“Greenbelt is a phenomenal enterprise.”
Maybe a similar thought has run through your mind as you walk or bike our pathways, use our recreational facilities, see a movie in our historic theater or take part in activities in our Community Center? When Greenbelt resident Isabelle Gournay makes such a statement, however, many folks outside our own community take notice.
Architectural historian Gournay has taught at the University of Maryland’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (MAPP) from 1992 to 2018. In 2006, she moved into one of the five experimental prefabricated Cape Cod houses built in Greenbelt by the federal Farm Security Administration in 1937. Now part of Greenbelt Homes, Inc. (GHI), Gournay enjoys the fact that GHI takes care of much of her home’s maintenance. “I also like the fact that I have a garden…that is important too…. I like the balance.” These elements of affordable cooperative living and picturesque landscaping are only two of the many aspects she has explored in academic articles, historic preservation reports and lectures promoting Greenbelt as a New Deal icon. “I was always interested in housing,” she says. “When I live in a place, I like to know about it.”
Parisian-born Gournay first visited the U.S. when she was 20 years old. She travelled from Williamsburg, Va., to Quebec City, Canada, on Greyhound buses, always sketching along the way. Back in Paris, she earned an art degree and museum training certificate from the École du Louvre in 1979 and 1980 and a Masters of Architecture from the École des Beaux-Arts in 1980. With these degrees in hand, she came back to the U.S. to attend Yale University. Returning once again to Paris to work on her dissertation, she began to pursue her interest in the connections between urbanism, architecture and housing in France and the U.S. which have since defined her career. She received her Ph.D. in art history in 1989 while living in Atlanta, Ga., with her then husband and expecting her daughter. She taught at several colleges there before joining the MAPP faculty at the University of Maryland (UMD). An impressive scholar, Gournay has authored two books and edited four, written numerous articles and book chapters and guest curated three exhibitions. She has not slowed down in retirement, with several new works in progress.
One American architect in particular who she discovered in her research was North Carolina native Douglas Ellington. A student at the École des Beaux-Arts in the early 20th century, he would eventually become one of the chief architects for Greenbelt. “My gut feeling is that he was the principal designer for the Greenbelt Center Elementary School (now the Community Center).” (To see Gournay’s Greenbelt Museum lecture on Ellington, visit greenbeltnewsreview.com/issues/GNR20140410.pdf.) “I like the notion of doing research which is also based on personal observation that is not totally abstract, but has some potential to be used by other people,” she says. “I went to the École des Beaux-Arts and I was educated like Douglas Ellington and I was in the same location. So it’s not totally autobiographical, but also something I can relate to.”
Gournay has explored her ideas about urban housing and architecture in several publications she has co-authored with another Greenbelt colleague, Mary Corbin Sies, who teaches American Studies at UMD. They began their research and writing partnership in 2002, when awarded grants from the Maryland Historical Trust to study the Modern Movement in Maryland. This project initially included a comprehensive context essay about modernist architecture in the state. More recently, it has focused on documentation for National Register nominations for a selection of key resources, including the Lustine dealership in Hyattsville. For these reports, UMD graduate students worked alongside Gournay and Sies.
Their latest publication, Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change, is a series of international case studies by various planning history scholars that they co-edited with Robert Freestone in 2019. The duo also contributed an essay, Greenbelt at 75: Sustaining a New Deal Icon. Their book won a prize from the International Planning History Society in 2020. “Mary and I have done a lot of work together and we complement each other very well,” says Gournay. “She has inspired me.” (For more about their book, see the November 21, 2019, issue of the News Review)
“The Greenbelt plan was really iconic…it is so characteristic with its crescent shape. It is very scenic – you take a little pathway and never is it the same, never cookie-cutter,” Gournay says. “You don’t find two courts that are absolutely alike.” She further explains that “I always feel like I live in the plan.” As a volunteer guide for the Greenbelt Museum since 2006, she uses her intimate knowledge of these byways to give her tour groups a truly immersive experience. “I really love giving tours for the Greenbelt Museum,” she says. In one case, for instance, “I took landscape students from Penn State through the tiniest of pathways – places where we could almost get lost.”
Beside her activities on behalf of the Greenbelt Museum, Gournay served on Greenbelt’s 75th Anniversary Advisory Committee, chairing the 75th Anniversary Symposium: Sustaining Greenbelt’s Legacy in 2012. She has also been a member of Greenbelt’s Advisory Planning Board since 2013. In the Planning Board meetings, she says, “It’s sometimes out of my comfort zone…but I speak my mind about the projects. We are trying to push developers, a bit, toward doing things which are more amenity-rich and interesting. The professional planners in Greenbelt are very good,” she acknowledges, “it’s a nice group to work with.” The City of Greenbelt honored her with a Public Service Citation in 2013 in recognition of her cooperative spirit.
Gournay points out that after World War II, the Greenbelt plan came to be a point of reference for new towns internationally: “Greenbelt became really a very important testing ground for a lot of ideas…it was rather unprecedented in that way.” She believes that Greenbelt needs to be placed in its context, both in terms of where its original designers found their inspirations abroad and how its design may have influenced later planned communities outside of the U.S.
Looking toward the future of Greenbelt as a continuing legacy of its New Deal roots, “Nothing in Greenbelt is meant to be a showcase of something we are not,” observes Gournay. “There is a lot of authenticity…it is true to the origin story of the place.” To that end, she is a tireless ambassador for Greenbelt and its history of cooperative living in an amenity-rich and nature-friendly environment. She is still making new discoveries about Greenbelt, presenting her findings at international conferences in Canada and Europe.
Although officially “retired” from her faculty duties, Gournay says “I love sharing my knowledge of Greenbelt and I continue to do that…. What I tell people is that I am not a U.S. citizen – but I am a Greenbelter!”