Architecture the City Beautiful Movement

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PLAN OF CHICAGO MICHIGAN AVENUE, 1909

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Architecture: TheCity BeautifulMovement

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Architecture: The City Beautiful MovementIn Henry Blake Fuller's 1895 novel, With theProcession, the artistic young Truesdale Marshall,just returned home from a prolonged grand tour,looked upon his native Chicago as a hideousmonster, a piteous, floundering monster too. Italmost called for tears. Nowhere a more tirelessactivity, yet nowhere a result so pitifully grotesque,gruesome, appalling. Marshall was not alone:many observers of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americaresidents, visitors, andexpatriates alikebelieved that its cities were ugly.

The shapelessness of American cities was due in large measure to the extraordinaryspeed with which they had developed: between 1860 and 1910, the number ofAmerican cities with more than 100,000 residents rose from 8 to 50. By 1910, severalcities had passed the one million mark. Such statistics are crucial to understanding theCity Beautiful impulse. Despite its preoccupation with aesthetic effect, the movementconcerned far more than facade: the quest for beauty paralleled the search for thefunctional and humane city. Urban planning as the twentieth century would know itdeveloped out of the City Beautifulboth as a phase of it and a reaction to itand itscoalition of planners, of paid experts and unpaid volunteers, of architects, artists, civicofficials, journalists, business people, and interested ordinary citizens.

Daniel Hudson Burnham was indisputably the Father of the City Beautiful. Asdirector of works of the World's Columbian Exposition (1893), he effectively launchedthe movement that 15 years later would reach its apogee in his epochal Plan of Chicago(1909). Burnham's importance as an architect and planner lay chiefly in his ability todirect and stimulate the design efforts of others. His own credo captured the essence ofhis life and work: Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood. ... Makebig plans ... remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die,but long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself with ever growingconsistency. In his various architectural and planning pursuits, Burnhamchoreographed large efforts indeed.

Burnham moved with his parents to Chicago in 1854. He became an architect byapprenticing first with William Le Baron Jenney and then in the office of Peter B.Wight, where he met his future partner, John Wellborn Root. Through the 1870s and1880s, Burnham & Root, and such contemporaries as Adler & Sullivan and Holabird &Roche, helped rebuild the city that had been destroyed in the fire of 1871. In so doing,they developed what would come to be called the Chicago School of skyscraperarchitecture. Following Root's premature death in 1891, Burnham turned to asuccession of designers, but he never found one who complemented his own talents ascompletely as Root. With Root's death, Burnham lost both his design gyroscope and hisaesthetic self-confidence, and he turned increasingly to the authority of historicism.In the 20 years between Root's death and his own, Burnham found his greatestfulfillment as the leader of the City Beautiful movementan effort to achieve forAmerican cities something approaching a cultural parity with Europe's great urbancenters.

The central ideological conflict surrounding the City Beautifulpitted invention and innovation against continuity andtradition. The newness and cultural nationalism espoused byLouis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright lay in their quest for auniquely American culture, one with maturity and

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SEE ALSO HISTORICALSOURCESBuilt Environment of the Chicago RegionLandscape DesignBurnham & RootNorthwestern Terra Cotta Co.

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CARSON PIRIE SCOTTENTRANCE

STATUE OF REPUBLIC, GRAND BASIN, 1893

confidence enough to cease relying so heavily on Old Worldtraditions. Burnham and his allies, by contrast, believed thatthe sometimes frantic quest for American-nesstheobsession with New World originality and horror of all thingsEuropeanwas itself a kind of insecurity, and that maturitywould consist in an acknowledgment that America was not

culturally isolated from the rest of the world. Burnham and his associates saw theUnited States as a rightful heir to the traditions of Western culture and chose thus torecall, celebrate, and use those traditions themselves.

Indeed, Europe and its traditions could provide a standard by which critics ofAmerica's urban ugliness could appeal to the consciousness of a larger constituency.Complementing their muckraking contemporaries in journalism, architects couldembarrass civic leaders into realizing that in civic amenities as in social and politicalequity, America was somehow woefully behind. City Beautiful advocates could invokeFuller's heroine: Keep up with the procession is my motto and lead it if you can.

Procession is an apt metaphor for the City Beautiful. However eclectic it became inits borrowings and whatever the style of particular buildings within its plans, theprovenance and thrust of City Beautiful planning was classical and Baroque in itsemphasis upon processions of buildings and open spaces arranged in groups. For theparallax effect, it depended on the movement of the individual, or the humanprocession, through space from one specific point to another. Great buildings ormonuments were sited so as to become the terminal vistas of long, converging,diagonal axes. The impact on the individual of this arrangement, repetition, andceremonial procession was, in the Baroque and in the City Beautiful, calculatedlypowerful, impressive, and moving.

