Myer R Wolfe

Myer Richard "Mike" Wolfe (July 15, 1918 - June 25, 1989) was an American urban designer and a founding member of the Department of Urban Planning (1961) and the Urban Design Certificate Program (1967) at the University of Washington. His life work pioneered such topics as urban form, the town as artifact, the urban design process, and comparative urbanism in the field of urban planning.

Early years

Wolfe was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1918 to Bernard Wolfe (1890-1972) and Ester Krawetz (1890-1969), Eastern European Jews whose families immigrated to the US in 1907 and 1909, respectively. Bernard was a plumber, and Esther, a knitter. They first lived at 145 Boylston Street in Malden, MA, and then moved to 91 Howard Street in Haverhill, MA. The household included Mike’s older brother and a cousin who was about the same age as Mike.

Wolfe graduated from Haverhill High School (ca 1937) and received a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture (ca 1941) from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH. He joined the US Army Air Forces in 1942, serving in the Burmese-Chinese-Indian theatre of operations until 1945. He then enrolled in Cornell University’s ten-year old Urban Planning Program and received a Master of Regional Planning degree in 1947, submitting a thesis entitled "The Current Toll Road Trend." Wolfe’s first academic appointment was at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS. In 1949, he moved to Seattle to teach at the University of Washington School of Architecture.

Institution Building at the University of Washington

At the University of Washington School of Architecture, Wolfe was in the company of other such future luminaries as architect Victor Steinbrueck, whose advocacy was responsible for preserving much of Seattle’s urban architectural heritage; and Richard Haag, who founded the program in and later the Department of Landscape Architecture. Together with other local colleagues, these newcomers helped create the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (1957-58) (name changed to College of Built Environments in 2008), which helped formalize the establishment of separate departments of Architecture and Urban Planning (1961) and of Landscape Architecture (1969).

Mike Wolfe was active in the surrounding Puget Sound region, serving on the Washington State Highway Commission, the Seattle World’s Fair Commission, and carrying out important funded research about the developing Seattle suburbs. He collaborated early on with some of the young forward thinkers who had joined programs in Engineering, Geography, and Sociology, and who were shaping the emerging fields of data and computer sciences, leading to the quantification of the social sciences. Wolfe cooperated with Engineering Professor Edgar Horwood, one of the early contributors to the development of the digital and spatial US Census and the founding member of URISA (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association). In 1961, Horwood led one of the first use of computerized data in urban planning, applied to the development of the Community Renewal Plan of the City of Spokane, WA, which served as a pilot case for using US Census population and housing digital data.

Wolfe welcomed geographers, anthropologists, sociologists and economists as faculty in the newly formed Department of Urban Planning. He himself remained a traditional urbanist, focusing on the visual and formal dimension of cities. He did not espouse the construct of dividing the quantitative from the visual, writing forcefully and prematurely (1965) on the promises of "a visual supplement to urban social studies". He formed one of the first Urban Design programs in the US (ca 1967) that was independent from the established departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. The program welcomed students from all the professional programs (urban planning, architecture, and landscape architecture) enabling them to work together with the ultimate goal of making quality urban environments. In 1965 Wolfe started a class called the Urban Form, which remains at the core of the urban design and planning program today.

Wolfe stayed at the University of Washington until his death in 1989. He ended his academic career as the Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (1979-83), a position that allowed him to foster further interdisciplinary teaching and research both between the College departments and within the larger university setting.

Lectures and Consultancies in the US

Wolfe actively shaped academic and professional organizations such as the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP founded in 1969) and the American Institute of Planners (which was folded into the American Planning Association [APA] in 1978). He advised the Johns Hopkins University Center for Metropolitan Planning (1972), graduate programs in urban design and planning at the universities of Puerto Rico, Texas, Maryland, Hawaii, and Minnesota, as well as the US National Endowment for the Arts on Urban Design Education (1982). He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (1963-64). After retirement from the University of Washington, he became Acting Dean of the then College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University in Tempe (1986-87).

Wolfe consulted for a variety of public agencies outside of the Pacific Northwest. In 1966, he advised the housing and urban renewal administration of San Juan, Puerto Rico on their strategies, policies, plans and programs. Between 1973 and 1976, he consulted for the State of Hawaii Department of Planning and Economic Development, working on a demonstration program for the production of urban design plans that balanced governmental processes with private sector costs and benefits. The plans addressed new housing development, commercial services, and transit systems, while avoiding the displacement of small businesses and guaranteeing the preservation of historic areas. This work led to the publication of an Urban Design Primer for Hawaii professional planners and elected officials.

Sponsored Research

Wolfe carried out several major research projects that focused on the fast-growing Pacific Northwest region. With small grants from the University of Washington Graduate School, he studied the dynamics of urbanization. In 1960, he negotiated a research contract with the Weyerhauser Corporation, a major landowner in the Pacific Northwest, to study patterns of suburban land development in the Seattle area. Studying contemporary urban growth and development was as important to Wolfe as preserving the extent environment of older towns. Early on, he wrote about the changing responsibilities of urban planners in the wake of suburbanization and the importance of seeking continuity in urban form through the ages, publishing in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners''. Scaling up his studies of explosive suburban development beyond the Seattle region, he published an article in the British Town Planning Review, which helped him secure a grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1967. The 4-year grant produced Urban Design within the Comprehensive Planning Process, a guide for planners to consider new and old urban forms in the general plan making process.

