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Designing the American Century: The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rapuano, 1915–1965
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August 5, 2026
TL;DR. I loved this book! So much I wrote a pretty LONG review/riffs/response.
Moses, Modernism and the Most Influential Landscape Architects You’ve Never Heard Of
You’ve probably heard of 20th Century freeway titan Robert Moses, but did you know that Moses had go-to landscape architects? Those would be Gilmore Clarke and Michael Rapuano and their firm, subject of an excellent new book Designing the American Century by Thomas J. Campanella, a professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Campanella also has an excellent lecture on the subject here, at the Skyscraper Museum.
Briefly, on Robert Moses: Many people in design, architecture, planning, housing, government, community activism, journalism, etc., are deeply influenced by Robert Caro’s famous doorstop biography of Moses called The Power Broker (1974). Recalling his reading of it at age 22, Barack Obama said he had been “mesmerized.” Less precociously, I didn’t pick it up until age 25, but I felt the same. Its Bible-thin 1000-plus pages were my constant bedtime companion for several months.
Moses was an exceptionally powerful New York City and state bureaucrat who began as a parks commissioner in the 1920s and eventually held posts in planning, housing and, most famously, helmed the Triborough Bridge Authority for three decades. From these spots, he controlled vast public works that shaped New York City and, via its center-of-the-empire influence, much of the nation during the 20th century’s automotive age. The parks built in Moses’ pre-WWII career are still beloved (e.g. Jones Beach), but not so much the tollbridges, urban expressways and so-called slum clearances that came after the war. His name today is virtually synonymous with freeway sprawl, neighborhood displacement and urban fabrics rent asunder for the almighty automobile.
Moses wasn’t a singular Ayn Randian (anti)hero, although he might have enjoyed people thinking so. Huge public works projects require vast teams of designers, planners, engineers, administrators, builders, laborers ... and landscape architects.
Moses’ most-hired landscape architects were Gilmore Clarke and Michael Rapuano. Professor Campanella has done tremendous research to bring their story to light, including finding and documenting previously uncollected material. In addition to the comprehensive narrative and appended project list, the book includes plentiful reproductions of site plans and other drawings.
In their day, Clarke and Rapuano were huge by landscape architecture standards. They were active across six decades, billed millions per year in today’s dollars, and staffed an office of 50 across multiple aligned disciplines, including engineering. In fact, they were both licensed engineers themselves, a double qualification as relatively rare then as now. Yet today they’re relatively unknown, possibly overlooked due to Moses’ present-day negative popularity. Or maybe, because they were “modern” in the sense of being at one with their times and technologies, but not capital-M Modern in the sense of artistically avant-garde, that their works and influence became so ubiquitous, especially on their home turf, that their style and works became almost a default, almost invisible.
Their firm was so prolific and prominent, Campanella argues, that they came to shape the look of the twentieth century, especially in the civic realm, and particularly in New York City and Washington, D.C. In the book’s opening anecdote, the motorcade carrying Nikita Khrushchev on his historic state visit though New York in 1959 passed by or through two dozen landscapes -- parks, monuments and infrastructure projects -- that were wholly or partially created by Clarke and Rapuano.
This legacy is visible in projects as large as Idlewild Airport (JFK International) and in details as small as the ubiquitous plane trees, bluestone flagging, wire-mesh wastebaskets, and concrete-and-wood-slat benches that define the look of so many New York City parks.
Generally, Gilmore Clarke, the older partner, was the business and political operator who brought in endless work, including through his alliance with Moses and his knowledge of the federal government dating to his World War I Corp of Engineers service. Michael Rapuano was the artistically talented site designer with a quick study of a site’s topographic potential. There was also a “silent third partner,” the serendipitously named Elizabeth “Betty” Sprout. Sprout was a licensed landscape architect who created or oversaw the firm’s planting plans and garden designs; eventually, she and Clarke married. The firm also employed numerous associate practitioners; where possible, Campanella credits these individuals in the book next to the specific drawings they created.
Before founding their firm in 1939, Clarke and Rapuano worked together at the Westchester County parks department to create their earliest influential works: the parkways. The very first was the Bronx River Parkway and it was followed by Henry Hudson Parkway, Garden State Parkway and dozens of others in the New York area and beyond, including route planning for Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. When I say influential, consider: A German delegation visited the Bronx River Parkway and designs for the autobahns followed. And Moses himself attended the road’s 1922 formal opening, then modeled his Long Island parkways on it.
