Name Arthur Shurtleff Role Urban planner | Died 1957 | |
Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University | ||
Arthur Asahel Shurtleff (September 12, 1870 –November 12, 1957) was a landscape architect and urban planner. Shurtleff grew up 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 Olmsted firm 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 began in 1904 he specialized in city planning work, certainly one of the earliest to do so in the United States.
His studies of the Boston area were carried out for the Boston Metropolitan Improvement Commission 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 the article 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 Street Schemes."
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 1928 he 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 as an 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.