Architecture: The City Beautiful Movement

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Architecture: The City Beautiful Movement

In Henry Blake Fuller's 1895 novel, With the
Procession, the artistic young Truesdale Marshall,
just returned home from a prolonged grand tour,
looked upon his native Chicago as a hideous
monster, a piteous, floundering monster too. It
almost called for tears. Nowhere a more tireless
activity, yet nowhere a result so pitifully grotesque,
gruesome, appalling. Marshall was not alone:
many observers of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Americaresidents, visitors, and
PLAN OF CHICAGO MICHIGAN AVENUE, 1909 expatriates alikebelieved that its cities were ugly.
The shapelessness of American cities was due in large measure to the extraordinary
speed with which they had developed: between 1860 and 1910, the number of
American cities with more than 100,000 residents rose from 8 to 50. By 1910, several
cities had passed the one million mark. Such statistics are crucial to understanding the
City Beautiful impulse. Despite its preoccupation with aesthetic effect, the movement
concerned far more than facade: the quest for beauty paralleled the search for the
functional and humane city. Urban planning as the twentieth century would know it
developed out of the City Beautifulboth as a phase of it and a reaction to itand its
coalition of planners, of paid experts and unpaid volunteers, of architects, artists, civic
officials, journalists, business people, and interested ordinary citizens.
Daniel Hudson Burnham was indisputably the Father of the City Beautiful. As
director of works of the World's Columbian Exposition (1893), he effectively launched
the 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 to
direct and stimulate the design efforts of others. His own credo captured the essence of
his life and work: Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood. ... Make
big 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 growing
consistency. In his various architectural and planning pursuits, Burnham
choreographed large efforts indeed.
Burnham moved with his parents to Chicago in 1854. He became an architect by
apprenticing 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 and
1880s, 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 skyscraper
architecture. Following Root's premature death in 1891, Burnham turned to a
succession of designers, but he never found one who complemented his own talents as
completely as Root. With Root's death, Burnham lost both his design gyroscope and his
aesthetic 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 greatest
fulfillment as the leader of the City Beautiful movementan effort to achieve for
American cities something approaching a cultural parity with Europe's great urban
centers.
The central ideological conflict surrounding the City Beautiful
pitted invention and innovation against continuity and
tradition. The newness and cultural nationalism espoused by
Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright lay in their quest for a
uniquely American culture, one with maturity and

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confidence enough to cease relying so heavily on Old World