It is amazing to contemplate, looking back, that PARKways were originally created to be something like parks -- bona fide amenities. Parkways were the thoughtfully designed, picturesque roads that historically preceded the remorselessly utilitarian thoroughfares now known as freeways and expressways. Clarke’s 1925 design for the Bronx River Parkway pioneered the key features of the limited-access roadway: overpasses, underpasses, wide rights of way, curves designed to be taken at cruising speed and landscaped median strips. Of course, cruising speed in the 1920s was a breakneck 35 miles per hour! Today it's unimaginable that a road with such features could also be intended for beauty, but in the 1920s and ’30s that was the idea: “a kind of romantic bower in which modernism and pastoralism could intertwine,” as author Marshall Berman put it.
Clarke and Rapuano also worked extensively in two other areas that are, for better or worse, archetypes of mid-20th century planning hubris: The superblock public or public-private housing project, and the large-scale urban renewal scheme. The names of some of these housing developments are iconic even today, e.g., Parkchester, Stuyvesant Town and Harlem’s Riverton Houses. In this era, optimism for and construction of public housing were peaking.
When it came to urban redevelopment (the mega-projects of “slum clearance” and rebuilding largely funded through Title I of the federal 1949 Housing Act), Clarke and Rapuano worked in New York, of course, and also in cities like Nashville, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, Cleveland and Milwaukee. In Pittsburgh, at Howard C. Heinz’s invitation, they joined Moses and Pittsburgh-based landscape architect Ralph Griswold in developing plans for Point State Park, the Parkways East and West, and, sadly, the I-579/Civic Arena project that wiped out the Lower Hill.
Rewinding back past the hubristic -- and ultimately damaging -- excess of midcentury megaplanning, Clark and Rapuano’s prewar and postwar parks remain loved and iconic. Many of those in New York were completed or renovated in a heroic sprint that harnessed New Deal funds during the worst of the Great Depression. The parks newly created or substantially renovated include Bryant, Battery, Cadman Plaza, Jones Beach, the Central Park Zoo and dozens of others on a long citywide roster. Brooklyn Heights Promenade was a later work, during the expressway era. As mentioned earlier, Clarke designed the familiar wood-and-concrete NYC park bench, while Rapuano played a major role in popularizing the London plane as a street tree across America following the Dutch Elm disease crisis.
Their firm also did the site plans for both the 1939 and the 1964 World’s Fairs, the United Nations headquarters in New York and the CIA headquarters in D.C. With the personal backing of FDR, Clarke essentially overruled a Congressional committee to choose the site for a modest little building known as the Pentagon.
If an underdog profession like landscape architecture had an Establishment, they were it.
As they did more and more public commissions, they were criticized even in their own time for becoming too repetitive and efficient, cranking out designs that were “mechanically conceived and mechanically executed” as Louis Mumford complained. But working that way was, in its way ... modern! Modern in the sense of mass production, which was once viewed as a source of inspiration and optimism by no less than the Bauhaus, but also modern like Andy Warhol’s Factory: part art and design collective, but also part relentless screenprinting workshop, making an art of repetition.
Thus their work was modern in the sense that it shaped our modern age and was at one with the motor age. However, it was not stylistically Modern except for a few designs of Rapuano’s, e.g., the Voorhees Memorial Garden at Princeton. As for Clarke, he didn’t even like stylistic Modernism. Instead, the firm’s style was typically an updated, civic version of Beaux Arts. At one point, Campanella calls it “public works Baroque”; another possible portmanteau, Streamline Beaux Arts, also occurs to me. Rapuano specifically drew on Italianate traditions such as axes, grids and forced perspective. For his part, Clarke’s parkways carried the Olmstedian curved line into the motor age. Their projects weren’t artsy, highbrow or avant-garde works like sculpture gardens and museums but rather 20th-century public landscapes that became so familiar that we have come to perceive them as a default.
Eventually and ironically, the modern motor age gradually sidelined them. From the 1920s through the early postwar era, they had been conceptualizers and lead contractors, sitting in meetings with the bigwigs, seeing their visions realized. At the apex of their success, they were as primary to their projects as Olmsted was to his landmarks like Central Park. But as parkways became freeways, as Moses himself became more all-powerful, as the “urban renewal” machine chewed up American cities, and, finally, as the motoring public came to accept the anti-aesthetic of pure traffic, landscape architects like Clarke and Rapuano were de facto demoted -- not quite down to shrub-it-up subcontractors, but not as often the lead designers of great public works. Engineering-only firms and engineer-dominated state DOTs took over, and expressways grew enormous, destructive and formulaic. The automobile and its great and terrible power had given, and then it taketh away.
Overall I found the subject fascinating and Campanella’s synthesis of the material -- much of it collected by him for the first time from private individuals’ files and attics -- compelling and well-told. I was able to read the book and pore over its images on my laptop via my library’s Hoopa online e-reading app, which your library may also subscribe to. I’ll also look for some of Campanella’s other books including his best-known, The Once and Future Brooklyn (2019), and his even more intriguing -- to me, anyway! -- history of the American elm tree, Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (2003).
