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.

CITTÀ NUOVA (1914)

On 20 May 1914 Antonio Sant’Elia from Italy and Mario Chiattone from Switzerland,
two young architects in the Italian avant-garde movement Il Nuovo Tendenze, exhibited
drawings that illustrated fragments of a new urban metropolis. Chiattone’s contribution,
entitled “Structures of a Modern Metropolis,” included several fine renditions of high-rise
apartment buildings that presaged later developments in the 1920s and 1930s, but they
were overshadowed by Sant’Elia’s collection of drawings, entitled La città nuova (The New City), his
vision of Milan in the year 2000. These drawings were accompanied in the exhibition
catalog by a written text, a messaggio (or manifesto) on the problems of modern architecture,
bearing Sant’Elia’s name only. This polemical essay reappeared in a reworked form
several weeks later, on 11 July 1914, as L’a rchitettu ra futu ris ta (Futurist Architecture), still authored by
Sant’Elia, but bearing the unmistakable stamp of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the
mouthpiece of Italian futurism.
Dispute still lingers over the precise relationship of Sant’Elia to Marinetti and to the
futurist movement in general. Most critics agree that Sant’Elia was primarily a socialist
who joined Marinetti’s movement without much enthusiasm on account of its
increasingly outspoken nationalist character, at odds with the more internationalist views
of socialist thought at that time. But there is little doubt that Sant’Elia’s vision of the new
city, an urban environment infatuated with the awesome potential of mechanistic form, is
futurist in concept, even if not specifically created under that banner.
Antonio Sant’Elia was born in Como, in northern Italy, in 1880. He studied
architecture in Milan and later in Bologna, where he graduated at the age of 24. His
studies were interrupted by a period of apprenticeship with the Villoressi Canal Company
and some time spent in the works department of the commune of Milan. On his return to
Milan from Bologna in 1912, Sant’ Elia was in touch with the polemical futurist group
under Marinetti’s provocative leadership and clearly had sympathy with several of their
aesthetic aims having to do with the dynamism and mechanized setting of futurist life in a
truly modern metropolis.
The eleventh proposition of the original Futurist Manifesto, published by
Marinetti in 1909, praises “the midnight fervor of arsenals and shipyards
blazing with electric moons; insatiable stations swallowing the smoking
serpents of their trains; factories hung from clouds by the twisted threads
of their smoke; [and] bridges flashing like knives in the sun, giant gymnasts that leap over rivers.”
This passage could serve as a preface for Sant’Elia’s vision, and in a series (possibly
hundreds) of provocative sketches made in 1912, 1913, and 1914, Sant’Elia sought to
translate the spirit and content of mechanical innovations into architectural and urban
form. Tall sculpted shapes define a city of rapid travel and technical purity, forms that
owed much to the artifacts of the new industrial society such as power stations—an icon
of Marinetti’s futurist vocabulary—and engineering structures such as great dams. One of
the most famous drawings, Stazione aeroplani (1914)—a study for the more finished version in La città nuova
exhibition—illustrates a railway station shaped like a huge dam. Trains vanish beneath
the great, sloping mass, raked by escalators and flanked by symmetrical towers, whereas
to the rear an aircraft landing strip vanishes into the distance between clifflike slabs of
buildings—a particularly dangerous transport interchange that reappeared in Le
Corbusier’s drawings a decade and more later.
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Several lines in Sant’Elia’s manifesto that accompanied his drawings at
the 1914 exhibition echo the sentiments and wording of the Futurist
Manifesto closely, but the text, put together by a colleague, Ugo Nebbia,
from Sant’Elia’s own words, indicates that the architect was quite capable
of formulating futurist polemics and visions without any direct help (or interference) from Marinetti. Sant’Elia’s
words marry with his images to create a future world in which architects “must invent
and rebuild ex novo our Modern city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard. …Elevators
must no longer hide away like solitary worms in the stairwells…but must swarm up the
facades like serpents of glass and iron.”
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In none of the drawings and sketches are conventional streets or buildings indicated.
