City Beautiful movement
May 27, 2009 by blogtopia
Filed under Architectural style
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., did not 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 promote a harmonious social order that would increase the quality of life and help to remove social ills.
The movement arose in large cities in the United States in response to the crowding in tenement districts, a consequence of high birth rates, 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.
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.
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.
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 Wilmington, Delaware, it inspired the creation of Rodney Square and the surrounding civic buildings. 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.