Burnham launched the City Beautiful movement atthe 1893 World's Fair. While the relatively informallagoon area on the north side of the fairgroundsreflected the picturesque preferences of FrederickLaw Olmstedthe designer of New York City'sCentral Park and a participant in the fair's planningfrom its earliest sessionsthe stately and well-ordered White City formed the seminal image of theCity Beautiful approach. Several of the fair'sarchitects had in fact studied at the Parisian coledes Beaux-Arts and had garnered their penchant for

neoclassicism there. All were imbued with the formal, ordered, and axially orientedimperatives generally associated with Beaux-Arts aestheticsa point of view thatwould dominate most City Beautiful design.

The resulting ensemble of neoclassical temples, especially impressive when lighted atnight, had much of the twinkle and iridescence that Henry James had found in Paris.It was at the World's Fair that Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner lamentedthe end of the American frontier; but it was there as well that urban reformers drew asuggestive vision of new, urban frontiers. The journalist Henry Demarest Lloydthought the White City revealed to its visitors possibilities of social beauty, utility, andharmony of which they had not been able even to dream. Henry Adams and WilliamDean Howells saw it as a suggestive model for the planning of actual cities. Thebuilders of the temporary city had, after all, struggled with the problems posed byactual cities, from the efficacy of streets, sidewalks, waterfronts, and bridges, to therealities of sustenance, transportation, and sewage. But the White City and themovement it embodied continued to have detractors as well. Louis Sullivan saw itsinfluence as a virus that would afflict American architecture for 50 years. Each side ofthe debate might have taken a different moral from the fact that one of the manuallaborers working to create the fantasy was a man by the name of Elias Disneyfatherof Walt.

For more than a decade following the fair, Chicago lagged behind other cities in therealm of urban planning. Yet during those years Burnham conceived and directed CityBeautiful plans for Washington DC (1902), Cleveland (1903), Manila (1904), and SanFrancisco (1905) from inside his Chicago office. His work also inspired the efforts of

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WACKER DRIVE, C.1930

other City Beautiful planners, most notably Charles Mulford Robinson and FrederickLaw Olmsted, Jr.

The apogee of the City Beautiful came 16years after the fair in Burnham and EdwardBennett's Plan of Chicago, which unified thegoals of City Beautiful and City Practical withunprecedented success. Never before had onecity plan taken into account so much of thesurrounding region. The plan encompassedthe development of Chicago within a 60-mileradius via a system of radial and concentricboulevards that connected the center to itsoutlying suburbs and linked the suburbs onewith another. One of the plan's most prescientrecommendations was for what wouldbecome, in Wacker Drive, the modern world'sfirst double-level boulevard for regular andcommercial traffic. The Chicago River wouldbe straightened and enhanced for moreefficient water transportation and river-borne

commerce. The stations and tracks of competing rail lines would be consolidated intoseveral train stations. A lakefront park system would run 20 miles along LakeMichigan. The elegant, formal downtown would culminate in a refurbished Grant Parkthat would be eastwardly inflected toward a new inner harbor with breakwatercauseways stretching far into the lake. At the southern edges of this central park wouldrise such grandly neoclassical buildings as the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museumof Natural History, counterpoints to the Art Institute of Chicago on the park's northernedge. The number and quality of the city's outlying parks would be increased,enhanced, and unified into an integral network.

Parks were central to the City Beautiful impulse and to Burnham's sense of civicharmony. Fifty years ago, he explained, before population had become dense incertain parts of the city, people could live without parks, but we of today cannot. Goodcitizenship, he argued, was the prime object of good city planning. Civic renewalmore generally, Burnham believed, could provide healthy activities to those citizenswho could not afford extensive traveling and who thus depended on the city forrecreational and cultural enrichment. He worried about the problems that congestionin city streets begets; at the toll of lives taken by disease when sanitary precautions areneglected. If such needs could be met, Burnham had confidence that Chicago wouldbe taking a long step toward cementing together the heterogeneous elements of ourpopulation, and toward assimilating the million and a half of people who are here nowbut who were not here fifteen years ago.

Privately financed in its early stages by the Commercial Club, the Burnham Plan waspresented as a gift to the city, which appointed a commission to oversee itsdevelopment. The Chicago school board agreed to use an elementary version ofBurnham's report as an eighth-grade civics textbook. Ministers and rabbis throughoutthe city delivered sermons on the plan's importance. Brochures, a slide lecture series, atwo-reel motion picture, and other advanced promotional devices made their way intopeople's homes. It was a masterfully orchestrated propaganda campaign. The mostimportant years in the plan's realization were the two decades between its publicationin 1909 and the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. In the teens and twenties,costs exceeded $300 million. For the rest of the century, the Burnham Plan wouldserve as a base point for the city's changing needs and as proof, perhaps, of Burnham'sbelief that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die.

Thomas S. Hines

BibliographyBurnham, Daniel H., and Edward H. Bennett. Plan of Chicago, ed. Charles Moore. 1909.Fuller, Henry Blake. With the Procession. 1895; 1965.Hines, Thomas S. Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner. 1974.

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