Edmund Bacon (architect) - Early Life

Early Life

Bacon was born in Philadelphia, the son of Helen Atkinson (née Comly) and Ellis Williams Bacon. He grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and graduated from Swarthmore High School in 1928. He was educated in architecture at Cornell University, where his senior thesis for a new civic center for Philadelphia included an urban park at the position where Philadelphia's famous LOVE Park was later built. After college, while traveling the world on a small inheritance, Bacon found work as an architect in Shanghai, China, a city that exerted a deep influence on his thinking, and Philadelphia. After a year in China, he returned to Philadelphia where he worked for architect William Pope Barney.

He soon was awarded a scholarship to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, with renowned Finnish architect/planner Eliel Saarinen, whom Bacon revered and whose theories about the city as a living organism as expressed in Saarinen's book The City were a basis for Bacon's later work. Saarinen sent Bacon to Flint, Michigan to guide a WPA traffic survey. This project transformed into a permanent position for Bacon at the Flint Institute for Planning and Research. Bacon became very active in civic life in Flint, helping to establish the Flint Housing Association and reforming the city's Planning Commission. During his time in Flint, Bacon witnessed the 1936-37 Flint Sit-Down Strike, and felt empathetic to the workers. Bacon gained close contacts with individuals who were active in establishing the Federal Housing Authority, such as Catherine Bauer and Lewis Mumford. Through these contacts he helped secure federal housing dollars for Flint. However, the local real-estate industry came to see this Federal funding for public housing as a threat to their business (as was the case in several cities early in the history of the FHA). The funding was turned down, and Bacon was effectively run out of Flint in 1939.