THE CITY BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT

ESPIÑA, RITA MAY

PALAO, KRISTINE MAE

DORIA, JAYSON

DOYOHOY, ALDRIN

CONSING, EMMANUEL

 

The City Beautiful Movement

American urban-planning movement led by architects, landscape architects, and reformers that flourished between the 1890s and the 1920s with the intent of introducing beautification and monumental grandeur in cities.

Its influence was most prominent in cities such as Cleveland, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

the City Beautiful Movement linked morality and social progress with life in beautiful, spacious, park filled, and clean towns or cities.

In its style it focused on grandeur in building design and arrangement, casual-seeming but highly artificial landscapes, the re-design of cities for beauty’s sake, and the treatment of cities as if they were giant works of art.

History The movement began in the United States in response to

crowding in tenement districts, a consequence of high birth rates, increased immigration and consolidation of rural populations into cities.

The particular architectural style of the movement borrowed mainly from the contemporary Beaux Arts and neoclassical architectures, which emphasized the necessity of order, dignity, and harmony.

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris emphasized the principles of compositional unity and symmetry, the relationship of the elements of a building within itself and to other buildings, and the continuity of history, manifesting most frequently in Greco-Roman Revivalism.

World's Columbian Exposition was a World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893 to

celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492

The Exposition was an influential social and cultural event and had a profound effect on architecture, sanitation, the arts, Chicago's self-image, and American industrial optimism.

The layout of the fairgrounds was created by Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Beaux-Arts architecture of the buildings was under the direction of Daniel Burnham, Director of Works for the fair.

World's Columbian Exposition Exhibited an idealized urban setting of white classical

architecture in a formal symmetrical arrangement with canals and lagoons

The exposition displayed a model city of grand scale, known as the "White City", with modern transport systems and no poverty visible.

The Exposition introduced the concept that city beautification was a thing and that city design could be an organized, orderly, planned process. It also furnished a demonstration of the process at work. 

Many people who attended the fair returned to their hometowns with a new vision of urban beautification.

White City Is the area at the Court of Honor The buildings were clad in

white stucco. It was also called the White City

because of the extensive use of street lights, which made the boulevards and buildings usable at night.

The "White City" as it came to be known served as the model for numerous prospective and actualized civic plans that followed clear across North America and into Australia.

White City  It included such buildings as:

Administration Building

Agricultural Building

Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building

Mines and Mining Building

Woman's Building Transportation Building

Electricity Building Machinery Building

White City

White City:Role in the City Beautiful Movement The White City is largely credited for ushering in the City

Beautiful movement and planting the seeds of modern city planning.

The highly integrated design of the landscapes, promenades, and structures provided a vision of what is possible when planners, landscape architects, and architects work together on a comprehensive design scheme.

The White City inspired cities to focus on the beautification of the components of the city in which municipal government had control; streets, municipal art, public buildings and public spaces.

Role in the City Beautiful Movement The designs of the City Beautiful Movement are

identifiable by their classical architecture, plan symmetry, picturesque views, axial plans, as well as their magnificent scale.

The White City of the World's Columbian Exposition inspired the Merchant's Club of Chicago to commission Daniel Burnham to create the Plan of Chicago in 1909, which became the first modern comprehensive city plan in America.

Louisiana Purchase Exposition was an international exposition held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904.  This exposition was the largest yet held, featuring some 1,500

buildings organized in an orderly fashion by George Kessler. Duty as the Chief of Design fell to Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, who

chose the Beaux-Arts style for the exposition's major buildings. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition transformed the western half of

the park into a fairyland of white palaces surrounded by lagoons and artistic landscaping.

The fair possessed broad, curved boulevards, spacious plazas with lagoons, sunken gardens and beautiful, shady open spaces.

The main palaces of the fair featured the Neo-Classical elements and observed rules of composition taught at the Paris Ecole des Beaux Arts, emphasizing symmetry, large-scale planning, and elaborate ornamentation.

The Palace of Agriculture

Government Building Missouri State Building

Palace of Electricity Palace of Liberal Arts Palace of Transportation

Palace of Mines and Metallurgy

Palace of Arts Palace of Varied Industries

Palace of Varied Industries Illinois State BuildingMachinery Building

Education & Social Economy Building

East India Building Cascade GardensPalace of Horticulture

Grand Lagoon Grand Festival Hall

Goals And Objectives

To introduce beautification and monumental grandeur in cities.

To sweep away social ills To have a cultural resemblance with their

European competitors through the use of Beaux-Arts Idioms.

