City Beautiful movement
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- Date:
- c. 1890 - c. 1929
City Beautiful movement, American urban-planning movement led by architects, landscape architects, and reformers that flourished between the 1890s and the 1920s. The idea of organized comprehensive urban planning arose in the United States from the City Beautiful movement, which claimed that design could not be separated from social issues and should encourage civic pride and engagement. Its influence was most prominent in cities such as Cleveland, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
The movement first gained ground in 1893 with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Daniel H. Burnham headed the construction of the fair’s temporary city, known to those who attended as the “White City,” a semi-utopia in which visitors were meant to be shielded from poverty and crime. Burnham’s plans for the site incorporated the designs of architects trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, who paired the balance and harmony of Neoclassical and Baroque architecture with the aesthetic of Chicago’s buildings and cityscape. The landscape of the Columbian Exposition, which included lagoons and big green expanses, was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., famous for his winning design of New York City’s oasis, Central Park, which broke ground in 1857. To not only enhance the city’s appearance but also help the flow of vehicle and pedestrian traffic, the City Beautiful concept focused on incorporating a civic centre, parks, and grand boulevards. The holistic and multipurpose approach to urban planning that was championed by Burnham and displayed at the Columbian Exposition remained at the forefront of architecture, landscape architecture, and design for many years. Its impact is still visible in many cities throughout the United States.
Aside from making cities more livable and orderly, the City Beautiful movement was meant to shape the American urban landscape in the manner of those in Europe, which were primarily designed in the Beaux-Arts aesthetic. Burnham especially thought of the movement as a mechanism by which the United States could establish visible and permanent ties to European Classical traditions. His opponents, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright among them, wanted to avoid borrowing from and outright replication of European design and instead invent a new and truly American style.
The City Beautiful movement emerged at a time in U.S. history when the country’s urban population first began to outnumber its rural population. Most city dwellers perceived that cities were ugly, congested, dirty, and unsafe. As cities grew—an increasingly rapid condition enhanced by an influx of immigrants at the end of the 19th century—public space was being usurped. With increased congestion, city dwellers needed open outdoor areas for recreation as they never had before. In addition, the chaotic approach to sanitation, pollution, and traffic found in most big American cities affected rich and poor alike, which is how the City Beautiful movement gained both financial and social support. The movement’s chief spokesperson, Charles Mulford Robinson, a muckraking journalist from Rochester, New York, helped inspire politicians to perceive it as a move toward increased civic virtue and the waning of social ills. He published his first major book on the subject, The Improvement of Towns and Cities, in 1901. It subsequently became the bible of the movement.
Washington, D.C., in 1902 became the first city to carry out a City Beautiful design, the McMillan Plan, named for Michigan’s U.S. Sen. James McMillan, who was chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. It limited building heights and positioned new structures and monuments throughout the city to create a balanced aerial composition. Other cities that benefited from the movement were Cleveland (1903), San Francisco (1905), and St. Paul, Minnesota (1906).
The pinnacle of the movement came in 1909 with Burnham and fellow architect and urban planner Edward H. Bennett’s design for Chicago, published as the Plan of Chicago and also known as the Burnham Plan. The plan involved a 60-mile (95-kilometre) radius in which avenues would extend out from a civic centre. It included an extensive rail system, a bi-level boulevard for commercial and regular traffic (what is now Wacker Drive), and a sprawling network of parks. The lakefront, in particular, was an important component of the proposed plan; a park and trail were constructed to run near the shore of Lake Michigan. In addition, a comprehensive highway system that promoted simplicity and efficiency was to connect the city to its suburbs and the suburbs to one another. The implementation of much of the Burnham Plan took place over the course of 20 years, starting in 1909 and coming to an end—though incomplete—at the start of the Great Depression in 1929.
Over time, the movement’s shortcomings came to the fore, and it became apparent that improvement of the physical city without addressing social and economic issues would not substantively improve urban life. The movement, as a whole, began to wane by World War I and was then succeeded by a modernist approach to architecture known as the International style. Examples of extant buildings from the City Beautiful period are Union Station in Washington, D.C., the Field Museum in Chicago, and the Boston Public Library in Boston.
