Ar - Edmund Bacon

EDMUND N BACON –
THE FATHER OF MODERN PHILADELPHIA
OLD TOWN
NEW CITY
SUBMITTED BY
GREETY MARIA THOMAS C
M ARCH
EDMUND NORWOOD
BACON(1910 –Oct 14, 2005)
A noted American urban planner,
architect, educator and author.
During his tenure as the Executive Director of
the Philadelphia City Planning Commission
(1949-1970), his visions shaped today's
Philadelphia, the city in which he was born, to
the extent that he is sometimes described as
"The Father of Modern Philadelphia."
“Great cities are not great because of

individual buildings. They’re great because
of the way things fit together,” he said.
“I was thrown out of Flint in disgrace,” he

said. “But I had learned that city planning is
a combination of social input as well as
design.”
He graduated from Cornell University in 1932
with a degree in architecture and then went on a
tour that led him through Europe to China. In
Shanghai, he was impressed by the brightly
coloured buildings and roofs, which, he later
said, "taught me that city planning is about
movement through space, an architectural
sequence of sensors and stimuli, up and down,
light and dark, colour and rhythm.“
PHILOSOPHY
• Edmund Bacon believed that the most important and difficult thing to do was deciding what to advocate and
that the trick in making that decision was selecting something that you could bring to fruition.
• The spare geometry of buildings, makes disregard for the vitality of the traditional street‘.
‘The more density, the more walkability, the more energy, then the more opportunity,
the more jobs; that's my starting point for what a successful city is:'
• First ambitious stab at city planning, calling for the extensive urbanization of the Parkway, with apartment
towers, restaurants and dramatically narrowed roadways.
PHILADELPHIA : CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE
 It is conveniently located in Northeast USA, just 1hr 20 minutes from New York city.
 Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and its only consolidated city country, the fifth most
populous city I United States, and the core of the sixth largest metropolitan area in the country
This was the old Philadelphia designed
by William Penn in gridiron pattern.
 He closely guarded a city's structural heritage; for example, he
favored maintaining a ceiling on Philadelphia building
heights, honoring the tradition that no building should stand
taller than 491 feet the height of the statue of William Penna top
City Hall, that shaped today's Philadelphia.
• In Philadelphia, height
regulations tailored for
each historic district
promote new buildings
that match their context
and maintain district scale.
• In 1932, Philadelphia became home to the first International style

skyscraper in the united states, The PSFS Building, designed by
George Howe and William Lescaze. It is the United states first modern
skyscraper and considered the most important one built in the first
part of 20th century.
• Height setbacks around significant

landmarks with special design
guidelines discourage the diminishing
effect of tall buildings had on
Philadelphia City Hall.
Bacon and his colleagues emphasized small-scale
demolition and often restored older structures so that
new features like shops and parks were interwoven with
the existing landscape. Best exemplified in the
redevelopment of Society Hill, these design principles were
also publicly showcased at the Better Philadelphia
Exhibition in 1947.
Bacon’s plans included family-friendly
residential homes positioned in loop
streets that echoed the area’s natural
topography and preserved open spaces for
children to play. In addition, retail centres
with connections to downtown transit
would serve as the central hubs of these
communities, though in the end retail
centres were eliminated in favour of strip
malls and the loop street design
evolved into cul-de-sacs.
His vision for the future of
Philadelphia has strongly influenced
the current form of Centre City
including the preservation of
colonial Old City, tiny brick row
houses with a high-rise office
corridor, a modern urban shopping
district, and an affluent middle-class
neighbourhood at its core. The
creation of modern business
district, Penn Centre, and the
development of Philadelphia's most
popular tourist destination,
Independence Mall were all his
projects.
Unlike so many other American
cities, Philadelphia never lost the
habit of downtown living. Its
large and growing city-center
population remains one of its great
strengths today.
• Bacon believed, if city planning avoids abstraction
and focuses on the environment that real people
inhabit, so his hypotheses were based on “field
experiences in city rebuilding.”
• He envisioned a city (with the focus on Centre
City) that would be clean, appealing, and
symmetrical, with thriving businesses and
offices, historic architecture, and plenty of open
spaces.
 Representing a new era in urban planning

after World War II, Bacon then set forth
his own principles, concluding that by
balancing old and new structures,
pedestrian and vehicle flows, and work
and leisure activities, post-war
Philadelphia could be made vibrant and
pleasant.
Transit corridor
Bacon is responsible for implementing the revitalization of

Society Hill in the 1960s.
• From adventure rides around the city to

interactive museums, parklands,
internationally renowned festivals, and even
nations first zoo.
• The city is designed on an easy to
explore, walkable grid system.
Bacon envisioned a city-wide event Section through shopping concourse on Market
with a variety of attractions, which are Street proposed by Bacon.
easily accessible through

underground streets and moving
sidewalks and also an overhead
cable car system.
• He was in favour of
pedestrianism and row
houses, but for separating retail
from housing and sidewalks from
streets.
Pedestrian friendly intersection

HIS BOOKS
'The major contemporary work on urban design. Splendidly

presented, filled with thoughtful and brilliant intuitive insights.
The essays assess the wider context of
In this book Bacon relates historical exam to modern
Philadelphia's planning, architecture and
principles of urban planning. Illuminating the historical back
real estate communities at the time, how
ground of urban design, Bacon also shows us the
city officials were reacting to
fundamental forces and considerations that determine the
economic decline, what national
form of a great city. Perhaps the most significant of these are
precedents shaped Bacon's faith in
simultaneous movement systems the paths of pedestrian and
grand forms of urban renewal, and
vehicular traffic, public and private transportation that serve as
whether or not it is desirable or even
the dominant organizing force and Bacon looks at movement
possible to adopt similarly ambitious
systems in cities such as London, Rome and NewYork. He
visions for contemporary urban
also stresses the importance of designing open space as well
planning and economic development.
as architectural mass and discusses the impact of space,
color, and perspective on the city-dweller.
CRITICS
• In his contribution, critical comment was that Bacons lack of foresight. Bacon and his
planners anticipated that the city would retain at least a stable level of population and
employment over the next quarter century. For them, the key to successful planning
lay in a reduction of housing density and an overall emphasis on design excellence ...
In contrast economists and industrial development experts saw a bleaker future in
which obsolete, crowded factories would interact with a changing economy and a
racially segregated population to create an environment inhospitable for economic
survival, much less growth.
• Bacon also failed to understand how racial and social upheaval would alter the city,
especially vivid in the planning for the Bicentennial.
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What were Bacon's principles of city planning?

What were some of Bacon's accomplishments as the head of Philadelphia's city planning commission?

EDMUND N BACON –

THE FATHER OF MODERN PHILADELPHIA

"The Father of Modern Philadelphia."

“Great cities are not great because of

“I was thrown out of Flint in disgrace,” he

• In 1932, Philadelphia became home to the first International style

• Height setbacks around significant

 Representing a new era in urban planning

Bacon is responsible for implementing the revitalization of

• From adventure rides around the city to

easily accessible through

Pedestrian friendly intersection

'The major contemporary work on urban design. Splendidly

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