Moses, Modernism and the Most Influential Landscape Architects You’ve Never Heard Of
You’ve probably heard of 20th Century freeway titan Robert Moses, but did you know that Moses had go-to landscape architects? Those would be Gilmore Clarke and Michael Rapuano and their firm, subject of an excellent new book Designing the American Century by Thomas J. Campanella, a professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. Campanella also has an excellent lecture on the subject here, at the Skyscraper Museum.
Briefly, on Robert Moses: Many people in design, architecture, planning, housing, government, community activism, journalism, etc., are deeply influenced by Robert Caro’s famous doorstop biography of Moses called The Power Broker (1974). Recalling his reading of it at age 22, Barack Obama said he had been “mesmerized.” Less precociously, I didn’t pick it up until age 25, but I felt the same. Its Bible-thin 1000-plus pages were my constant bedtime companion for several months.
Moses was an exceptionally powerful New York City and state bureaucrat who began as a parks commissioner in the 1920s and eventually held posts in planning, housing and, most famously, helmed the Triborough Bridge Authority for three decades. From these spots, he controlled vast public works that shaped New York City and, via its center-of-the-empire influence, much of the nation during the 20th century’s automotive age. The parks built in Moses’ pre-WWII career are still beloved (e.g. Jones Beach), but not so much the tollbridges, urban expressways and so-called slum clearances that came after the war. His name today is virtually synonymous with freeway sprawl, neighborhood displacement and urban fabrics rent asunder for the almighty automobile.
Moses wasn’t a singular Ayn Randian (anti)hero, although he might have enjoyed people thinking so. Huge public works projects require vast teams of designers, planners, engineers, administrators, builders, laborers ... and landscape architects.
Moses’ most-hired landscape architects were Gilmore Clarke and Michael Rapuano. Professor Campanella has done tremendous research to bring their story to light, including finding and documenting previously uncollected material. In addition to the comprehensive narrative and appended project list, the book includes plentiful reproductions of site plans and other drawings.
In their day, Clarke and Rapuano were huge by landscape architecture standards. They were active across six decades, billed millions per year in today’s dollars, and staffed an office of 50 across multiple aligned disciplines, including engineering. In fact, they were both licensed engineers themselves, a double qualification as relatively rare then as now. Yet today they’re relatively unknown, possibly overlooked due to Moses’ present-day negative popularity. Or maybe, because they were “modern” in the sense of being at one with their times and technologies, but not capital-M Modern in the sense of artistically avant-garde, that their works and influence became so ubiquitous, especially on their home turf, that their style and works became almost a default, almost invisible.
Their firm was so prolific and prominent, Campanella argues, that they came to shape the look of the twentieth century, especially in the civic realm, and particularly in New York City and Washington, D.C. In the book’s opening anecdote, the motorcade carrying Nikita Khrushchev on his historic state visit though New York in 1959 passed by or through two dozen landscapes -- parks, monuments and infrastructure projects -- that were wholly or partially created by Clarke and Rapuano.
This legacy is visible in projects as large as Idlewild Airport (JFK International) and in details as small as the ubiquitous plane trees, bluestone flagging, wire-mesh wastebaskets, and concrete-and-wood-slat benches that define the look of so many New York City parks.
Generally, Gilmore Clarke, the older partner, was the business and political operator who brought in endless work, including through his alliance with Moses and his knowledge of the federal government dating to his World War I Corp of Engineers service. Michael Rapuano was the artistically talented site designer with a quick study of a site’s topographic potential. There was also a “silent third partner,” the serendipitously named Elizabeth “Betty” Sprout. Sprout was a licensed landscape architect who created or oversaw the firm’s planting plans and garden designs; eventually, she and Clarke married. The firm also employed numerous associate practitioners; where possible, Campanella credits these individuals in the book next to the specific drawings they created.
Before founding their firm in 1939, Clarke and Rapuano worked together at the Westchester County parks department to create their earliest influential works: the parkways. The very first was the Bronx River Parkway and it was followed by Henry Hudson Parkway, Garden State Parkway and dozens of others in the New York area and beyond, including route planning for Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. When I say influential, consider: A German delegation visited the Bronx River Parkway and designs for the autobahns followed. And Moses himself attended the road’s 1922 formal opening, then modeled his Long Island parkways on it.
It is amazing to contemplate, looking back, that PARKways were originally created to be something like parks -- bona fide amenities. Parkways were the thoughtfully designed, picturesque roads that historically preceded the remorselessly utilitarian thoroughfares now known as freeways and expressways. Clarke’s 1925 design for the Bronx River Parkway pioneered the key features of the limited-access roadway: overpasses, underpasses, wide rights of way, curves designed to be taken at cruising speed and landscaped median strips. Of course, cruising speed in the 1920s was a breakneck 35 miles per hour! Today it's unimaginable that a road with such features could also be intended for beauty, but in the 1920s and ’30s that was the idea: “a kind of romantic bower in which modernism and pastoralism could intertwine,” as author Marshall Berman put it.