To prevent upper classes back to live, but to work and spend money in the urban zone.

PIONEER THINKERSDaniel Burnham(1846-1912)

was an American architect and urban designer

He was the Director of Works for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Burnham took a leading role in the creation of master plans for the development of a number of cities, including Chicago, Manila and downtown Washington, D.C.

Works Plan of Chicago

The 1909 Plan of Chicago was the city’s first comprehensive plan. 

The Burnham Plan is a popular name for the 1909 Plan of Chicago, co-authored by Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett.

It recommended an integrated series of projects including new and widened streets, parks, new railroad and harbor facilities, and civic buildings.

Though only portions of the plan were realized, the document reshaped Chicago's central area and was an important influence on the new field of city planning.

Plan of the complete system of street circulation; railway stations; parks, boulevards circuits and radial arteries; public recreation piers, yacht harbor, and pleasure-boat priers; treatment of Grant Park; the main axis and the Civic Center.

 6 Major Elements Of The Plan Improvement of the lakefront A regional highway system Improvement of railway terminals New outer parks Systematic arrangement of streets Civic and cultural centers

Works Plan of San Francisco

Daniel Burnham’s San Francisco Plan emerged directly from The Association of the Improvement and the Adornment of San Francisco, formed January 15, 1904.

Burnham’s plan, completed in September 1905, proposed to change the city completely. His 184-page report, with 30 large photographs and 23 maps and plans, included broad new boulevards and circular traffic ways, parks, and municipal facilities.

Works

The McMillan Plan marked one of the City Beautiful Movement's

greatest successes. Chaired by Senator James McMillan

chaired by Senator McMillan and including Burnham alongside architect Charles F. McKim, landscaper Frederick Law Olmstead Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, all of whom distinguished themselves with the World's Columbian Exposition. 

Plan of Manila Daniel H. Burnham’s assignment i n the

Philippines was principally the result of his increasing renown as an architect and his long friendship with W. Cameron Forbes.

Burnham’s task was, first of all , to create a pl an for the physical redevelopment of Manila.

In Burnham's plan, there were sites allotted for national and municipal buildings near Intramuros, hospitals, and colleges. Spaces were also set for a world‐class hotel, city and country clubs, a casino, boat clubs, public baths, and the new residence for the Governor General.

The plan states that it aims to provide:

Development of water front and location of parks and parkways so as to give proper means of recreation to every quarter of the city.

The street system securing direct and easy communication from every part of the city to every other part.

Location of building sites for various activities. Development of waterways for transportation. Summer resorts

The plan of Manila included:

A civic center: a grouping of cultural and governmental institutions located near the bay and south of the old walled inner city

Major public buildings NOT in the neoclassical style, but formally arranged

Special considerations due to the tropical climate Efforts to accommodate the “manana ambience of

the Spanish Philippine tradi tion” Space along the river and seashore for private

clubs, a luxury hotel , and public use

Improved public facilities, low rent housing Abundant foliage, fountains of water, and a

continuous parkway along the waterfront Preservation of the system of canals, or esteros Streets conforming to the natural contours of the

land A street system with diagonal streets radiating out

from the civic center to outlying parts of the city

Plan of Baguio Burnham was commissioned by the American

Governor Luke E. Wright to develop a pl an for a “health resort where American soldiers and civilian employees could find respite from the sweltering lowland heat.”

This plan “greatly altered the original mountain settlement and provided the first physical framework plan for the City.

The physical framework as embodied i n the Burnham Plan integrates a road and park system into one. It envisioned evolving in a compact garden city for 25,000 to 30,000 people.

Three fundamental elements of their plan: Street Systems

While the closely built sections of the city should have a regular geometric street system, the rest should have ungeometrical streets that mimic the contours of the valley.

Placement of Important Institutions The plan notes that the hills surrounding the Baguio

plain are perfect for schools, churches, hospital s, and the like, but does not attempt to determine the precise location of any particular group, except for the official residences of the Governor General of the islands, and the Major General Commanding the Department.

Recreational Areas Recreational fields would be located on the west side of

town where enclosing hill s form a natural hollow.

Charles Mulford Robinson (1869–1917) was a journalist and a writer who became

famous as a pioneering Urban Planning theorist.

He was the first Professor for Civic Design at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, which was only one of two universities offering courses in Urban Planning at the time, the other being Harvard.

