The Global Postcolonial Moment and the American New Town

Historians traditionally contextualize the new town of Reston, Virginia, within the long garden city movement and its idealistic planning heritage. ¹ While they may disagree as to how closely Reston adhered or not to the land use tenets fostered in the United States by the City Housing Corporation, the Regional Planning Association of America, or the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration, most agree on the lineage, and with good reason. Launched in 1961, Reston bore many direct connections to that history, from developer Robert Simon’s family links to the financing of Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn, to his trips to the British new towns of Crawley, Harlow, and Stevenage for inspiration, to the architecture firm Simon chose for the project, which Simon knew as “this firm that had done Radburn and Kitimat,” its longtime principal, Albert Mayer, having gotten his start as assistant planner at Radburn and his partner, Julian Whittlesey, having through the early fifties led the planning of Kitimat, the new town for the Aluminum Company of Canada that their friend and colleague Clarence Stein, who also worked on the project, called the first complete new town in North America. ² Early Reston’s housing clusters, car and foot traffic separated by designed overpasses, public art, prefabricated construction techniques, preserved public space, and neighborhood unit focal points drew these obvious connections on the ground. Simon also forged an important friendship with the Washington urbanist Frederick Gutheim, who became Reston’s most effective promoter among planning intellectuals, broadcasting far and wide the new town’s “continuity with the main tradition of housing and community design in the United States since the first World War.” ³

This essay does not attempt to dislodge Reston from that history. But the power of the long garden city narrative, solidified by its repetition, with different levels of specificity and often in thumbnail form, countless times, does have a curious effect. Reston can seem to have more to do with 1898 (when Ebenezer Howard published his To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform) or 1909 (when Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. began planning Forest Hills Gardens in Queens) or 1928 (when Clarence Stein developed his “Radburn idea,” using overpasses to separate auto and foot traffic in his “town for the motor age”) or 1935–1937 (when the three New Deal Greenbelt towns were built and welcomed their first residents) than with 1961. On the other hand, the national narrative of the American suburbs has its own powerful aura, and there is another series of temptations to define Reston, as Simon himself often did, as merely a retort to 1950s America, the decade when speculative suburb building reigned triumphant.

This essay situates Reston not primarily in the long garden city movement or in the national frame of the 1950s United States, although the new town occupied both of them. Between World War II and the founding of Reston lay not just the history of the American suburbs but world decolonization and national independence movements that dramatically altered the globe’s political geography. Reston was not just another imperfectly executed garden city but a situated product of the global 1950s. By focusing on Reston’s architectural firm, its members, Albert Mayer, Julian Whittlesey, William Conklin, Edward G. Echeverria, and James Rossant, and their work in an international milieu, this essay presents two features of Reston almost universally absent from the literature—its physical distillation of the anxieties and revisions of international modernist architectural aesthetic at the time of its opening, and its importation to the United States of a postcolonial urban form. Through Reston and building on the growing body of work that examines the complex relationship between midcentury modernism and the decolonizing world, ⁴ this essay also explores the interdependence between the articulation of the revised modernist building practices of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in the 1950s—stressing the “core” and the “human scale”—and the independent building practices of “new nations” and late colonies looking to represent progressive nationalism through spatial and often indigenous form.

Despite the deep, although often disavowed connections between the histories of modernism and the garden city tradition, ⁵ the story of the 1950s new town is still commonly or at least implicitly split in two—the British New Towns of the 1946 Act and the Scandinavian towns of Vallingby in Sweden and Tapiola in Finland on one side, the new forthrightly modernist capitals of Brasilia and Chandigarh on the other. ⁶ When scholars combine these projects in their histories, the latter appear as either passively absorbing or illustrating the British influence. ⁷ In the context of a postwar United Nations cultural moment, this division was not always so stark. The rebuilding of bombed and war-torn cities like London and Helsinki, the rebuilding of nations formally decolonizing and declaring independence, the building in Latin America that had paused during the war, the arrival to American cities of people whom the planner Charles Abrams, perhaps thinking of his extensive work in refugee towns for the UN abroad, called “darker skinned migrants,” and the arrival to American suburbs of the people whom the mall builder Victor Gruen called “refugees” were often folded together by international planners as different facets of one single historical moment and opportunity for planning. ⁸

Reston emerged from this milieu. It reflected insights gleaned by the Mayer firm through their work designing refugee towns, capitals, and postcolonial metropolises for more than a decade with the Nehru government and its planners in India in the years after independence. As people moved into and visited Reston, the town shared a social and political population with the planned cities of India that can be thought of as one crucial audience and actor of this global postcolonial moment. Just as Reston’s architects brought postcolonial designs to the Virginia suburbs, architects and designers from India and Sri Lanka visited Reston and carried its designs back to their countries to accomplish particular political goals, reflecting the multidirectional interchanges of influence that defined the period. Reston’s architects themselves took the form developed in Nehru’s India in the 1950s to Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania in the 1970s, in their designs for the new capital at Dodoma. The plans in India, at Reston, and at Dodoma had ambiguous results and vexed legacies. But this is also part of the story. Just as postcolonial designs relayed messages about national idealism and free community in the moment of their construction that could not quite be conveyed by other means, their results memorialize the political counterforces vying with decolonization that inhabited the same historical moment.

In 1969, the French scholar Pierre Merlin articulated the typically Western view of town planning in this period, as he ventured to broaden his study of new towns in Western Europe. “Ruling out the underdeveloped countries,” he wrote, “for whom questions of town planning are very different and from whom little could be learned, it was decided to take some examples of new towns built by private promoters in the United States, land of free enterprise, the motor car and individual houses.” ⁹ Reston was one of his major examples. The present study argues, through the lens of early Reston, that the so-called “underdeveloped countries” and the “land of free enterprise” shared a more intimate and intertwined genealogy of building practices than has been acknowledged.

The New York planner Albert Mayer spent World War II abroad as a lieutenant colonel with the Army Corps of Engineers, designing airfields, supply depots, and officers’ clubs in India and Burma from 1943 to 1945. While there, he studied Indian building practices. For an officers’ club in Calcutta in 1946, Mayer decorated the lobby with photographs of Indian architecture and kept prints for his private collection. ¹⁰ In the evenings, he socialized with Indian nationalists, government officials, and Congress party activists, including Humayun Kabir and Jawaharlal Nehru. After his tour, Mayer flurried Nehru with letters offering his services as a planning advisor. In May 1946, Nehru invited him to advise a village reconstruction program in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The result was more than a decade of work for Mayer, his partner Julian Whittlesey, and other members of his firm in India. ¹¹

Albert Mayer in India was a complicated figure, one of “hundreds of thousands of Americans” who “flowed into Asia during the 1940s and 1950s as soldiers, diplomats, foreign aid workers, missionaries, technicians, professors, students, businesspeople, and tourists,” advertising U.S. technical know-how and chummy goodwill to nationalists who, as Mayer put it in 1945, “don’t have any illusions over here as to the degree of inclusiveness of American democracies.” ¹² But unlike many of them, Mayer had a significant social outlook, which won him Nehru’s attention. His firm prided itself on working for the Indian government, rather than the U.S. aid agencies, and Mayer once became furious when Truman’s Point IV aid program took credit for his work. Mayer saw the potential for an exchange with Indian nationalists, what he called the “transplantation of institutions in both directions.” ¹³ It came in the form of three dominant spatial ideas Mayer and his partners carried home from India: the concept of the village, the concept of human-scaled architecture and human-scaled village centers for dispersed satellite cities for refugees, and the concept of the “urban sinew.” Through these ideas, the postcolonial era reshaped older garden city notions to give Reston, at least in its initial conception, a more activist, participatory, democratic valence.