There is no indication of traditional urban structure. Instead, Sant’Elia depicts the city as
a megastructure of connected building masses and multilevel movement systems,
presaging the fascination with urban megastructures during the 1960s and 1970s. In this
aspect his vision of the future city differs sharply from that of Tony Garnier, whose Cité industriel le of
1901–04, although relying on hydroelectric power and containing large industrial
buildings and a modern train station, still contains residential areas comprising streets of
neat homes surrounded by greenery. In Sant’Elia’s vision, such residential quarters are
superseded by stacked apartment houses, their stepped profiles lined with terraces and
accessed by elevator towers and flying bridges.
It is not clear whether Città nuova was to replace the existing city fabric of Milan completely.
However, in accordance with futurist principles that placed emphasis on the continual
rein-vention and rebuilding of the city, it is evident that by drawing a completely new
urban world, Sant’Elia did want to inspire people to supplant existing cities. This cleared
site approach was emphasized again in Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan vois in for central Paris and was to
come true with many devastating consequences in American and European cities during
the urban renewal period of the 1950s and 1960s.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is easy to blame Sant’Elia’s visions for some of the
negative physical and social outcomes of this radical demolition approach that are evident
to architects and planners at the end of the 20th century. But these visions were born of
their time, and the world of fin-de-siècle Europe was vastly different; there was a
growing sense, especially in Italy (only recently unified in 1861), that the old age was
passing and a new one beginning, politically and in terms of technology.
For most of the 19th century, new technologies had little impact on the appearance of
Italian cities, but the last quarter of the century saw massive changes, especially in the
northern cities of Milan and Turin. These cities became major industrial centers in which
new building types—train stations, large factories, and power stations—jostled side by
side with older buildings. Electric lighting came to city buildings and streets, and these
same thoroughfares became clogged with traffic and the new electric trams. This
transformation of Milan—the home base of Marinetti and the futurists—from an Old
World princely capital to an industrial metropolis galvanized futurist thought. Clearly the
new world would not fit into the antiquated Renaissance palaces of Italian history; the
young nation of Italy, with new technological power and potential, needed a
correspondingly modern urban environment in which to flourish. But before this
contemporary city could arise, Sant’Elia theorized, Italy had to be shaken from its
architectural slumber and cast off the burden of its classical past and deadening
architectural conventions.
This new urban world, created with an architecture of engineering directness and bold
sculptural form, is illustrated precisely in Sant’Elia’s drawings for La citta nuova. His forms, surfaces,
and spaces destroyed the traditions and styles of classicism and historical eclecticism.
Sant’Elia reworked several of his earlier sketches, transforming them from fluid
Expressionist compositions to finely wrought illustrations, drafted with exquisite care and
precision. Using black ink and black (occasionally blue-black) pencil on paper and
tracing paper, Sant’Elia transmuted the flowing romantic images of his preparatory
drawings into hard-edged perspectives that transcended other visualizations of the future
metropolis. When compared with contemporary illustrations of future New York by
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R.Rummel (1911) and H.Wiley Corbett (1913), which comprise large, lumpen buildings
and bridges clothed in standard historicist details, Sant’ Elia presented an architecture of
stark and flashing profile, developed with convincing engineering details that pushed new
materials and technologies to their limits.
For the Nuovo Tendenze exhibition Sant’Elia selected 16 drawings comprising the
Airplane and Train Station; the Casa Nuova apartment building and four other high-rise
apartment buildings (referred to as “terraced houses”) incorporating external elevators
and sited adjacent to multilevel roadways; three power stations; a bridge; and six other
detail or preparatory sketches. Taken together, these thoroughly worked out illustrations
provided the most heroic and poetic conception of all the Utopian visions of the 20thcentury
city. Compared to the polite, well-mannered comprehensiveness of Garnier’s Cité industrielle,
the rationalist bombast of Le Corbusier’s Plan vois in (1925), or the idiosyncratic prairie aesthetic of
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1934–35), Sant’Elia’s imagination depicts, in a
marvelous pictorial synthesis, a city infatuated with the majestic and liberating potential
of the machine. Sant’Elia’s tragic, if heroic, death at the battle of Monfalcone, on 10
October 1916, denied the world a more developed examination of this urban potential.
The futurist architecture of La città nuova died with its precocious young author.