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The City Beautiful Movement
May 17, 2010
One hundred years ago, architect and
city planner Daniel H. Burnham (with
Edward Bennett) unveiled the Plan for Chicago (1909). It was not the first, but it is perhaps
the best and best-known reflection of the City Beautiful Movement.
The movement was a reaction to the rapid, ferocious and unplanned growth of American
cities in the modern industrial era after the Civil War. The movement of people from country
to city had become a flood. By 1910 46% of Americans lived in cities or larger towns. By
1920 the number would go to over 50%. Those towns and cities were dirty, crowded,
polluted, crime-ridden places and they were ugly. Little thought was given to beauty when
there was money to be made. Also as the late 19th century progressed more and more of
the urban residents were immigrants, and not the same old Germans, English and Scots
immigrants of the past; and not even the Irish who had come in great numbers since the
1840s. These newcomers were from eastern and southern Europe, and included Turks,
Bulgarians, Italians, Slovenians, Jews, Muslims and others not of the Anglo Saxon and
Christian (if not always Protestant) culture.
The City Beautiful Movement was an attempt to bring beauty, order and a mild form of
social control (by promoting civic virtue and allegiance among city dwellers) to the modern
metropolis. But first on the agenda was beauty. Daniel Burnham was the father of the
movement in his orchestration of the Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
The White City he erected as the grounds for the Worlds Fair was a monument of beauty
and order that featured grand public buildings, stirring vistas, coordinated cornice heights
(which visually united buildings of different size and scale), a pristine color scheme and
grand evening illumination with the spectacular electric lights. While not a real city, the
steve germann
Dayton Urban Design Examiner
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fairgrounds was an inspiration for future city designs. The more nuts and bolts features of
the philosophy (zoning, affordable housing, traffic control) would be carried out by the urban
planning movement which grew out of the City Beautiful Movement.
Burnham himself created plans for Washington, DC (1901), Cleveland (1903), and San
Francisco (1905). Ironically Chicago lagged behind, not releasing its own plan until 1909.
While the movement was national and even international in scope, it was particularly
important in the Midwest. Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Des Moines and
Madison were consciously planned around City Beautiful principals which included grand
public buildings, mostly in the Beaux Arts style, long vistas, radial and concentric
boulevards, and numerous large parks. In Chicago today, one sees in Grant Park, the
Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of Natural History and the Art Institute of Chicago the
reflection of the City Beautiful Movement.
Some critics, today and in the past, contend that the movement was retrogressive that it
looked to old-fashioned European urban forms (for example, Beaux Arts architecture), not
modern American solutions to American problems. James Howard Kunstler, and American
urban analyst and writer, feels differently. He said to a conference gathering some years
ago that (despite what he sees as a historical and contemporary anti-urban sensibility) in
the early twentieth century we had a brief spasm of urban intoxication called the City
Beautiful Movement. He praises the impulse and then goes on to say that after the end of
World War I, however, we spent our money and energy retrofitting our cities to
accommodate the automobile and made them more disgusting than they had been during
the rise of industrialism.
As a result, he said, many American cities are deadly places. Kunstler, a New Yorker
speaking to a national audience at a conference in San Diego in 1998, nevertheless saw
many of our urban ills best illustrated in the Midwest. While he mentions Charlotte, North
Carolina, his main lament was for the old industrial heartland when he said Go to
Cleveland, go to Dayton, Ohio, Detroit, Lansing, Des Moines, and Minneapolis. Dead.
Of what importance, then, is this movement that withered after 1920, even though its
practice continued throughout the last century and its monuments still stand? To some
extent, its current importance is its link to a concept known as the New Urbanism. But that
is the topic for a later article.
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