Before Mayer went to India, the “neighborhood” was his integrated social unit for town planning—Clarence Perry’s old “neighborhood unit” from the Regional Plan of New York in 1929. ¹⁴ Yet in Uttar Pradesh, Mayer cultivated a passionate interest in the Indian village’s built environment and social forms. Scholars have noted Mayer’s enthusiasm for the village, but they underestimate the degree to which it developed out of Mayer’s early meeting with Gandhi. Most concisely, Mayer came to understand the village as a unit of production, both economic and creative. ¹⁵ It offered collective self-sufficiency at an intimate scale, a defined sense of place, a model for participatory self-government and the productive fusion of work and life, and a spatial framework that promoted “creative life” and “cultural activity.” ¹⁶ In the neighborhood unit, consumer-oriented residents in “family-life” groups near elementary schools shopped at home, but “find their occupations outside of the neighborhood” and “attend the opera or visit the museum” in the “‘downtown’ district.” ¹⁷ In the Gandhian village, Mayer found instead “a framework which will take account of groups of people in their corporate activity . . . and of the individual’s need of serenity, for aloofness sometimes, for facing himself.” ¹⁸

These insights were all shaped by Gandhi and the “close co-worker relationships” Mayer worked to cultivate with Gandhian activists. ¹⁹ Mayer promised copies of the 1944 book Gandhiji to his friends so they could read about “one of the greatest spiritual leaders of all time, not inferior to Christ, Moses, Buddha.” ²⁰ He hiked to tent camps to meet Vinoba Bhave, who spoke of his foot tour for land donations for the poor. ²¹ In an “absurdly inadequate shack,” he watched Dhiren Mazumdar train men and women as village leaders. ²² Modeling their approach, while in Uttar Pradesh, Mayer slept in a room attached to a local temple. ²³ He kept a scrapbook of clippings of Gandhi’s speeches and repeated on numerous occasions that Gandhi’s ideas should be influencing Western planners. ²⁴ After Gandhi’s assassination, Mayer and Whittlesey designed his memorial cenotaph in Delhi in 1951. ²⁵

The small village idea that captivated Mayer was not merely nostalgic but embedded in the modernity of official Indian nationalism, an outgrowth of Gandhi’s emphasis on “cultural nationalism as a major strategy of anti-colonial resistance,” during the freedom struggle. While Gandhi and Nehru differed on their vision of the role of the village in national development, Nehru also recognized the political importance of the villages. ²⁶ Mayer experienced national village organizing that included brick-making and timber-producing cooperatives, self-help construction, community cattle sheds, cooperative tool storage and credit societies, drama troupes, socialized health centers, and small industries like a diesel engine factory. ²⁷ The village idea itself was a hybrid, influenced as much by Arthur Morgan’s Tennessee Valley Authority and Gandhi’s reading of British colonial sociologist of the law Henry Maine and John Ruskin, as it was by Indian spatial history. It was a product, in this sense, of British colonialism. ²⁸ But the idea came into focus for Mayer through its roles in India in “filling in the abstract space of the national map,” in marshalling national vernaculars to represent independence to free citizens, in developing regional specialties and cultural productions that could enrich a diverse Indian nationalism not structured by caste, and in fostering cooperative, face-to-face democratic and spiritual work at an intimate community scale. ²⁹

Mayer was not the only international planner drawn to these ideas. Similar understandings of India’s spatial practices appealed to international modernists at the same time, affirming his work. In 1947, in the early days of Mayer’s planning in Uttar Pradesh, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt published her Patrick Geddes in India, simultaneous to independence. Tyrwhitt was a South African–born member of the Modern Architecture Research Group, the British chapter of CIAM. Patrick Geddes in India was her compendium of excerpted writings by the British biologist and planner about Indian cities and architecture, penned during his extensive city planning in India three decades before, under both British and local Indian administration. ³⁰ Tyrwhitt chose writings from Geddes that closely paralleled ideas Mayer was drawing from his experiences in India—respectful impressions of the “inseparably interwoven structure” of the Indian city, the “higher form of order” of “the old city’s labyrinth,” the need for a “recovery and renewal of old-world village life,” and the “village centers that are second to none that I know of—either in the west or in the east.” Geddes employed the term urban village that would become Mayer’s watchword. He even at one point suggested, given the power of Indian forms that already put the suppositions of Western utopian planning into practice, that the term garden city might be better changed to orchard village. The writing in the book reflected Geddes’s own admiration for and correspondence with Gandhi, and Albert Mayer read it with enthusiasm. In a review for the American City magazine, Mayer praised Geddes’s “authentic understanding” of village ideas, from the “little meeting square in each neighborhood” to the “narrow lane in a land of hot sun,” as well Geddes’s method, which was “not only to talk about the people as we all do, but to go among them.” Tyrwhitt’s Patrick Geddes in India foregrounds not only the connections between a planner like Mayer and CIAM modernism but also the degree to which the postcolonial world, and independent India’s active articulation and recovery of these building practices seen as indigenous and connected to India since the early freedom struggle, both modeled ideas for people-centered, human-scale international modernism and provided the urgency and political context within which it mattered and made sense, particularly for intellectuals in places like war-torn Britain, whose own urban fabric demanded dramatic reknitting. Tyrwhitt went on to work with Josep Lluís Sert on the theoretical shifts toward “heart of the city” and the “core” that defined 1950s modernist practice, propagated at the 1951 Hoddesdon CIAM conference Tyrwhitt helped plan and in the companion volume she edited. ³¹

