Article 5 1-1-2002 City Limits Frederick Steiner Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/oz This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Frederick Steiner I live in a city that is reluctantly urban. My workplace and home are within the Austin city limits. Deep in the heart of Texas, Austin is both the state capital and a state of mind. The city embodies Texan-ness while contrasting with the rest of the state. Cities develop through the cumulative impact of many plans and designs, as well as unplanned activities. Unintended consequences arise from both planned and unplanned actions. My neighborhood and campus were partly due to two plans. The plans affecting my office and home were completed several years apart. The first plan was prepared by Paul Philippe Cret (1876–1945) for the University of Texas campus in 1933. Cret was one of the most prominent architects in the United States from the first decade of the twentieth century through the 1930s. His reputation declined in the latter half of the twentieth century with the rise of the International Style. The modernists opposed the Beaux-Arts tradition and Paul Cret was the standard-bearer for the French school in America. Cret first entered the École des Beaux-Arts in his home city Lyon, France. In 1896, he won the Paris Prize, enabling him to study at the most important architectural school in the world then: the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He came to the United States in 1903 to teach at the University of Pennsylvania. He stayed in Philadelphia until his death in 1945, except for his service in the French army during the First World War. While teaching and directing the architecture atelier at Penn, Cret maintained a robust practice in Philadelphia designing such buildings as the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C. (1907–1917), the Indianapolis Public Library (1917), and the Detroit Institute of the Arts (1920–1927). The second plan was prepared by Ian L. McHarg (1920–2001) in 1976 for the Lake Austin area. McHarg was the most prominent planner and landscape architect in the world during the 1970s. After apprenticing as a landscape architect in his native Scotland, he served in the British commandos during the Second World War. Afterwards, McHarg studied landscape architecture and city planning at Harvard University, a school then dominated by Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus. In 1954, McHarg went to the University of Pennsylvania,Article 5 1-1-2002 City Limits Frederick Steiner Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/oz This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Frederick Steiner I live in a city that is reluctantly urban. My workplace and home are within the Austin city limits. Deep in the heart of Texas, Austin is both the state capital and a state of mind. The city embodies Texan-ness while contrasting with the rest of the state. Cities develop through the cumulative impact of many plans and designs, as well as unplanned activities. Unintended consequences arise from both planned and unplanned actions. My neighborhood and campus were partly due to two plans. The plans affecting my office and home were completed several years apart. The first plan was prepared by Paul Philippe Cret (1876–1945) for the University of Texas campus in 1933. Cret was one of the most prominent architects in the United States from the first decade of the twentieth century through the 1930s. His reputation declined in the latter half of the twentieth century with the rise of the International Style. The modernists opposed the Beaux-Arts tradition and Paul Cret was the standard-bearer for the French school in America. Cret first entered the École des Beaux-Arts in his home city Lyon, France. In 1896, he won the Paris Prize, enabling him to study at the most important architectural school in the world then: the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He came to the United States in 1903 to teach at the University of Pennsylvania. He stayed in Philadelphia until his death in 1945, except for his service in the French army during the First World War. While teaching and directing the architecture atelier at Penn, Cret maintained a robust practice in Philadelphia designing such buildings as the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C. (1907–1917), the Indianapolis Public Library (1917), and the Detroit Institute of the Arts (1920–1927). The second plan was prepared by Ian L. McHarg (1920–2001) in 1976 for the Lake Austin area. McHarg was the most prominent planner and landscape architect in the world during the 1970s. After apprenticing as a landscape architect in his native Scotland, he served in the British commandos during the Second World War. Afterwards, McHarg studied landscape architecture and city planning at Harvard University, a school then dominated by Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus. In 1954, McHarg went to the University of Pennsylvania,