100 CONFERENCE ON NATURAL BEAUTY 



hedges and trees, screening off the parking lots and gasoline stations 

 and junkyards. 



As one approaches cities we are faced with the depredation of the 

 automobile. The screening of these automotive services and facili- 

 ties by various kinds of landscaping techniques can be accomplished. 

 Perhaps there are some suggestions as to how we can do it on a 

 national level. 



AUGUST HECKSCHER. I think if I were going to say anything on 

 this it would be in the nature of a warning rather than a summary. 



There is a great danger in discussions of this kind that we think of 

 beauty in too narrow and too conventional a sense and that we 

 think about cities as they have been rather than as they must be 

 in the times ahead. If, as President Johnson has said, we are going 

 to rebuild America in the next 40 years, and it is going to be a dif- 

 ferent looking America from anything that has existed before, we 

 are going to need wholly new standards of beauty. 



I am all in favor of trees, for example, but I must say I was some- 

 what surprised by the exceptional emphasis placed upon them in this 

 meeting and by Mr. Gutheim in particular. 



I am all in favor of what Mr. Stone has said in regard to town 

 houses as opposed to the individual houses, the small Monticello 

 palaces placed upon their 50- by 100-foot lots. But if we are really 

 thinking about the new scale and the new America, it seems to me 

 our concepts of beauty must be somewhat different from these and 

 somewhat more novel. 



I would guess, for example, that the row house is going to be 

 only the expedient of a moment in time and will satisfy our re- 

 quirements only for a passing instant before we have to go into 

 wholly new forms of dwellings that are going to satisfy the im- 

 mense population and the immense pressures towards urbaniza- 

 tion within this country. 



We will have to break away from the row house into some 

 kind of high-rise habitation and in those we will have to find our 

 beauty in the same way as with regard to trees. 



When you have the old-fashioned street, it is important to line 

 it with trees, but the real question is are we going to have the old- 

 fashioned street? 



I think the time is past when you are going to have streets 

 which fulfill the functions that have been traditional functions of 

 bearing traffic, of carrying pedestrians and, ideally, of allowing 