Mayer brought these themes together on the ground. He drew from the Gandhian village as a theoretical tool kit for his planning, alongside Indian designers, to an extent missed by scholars only emphasizing garden city connections. At Chandigarh, where Nehru charged Mayer and Whittlesey to plan the modernist city meant to symbolize the “freedom of India” and to incorporate refugees fleeing over the new border from Pakistan after the rupture of partition, the architects pushed the neighborhood unit idea to become the “urban village,” designing live-work buildings that stressed low heights and interconnectivity and creating spaces within the plan that mixed housing by class and celebrated everyday informal economies. ³² At the new town in Bombay the firm designed for the Stanvac Oil Company, which “in every stage of the process . . . involved Indian architects, engineers, and draftsmen,” they re-created this idea as the “compact community,” designed as a “source of pride to the worker.” Houses for thirty to fifty families were subgrouped around a “Gandhi chabutra,” a “simple-roofed, open-walled raised platform, where people can sit and gossip just as they did in their village on similar chabutras.” ³³ At the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, the firm incorporated climate-sensitive village siting and rural iconography as a cultural trope. ³⁴ At Faridabad, the firm built on the cooperatives that Gandhi’s emissary to the British, Sudhir Ghosh, fostered as secretary of Faridabad’s development board to create a human-scaled civic center that was less a square than a series of relationships, defined by continuous bazaars and Western shops with residences suspended above, complexly stacked with public spaces, inner gardens, and alleys for human contact. ³⁵

Mayer was more of a planner and promoter than an architect by temperament, but he solidified his ideas by hiring creative modernist designers. From the villages, he refined spatial connections between public and private space, clustering and cooperation. But the architecture of postcolonial India also influenced him. The firm first attempted a complete modernist new town at Chandigarh in 1950. Mayer’s architect on the project was the celebrated Polish émigré Matthew Nowicki, who had worked on the design team for the United Nations headquarters in New York. Nowicki materialized the urban village idea with a plan to “continue and develop the building tradition of India . . . based on its village origin,” where houses were grouped around closed courts with a “richness of form” to create “small compact groups of often mixed income . . . preserving the privacy of their family life, but welcomming [sic] a bond of common space with a selected group of others.” This modernism reflected the new emphasis on the human scale and a sculptural, expressionistic, and artisanal tendency that accorded with international shifts in modernist practice, but it also arose explicitly from research and contact on the ground in India. Nowicki’s working relationship with the engineer P. L. Varma included study tours of the Punjabi cities of Jagadhari and Amritsar. His configurations of ventilated courtyard housing, his interconnected buildings of low heights, his use of native pink and red limestone and brick popular in the region, and his rethinking of exteriors with texture and patterning mirrored Mayer’s studies of “the gaiety of the village and of the bazaar; and the spontaneity of its craftsman-like and sub-craftsman-like ornamentation” during World War II. ³⁶

The ideas motivating Western design schools and modernist elite in the mid-twentieth century frequently took root in the context of decolonization and its large state construction programs—from Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew’s concept of “tropical architecture” that used West Africa as a canvas to explore the revised, “contextual” modernist designs necessary to manage weather in the “hot climates,” to Sert’s framework for the “heart of the city,” popularized through CIAM and drawn from his work in Latin America—in which a democratic, people-centered urbanism centered around the “core” was meant to address “the problems of reconstruction and the development of new regions demanding the creation of new communities” amid the “general awakening of peoples in Asia, South America, Africa.” ³⁷ Scholars frequently interpret these connections through the frame of modernism itself and its global dissemination, or by examining the ways modern architecture recycled colonial and imperial power relations with colonies leading up to and just after the formal declaration of independence, often as a means of maintaining colonial authority within a period of apologetic rule. But they are more reluctant to explore how these ways of building reshaped architecture and practice in the so-called metropole. Certainly, modernist advising and building in the “new nations” bore complex and lasting relationships to imperial and colonial history, just as the postcolonial was often defined by its colonial past. The United States itself often bolstered European colonialism and its own imperial power through its advising relationships. But that should not obscure the fact that the design products of the period were as frequently representative of an international culture in formation or a complex “collective endeavor” as they were merely a two-way flow of authority and resistance. ³⁸ The modernist developmental imagination guiding nation-building programs in the Third World and the search for authentically national vernacular forms, rather, amplified and educated a reformist impulse among modernists at the time, as they traveled abroad with an intersubjective mind-set and the fragile human subject of wartime destruction firmly in mind, in addition to their more imperialist and nationalist concerns.

For the decolonizing world’s “first generation of architects trained in modernism,” meanwhile, as Anoma Pieris has shown, the style attracted adherents because it promised a break with the colonial past. Yet as the export of the International Style after the war rearticulated the colonies as a canvas of European experiment—as in Le Corbusier’s revision of Mayer’s Chandigarh plan—cosmopolitan postcolonial architects often led the search for more subtle renovations of modernism to step into the breach, variations that could align with their own reexaminations of indigenous and historical forms of regional building in the search for a new national style, one that for Nehru entailed “forms international in rhythm, yet Indian in spirit.” Ideas such as “tropical architecture” and “heart of the city” factored into these building programs as part of the period’s circulating conceptual resources. ³⁹

After Nowicki died in a plane crash in 1950, the young William Conklin joined the Mayer firm. Conklin was a graduate of Walter Gropius’s Graduate School of Design at Harvard, and recent of a stint designing low-income housing out of reinforced concrete in South America for Nelson Rockefeller’s International Basic Economy Corporation. ⁴⁰ A former divinity student, he had been part of a team at Harvard that designed an early “heart of the city” project for a graduate thesis, a plan to remodel downtown Providence. Redesigning Providence’s city center to “speak of life and its joys,” the team presented their project at CIAM’s 1951 Hoddesdon “Heart of the City” conference. ⁴¹ A section appeared as an illustration in Tyrwhitt and Sert’s accompanying book, where in his opening essay, Sert called for jettisoning “architecture aimed solely at expressing function” for “a more completed architecture, where colour, texture, and sculptural values could play a very important role.” Sert’s argument for horizontal organizations, dense housing that punctuated sight lines, and a “differentiation of scale” that contrasted low continuous buildings with high tower elements to orient cities toward walkers who would move through “constellations of community centers” graduating toward one main center, the “heart of the city,” resonated with Conklin. ⁴² Yet the difference between the massive blocky modernist forms largely severed from the urban fabric that defined Conklin’s thesis project for Providence and his subtle, blended, walker-oriented designs in India and afterward indexes not only the wide and paradoxical variety of projects and scales that could fall under the “heart of the city” banner but also the crucial pedagogical function that Conklin’s work amid the place-based modernism of India had on him as a designer.