Wolfe built on the transportation work that he had started in his master’s thesis with grants from the Washington State Legislature to develop criteria for designating highway scenic areas (1962 ), and from the US National Cooperative Highway Program to assess impacts of highway improvements on adjacent communities. From the early-to the mid-1980s, two grants from the National Science Foundation led to assessments of vulnerability to earthquakes and mitigation approaches to guide land use decisions.

Wolfe also received one grant from the US National Endowment for the Arts for research on small towns (1970) and one Design Project Fellowship (1977).

International activities

Wolfe was also active internationally. He received two Fulbright Fellowships for study abroad, one to stay at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Copenhagen, Denmark (1959), and the other to stay at the Technical University in Milan, Italy (1965). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he went to Western Australia to consult on the design of a New Town Prototype for a private consortium. In the early 1970s, the US Department of State sponsored Wolfe to help replanning the central city of San Salvador, El Salvador; in the mid-1970s, he was part of a United Nations Advisory Team to assess the effects of a new expressway, including the possible displacement of existing settlements, in the Metropolitan Area of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and in the late 1970s, the US State Department sponsored Wolfe to give lectures and seminars in Korea, Hong Kong, and Burma.

From 1967 to 1978, Wolfe was a Consultant to and Senior Research Associate in the Urbanisticni Institut in the city of Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). The project was a demonstration study of regional planning in the Ljubljana Metropolitan Area. It was sponsored by the US Department of State, the Ford Foundation, and their Yugoslav counterparts and included advisors from several universities. In 1978, the last year of the “Yugoslav project,” Mike spent time as a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, Italy.

Sketches

Wolfe left numerous sketches of towns, cities, urban, and suburban places, which he used to record his travels and to document his studies. His sketches of small towns in the Pacific Northwest were meant to encourage the local populations to preserve the integrity of their built environment. Wolfe also sketched the emerging suburban development that he studied in the Seattle region. In the 1960s already, he was an advocate of the need to use a design approach to the newly emerging suburbs. Some of the sketches came in the form of conceptual diagrams and plans, but most were perspective drawings of places as seen or observed. The sketches were donated both in original and digital form to the University of Washington archives.

Personal life

In 1943, Mike and Rosamond Virginia Fellman (1924-2023), from Newburyport, MA, married in Broward County, FL. They had two sons, Michael (born 1944), an architect, and Charles R (Chuck) (born 1955), a writer about cities and formerly an environmental and land-use attorney.

Legacy

Documents regarding Mike Wolfe’s papers, lecture notes, building designs, urban planning projects, and sketches are held in the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections Division Collection #3390

Further reading

• Wolfe MR. A comprehensive plan for Quincy, Washington. Quincy Planning Commission, Quincy School District, 1956. https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Wolfe%2C%20Myer%20R%2E
• Wolfe MR. Towns, time, and regionalism. University of Washington. Department of Urban Planning, 1963. https://books.google.com/books?id=KnMbAQAAMAAJ

Available at the University of Washington Libraries https://lib.uw.edu/types/

• Wolfe MR, Kauffman JR. An analysis of the problems involved in the development of a federal public housing project. Wolfe MR, editor, 1951.
• Wolfe MR, Lifvendahl RE. Zoning. Wolfe MR, editor, 1954.
• Wolfe MR. Proposals for the new town of Royal: Lower Crab Creek, the Columbia Basin. Washington State. Warden: Royal City Development Corporation 1955.
• Walker S, Wolfe MR, Thiel P. The problem of sequential connectedness in the urban environment. Seattle, WA: University of Washington, Department of Urban Planning, 1963.
• 1963-64, 1967 Binario (Portuguese periodical containing writings by Myer Wolfe in Portuguese and English) available in archives.
• Wolfe MR. Outline - Urban Planning 479, The Urban Form. Seattle, WA: University of Washington, Department of Urban Planning 1966.
• Banerjee TK, Shinn RD, Copeland LG, Wolfe MR. Uses of the anachronistic. Seattle, WA: University of Washington, Department of Urban Planning, 1967.
• Leigh R, Dost J, Smith WF, Jonas P, Wolfe MR, Shinn RD, Stahl JE, Walter GR, Zink LB, Brown RC, Chatterji M, Healy RG, Monahan RL. Book reviews. 1969:248-70.

Lectures

Mike’s archives at the University of Washington archives include (1) “The economic outlook of the Pacific Northwest,” ca 1982, and (2) “An introduction” to the International Conference “Streets as public property: public/private interaction in planning and design," University of Washington, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Seattle, Washington, May, 1982.

Available online is “Urban design in the urban planning process,” Ball State University Libraries 1979-10-22 Introduction by Malcolm MacNair; presented as part of the Guest Lecture Series at Ball State University’s College of Architecture and Planning.

Wolfe Endowment and Lecture Series at the University of Washington

The Endowment awarded a total of 45 urban design students, 35 who received a scholarship since 1993 and 10 who received a thesis award since 1995. It has sponsored 7 MR Wolfe Lectures since 1986.

Awards

N.D. Inducted to the University of Washington College of Architecture and Urban Planning Roll of Honor in Architecture Hall on the Seattle campus.

2018 University of Washington College of Built Environment, Distinguished Faculty Award for Lifetime Achievement.