Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,733
By This is the grave of Sidney Shurcliff.
Born in 1906 in Boston, Shurcliff went to Harvard, graduating from there in 1927. His father was a draftsman and architect and he joined his father’s firm after graduation. His father offered him a partnership in 1933. Hard to grow up rich, I know. Shurcliff became famous for a very specific kind of landscape architecture that became popular in the 1930s. See, John D. Rockfeller Jr had weird ideas about America that he wanted to see fulfilled. I know that in this era of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg it’s hard to imagine super rich weirdos trying to implement their own oddball ideas about America, but bear with me here. Well, Rockefeller had a vision to recreate the American past. By the 1920s, now that Americans increasingly had cars and leisure time and expendable income as the middle class grew, he wanted to create an old-timey space where visitors could see what the past was really like. Of course that’s not really the case, they get at best the most superficial vision of the past possible and usually one that avoids all the messy stuff in favor of demonstrations from people dressed up in old timey clothes on how to churn butter and the like. Anyway, Rockefeller and the Daughters of the American Revolution and some other weirdos wanted to create a space that replicated early colonial America.
Well, they had to hire someone to recreate Williamsburg into Colonial Williamsburg and that someone was Sidney Shurcliff. He started that project in 1930 and continued on it all the way until 1948. In the middle of that, Massachusetts, not to be outdone by Virginia (I mean, there’s pride there!) decided on their own version of this and that became Colonial Sturbridge, which, again, if you want to pay money to go see people dressed up churning butter, go for it I guess. I understand they have a nice Christmas season. In any case, the people behind this hired Shurcliff in 1936 to do their version too and that continued until 1946. He did take a little time off from both of these projects during World War II, when he joined the Navy for a bit. Amusing, the first thing that came up when I put Shurcliff’s name into Google Books was a tiny letter the editor he wrote to Life in 1942 about a picture of a boat. Guess he wasn’t that busy during the war!
After the war and with his historical revivals wrapping up, Shurcliff looked more to the future than the past and started designing shopping malls. One of his biggest projects in this field was Shoppers’ World, in Framingham, Massachusetts, one of the first major malls. It’s hard to consider how transformative malls were from our perspective of most of our malls dying. There’s actually a gigantic scholarly literature on the shopping mall crossing many fields and it’s easy to criticize them for everything from gutting downtowns to privatizing public spaces and all the security and lack of free speech that comes with it. But they are what people wanted and in the suburban rush after the war, Shurcliff and others were there to provide the brainwork for those projects.
The other area Shurcliff got super involved with after the war also reflected the expanding middle class of the postwar era. That was the college campus master plan. With the GI Bill vastly expanding college enrollments and with that seen as likely to continue into the future, which was true, colleges and universities invested in master plans to build out their campuses in a way that reflected the values of the place, which usually had an eye to the past anyway. So Shurcliff won contracts from the University of Massachusetts, the University of New Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke College to develop their master plans. I’ve never been on the UNH campus, so I can’t speak to it. Holyoke is of course very nice. UMass is kind of weird because the school went so all in on high modernist architecture and that is combined with the old-timey stuff. I have no idea what part belongs to Shurcliff and his agency. He also was the first American to be President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, which he was from 1958 to 1962. He also had a fancy house built for himself in Ipswich, which he in fact did not design.
If you have access to a university library (or maybe a public, depending on what they subscribe to, you can find all kinds of fun stuff Shurcliff wrote over the years. For example, there’s his 1958 article in Landscape Architecture titled “Big Boom in Club Swimming Pools: Busy Life around the Pool Requires Expert Enclosure.” This is actually kind of interesting because it starts by discussing the reasons for the vast increase in private clubs building swimming pools. There is the decline of servants in the house, the difficult of getting babysitters, and, yep, desegregation making whites choose private clubs for their pools. And then, simply realizing the facts rather than commenting on them, goes about talking about the seven or so swimming pools he and his firm had designed for Boston area country clubs in the past few years and where to put them, how many tables to put around the pool, the ratio of people in the water and people watching those in the water (1:4), and the need to enclose the people to keep out the unwanted, whether humans or animals.
Then there’s Shurcliff’s 1952 article in the same journal, “Shoppers’ World: The Design and Construction of a Retail Shopping Center,” which explores his Framingham project. It basically brags about the project from stem to stern. The justification for such a project is that there are just too many cars for downtown shopping these days, which I suppose did become a problem with the government incentivizing every white person to move out of the inner cities through redlining and then, later, the Federal Highway Act. But if you are interested in things such as zoning changes and how landscape architects imagined parking at this time, it is a worthy historical document.
In his older age, Shurcliff could get pretty pissy about the history of the field. He wrote a letter to the editor of Landscape Architecture in 1972, talking about how if the journal didn’t get its facts in order with regards to the history of the profession, no one was going to take it seriously anymore. Fair enough!
Shurcliff died in 1981, at the age of 74.
Sidney Shurcliff is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
If you would like this series to visit other landscape architects, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Nolen is also in Mount Auburn, the cemetery that keeps on giving. I am sure there are others, but they aren’t the easiest to get names on and I have real work to do here today. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.