CITY BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT

Begun in the United States in the late 19th century, the City Beautiful movement enjoyed
a relatively brief reign, fading into obscurity during the New Deal and the rise of
modernism. City Beautiful architects and planners sought to bring elements of city
planning, architecture, and landscape architecture into a harmonious unity. It aspired to
many of the principles of baroque or neoclassical city design, which had transformed the
medieval cores of European cities such as Rome from the reign of Pope Sixtus V in the
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late 16th century to Paris under the prefecture of Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann in
the mid19th century. Equally embedded in City Beautiful was a celebration of
neoclassical architecture, transplanted to American soil by architects loyal to the aesthetic
principles promoted by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Although its intellectual seeds were sown by a handful of 19th-century figures, such as
landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and city planner Charles Mulford Robinson,
the possibilities of the City Beautiful ideal were most dramatically portrayed at the
World’s Columbian Exposition, opening in Chicago in 1893. With Daniel H.Burnham in
charge of the overall design and construction process, highly regarded architects such as
Van Brunt and Howe; McKim, Mead and White; Peabody and Stearns; Adler and
Sullivan; Burling and Whitehouse; Jenny and Mundie; and Henry Ives Cobb contributed
designs for individual buildings and features. Rendered in a special type of plaster, their
work resulted in magnificent exhibition halls designed in classical Greco-Roman and
Renaissance architectural styles. Olmsted’s landscaping talents infused the site plan of
the fair and included a lagoon, canals, ceremonial plazas, promenades, gardens,
fountains, and statuary. By the fair’s end well over 20 million people had visited and
returned to their home cities and countries around the world with an idealized vision of
the future city. This idealized view characterized the City Beautiful movement wherever
it was pursued, in small town and large city alike.
At its heart City Beautiful was less an aesthetic ideal and more fundamentally a
concept that at that time was largely alien in North America, namely, that cities should
result not from random and cumulative decisions by individual architects and builders but
from a holistically conceived and visually coherent plan that prescribes siting, scale, and
other design principles in a rational and balanced ensemble. A bold idea, to be sure, City
Beautiful arose in the context of the reformist fervor that sought to transform politics,
government, and social policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries within an orderly
and humanly scaled urban setting combining nature and planning.
Eight years after the exposition’s close, the nation’s capital became the first U.S. city
to seriously pursue City Beautiful principles. As consultants to the McMillan
Commission, Burnham, Olmsted, Charles F.McKim, and Augustus St. Gaudens sought to
restore the essence of Washington’s original 1792 plan as prepared by Pierre Charles
L’Enfant and refined by Andrew Ellicott. The plan resulted in the removal of railroad
tracks, a polluted creek, and several buildings from the Mall. The Mall was relandscaped
in the tradition of French formalism. Building heights and massing were carefully
limited, and structures were sited so as to enclose the Mall in a balanced and harmonious
composition. Although many details have been altered, the 20th-century redevelopment
of the Mall and environs in central Washington has more or less embraced the spirit of
the McMillan Commission plan.
Several other communities followed suit. For example, Virgil G.Bogue’s plan for
Seattle (1911) and Edward H.Bennett’s plans for Minneapolis (1917) and Denver (1917)
also promoted City Beautiful ideals. However, for sheer aspirations and comprehensive
vision of present and future conditions, the 1909 plan of Chicago knew no equal in terms
of boldness and departure from the city’s 19th-century status quo. Written by Burnham
and Bennett, the plan prescribed a great civic center plaza in the downtown, framed by
federal and state buildings and a new city hall; a lakefront park, its symmetrical jetties
embracing a view corridor westward to the civic center; broad boulevards and diagonal
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avenues intersecting at magnificent circles and squares containing obelisks, columns,
fountains, and decorative focal features; and carefully proportioned buildings built to
uniform cornice heights. Today, in the city of skyscrapers and gridded streets, Grant
Park, Wacker Drive, Michigan Avenue, and the city’s associated cultural institutions and
sprawling park system echo the grandiose utterances found in the plan.
Beyond Chicago, fragments of City Beautiful plans appeared in other
cities. Burnham’s modified plan for San Francisco resulted in construction
of a civic center embraced by the domed neoclassical City Hall (1915),
library (1916), courthouse (1926), and other civic and government
edifices. Burnham, John M. Carrère, and Arnold W.Brunner prepared
Cleveland’s Group Plan (1903), which ultimately led to construction of
that city’s civic center, the Mall. Arrayed on its perimeter are a federal building (1910), courthouse (1911), city hall (1916), auditorium (1922), library (1925),
Board of Education building (1930), and county building (1957). Civic center plazas or
malls were added to Indianapolis, Denver, and St. Louis, all in the early 20th century.
Other cities appropriated other City Beautiful conventions. Philadelphia’s Benjamin
Franklin Parkway (1919) is a grand avenue cutting diagonally through the city’s grid
system to visually link City Hall to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Between them lie a
grand circle and an oval providing open space for landscaping, statuary, and other
decorative features. City Beautiful plans found reality in many state capitals, including
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Austin, Texas; and Augusta, Maine. In these cities and others,
carefully organized vistas, elevated public buildings, ceremonial boulevards, formalistic
landscaping, and near uniform building heights bespeak the legacy of Burnham, Bennett,
Olmsted, and others.
An irony of the City Beautiful movement was the fact that it emerged in opposition to
the real American industrial city of the Gilded Age. Embedded in the times was a
struggle among architects, landscape architects, engineers, artists, and civic leaders over
the direction and meaning of the fledgling city-planning profession. Many sought to
emphasize the functional elements of city planning, including efficiency, economy,
safety, and reform of social conditions. Others insisted that the aesthetic and cultural
attributes of European baroque ideals and neoclassical architecture would inspire civic
pride, respect for democratic values, and cultural growth among citizens and visitors to
American cities. With more than a century behind it, the City Beautiful legacy remains in
American history a celebration of order, balance, symmetry, axiality, monumentality, and
restraint.