Gilmore Clarke (1892–1982) and Michael Rapuano (1904–1975) founded one of the first American interdisciplinary design and engineering firms and designed some of the country’s most important public spaces. Their work in New York—extraordinary in scope and scale—ranges from Bryant Park, Jacob Riis Park, and the Central Park Zoo to Jones Beach, the Taconic Parkway, and the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, along with most of the region’s early parkways and much of its public housing. They also designed numerous sites in Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Cleveland; and beyond. Yet virtually nothing has been written about the two men outside of studies of the life and work of Robert Moses, with whom they collaborated for over five decades. Designing the American Century is the first book to focus on these influential and prolific designers to address the importance of their work in the historiography of American landscape architecture.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Thomas J. Campanella is a historian of city planning and the urban built environment and professor in the department of city and regional planning at Cornell University. Though primarily an Americanist, he has also studied and written about the extraordinary growth of Chinese cities in the post-Mao era. Campanella has received Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the James Marston Fitch Foundation. His books include Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton University Press, 2019), The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), and Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (Yale University Press, 2003), winner of the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. He has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Nanjing University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.