Excerpt from Building Height Bulk, and Form: How Zoning Can Be Used as a Protection Against Uneconomic Nomic Types of Buildings, on Land High-Cost Land

Trained as an architect, at first in this country, and then at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, George Burdett Ford was soon primarily interested in the field of City Planning. In his service with the New York Commission on City Planning and the Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions, in his large and varied professional work as a city planner, in his work for the French Government in replanning Rheims and Soissons, in his lecturing, in his writing, he had become an international leader in the City Planning movement.

As an architect and an artist, he had a profound influence on modern "skyscraper" architecture. The conception of the "Zoning Envelope" within which the form of the restricted building must lie, the first visualization of the architectural forms so brought about which now create a new architectural style, - these were primarily the work of George B. Ford during the drafting of the New York Zoning Ordinance passed in 1916.

Perhaps more than any other architect, he faced squarely and studied completely the factors of the economics of construction, upkeep, use, and mutual amenity of city buildings, as an inseparable and underlying part of the whole problem the final solution of which is the efficient and beautiful neighborhood or district rather than the individual structure.

He died, it might be said, in armor and on the field of battle. He had hardly settled to his duties as General Director of the Regional Plan Association of New York, his task being to keep the Plan a living force and an inspiration to the Region and to the country at large. On the very day before his death he had finished the writing of a report for the Harvard School of City Planning on Building Height, Bulk, and Form which carries further some of the ideas and ideals for which he had fought so well.

His whimsical humor, his amazingly constant good temper, his optimism and enthusiasm backed by the most self-sacrificing hard work, were a gift to the world which will not be replaced, - nor forgotten.

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