Clarke and Rapuano also worked extensively in two other areas that are, for better or worse, archetypes of mid-20th century planning hubris: The superblock public or public-private housing project, and the large-scale urban renewal scheme. The names of some of these housing developments are iconic even today, e.g., Parkchester, Stuyvesant Town and Harlem’s Riverton Houses. In this era, optimism for and construction of public housing were peaking.
When it came to urban redevelopment (the mega-projects of “slum clearance” and rebuilding largely funded through Title I of the federal 1949 Housing Act), Clarke and Rapuano worked in New York, of course, and also in cities like Nashville, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, Cleveland and Milwaukee. In Pittsburgh, at Howard C. Heinz’s invitation, they joined Moses and Pittsburgh-based landscape architect Ralph Griswold in developing plans for Point State Park, the Parkways East and West, and, sadly, the I-579/Civic Arena project that wiped out the Lower Hill.
Rewinding back past the hubristic -- and ultimately damaging -- excess of midcentury megaplanning, Clark and Rapuano’s prewar and postwar parks remain loved and iconic. Many of those in New York were completed or renovated in a heroic sprint that harnessed New Deal funds during the worst of the Great Depression. The parks newly created or substantially renovated include Bryant, Battery, Cadman Plaza, Jones Beach, the Central Park Zoo and dozens of others on a long citywide roster. Brooklyn Heights Promenade was a later work, during the expressway era. As mentioned earlier, Clarke designed the familiar wood-and-concrete NYC park bench, while Rapuano played a major role in popularizing the London plane as a street tree across America following the Dutch Elm disease crisis.
Their firm also did the site plans for both the 1939 and the 1964 World’s Fairs, the United Nations headquarters in New York and the CIA headquarters in D.C. With the personal backing of FDR, Clarke essentially overruled a Congressional committee to choose the site for a modest little building known as the Pentagon.
If an underdog profession like landscape architecture had an Establishment, they were it.
As they did more and more public commissions, they were criticized even in their own time for becoming too repetitive and efficient, cranking out designs that were “mechanically conceived and mechanically executed” as Louis Mumford complained. But working that way was, in its way ... modern! Modern in the sense of mass production, which was once viewed as a source of inspiration and optimism by no less than the Bauhaus, but also modern like Andy Warhol’s Factory: part art and design collective, but also part relentless screenprinting workshop, making an art of repetition.
Thus their work was modern in the sense that it shaped our modern age and was at one with the motor age. However, it was not stylistically Modern except for a few designs of Rapuano’s, e.g., the Voorhees Memorial Garden at Princeton. As for Clarke, he didn’t even like stylistic Modernism. Instead, the firm’s style was typically an updated, civic version of Beaux Arts. At one point, Campanella calls it “public works Baroque”; another possible portmanteau, Streamline Beaux Arts, also occurs to me. Rapuano specifically drew on Italianate traditions such as axes, grids and forced perspective. For his part, Clarke’s parkways carried the Olmstedian curved line into the motor age. Their projects weren’t artsy, highbrow or avant-garde works like sculpture gardens and museums but rather 20th-century public landscapes that became so familiar that we have come to perceive them as a default.
Eventually and ironically, the modern motor age gradually sidelined them. From the 1920s through the early postwar era, they had been conceptualizers and lead contractors, sitting in meetings with the bigwigs, seeing their visions realized. At the apex of their success, they were as primary to their projects as Olmsted was to his landmarks like Central Park. But as parkways became freeways, as Moses himself became more all-powerful, as the “urban renewal” machine chewed up American cities, and, finally, as the motoring public came to accept the anti-aesthetic of pure traffic, landscape architects like Clarke and Rapuano were de facto demoted -- not quite down to shrub-it-up subcontractors, but not as often the lead designers of great public works. Engineering-only firms and engineer-dominated state DOTs took over, and expressways grew enormous, destructive and formulaic. The automobile and its great and terrible power had given, and then it taketh away.
Overall I found the subject fascinating and Campanella’s synthesis of the material -- much of it collected by him for the first time from private individuals’ files and attics -- compelling and well-told. I was able to read the book and pore over its images on my laptop via my library’s Hoopa online e-reading app, which your library may also subscribe to. I’ll also look for some of Campanella’s other books including his best-known, The Once and Future Brooklyn (2019), and his even more intriguing -- to me, anyway! -- history of the American elm tree, Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (2003).
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