Marjorie Sewell Cautley

Marjorie Sewell Cautley
Born	1891
Died	1954
Education	Cornell University, Landscape Architecture
Notable work	Sunnyside Gardens; Roosevelt Commons; Radburn

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.

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. She went on to receive a degree in landscape architecture in 1917 from Cornell University, and was employed shortly thereafter 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.

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