One of Conklin’s first jobs for India was writing extensive reports on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s relevance for the firm’s work with the Indian government on the Damodar Valley development projects. The first Mayer project in India that bears Conklin’s design work is the civic center at Faridabad, the onetime tent city for fifty thousand refugees from Pakistan fifteen miles south of Delhi. ⁴³ In a relatively undeveloped area near a rail station, Mayer and his colleagues designed the center of this important national icon—which Nehru called “one of our show places.” The result was one of the firm’s first sensitive plazas—its first heart-of-the-city-style human-scaled “cores”—that moved on into the Reston work. The Faridabad center linked contrasting forms of use, bazaars and Western shops, government buildings and cinema, village housing and heart of the city architecture, to create a sense of place defined by the narrative quality and sequenced open spaces of interwoven pathways and buildings, and their staging of everyday experience. ⁴⁴

Attempts at a formal language to incorporate the democratic subject of the postcolonial state developed through Conklin’s architectural work on the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, the missionary school in Nehru’s hometown. In 1952, Mayer decided he and Conklin should simply “take time out” of the firm’s other work to focus on the project. The institute, which dated from the colonial period, was to be redesigned in keeping with India’s celebration of “village life and self-government and self-reliance and self-expression,” according to Mayer. His program included employing rural and agricultural iconography, using murals and sculpture as focal points, incorporating village painting to create a “carpet . . . of art” across the campus, and creating bas reliefs and underpasses to define the contours of buildings “full of movement and color.” A rank romanticism gilded some of the work—emblazoning walls, for instance, with the patterns of “a lotus flower . . . a bamboo clump, or a plantain.” But Mayer asserted that “we certainly don’t want to be revivalists.” Instead, he cited Diego Rivera’s murals in Mexico to show how locally produced modern art by free citizens employing “native” subjects and techniques could serve globally as the foundation for a progressive, nonhierarchical modernist vernacular. ⁴⁵

At Allahabad, William Conklin designed the agronomy, chemistry, biology, and administration buildings, a women’s hospital, dormitories, a library, and a chapel. His early designs stumbled, presenting an orientalist sense of “Indianness” drawn from books checked out from the New York Public Library, including one chapel’s curvilinear roof line meant to echo “the sensuousness of Indian religious buildings.” Other early efforts were white elephants. Allahabad council members critiqued one for its kinship to a “truck body” or an “airplane hangar.” But over time, Conklin polished a nuanced vocabulary that responded to climate and site by incorporating patterning, open spaces, pierced walls, texture, color, tile and brick work, sunscreens, recessed balconies, breezeways, and modular geometries into building surfaces that blended humane and vernacular elements and responded to the needs of the firm’s clients in the Indian government. ⁴⁶ The amount to which these postcolonial innovations in detailing, environmental sensitivity, and the artistic and expressive treatment of surfaces and form saved brute, functionalist modernism from itself as it was repatriated to the United States in the 1950s—including in Conklin’s own designs in New York City and at Reston—has been understudied. This conceptual vocabulary reached its high point for the firm in the Delhi master plan.

The Delhi master plan, drafted in 1960, proposed civic design, public land acquisition, democratic participation aiming to devolve power on the poor, and effective master planning to build India’s first “world capital, the capital of an independent nation with vast development plans.” Nehru requested Mayer’s commission as “overall consultant” to the Indian Town Planning Organization. ⁴⁷ Mayer chose another young member of his firm, the Mexican American Edward G. Echeverria, as physical planner, because of Echeverria’s broad experience in international housing. Echeverria came to Delhi in 1957 having rehabilitated towns in Guatemala under president Jacobo Arbenz after the mudslides of 1951, rehoused dispossessed people in El Salvador after the earthquake the same year, and improved site plans for low-income housing in Colombia. He carried CIAM’s Heart of the City book with him to India, as well as Tyrwhitt’s Patrick Geddes in India. ⁴⁸ From Manhattan, William Conklin designed blueprints and wrote climate reports for Delhi throughout 1958 and 1959, as the firm, which now also included the young Gropius- and Paul Rudolph–trained modernist James Rossant, drafted the Delhi master plan under the auspices of the Ford Foundation with a team of Indian and American planners. ⁴⁹

In Delhi, Mayer first proposed his idea for the “urban village cluster.” Situated along the city’s edges, the urban village clusters were groups or chains of unique yet interdependent villages that acted as transitional, mediating social spaces, absorbing craft work and cattle rearing from elsewhere in the city, and serving as the point of entry into Delhi for poor rural migrants, providing, in the words of one scholar, “a more conducive environment for the people and their industry.” Imagined as boosting village life by giving urban villagers access to a new “greater total village hinterland” created by their clustering, they bore similarities in form to garden city notions of the “social city” or the RPAA’s “regional city,” but the urban villages were unique. They represented a crucial part of Delhi itself, centers of craft production and interdependent parts of the city’s economy and culture. Mayer wanted to hire a permanent “Rural Re-Creator” to help organize the highly programmed, never-passive working rural spaces that divided the villages. Architecturally, he considered them sites for “creative planning and development in very much the same dynamic spirit as the urban parts” of the city, a fact that, as they were never built, is often lost from the record, although some of their qualities, such as central villages within the clusters that housed raw material processing industries and other cooperative economies of scale, did find their way into the draft plan as what its authors considered one of their “fully creative” ideas. ⁵⁰

At Delhi, Mayer also toured the Old City with planner Syed Shafi, where he studied the katras that defined local building practices, “in which a number of households live in tenements or houses within an enclosed space with one common entrance.” ⁵¹ While Mayer interpreted these dense housing forms as responses to climate—“because in their best climatological understanding as of that time, this was the way to build”—rather than as a means of social reproduction, Mayer and Conklin, who drew the blueprints, used these experiences as a basis for the housing form that was the constituent element of their residential clusters through the city—the “enclosed courtyard type, built in considerable numbers around Delhi.” Designed to give poor families “a feeling of a clustered joint family but still a part of a neighbourhood,” Conklin’s one- and two-room units in courtyard formations distilled the firm’s experiments from the previous decade in their most far-reaching urban plan. ⁵² The designs echoed Nowicki’s drawings for Chandigarh, but also reflected a common Delhi spatial practice, where densely built housing forms articulated a sequential framework, a narrative for the Old City. These residential buildings coalesced around district centers that, in Mayer’s early plans, included “flatted factories” for craft work and irregular patterns of space for hawkers, bazaar stalls, urban science museums, bicycle wholesale markets, rear-yard workshops, cinemas, health centers, and promenades designed to preserve old neighborhood patterns—the “narrowness with occasional widening and elegances” and the “small intimacies” that generated Delhi’s “lively local fraternity.” ⁵³ The planners frequently referred to such spaces within the city as “villages,” “clusters” or “urban villages.” ⁵⁴ Only when they reached Reston in 1962 as “urban sinews” did they appear as “new” to Western observers and critics.

