Marjorie Sewell Cautley (1891–1954) was an American landscape architect who played an influential yet often overlooked part in the conception and development of some early, visionary twentieth-century American communities.
Early life
Cautley's father was William Elbridge Sewell, who later became Governor of Guam. She was raised in New York and New Jersey at a time when the east coast region was beginning to see a need to address the problem of housing. As the advent of the car and more sophisticated infrastructure prompted the move of many middle-class Americans to bedroom communities outside the more crowded urban areas, many designers and intellectuals saw themselves faced with the specter of unchecked, poorly designed growth. A strong interest arose in the possibilities of the Garden Cities as discrete integrations of the townscape with communal landscapes.
Cautley spent her youth in Asia and the Pacific, where her father was stationed in the Navy, yet was orphaned at twelve, at which point she was sent to live with relatives in Brooklyn. While there, she studied at the Packer Institute for Collegiate Studies. She went on to receive a B. S. degree in landscape architecture in 1917 from Cornell University, and an M.A. in City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania in 1943.
Career
She was employed shortly after her graduation from Cornell by the architect Julia Morgan in Alton, Illinois, who was best known for her designs at Hearst Castle. In her work with Morgan and in setting up her own New Jersey practice in 1921, Cautley was exposed to an interest in designing communal spaces. The primary project she worked on with Morgan, during World War I, was a hotel for war workers. Her first project undertaken as an independent practitioner – at only thirty-years old – was a public park in Tenafly, New Jersey, called Roosevelt Common. One of the interesting aspects of this design, which was applied extensively in her later work, was a use of native plants to imbue the landscape with a strong sense of place.
It was perhaps Cautley’s interest in these neighborhood spaces, combined with this strong interest in local species, which caused the architects/planners Clarence Stein and Henry Wright to take an interest in her. Stein and Wright had already been experimenting with innovative housing design, and when Cautley joined their office in 1924, they began working on a now well-known housing project in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens in New York City, not far from the Brooklyn neighborhood where Cautley had spent much of her childhood. Sunnyside Gardens was built in response to the post-World War I housing shortage, and was intended for families of modest income. The great achievement of Sunnyside was its 200 ft. by 900 ft. “super-blocks,” with all the houses oriented towards rear courts. Only 28 percent of each block was developed, allowing for a large middle expanse to be devoted to community garden plots and public greensward. Some believe that Cautley should be largely credited for devising this housing configuration, although she is often only mentioned in passing in articles on the work of Stein and Wright. Cautley’s planting plans filled the rear court of each house with sycamores and flowering shrubs, enclosed by low hedgerows that delineated each parcel while still fostering a communal sensibility among neighbors.