Series Contents
Continued from: Part 8 | Part 7

Part 9:
Version 1.0: December 19, 2019 Revision

Unless specified otherwise, page numbers and quotations are from Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) [1]. Internet references are cited as accessed on or before December 19, 2019. Topics for further research are sometimes underlined.

Continuing with Specifics about Delos and McLuhan’s Fellow Attendees

Stewart Bates, President of Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (Canada)

Dr. Bates was mention in Part 7. Here is an explanation about his organization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Mortgage_and_Housing_Corporation

. . . on 1 January 1946 Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation was created (changed to “Canada” Mortgage and Housing Corporation in 1979) to house returning war veterans and to lead Canada’s housing programs.

CMHC’s basic functions were to administer the National Housing Act and the Home Improvement Loans Guarantee Act and provide discounting facilities for loan and mortgage companies. . . .

In the present day, CMHC

has since expanded its mandate to assist housing for all Canadians. The organization’s primary goals are to provide mortgage liquidity, assist in affordable housing development, and provide unbiased research and advice to the Canadian government, and housing industry.

Jacqueline Tyrwhitt (Most links accessed Dec. 8, 2018)

According to the editor (p. 277), Jackie Tyrwhitt (1905-83) was born in South Africa. She trained at the Architectural Association in England and specialized in Town Planning.

In 1951, she was assigned to the Graduate School, University of Toronto, and started working for the School of Architecture’s planning department in 1954. She spent a lot of time with McLuhan and his colleagues Tom Easterbrook, Carlton Williams and Edmund Carpenter (another bio: https://thetorontoschool.ca/carpenter-homage/), welcoming guests such as Eric Havelock and Ashley Montagu.

Tyrwhitt was an associate editor of Explorations. She caused some controversy when the CBC televised her project on the development of Toronto Island. According to this bio, https://thetorontoschool.ca/jaqueline-tyrwhitt/, Tyrwhitt also worked for the United Nations. She left in 1955 to become Professor of Town Planning at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University where her friend Sigfried Giedion was head. Jackie met C. A. Doxiadis in India in the 1950s, who enabled her to build a house in Greece. She worked as the editor of his magazine, Ekistics: Review on the Problems of Human Settlements. McLuhan’s first of many letters to her was on December 23, 1960.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaqueline_Tyrwhitt (accessed Dec. 19, 2019)

. . . was a British town planner, journalist, editor and educator. She was at the centre of the transnational network of theoreticians and practitioners who shaped the post-war Modern Movement in decentralized community design, residential architecture and social reform. . . .

Tyrwhitt spent the first nine months of 1937 studying town planning and land settlement at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin (TH-Berlin). In later reflections on the experience she said she had wanted to experience life under a totalitarian regime, in particular to observe early town planning schemes created by National Socialist planners. There she studied under Gottfried Feder who sought to apply Nazi anti-urban, Blut und Boden doctrine, aimed at the dissolution of the metropolis whereby metropolitan populations would be reabsorbed into the surrounding landscape.

Building on the English garden city model, he proposed the redistribution of the German population to small cities of a maximum of 20,000 inhabitants each. He promoted a Nazi ideal urban plan based on an oval, with a civic core centred in a radial street pattern. He called for housing produced in the traditional arts and crafts techqniues in a Volkisch vernacular style. This strategy was embraced as a means of both preserving historical settlement patterns and German-izing the landscape and peoples of occupied areas.

Tyrwhitt served as both Director of Research and Director of Studies during World War II at the School of Planning and Research for Regional Development, where she worked for seven years. Beginning in 1941 she worked under Lord Reith [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Reith,_1st_Baron_Reith] with the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction for wartime mapping of social statistics and planning for postwar reconstruction. . . .

In 1951 she left England for Canada and helped establish a graduate program in city and regional planning, where along with University of Toronto colleague Marshall McLuhan, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, political economist Tom Easterbrook, and psychologist D. Carl Williams, co- founded the Explorations Group and the Ford Foundation Seminar on Culture and Communication at the University of Toronto in 1953. The next 18 years were spent working for the School of Graduate Studies in Toronto, for the United Nations in India (1953–54), and later at Harvard University, all in town and regional planning-related jobs. She retired from Harvard in 1969, and moved to Greece, where she was appointed editor of the journal Ekistics, whose publisher, architect Constantine Doxiadis, was a friend . . .

References

Note: unless specified otherwise, Internet references are cited as accessed on or before December 13, 2019.

[1] Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987). Selected and Edited by: Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, William Toye. Oxford University Press, 1987.

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