ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

The city hall is an ancient building type, its origins found at least as far back as the classical Greek bouleutrion, the assembly chamber of the city-state. In medieval Europe the city hall took on a number of auxiliary spaces that complemented the council chamber, such as market halls, office spaces, and social rooms. Some, such as the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena or the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, celebrated the corporate identity of the independent city with soaring towers and instructive works of art. As cities grew in size and administrative complexity, their city halls grew ever larger and assumed a prominence in the urban form of their cities that rivaled only the greatest sacred edifices. By the end of the 19th century, enormous piles, such as Alfred Waterhouse’s Manchester Town Hall (1867–77) and John McArthur’s Philadelphia City Hall (1871–1901), marked the seats of municipal authority with complex historical allusions and equally convoluted silhouettes. At the be...

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 Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 496 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 L...