David A. Wallace

David A. Wallace, FAICP, AIA, PP (1917 – July 19, 2004) was an influential urban planner and architect who founded the firm of Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT) with Ian McHarg.

In an illustrious career that spanned the second half of the 20th century, David A. Wallace contributed significantly to the fields of planning and urban design as a professional, as a builder of communities, and as a teacher. His accomplishments in planning serve as models for the profession. Beginning in Philadelphia, PA in 1953, under Mayor Joseph S. Clark, Wallace led a citywide urban redevelopment evaluation that resulted in the Central Urban Renewal Area (CURA) Report. In it he established a new strategy for overall redevelopment that targeted catalytic actions to strengthen communities and downtown. CURA became a model for other cities, notably Baltimore, MD.

In 1957, Wallace moved to Baltimore and headed a team to prepare a plan for the city’s ailing central business district. Responding to the need for immediate action, the team designed the 22-acre (89,000 m²) Charles Center, a mixed-use project that started the revitalization. Praised by Jane Jacobs in the Architectural Forum as the New Heart for Downtown Baltimore, Charles Center also set the stage for Baltimore’s famous Inner Harbor.

Wallace returned to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts as professor of planning and urban design. In 1963, he co-authored with Ian L. McHarg the benchmark “Plan for the Green Spring and Worthington Valleys,” the 80-square-mile (210 km²) northwest sector of the Baltimore region. The key idea in the plan was the preservation of the valleys as largely undeveloped open space, and the diversion of development to the surrounding plateaus. Lewis Mumford cited the plan as “brilliantly conceived… a most important contribution to regional planning.” McHarg republished the plan as a chapter in his seminal book Design with Nature and wrote in his autobiography, A Quest for Life, “By the 1970’s Wallace was, indisputably, the dominant city planner in the United States.” The valleys remain open to this day.

When Wallace received the assignment to prepare the Inner Harbor Master Plan, also in 1963, he asked McHarg, architect/landscape architect William H. Roberts, and architect/urban designer Thomas A. Todd to join him in founding Wallace McHarg Roberts & Todd (WMRT). With Wallace as partner in charge, the plan established the basic principles for development. Over the next 25 years Wallace and his partners were the designers of all of the Inner Harbor’s infrastructure, promenades, piers, bridges and fountains, and the design controls for all private development. The Inner Harbor has reportedly received more awards than any other comparable project in the United States.

Impressed by the Inner Harbor plan, Mayor John Lindsay and the city of New York retained WMRT in 1965 (with Whittelsey, Conklin and Rossant as local architects) to prepare a master plan for the moribund Lower Manhattan district. Excavation for the World Trade Center’s foundations was underway, and the plan was to prepare a response to the WTC’s impact. Wallace invented an urban design and growth modeling procedure that evaluated existing conditions, determined the susceptibility-to-change, forecast the probability-of-change, and proposed a design response. The catalytic idea in the Lower Manhattan Plan was to develop a predominantly residential community on land created by filling between the bulkhead and pier head lines at both Hudson and East Rivers, adjacent to the single-use commercial centers. Public walkways would be provided at the water’s edge, linked by pedestrian ways to the centers and subway stations. The districts’ elevated expressways would be depressed. The Lower Manhattan Plan won the New York Municipal Art Society’s Honor Award and was published in Progressive Architecture. The plan also established Wallace and his firm as the preeminent downtown planners and urban designers in the US for the next decade. Plans for the central areas of New Orleans, LA, Buffalo, NY, Miami, Orlando, and Jacksonville, FL, Oakland and Los Angeles, CA, and Baltimore’s MetroCenter followed, all employing Wallace’s growth modeling method combined with catalytic projects unique to each.

The Lower Manhattan Plan’s (LMP) full public access to the rivers and continuous walkways at the water’s edge caught the eye of John Weingart, then director of New Jersey’s Division of Coastal Zone Management. Part of the NJ Department of Environmental Protection, his division had been assigned regulatory control over a 300-foot (91 m)-deep coastal waterfront, and he saw the LMP concept as applicable. He retained the newly formed Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT), after Ian McHarg left the firm, to prepare the plan and develop design guidelines for the 18-mile (29 km), nine-community facility. Mandated for both public and private developers, to date, 75% of the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway is completed or in planning.

David Wallace received the John Harbeson Award from AIA Philadelphia for distinguished service to the profession in 2002 and the American Planning Association’s Distinguished Leadership Award in 2003. He was the author of Urban Planning/My Way, a memoir published by The Planners Press in 2004 that features case studies that examine the evolution of large-scale urban development in the 20th century.

Throughout his career, Wallace initiated and investigated new ideas through teaching, first at the University of Chicago, then at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught for 17 years. Through the network of his former students, staff, and the many people who have participated in his work as clients and stakeholders, he made a significant contribution to the profession and to the communities where he worked. In all, David Wallace was a true pioneer of planning practice, education, and theory whose work had a direct, significant, and positive impact on the field that endures to this day. This long-term impact can be seen not only in his own extant work, but in the work of others whom he has influenced.

In 2008, both APA Pennsylvania and National APA recognized the importance of Wallace's contributions to the planning profession, as having significantly and positively redirected planning with long-term results, and selected him for the 2009 AICP National Planning Pioneer Award.

Books

• Urban Planning/My Way:From Baltimore's Inner Harbor to Lower Manhattan and Beyond David A. Wallace 2004 ISBN 1884829899

External links

• Wallace Roberts & Todd, LLC (WRT) Website
• Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT) Wikipedia Page