The guiding principle of the City Beautiful Movement was a belief in aesthetics as a moral philosophy. Beautiful environments, they maintained, would inspire civic pride and moral uprightness as citizens strove to live up to the standards of the architecture and city planning surrounding them.

Works He wrote extensively for newspapers and

periodicals and was a frequent contributor on the subjects of “civic improvement” and “city planning” in such journals as The Architectural Record, Harper’s Monthly, The National Municipal Review and The Survey.

He was the author of eight books, with the most planning-oriented being: The Improvement of Towns and Cities (1901), Modern Civic Art (1903) and City Planning (1916).

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.(1822 -1903) was an American landscape architect,

journalist, social critic, and public administrator.

He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture.

Olmsted was famous for co designing many well known urban parks with his senior partner Calvert Vaux, including Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City, as well as Elm Park (Worcester, Massachusetts), considered by many to be the first municipal park in America.

Works Olmsted had a significant career in

journalism. In 1850 he travelled to England to visit public gardens, where he was greatly impressed by Joseph Paxton's Birkenhead Park.

He subsequently wrote and published Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England in 1852.

His better-known projects included plans for metropolitan park systems and greenways across the country.

Thomas Hayton Mawson (1861-1933) was an English landscape architect and town

planner. A strong and eloquent proponent of the City Beautiful Movement, he made four North American tours and promoted town planning schemes for a number of Canadian cities.

In 1910, he came to North America on a lecture tour of several universities, including Harvard, Cornell, and Yale.

Works Mawson Plan

Mawson’s plan offered extensive suggestions on improving Calgary which it delivered with a strong dose of flattery. 

Mawson also wanted the new parks to use local foliage that would survive Calgary’s weather, instead of fragile exotic plants.

Mawson’s report called for the expansion of Calgary’s public transit system while there was still reasonably affordable land to build on and purchase for future use.

Although Mawson’s plan was never implemented in Calgary, parts of the city do show his influence. 

Elements of the City Beautiful MovementStreets Axis and cross-axis

Such streets offered an unobstructed view or were terminated by a vista, usually a public building or a special feature of the city (e.g. A park). The intersection normally the site of civic centre.

Diagonal streets These were the main element of any Burnham

plan and would radiate outwards from the civic center.

Circumferential streets This concept first appeared in the San Francisco

Plan with the recommendation that all major streets terminate in an encircling shoreline drive

Boulevards Boulevards made up of second road system.

Linking together the various parks, boulevards were green pleasure drives and were to be considered part of the park system.

Civic Centre Burnhams earliest civic centre plans

(Washington and Cleveland) borrowed heavily from the Court of Honor at the fair while his later plans adapted elements of the civic centre to the needs of traffic.

ClevelandChicagoCourt of Honor

Common Civic Centre Elements Axis and cross-axis

In Washington the main axis extends from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the cross axis from the White House to the Potomac. Their intersection was to be marked by fountains and sculpture as well as the already existing Washington Monument.

A “mall” or open space The malls were to be created along the main axis.

Cleveland’s mall was to be park-like and was offered as a contrast to the city artificiality.

Buildings In all cases the public buildings were to be

monumental in scale and classical in design. They were to be of similar height, mass and treatment. In fact, two of Cleveland’s buildings were to be nearly identical.

Gateway It was felt that every city should have an

impressive gateway, and Burnham usually included a railroad station as part of or adjacent to the civic centre.

Parks Burnham considered parks as

second only to streets in importance. Park systems were recommended in all Burnham’s plans, including the one for Cleveland despite the fact that its scope was to be confined to a civic centre.

Other Elements of Burnham’s Park System Forest reserves

In the Chicago Plan, Burnham incorporated the proposals of Special Park Commission’s 1904 report in recommending the continued acquisition of “forest reserves”.

He saw such reserves as conserving both public health and natural resources, providing relief from the city, increasing lad values and attracting tourists.

Any landscaping was to be “natural” and only a few country roads would be allowed to intrude.

Large urban parks These were the parks that were commonly called

the city’s lungs. It was felt they opened up space to light and air and provided healthy recreation opportunities for urban residents.

The large urban parks might also be located according to city’s special features.

In San Francisco, those hills that were unsuitable for buildings were to be transformed into parks containing abundant greenery amidst a formal framework of terraces, colonnades and statues.

Small parks and playgrounds These were to be distributed according to

population density. Intended to be much more that just “breathing spaces”, they were to contain a variety of recreation facilities including playing fields, playground equipment, swimming pools, baths, gymnasiums, clubhouses, auditoriums and libraries.

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