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Arthur ShurtleffFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arthur Asahel Shurtleff(1870-1957) was a landscape architect and urban planner. Shurtleff grewup in Boston. He graduated in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. in 1894, and from Harvard

University in 1896. For eight years he worked in the Brookline, Massachusetts office of the Olmstedfirm of landscape architects, and during that time helped Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. establish

America's first four-year program in the field at Harvard in 1899. In his own practice that he beganin 1904 he specialized in city planning work, certainly one of the earliest to do so in the UnitedStates.

His studies of the Boston area were carried out for the Boston Metropolitan ImprovementCommission and the Massachusetts State Highway Commission as well as for several towns in the

vicinity. It is from a longer section in the 1907 report of the Imaprovement Commission that thearticle below is drawn. Shurtleff also presented another abbreviated version of his longer study

before the Fourth National Conference on City Planning, held in Boston in 1912. He then gave it the

title "The Public Street Systems of the Cities and Towns About Boston in Relation to Private StreetSchemes."

Shurtleff also prepared several campus plans, including those for Amherst and Wellesley Colleges

and Brown University and for Deerfield, St. Paul's, and Groton among preparatory schools. In 1928he became Chief Landscape Architect in the restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia, serving until

1941. Later he planned the outdoor museum of Old Sturbridge Village in central Massachusetts.

Probably to avoid confusion with Flavel Shurtleff, a prominent Massachusetts city planning attorney(but adding to a modern bibliographer's dilemma), he changed his last name in 1930 to Shurcliff.

Under one name or the other he wrote many articles on planning. One of these, delivered in 1908 asan illustrated lecture before the American Society of Landscape Architects, summarized many of the

urban design theories of German planners then under the influence of the teachings of Camillo Sitte.From 1928 to 1932 he was a two-term president of the American Society of Landscape Architects, .He also served on the Boston Art Commission, and in 1917 became one of the 52 founding members

of the American City Planning Institute.[1]

References

1. ^ Shurtleff, Arthur. "The Street Plan of the Metropolitan District ofBoston" (http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/shurbos.htm) . Information in biographical

introduction to article fromLandscape Architecture, v. 1, pp. 71-83, January 1911..

http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/shurbos.htm. Retrieved November 23, 2010.

External links

Fairfield University: Arthur Asahel Shurcliff (1870-1957)(http://www.fairfield.edu/art_shurtleff.html)

Mass. Historical Society - Arthur Asahel Shurcliff Papers(http://www.masshist.org/findingaids/doc.cfm?fa=fa0023)

Harvard University - Papers of the Nichols-Shurtleff family, 1780-1953(http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~sch00112)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Shurtleff"

Categories: architectsAmerican landscape | American urban planners | from Boston,PeopleMassachusetts | 1870 births | deaths1957

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