Mayer approached the plan for Delhi hoping to bring high culture to “the people who live in the Mohallas,” Delhi’s neighborhoods, to site important buildings to emphasize democratic symbolism and citizen access, to keep a flexibility allowing ordinary people to adapt the plan over time as needed, to generate rural spaces that were not merely greenbelts but dynamic arenas for work and culture, to encourage hawkers to “enliven areas” of urban public space, to design district centers as both local workshops and “sub-civic” centers, and to retain the “pleasant irregularities” of form he had seen in the katras and villages. ⁵⁵ Almost none of these goals reached the final Delhi Master Plan of 1962, a widely reviled document of ineffective, myopic, top-down, elitist planning. ⁵⁶ But despite its predictable commitments to segregating uses and eradicating blight, the draft plan did preserve traces of Mayer’s interests in what one writer calls the country’s “intensive habitation and building model,” what the planners defined as the city’s “essential character and virtues, some of which are actually modern, and sought by latter-day cities.” ⁵⁷ This model was urged on them by their Indian counterparts, tempering propensities for decentralization, and while dispersed by traditional standards, the draft plans for fifty to three hundred people per acre were still quite dense. ⁵⁸ The clustered city of Delhi, like the modern Indian villages, was not merely a receptacle where the Mayer firm dumped Western ideas proven ineffectual at home. These places influenced the American planners. The ideas they learned from Indian national planning traveled to the United States with the firm to the new town at Reston, only a year after Mayer wrote Echeverria about his “village cluster” idea and Echeverria returned to the States to conduct the next work.

Robert Simon contacted Julian Whittlesey about designing Reston a year after the firm finished at Delhi, and just after Albert Mayer’s departure. Whittlesey had worked extensively on Chandigarh and at Bombay in the early 1950s, before turning his attention to Kitimat. He advertised his experiences in India in his letter responding to Simon in March 1961. Conklin and Echeverria ran the first planning meeting with Simon to discuss ideas. ⁵⁹ After only one session in April 1961, they were already speaking of “higher density residential clusters,” but another month passed before they responded in detail because, in Whittlesey’s words, “there has been considerable activity here preparing for foreign consultation work in which the companion firm of Whittlesey Conklin and Echeverria is engaged.” ⁶⁰ In July, Echeverria left the country again to take charge of the Calcutta master plan and to develop a city planning organization for West Bengal. ⁶¹ By the end of 1961, his colleagues finished the work he helped start. They developed a master plan for Reston calling for seven interconnected “villages” or “village clusters” of ten thousand residents each that converged on a town center. ⁶² The planning technique was originally called “First Villages.” ⁶³

Eighteen miles from Washington, the Reston property fell near one of the corridors stretching out from the D.C. border slated for the development of new “satellite towns” by the era’s most celebrated plan for metropolitan Washington, the Policies Plan for the Year 2000, signed that year by John F. Kennedy. This fact, and the proximity to the nation’s capital, gave international observers the sense that Reston was part of a program of cohesive national planning much like the ones the architects had worked on in India. In the early plans, each village, sited according to topography and interspersed with a “commons” of parkland, included a fifteen-acre center that mixed housing and community buildings with an aggressive social programming of feminist child care centers, environmental stewardship, industry, and mixed-class and mixed-race community building in Jim Crow Virginia. Reston’s form was what supposedly fostered this activist life, what the most significant contemporary study called “the interweaving of recreation and residence, the use of new types of grouped housing in new forms of juxtaposition, sinews of high density as ‘activity spines of residential areas,’ linking the village centers and focusing the system of independent walkways which tie almost every house in Reston with those centers of activity.” ⁶⁴

The plan reflected Whittlesey and Echeverria’s skills in topographical site planning and Conklin’s research in human-scaled architectural form and design. ⁶⁵ Exploring ideas Sert developed through the 1950s, Conklin emerged from his India work urging projects that linked together built form by considering it to be a “continuous building . . . gradually changing from low to high,” one that would allow designers to sculpt a “continuous city” of “public living rooms.” ⁶⁶ But Reston’s principle ideas were familiar. The villages were cousins of the communitarian work-life units Mayer discovered through Gandhi in India. The center that Conklin and James Rossant designed for their demonstration village, Lake Anne, carved out spaces of publicness and privacy less like broad European plazas, and more like the spaces of retreat, exchange, collectivity, and enclosure of Faridabad. The visual style of Conklin’s two-story brown buff concrete apartments over stores that hugged the center, as well as his lakeside fifteen-story Heron House skyscraper, reflected the surface variation, texture, and use of balconies, windows, parapet walls and screens, structured views, and horizontal detailing that he experimented with at Allahabad and Delhi. The idea that the villages would grow from different and specific cultural and topographical amenities—a lake, a stable, a cliff, a college town—that would draw residents to villages and villagers other than their own echoed an idea first offered the firm by P. L. Varma at Chandigarh to promote democratic commingling. ⁶⁷ An early plan incorporated light industry and auditoriums into the village centers, reflecting postcolonial experiments in mixing craft, expression, and industrial work. ⁶⁸ The proposal for an operating rock quarry in the town and a working farm with “small shacks” on structured lots designed by Conklin similarly referenced the emphasis in postcolonial planning on working rural open spaces. ⁶⁹ The space reserved for “political conferences” and “international organizational sessions” in the heart-of-the-city town center, odd in suburban America, made more sense within the national postcolonial public sphere. ⁷⁰

Nowhere were these contiguities tighter than in Conklin’s “undulating high density sinews,” which drew the most attention as being new. Conklin saw them as Reston’s greatest contribution to American city planning. The sinews were never built, erased from later reproductions of Reston’s master plan altogether, but in the early stages they distilled the clustered housing forms of Indian village planning, the urban katras of Delhi and the firm’s particular iteration of the knitted-together sequences of “heart of the city” urbanism for the American new town. The sinews, which wound through the town to link the village centers and the central town center, were not just connected housing clusters and nature paths. Thick, integrated clusters of residences, community centers, businesses, child care centers, museums, and “active plazas,” they were closer to full city blocks unspooled along the topography of the land, continuous narrative sequences of built form. ⁷¹

They employed elements of Indian village planning, including a “house for a woodworking artisan” with a workshop built into a hillside near a modernist prefabricated housing cluster; arts complexes with space for ceramics, photography, painting, sculpture, ballet, and weaving; an “artisans’ colony with up to 20 units” between Lake Anne Village and the Reston Town Center; and a “fishing village.” ⁷² Generally formed from three- to six-story buildings before reaching much denser village and town centers, they worked as a circulatory system to “provide the linear structuring of the town,” as Conklin explained in a letter to his modernist colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. ⁷³ Designed for “strengthening the union between villages” and “group character,” they had a density in early years that was described as resting at 60 people per acre (also the density of the Delhi plan’s district centers). In early 1961 plans, it ranged between 92 and 215 people per acre. ⁷⁴ Debuted in the architectural press by Frederick Gutheim in August 1962, early illustrations showed the sinews as an extremely dense series of geometries and, later, as an intriguing rhythm of high and low forms in walkable formation that would make movement between Reston’s village centers continuous, like walking through a stretched-out city with “exciting differences in architectural expression,” ⁷⁵ past high-density housing, recreational facilities including children’s play areas on top of stores, and spaces “where work and living should be intimately associated,” as in Delhi’s Walled City. ⁷⁶

Even the small piece of the sinews finally built at Lake Anne, connecting the village center to the modernist geometric courtyard housing of the hill, lake and chimney house “clusters,” while much less dense than originally conceived, still showcased traces of the mediation between public and private spaces, openness and enclosure, and ideas about density, privacy, collectivity, and intimacy that reflected the postcolonial experiments, as did the modernist public sculptures and designed brick and concrete work on the buildings and in the plazas using local materials. ⁷⁷ While no one, including Conklin, ever connected these forms back to India, the master plan is clear that these sinews represented a “new pattern,” “very different from both the British New Towns and from suburban America.” ⁷⁸ This “newness” derived from an erasure—the postcolonial context.

