Clarence Samuel Stein (June 19, 1882 – February 7, 1975) was an American urban planner, architect, and writer, a major proponent of the garden city movement in the United States. Biography Stein was born in Rochester, New York, into an upwardly-mobile Jewish family. While a youth, his family decamped to New York City, where he was immersed in the milieu surrounding the Ethical Culture Society, attending its Workshop School and developing his sensibilities within the context of Progressive thought: the integration of physical and mental labor, the importance of a universal humanistic philosophy, the concept of a nurtured individualistic sensibility. Intense and self-absorbed, the young Stein had a nervous collapse shortly before he was scheduled to leave for college, experiencing a bout of what was then called neurasthenia for which he was sent to Florida to endure a rest cure. He returned to New York and worked in his family's casket business, where the combination of physical and mental labor matched the philosophy in which he had been educated, much in keeping with his contemporary John Dewey. After a year or so, he prepared to attend college, embarking on an American version of the Grand Tour: travel to the artistic and cultural centers of Europe, in this case in the company of his father. Returning to the United States, he immersed himself in work in the Progressive settlement house movement. In concert with his brothers and a small cohort of like-minded young men, many of whom would be influential partners for the rest of his career, Stein started the Young Men's Municipal Club, an organization modeled on many other such burgeoning social amelioration movements (Jane Adams's, Hull House is an example) and dedicated to studying and then agitating for improvements to the chaotic life of the modern city. While at work on that mission, Stein began to take classes at Columbia University, but they were not the traditional liberal-arts courses common at an Ivy League academy. Instead, he focused on a progressive curriculum newly installed at Columbia under the influence of Dewey: cabinet making, furniture design, and the useful arts. Having been deeply impressed by the vision of modern Paris while on his European tour, Stein decided to attend the prestigious, École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where many outstanding American architects were seeking training in design according to classical principles. Training at the École as an architect-designer required immersion in