan, while Ruth Glass is largely quoted. Despite the whole episode gained public visibility at the time, it made far less
of an impact on further developments. Middlesbrough represented a success, but for some reason it hasn't been exported
as a model, that might have been excepted from the positive review of the project. The issue of the public consultation
returned in the 1960s, and some of the ideas experimented at Middlesbrough were effectively implemented, but without
any credit to the project ran in 1944.

3
The promotion of sustainability at Ekistics with the economist Barbara Ward

After leaving Britain for the US and teaching at Harvard, in 1962 Jaqueline moved to Athens, engaged by the architect
Constantinos Doxiadis as chief editor of the journal Ekistics and organizer of the Delos Symposia, an international
forum held every summer in the Aegean Sea on the model of the pre war CIAM congresses. Doxiadis founded Ekistics,
defined as “The new science of human settlement” and the symposium and the journal were part of his project, focused
on the development of urban areas in the world. Tyrwhitt became his right hand and worked with and for him until her
death.
A strong collaborator for Tyrwhitt during the years she spent in Greece was Barbara Ward (1914-1981), a British
economist and writer, an internationalist and a world affair expert. She was mentioned in the Time magazine as one
most influential visionaries of the 20th century12. Barbara Ward has been interested in sustainable development since
the 1950s. Travelling a lot in post colonial countries, Ward was one of the first to investigate and comment on foreign
assistance during the years she spent living in Ghana. Her major interest was in the world development related to the
interconnections between national and international economies and ecologies, combined with social equality and
resource distribution, issues she dealt with in her awarded books, among them Progress for a Small Planet.13

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt collaborated with Barbara Ward in the draft of the final Delos Symposion declaration, which was
written at the end of every conference, since the first edition, held in 1963. The declaration was presented the last day

11 Edited by Ruth Glass, The Social Background of a Plan. A study of Middlesbrough (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
1948): 192
12 Time, Special Edition - Earthday 2000 April/May 2000: 54.
13David Satterthwaite, Barbara Ward and the origins of sustainable development, 2006, from the International Institute for
of the symposium with a ceremony, and eventually published on a special issue of the Ekistics journal. The holistic-
ecological approach that emerged, beside the strong emphasis given by the Doxiadis' rhetoric, is clearly inspired by the
work of Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Sigfried Giedion. According to the first Delos declaration the
urbanization trends at the time required foresight planning strategies; coordination and teamwork between disciplines
were the only tools to avoid the complete spoil of the human habitat in cities. Although the first edition of the Delos
Symposia wasn't addressed expressly on ecology, it revealed in the final declaration what were the purposes of the
whole project: the entire world was interconnected and sharing a limited amount of resources, and a new and better
management of them should be studied by a multi/disciplinary team of experts. This was included in the agenda since
the foundation of Ekistics.

Barbara Ward certainly shared these notions, and only after three years after attending the first Delos symposium she
wrote Spaceship Earth in 1966, in which she dealt with sustainable development and the relationship between
environmental conservation and living condition. She distinguished two concepts in between the work for the right
development should be done: "inner limits”, as the human right to an adequate standard of living, and "outer limits", to
refer what the Planet Earth can sustain.

There was a strong connection between the Athens Centre of Ekistics and the United Nations: some of the participants
of the Delos Symposia worked or collaborated with the UN, and one of the purposes of the forum in Greece promoted
topics to be developed at the international organization: Barbara Ward was one of the bridging figure in that sense. She
produced with the microbiologist Renèe Dubos an unofficial report entitled Only One Earth: The Care and
Maintenance of a Small Planet, for the conference held in Stockholm in 1972: it represented a pivotal moment in the
history of sustainability, as for the first time it was required not only to extend the issue on a global scale, but by an
global organization. Since then the agenda of the United Nations had a prominent part dedicated to environmental
issues and to the promotion of policies and campaigns for the conservation of natural resources. At the same time a
stronger consciousness started to consider the problems related to ecology on a global scale. Through its activities the
UN played an important role integrating the concepts of living quality, energy resources and social equality, also in the
formalization of concepts that came to be part of a common vocabulary, such as “Sustainable development”.

As chief editor of the journal Ekistics, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt took care of several issues have been devoted to the
Ecosystems, with the title “Man and Nature”: in 1969, 1970 and 1971, as an amplifier of the discussions held at the
Delos Symposia.14 Jaqueline with Barbara Ward synthesize in the report of Delos 6, 1968: “If we treat the living
ecology of the planet as a seamless web, within which breaks are disastrous, we can plan for the way in which man's
construction of an artificial environment can complement and improve the natural environment of this planet ... we
recognize also that the human environment is now the entire earth”.15 The environmental sense of responsibility was a
concept both Tyrwhitt and Doxiadis stressed during their work for the Delos Symposia and the journal Ekistics, trying
to reinforce the link with the UN, with the invaluable contribution of Barbara Ward and other scholars. In particular, on
the theme of sustainability, the works presented at Delos by the American inventor Buckminster Fuller and the
microbiologist Renee Dubos have enriched the debate at the international forum.

Conclusion
This paper doesn't constitute a comprehensive and complete illustration of all the collaborations Jaqueline Tyrwhitt
established during her life. She gained the esteem of very different kind of scholars, such as the cultural anthropologist
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) and the American planner and advocate Catherine Bauer Wurster (1905-1964);
Jaqueline on her side profoundly admired them , as well as Dr. Inner Pearse (1889-1978), co-founder of the Peckham
Health Centre, and Dorothy Elmhirst (1887-1968), co-founder of the Dartington Hall. For her course at the Graduate
School of Design at Harvard Jaqueline invited to give lectures the pioneer of housing planning Elizabeth Wood(1900-
1993) and the activist Jane Jacobs' (1916-2006). For years she worked with the American scientist, planner and a
geographer Gwen Bell (born 1934), and many more could be quoted.

Jaqueline was a woman in an age where it still meant to face important cultural barriers; she travelled and worked as a
complete freelance, with a lifestyle very unusual and probably with no equals in her contemporary time. The word most
recurrent in three episodes is “experiment”: all the women quoted above played a foundational role in their fields, they
ran pioneering projects and they made the value of their ideas win over any prejudice. That lesson was much more
important for Tyrwhitt in order to start her career, and she reached several opportunities to develop her own field
through a cross-fertilization of different branches of knowledge, a lesson of method that maintains its value still today.

14 Ellen Shoshkes, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: 221

15 Ekistics, Volume 28, No. 167, October 1969: 216