These connections were strongest in Reston’s early period, from when Robert Simon bought the 6,750 acres eighteen miles from Washington in March 1961 to the new town’s formal dedication in May 1966. But throughout their work at Reston, even after the departure of Mayer, Echeverria, and finally Whittlesey himself, the firm remained associated with their work in India in the public eye. A firm exhibit at Pratt in 1964 showcased the Calcutta plan. Delhi architects and critics in North America on UN and UNESCO fellowships sought meetings with Conklin. In one “extraordinary” encounter with the editor-critic Patwant Singh, Conklin enjoyed a long discussion of the “firm’s years of Indian operations.” ⁷⁹ The early 1960s were the high point of Conklin’s creativity, featuring the work at Reston and his most famous buildings in New York at 333 East 69th Street, Butterfield House on 12th Street, and the Kaplan and List buildings at the New School, projects celebrated for the “small-scale building elements,” “rich patterns,” courtyards, and decorative paving that defined the India work. ⁸⁰ Still, despite these correspondences, Conklin hardly ever addressed publicly his activities designing “several projects then in the office, some of which were in India,” which have generally disappeared from his oeuvre. ⁸¹

Conklin instead referenced a range of other influences on the urban sinew idea including the heart of the city and his work with Pratt students on Staten Island. For his colleagues and supporters, the Mediterranean village of Portofino and the French “parallel city” of Toulouse Le Mirail returned to reassert a Western European legacy. At other times, influenced by Jane Jacobs, their friend, the architects discussed Greenwich Village, Beacon Street, and Georgetown, as well as “the compactness and varied spatial experiences of older towns” in the United States. The long garden city movement and other new town planning, such as that of Tapiola, Finland, whose creator Heikki von Hertzen visited Reston in 1966 and struck up a correspondence with Robert Simon, also obviously shaped the Reston plan. ⁸²

The purpose of recovering the influence of the postcolonial India work on Reston is not to eschew all other influences but to question why the planning in India is the only shaping force on the new town almost universally absent from its histories. The answer returns to the idealistic U.S. town planning narrative that took prominence at midcentury—in the context of books like Clarence Stein’s Toward New Towns for America, his paean to his own work—as socially conscious marketing for U.S. planned communities in their decade of retreat, to the exclusion of more immediate influences coming out of complex advising relationships and transnational encounters in the Third World. These exchanges of influence were unassimilable by both the public discourse of cold war anticommunism and the simple assumption among Western planners, remarkably consistent in some corners today, that the “underdeveloped countries” were places where “little could be learned.” ⁸³ The gap is not merely a failure of representational acknowledgment or a form of cultural expropriation by silence, although the narrative of Conklin’s career does more closely reaffirm the hero-architect when it leaps from graduate school straight into the Reston plan. Rather, it is important for historians to recognize this history to gauge the degree to which idealistic town planning at midcentury, not to mention the forms of international modernism, was reshaped and defined by concerns arising from postcolonial design and political culture, a central historiographic implication.

In the Reston case, as the new town’s designers and historians repressed acknowledgment of these influences on the town’s design, decolonization returned in the first moments of the town’s life to speak back its presence. The language of decolonization was the tonic in early Reston’s promotional efforts. In addition to hoping for a profitable venture and bearing a genuine interest in idealistic planning, Robert Simon saw the new town as a way to prove to an assumed audience of global observers that liberal American capitalism, technical ingenuity, and progressive consumer society could produce concrete landscapes of abundance that would serve as evidence of U.S. claims to uplifting global leadership. Many of his efforts to advertise Reston internationally in its early years—in U.S. Information Agency exhibits in Belgrade, in the U.S. Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, in inter-American planning conferences in Mexico—took their tone of temporal urgency and revolutionary portent from the decolonization moment, albeit one drained of its anticolonial, nationalist fervor and recast, as it was by Simon’s wife Anne, a journalist who wrote some of Reston’s early promotional material, as a time “of global, national, and personal choice,” in which people would “ride the startling change in the human condition to a new, higher plateau.” ⁸⁴

Despite the flattening and decontextualizing that defined this appropriation of independence rhetoric in the U.S. context and its synchronicity with wider incorporative discourses of U.S. liberal internationalism during the cold war, its source in a revolutionary Third World politics should not be obscured. Planners like those in the Mayer firm brought the project of New Deal liberalism abroad in this period, sometimes quite self-consciously. When their advising contracts ended, they carried the mantle of decolonization home as a rhetorical resource for galvanizing the U.S. liberal imaginary of the New Frontier and the Great Society. ⁸⁵ Another way to put this is to say that decolonization’s language of historic social change was another extractable Third World resource, but one that could have hectic and unpredictable effects as it was repatriated to the United States.

When Simon set out to build the “physical framework of the Great Society” at Reston, the new town maintained this history. ⁸⁶ For the staff Simon formed from United Nations and International Labor Organization analysts, and veterans of liberal U.S. aid programs such as Truman’s Point IV in the decades before, the connection was often quite distinct, particularly as they designed some of the first “open housing” in northern Virginia with an aim toward combating the racial segregation that had muted U.S. claims to liberal authority on a global stage since at least the 1940s. ⁸⁷ Through such projects, the architectural forms of the postcolonial world and the egalitarian principles of an alternate global order remained bonded, stressing what Ebony magazine called the “connection between Reston’s modern designs and its residents’ lack of racial prejudice.” ⁸⁸

Those who chose to move to Reston also portrayed the new town’s imbrications with wider postcolonial time, giving the town a social history that cannot be assimilated by the history of suburban town planning in the post–World War II United States. Residents arrived in December 1964. They included many officials, administrators, translators, and field workers from the World Bank, NASA, the Agency for International Development, and the U.S. State Department, as well as Hubert Humphrey aides and Kennedy and Johnson appointees, Peace Corps workers late of Ethiopia, Bolivia, Nigeria, and the Philippines, and CIA officers, who moved to modernist townhouses along the lake and in the woods at Reston after conducting U.S. covert actions in Tibet, Yemen, Guatemala, Japan, Cuba, and India itself. ⁸⁹ Amid frequent discussions as to whether the town should “get in bed with Kennedy,” Reston planners were also in regular contact with Kennedy officials, and the town received visits from Stewart Udall, Lady Bird Johnson, Robert Weaver, Averell Harriman, Abe Fortas, Sargent Shriver, Arthur Schlesinger, and McGeorge Bundy, which conferred the atmosphere of an official national space. ⁹⁰ D.C. modernist Charles M. Goodman, who designed one of Reston’s courtyard housing clusters, had been head architect for the Army Air Transport Command during World War II. ⁹¹ David O. McKinley, who headed Reston’s in-house construction unit, came to the town after his work as construction manager for the U.S. military occupation of Japan. ⁹² These were the very actors who defined the United States’ complex labor in the decolonizing world in this period.

