Word: bacons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bacon's concern for cities in general and Philadelphia in particular began early. His senior thesis, as an architectural student at Cornell in 1932, was on "Plans for a Philadelphia Center City." After graduation, he used a $1,000 legacy to bicycle through Europe, walk through Greece and sail up the Nile. He got his architectural start working as a designer under Architect Henry Killam Murphy in Shanghai. "It's a good idea to cut your teeth where the product won't be around to haunt you later," says Bacon. Back in the U.S. after a year, he wrote...
...Eliel Saarinen was my great master and teacher," says Bacon. "He emphasized design as the relationship of form and space; so the real design problem is the city. Saarinen taught us that harmony of form and mass doesn't stop at property lines but continues." The Bacon generation at Cranbrook included such notables of arts and architecture as Designer Charles Eames, Sculptor Harry Bertoia, Eliel's late son Eero, and Designer Florence Knoll...
...wonderful thing the suburbs were going to be?discussing civic centers, working, shopping and living centers?that sort of thing," recollects Eames. "It was all quite new, and we were full of hope for the pastures. We were all gliding out of town on the freeways. But Ed Bacon looked at the first seep of city rot and saw the real crisis." After leaving Cranbrook in 1936, Bacon served for two years as a city planner in nearby Flint, then landed a job back in Philadelphia as managing director of the Philadelphia Housing Association. It was one of the earnest...
...1950s, the city's businessmen recognized that Philadelphia was a city in a state of collapse, to use Bacon's phrase. Industries were beginning to move out, sales in the center city were declining, and stores were moving to the suburbs, or talking about...
...businessmen did not wait for the Federal Government. They organized themselves into the Citizens Council on City Planning. Bacon and Architect Oscar Stonorov mounted an elaborate display of their notions for reconverting downtown Philadelphia in a complete-scale model with animated parts. The exhibit drew 385,000 people when put on display at a downtown department store. Bacon personally visited 13 public schools and encouraged schoolchildren to work up models of how they would like their local district to look. Result was a climate of enthusiasm for improvement and change that ranged through the whole community, from self-interested businessman...