Everything about The City Beautiful Movement totally explained
The
City Beautiful movement was a
Progressive reform movement in
North American
architecture and
urban planning that flourished in the
1890s and
1900s with the intent of using
beautification and
monumental grandeur in cities. The movement, which was originally most closely associated with
Chicago,
Detroit, and
Washington, D.C., didn't seek beauty for its own sake, but rather as a
social control device for creating moral and civic
virtue among urban populations. Advocates of the movement believed that such beautification could thus provide a harmonious social order that would increase the quality of life and help to remove social ills.
History
Origins and impact
The movement arose in the United States in response to inner-city crowded
tenement districts, itself a product of increased
immigration and consolidation of rural populations into cities. The movement flourished only for several decades, but in addition to the classicizing monuments it left, it also achieved great influence in urban planning that extended throughout the
20th century, in particular in regard to the later creation of
housing projects in the United States. The "
Garden City" movement in Britain influenced the contemporary planning of some newer suburbs of
London, and there was cross-fertilization between the two esthetics, one based in formal garden plans and urbanization schemes of the
Baroque the other, with its "
semi-detached villas" evoking a more rural atmosphere.
Architectural idioms
The particular architectural style of the movement borrowed heavily from the contemporary
Beaux-Arts movement, which emphasized the necessity of order, dignity, and harmony. The movement also borrowed from
classical monumental planning but differed from the true
neoclassical style in that in the City Beautiful movement, the classical idiom was adopted only partially, mixed with Beaux-Arts elements, and subjugated as means to the end of creating uniformity and harmony in style.
World Columbian Exposition
The first large-scale elaboration of the City Beautiful is considered to have been the "White City", as it came to be called, at the
World Columbian Exposition of
1893 in Chicago. The planning of the exposition was headed by architect
Daniel Burnham, who brought in architects from the eastern United States, as well as the
sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to build large-scale Beaux-Arts monuments that were vaguely classical with uniform
cornice height. The exposition displayed a model city of grand scale, with clean state-of-the-art
transport systems and no visible poverty. The exposition is credited with leading to the wide-scale embrace of the monumental idiom in American architecture for the next 15 years.
Richmond, Virginia's
Monument Avenue is one expression of this initial movement.
Louisiana Purchase Exposition
The momentum begun by the World Columbian Exposition was accelerated at the
Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. In 1901 the commissioner of architects selected Franco-American architect
Emmanuel Louis Masqueray to be Chief of Design of the Fair. In this position, which Masqueray held for three years, he designed the following Fair buildings in the prevaling Beaux Arts mode: Palace of Agriculture, the Cascades and Colonnades, Palace of Forestry, Fish, and Game, Palace of Horticulture and Palace of Transportation, all of which were widely emulated in civic projects across the United State. Masqueray resigned shortly after the fair opened in 1904, having been invited by Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul to come to Minnesota and design a new cathedral for the city in the Fair's Beaux Arts style. Other celebrated architects of the Fair's buildngs, notably
Cass Gilbert (who designed the
Saint Louis Art Museum, originally the Fair's Palace of the Fine Arts), similarly employed the City Beautiful ideas from the Fair throughout their life's work.
McMillan Plan
The first attempt to use City Beautiful ideal for a city plan with intent of creating social order through beautification was the
McMillan Plan, named for the Michigan Senator
James McMillan, which arose from the
Senate Park Commission's redesign of the monumental core of
Washington, D.C. to commemorate the city's centennial and to fulfill unrealized aspects of the city plan of
Pierre Charles L'Enfant a century earlier.
The Washington planners, who included Burnham, Saint-Gaudens,
Charles McKim of
McKim, Mead, and White, and
Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., visited many of the great cities of
Europe with the intent of putting Washington on par with the European capitals of the era and creating a sense of the legitimacy of government in a time of social upheaval in the United States. The essence of the plan surrounded the
U.S. Capitol with monumental government buildings to replace "notorious
slum communities". At the heart of the design was the creation of the
National Mall and eventually included Burnham's
Union Station. The implementation of the plan was interrupted by
World War I but resumed after the war, culminating in the construction of the
Lincoln Memorial in
1922.
Influence in other cities
The movement's success in Washington is credited with influencing subsequent plans for beautification in many other cities, including
Chicago,
Cleveland,
Columbus,
Montreal,
Denver,
Madison (with the axis from the capitol building through State Street and to the University of Wisconsin campus),
New York City (notably the
Manhattan Municipal Building),
Pittsburgh (the
Schenley Farms district in the
Oakland neighborhood of parks, museums, and universities), and
San Francisco (manifested by its
Civic Center). In
New Haven,
John Russell Pope drew up a plan for
Yale University that swept away substandard housing, but banished the urban poor to the peripheries.
Denver
In
Denver the energy behind extensive City Beautiful planning came from Mayor
Robert Speer, whose plan centered round a Civic Center, disposed along a grand esplanade that led to the
Colorado State Capitol. The plan was partly realized, on a reduced scale, with the Greek amphitheater, Voorhies Memorial and the Colonnade of Civic Benefactors, completed in 1919. The
Andrew Carnegie Foundation funded the Denver Public Library (1910), which was designed as a three-story Greek Revival temple with a colossal
Ionic colonnade across it front; inside it featured open shelves, an art gallery and a children's room. Monuments capping vistas were an essential feature of City Beautiful urban planning: in Denver Paris-trained American sculptor
Frederick MacMonnies was commissioned to design a monument marking the end of the
Smoky Hill Trail. The bronze Indian guide he envisaged was vetoed by the committee and replaced with an equestrian
Kit Carson.
Further Information
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