The tours Robert Simon encouraged to promote the town—270 by the end of 1965—often organized by the United Nations and the international office of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, drew in a broad assembly of visitors from the Third World: city planners from Singapore and Kabul, Chilean urbanists, French union organizers, educators from Medellin, Prague curators, Japanese and Israeli socialists, Frankfurt social scientists, Indonesian academics, architects from Managua, Buenos Aires, and Leningrad, and the mayor of Seoul. ⁹³ The painter Faik Hassan, one of the three pioneers of Iraqi modern art, whom Wijdan Ali describes in this period as “longing to break through domestic boundaries of the Arab world and toward internationalism,” toured the town after his first major opening in Washington in March 1966. ⁹⁴ The Uruguayan-born sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca lived in an apartment in nearby Herndon and inhabited Reston’s plazas as he designed the town’s modernist public sculptures, based on his world travels searching out an iconographic “Esperanto of human culture.” ⁹⁵

At the dedication in May 1966, the height of these gestures, ambassadors from “thirty countries active in the new town movement,” including Indonesia, the United Arab Republic, Algeria, Brazil, Nigeria, Ghana, Argentina, Guinea, Pakistan, Mexico, Libya, Venezuela, Sudan, and India, visited for an all-day event, surrounded by their national flags and exhibits and booths about their countries. “Our hopes for Reston,” read the invitation, “are our hopes for all men.” U.N. planning expert Oliver Weerasinghe, the ambassador from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), placed Reston in the global context. He demanded that the “physical environment for human needs and human welfare has its rightful place in the development of a country.” ⁹⁶ Simon gave the ambassadors dogwoods cut to form Reston’s artificial lake and urged that they plant the trees “on your national soil” as landscape-based symbols of a transnational new towns culture that would “form a new bond of friendship among the peoples of the world.” “This is a time when the barriers between people—economic, racial and social barriers—are under assault,” Simon said in a style typical of the Reston translation of the postcolonial rubric. “This is a time when laissez-faire is an echo of the past, and communal responsibility is reaching toward the goal of helping every individual who wants a rewarding life to achieve it.” ⁹⁷

Other cosmopolitan modernists carried ideas found at Reston home, repropagating the postcolonial form in the postcolonial context. Delhi architect Ranjit Sabikhi visited soon after the enthusiastic reception of one of his first major designs—the Dalmia pavilion at the Indian Industries Fair in 1963. Sabikhi, who like Conklin and Rossant spent time at Harvard, had at the time begun to isolate and incorporate into his designs many of the same forms the Mayer firm studied while in India as part of his own investigation into Indian architecture’s potential contribution to modernism, such as “the sense of enclosure and urbanity,” “the intensity of use, and a continuity of scale with the rest of the town.” Back in Delhi, he built the Yamuna Apartments, a lower-middle-class “integrated community settlement” sponsored by a South Indian group housing society on public land and known for its use of the “urban village,” with its “lively narrow galis or pedestrian streets,” modernist architecture with varied balconies and concrete bands at terrace level and continuous green spaces revolving around a central square. ⁹⁸ Sri Lankan architect Valentine Gunasekara visited in 1965. He returned to his home island and built what critics consider his “conceptual masterpiece”—the Tangalle Bay Hotel. The Indian village cluster’s intertwined pathways and networks combined with human-scaled modernism’s continuous, gently rising and falling architectural geometries to bolster in Sri Lanka and India what Anoma Pieris calls a new “sense of geographic belonging against a former history of colonial expression.” ⁹⁹

A decade after their work at Reston was cut short in 1967 when Gulf Oil took control of the town and fired Simon, Conklin and Rossant followed in these architects’ footsteps, with their commission for the postcolonial capital of Tanzania at Dodoma, which followed the firm’s earlier work in Ghana, at the Volta River. ¹⁰⁰ The capital at Dodoma was the personal project of Tanzanian head of state Julius Nyerere. Meant to rehearse independence by breaking with the colonial capital, segregated city and slave port at Dar es Salaam, Dodoma was to be “chief village in a nation of villages,” unfolded on a 2,500 acre site and designed to celebrate the “man on foot.” First through the United Nations and then in collaboration with Tanzanian Capital Development Authority Director General C. G. Kahama and a team of Tanzanian planners, Rossant, with Conklin’s assistance, answered this call by designing the city as an “immense stairway,” formed from terraces, each one story higher than the prior, stepping with the topography toward the sun to illustrate Nyerere’s “forward development toward a socialist self-reliant society.” On the terraces, the firm arrayed again their “urban villages,” mixing everyday common democratic use with governmental ceremonial use, linking the town with walkways, bridges, ramps, and intimate squares, using village forms for inspiration, and maintaining space within the city for agricultural production. The terraces rose to Dodoma’s core, the “ujamaa square,” whose modernist tree sculpture referred back to the role of trees as village gathering spaces. The relationship between this square and the lower terraces allegorically performed an idealized interconnected relationship between the capital at Dodoma and the villages of the nation. ¹⁰¹ The plan reflected the broad currency of the village as a rubric for postcolonial design and a unit of nationalism across multiple contexts and drew on the firm’s own work influenced by decolonization going back three decades.