traditions. Burnham and his allies, by contrast, believed that
the sometimes frantic quest for American-nessthe
obsession with New World originality and horror of all things
Europeanwas itself a kind of insecurity, and that maturity
CARSON PIRIE SCOTT
ENTRANCE
would consist in an acknowledgment that America was not
culturally isolated from the rest of the world. Burnham and his associates saw the
United States as a rightful heir to the traditions of Western culture and chose thus to
recall, celebrate, and use those traditions themselves.
Indeed, Europe and its traditions could provide a standard by which critics of
America's urban ugliness could appeal to the consciousness of a larger constituency.
Complementing their muckraking contemporaries in journalism, architects could
embarrass civic leaders into realizing that in civic amenities as in social and political
equity, America was somehow woefully behind. City Beautiful advocates could invoke
Fuller'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 in
its borrowings and whatever the style of particular buildings within its plans, the
provenance and thrust of City Beautiful planning was classical and Baroque in its
emphasis upon processions of buildings and open spaces arranged in groups. For the
parallax effect, it depended on the movement of the individual, or the human
procession, through space from one specific point to another. Great buildings or
monuments were sited so as to become the terminal vistas of long, converging,
diagonal axes. The impact on the individual of this arrangement, repetition, and
ceremonial procession was, in the Baroque and in the City Beautiful, calculatedly
powerful, impressive, and moving.
Burnham launched the City Beautiful movement at
the 1893 World's Fair. While the relatively informal
lagoon area on the north side of the fairgrounds
reflected the picturesque preferences of Frederick
Law Olmstedthe designer of New York City's
Central Park and a participant in the fair's planning
from its earliest sessionsthe stately and wellordered White City formed the seminal image of the
City Beautiful approach. Several of the fair's
architects had in fact studied at the Parisian cole
STATUE OF REPUBLIC, GRAND BASIN, 1893 des Beaux-Arts and had garnered their penchant for
neoclassicism there. All were imbued with the formal, ordered, and axially oriented
imperatives generally associated with Beaux-Arts aestheticsa point of view that
would dominate most City Beautiful design.
The resulting ensemble of neoclassical temples, especially impressive when lighted at
night, 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 lamented
the end of the American frontier; but it was there as well that urban reformers drew a
suggestive vision of new, urban frontiers. The journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd
thought the White City revealed to its visitors possibilities of social beauty, utility, and
harmony of which they had not been able even to dream. Henry Adams and William
Dean Howells saw it as a suggestive model for the planning of actual cities. The
builders of the temporary city had, after all, struggled with the problems posed by
actual cities, from the efficacy of streets, sidewalks, waterfronts, and bridges, to the
realities of sustenance, transportation, and sewage. But the White City and the
movement it embodied continued to have detractors as well. Louis Sullivan saw its
influence as a virus that would afflict American architecture for 50 years. Each side of
the debate might have taken a different moral from the fact that one of the manual
laborers working to create the fantasy was a man by the name of Elias Disneyfather
of Walt.
For more than a decade following the fair, Chicago lagged behind other cities in the
realm of urban planning. Yet during those years Burnham conceived and directed City
Beautiful plans for Washington DC (1902), Cleveland (1903), Manila (1904), and San
Francisco (1905) from inside his Chicago office. His work also inspired the efforts of
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other City Beautiful planners, most notably Charles Mulford Robinson and Frederick
Law Olmsted, Jr.
The apogee of the City Beautiful came 16
years after the fair in Burnham and Edward
Bennett's Plan of Chicago, which unified the
goals of City Beautiful and City Practical with
unprecedented success. Never before had one
city plan taken into account so much of the
surrounding region. The plan encompassed
the development of Chicago within a 60-mile
radius via a system of radial and concentric
boulevards that connected the center to its
outlying suburbs and linked the suburbs one
with another. One of the plan's most prescient
recommendations was for what would
become, in Wacker Drive, the modern world's
first double-level boulevard for regular and
commercial traffic. The Chicago River would
be straightened and enhanced for more
WACKER DRIVE, C.1930
efficient water transportation and river-borne
commerce. The stations and tracks of competing rail lines would be consolidated into
several train stations. A lakefront park system would run 20 miles along Lake
Michigan. The elegant, formal downtown would culminate in a refurbished Grant Park
that would be eastwardly inflected toward a new inner harbor with breakwater
causeways stretching far into the lake. At the southern edges of this central park would
rise such grandly neoclassical buildings as the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum
of Natural History, counterpoints to the Art Institute of Chicago on the park's northern
edge. 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 civic
harmony. Fifty years ago, he explained, before population had become dense in
certain parts of the city, people could live without parks, but we of today cannot. Good
citizenship, he argued, was the prime object of good city planning. Civic renewal
more generally, Burnham believed, could provide healthy activities to those citizens
who could not afford extensive traveling and who thus depended on the city for
recreational and cultural enrichment. He worried about the problems that congestion
in city streets begets; at the toll of lives taken by disease when sanitary precautions are
neglected. If such needs could be met, Burnham had confidence that Chicago would
be taking a long step toward cementing together the heterogeneous elements of our
population, and toward assimilating the million and a half of people who are here now
but who were not here fifteen years ago.
Privately financed in its early stages by the Commercial Club, the Burnham Plan was
presented as a gift to the city, which appointed a commission to oversee its
development. The Chicago school board agreed to use an elementary version of
Burnham's report as an eighth-grade civics textbook. Ministers and rabbis throughout
the city delivered sermons on the plan's importance. Brochures, a slide lecture series, a
two-reel motion picture, and other advanced promotional devices made their way into
people's homes. It was a masterfully orchestrated propaganda campaign. The most
important years in the plan's realization were the two decades between its publication
in 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 would
serve as a base point for the city's changing needs and as proof, perhaps, of Burnham's
belief that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die.
Thomas S. Hines

Bibliography
Burnham, 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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The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago 2005 Chicago Historical Society.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago 2004 The Newberry Library. All Rights Reserved. Portions are copyrighted by other
institutions and individuals. Additional information on copyright and permissions.

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