This essay focuses on the Mayer firm as designers because of the clarifying ways these architects as spatial actors in various locations throw into relief stylistic continuities and approaches between key sites in the history of decolonization. They drew their ideas and explored these building practices alongside a variety of infrequently acknowledged experts and more anonymous everyday actors in various national spaces, not to mention lesser known American architects within and without the firm. But across these cases, formal styles commonly cast as developed by experts resulted from politically situated transnational encounters shaped by geopolitical responses to independence. The producer-oriented villages imagined by the postcolonial Indian state as bricks in the house of the nation, the clustered forms of refugee towns and satellite cities with their experiments in creating cores within wider plans for national dispersal and reorganization, the thinking of modernists looking to integrate their forms with the new post–World War II building projects that often but not always took place in the Third World, the new experiments with sculptural architectural surfaces responding to “climate,” the rhetorical and institutional gestures toward new forms of democratic citizenship and global intersubjectivity, and the clustered and stacked katras, mohallas, and galis with their narratives of public and private space—all combined to produce this set of correspondences, influences, and forms born in the decolonizing world that traveled between continents in this period. What unified them was a search for a humanitarian way of building that worked to foster political community through spaces of proximity and independence. Forms that in the postcolonial context incorporated refugees fleeing the final geographies of colonial mapping functioned differently as they shifted to the middle-class American suburb where they incorporated refugees fleeing the urban crisis city. Yet one might not be too hasty in drawing too firm a boundary between the two—given the suburban, middle- to upper-middle-class form some planned parts of postcolonial cities like Delhi ultimately took, which “resulted in land prices in parts of the city that are more expensive than real estate in Manhattan,” or the fact that the American suburb looking to forge both black and white residents into a democratic polity in northern Virginia took form in 1961, the year after Washington, D.C., a colony without self-government and full representation, became the United States’s first black majority city in the midst of the wave of African decolonization. ¹⁰²

It is equally important to stress that Reston—as with the plans at Delhi and Dodoma—was never built according to its master plan, ended as a program of urban sinews, activist villages, and modernist architecture even before the 1967 Gulf coup. Reston’s original mix of 70 percent townhouses, 15 percent apartments, and 15 percent single family houses quickly became just the opposite—80 percent detached houses and 20 percent townhouses (with 5.8 percent of those actually in “elevator apartments”). ¹⁰³ Densities fell to an average of eleven people per acre, which represented more traditional garden city densities. ¹⁰⁴ Almost immediately Robert Simon also started building single family houses on conventional suburban cul-de-sacs to the south of his plot, five miles away from Lake Anne as an insurance policy “in case the townhouse cluster concept at Lake Anne Village was not acceptable to the Washington metropolitan area housing market.” By spring 1964, Lake Anne held 227 townhouses (90 by Smith, 90 by Goodman, and 47 by Whittlesey & Conklin), 133 apartments, and 50,000 square feet of commercial space. Rentals ranged from $125 to $290 a month, lots sold for $6,500, and townhouses for a hefty $23,450 to $46,800, despite promises that after the first building, the town would open to a class mix. ¹⁰⁵ By June 1965, only 50 of 180 units on the market at Lake Anne had sold. In the first two years, Lake Anne acquired only 2,700 residents, a quarter of its planned size. “Unfortunately for the dreams and concept of the plan,” wrote one historian, “the only part that was moving quickly was the sale of regular, though small, house plots.” ¹⁰⁶ In Jim Crow northern Virginia, Reston was known as “Simon’s folly” and “the screwball market,” packed with “communists.” ¹⁰⁷ For many years afterward, historians saw it only as a prelude to the federal New Communities program—particularly through Robert Simon’s testimony before Congress and influence over Title VII of the 1970 Housing Act—which shadowed the new town’s significance not only because of the general ill repute of the New Towns built under that program, trivialized by Herbert Gans as “little more than slightly superior suburbs,” but also because even in that literature Reston is an orphan, since Gulf Oil so thoroughly interrupted the town’s design. ¹⁰⁸

Even its architects considered Reston a failure from a design and socially progressive standpoint. “In spite of declared good intentions about ultimately accommodating those of low income, note the observable upper-class flavor . . . ,” Albert Mayer observed in his 1967 book The Urgent Future. “One unsuccessful aspect of Reston was its inability to expand rapidly and yet remain coherent,” William Conklin said in 1985. “It didn’t grow successfully; the newer parts are not as good.” To Robert Simon, Lake Anne represented “the only world-class architecture in all of Reston. In the Town Center you have the original building, the hotel and a couple of office buildings, I give a good B, a solid B. Most of the other buildings go from C to F.” In 1971, modernist Serge Chermayeff, whose son Ivan had designed Lake Anne’s semiotic signage, savaged the town with the most thoroughgoing critique: “Except for home-to-school walking distance, a motor vehicle must be used all the time. An excess of ‘green open spaces’ of the romantic tradition is unlikely to invite use in proportion to the cost of upkeep and control of this no-man’s-land. . . . Paths are often too long, always uneventful, leading to a very limited number of staple targets, and are passive and scenic in character.” Chermayeff mainly saw Reston as a sign of “the increase of private interests in control of public-scale territories.” ¹⁰⁹

Although aspects of the original siting of functions remain today and the developers who finally built Reston’s Town Center in the 1980s, on parts of the original site, have launched an energetic campaign to celebrate the center’s dubious “urbanism,” ¹¹⁰ the new town now essentially inhabits only one of several centers of a wealthy suburban landscape that forms one of Washington’s most sprawling Edge City conurbations. But the idealistic possibilities suggested by its early postcolonial influences were finally undermined, not inconsequentially, from another direction, by its immersion in the indigenous landscape of the U.S. agencies that in the same period had a quite different approach to the decolonizing world—the Pentagon and the CIA, inhabitants of the gap that mediated between the rhetoric of U.S. liberal uplift and the country’s actual foreign policies. In this way, Reston’s failure according to its first concepts suggests something broader about modernist designs arising from the postcolonial moment. What often linked modernist architects and postcolonial intellectuals in this period was the way they marshaled concepts of the vernacular, of imagined pasts and ideas about the authentic and the indigenous, to legitimize design practices. That part of all these plans’ failures resided in their wishful forgetting of other situated local “vernaculars,” with equally complex notions of peoplehood—the homestead farmers of Tanzania swept up in the speed and force of Nyerere’s top-down village collectivization campaigns, the Gandhian farmers displaced from their land to build Chandigarh, the working classes of Delhi, the CIA agents of Reston—suggests a need in this period for looking at the politics of competing political vernaculars as a route toward illuminating the ways empire and nation-building both used design to gloss over alternate political realities. Eric Mumford summarizes this point well in his discussion of Sert’s well-known heart of the city project in Havana in 1955, “commissioned by the American-backed military dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista.” “The irony of creating a ‘democratic’ public sphere for this corrupt and autocratic regime,” he comments, “does not seem to have been discussed by critics at the time.” ¹¹¹ Despite this important caveat, it must be stressed that this distinct mode of design—defined at the meeting point between a moment in modernist architectural history, a moment in the reformulation of development and modernization as rubrics and problems, a moment in the history of global empire and imperial competition, and a moment in anticolonial, revolutionary imagining and national formation—had a stickiness and breadth potentially visible across many postcolonial contexts. The American new town of Reston, Virginia, in this regard, is only one part of the larger project of delineating such a series of correspondences, even if at Lake Anne they remain only, as a critic worried at the time, little more than “an interesting museum piece in a sea of sprawl, a Williamsburg of nostalgia and might-have-been.” ¹¹²