The 

City Beautiful Movement was a

reform philosophy of North
CITY BEAUTIFUL American architecture and urban
MOVEMENT planning that flourished during the 1890s
and 1900s with the intent of
introducing beautification and monument
al grandeur in cities.

CAUSES: The movement began in the United States in response to crowding

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

INFLUENCED BY:
"White City" buildings in Chicago, built for the World's Columbian Exposition (1893) widely
displayed and inspired the City Beautiful
movement, influencing architecture with
such Beaux-Arts structures as
the Museum of Science and
Industry building. 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.

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).

Generally stated, the City Beautiful sought to improve their city through beautification, which
would have a number of EFFECTS:

1) social ills would be swept away, as the beauty of the city would inspire civic loyalty and
moral rectitude in the impoverished;
2) American cities would be brought to cultural parity with their European competitors
through the use of the European Beaux- Arts idiom; and
3) More inviting city center still would not bring the upper classes back to live, but certainly to
work and spend money in the urban areas.
The premise of the movement was the idea that beauty could be an effective social control
device
The term "City Beautiful" was then coined to describe the movement's Utopian ideals. The
techniques of the City Beautiful movement spread and were replicated by over 75 civic
improvement societies headed mostly by upper-middle-class women between 1893 and
1899.
The City Beautiful movement intended to utilize the current political and economic structure
to create beautiful, spacious, and orderly cities that contained healthy open spaces and
showcased public buildings that expressed the moral values of the city. It was suggested
that people living in such cities would be more virtuous in preserving higher levels of morality
and civic duty.

Thomas Hastings suggested that “Happy is the city governed by the laws of art”. With an

economic system in crisis, depression and civil upheaval, a shift in industry from agrarian
means to more advanced secondary industries and corrupt governmental rule the USA was
a nation of great power and wealth; but a nation living in, and scarred by,
spasmodic urban growth; lacking a “conscious hand” guiding urban planning.

Periods of growth often resulted in a vibrant expanding outer city surrounding an outdated,

overpopulated inner core  criss-crossed by overhead cables and
railroads. City cores resembled frontier villages more than they did the heart of an industrial
powerhouse.

Architects generally restricted themselves to individual buildings. As Hastings stated,

“...every man is for himself, more thoughtful of making a personal impression than doing a
beautiful thing.” In comparison with the grandeur of European cities such as Paris and
Venice, the USA was falling behind. However, urban planning in the USA had to deal with
different functions than many of the cities that inspired the City Beautiful movement.

For example Venice relied on traders and markets to generate capital in an enigmatically

bustling yet beautiful city; whereas cities such as New York or Chicago were based
on manufacturing.

The first step in “beautifying” American cities was the 1893 World Exposition, held in

Chicago. This was effectively a 1:1 model of how people such as Daniel Burnham, John
Root and Fredrick Law-Olmsted envisioned American architecture and urban planning. It
was the first co-ordinated approach to planning in the sense that
a team of architects, surveyors and landscape architects worked together to create a
coherent city plan which was designed with a “conscious hand” and was to be followed
,without exception. In addition, the exposition incorporated art and sculpture on a vast scale.

The City Beautiful movement was initially intended to improve the aesthetic of US cities.

However by doing this with reference to the classic periods of architecture (Renascence,
Classical and Greek) it quickly became more than simply
“Urban Beautificaton.” Buildings were often finished in white, connected by
long colonnades and surrounded by sculpture and vistas , inspired by French urban
planning.

McMillan Plan
An early use of the City Beautiful ideal with the intent of creating social order through
beautification was the McMillan Plan, (1902) named for Michigan Senator James McMillan.
The plan emerged from the Senate Park Commission's redesigning of the monumental core
of Washington, D.C. to commemorate the city's centennial and to fulfill unrealized aspects of
the city plan of Pierre Charles L'Enfant a century earlier.
The Washington planners, hoped to make Washington monumental and green like the
European capitals of the era; they believed that state-organized beautification could lend
legitimacy to government during a time of social disturbance in the United States. The
essence of the plan surrounded the United States Capitol with monumental government
buildings to replace "notorious slum communities".
At the heart of the design was the creation of the National Mall and eventually included
Burnham's Union Station. The implementation of the plan was interrupted by World War I but
resumed after the war, culminating in the construction of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922.
INFLUENCE IN OTHER CITIES

The success of the City Beautiful philosophy in Washington, D.C., is credited with influencing
subsequent plans for beautification of many other cities,
including Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland (The Mall), Columbus ,Des Moines, Denver, Detroit,
Madison , Montreal, New York City , Philadelphia, San Antonio etc..

Chicago
Burnham based the city around a central public area, which could be accessed along long boulevards
which cut right through the city to ensure that the centre remained both visible and
easily accessible even from the urban fringe. This was a theme that intrinsically linked with the City
Beautiful.

Washington
At the same time, Pierre Charles L'Enfant, regarded by some to be the forefather of the City
Beautiful movement, was adopting a similar approach in planning Washington D.C in 1791. Here, he
made the Capitol a strategic point from which all major routes radiated; in his words “prolonging (The
Capitol) on far distant points of view.”

ELEMENTS OF CITY BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT

San Antonio prior to 1920 with A typical residential street in Miami's Coral Gables
establishment of the Riverwalk
Capitol building in Denver The Fountain in Louisville's St. James Court was installed in 1892.

It also achieved great influence in urban planning that endured through particularly in regard
to United States public housing projects, throughout the 20th century
The City Beautiful manifesto strove to enforce the monumental, not through the scale or
mass of a building, but rather through “Consistency, Proportion and Detail” .

Cities designed within the City Beautiful movement made extensive use of

white materials and finishes. Not only did this create a strikingly beautiful city, it was hoped
that the ‘White City’ in all its opulence would facilitate civic and moral rectitude, ridding urban
areas of crime and unrest, and enabling their gentrification.

The movement made great use of architectural detailing normally reserved for cathedrals or

the upper classes of society; though seemingly purely aesthetic this had a greater moral
purpose. Train Stations, Shops and Warehouses were all designed to the same level of
detail, regardless whether they were to be used by the wealthiest or
poorest members of society. Moreover the extensive use of art and sculpture created a vivid
backdrop to the lives of all in the city. In doing this planners hoped that they would facilitate
the growth of a positive democratic culture.

DEVELOPMENT OF MOVEMENT

For the first time in Modern American History the movement made an attempt to base
the planning of settlements on artistic compositional values to attain regularity, and
harmonious design throughout a city; rules which had for centuries been applied to
the architecture of an individual building, but not an entire urban area.

The City Beautiful attempted to not only provide order to the layout of a city, but also order to
the society inhabiting it, hoping that the order and harmony would rid the USA of the violence
experienced during the Civil War and Revolution preceding the birth of this movement.

Whilst the movement was well suited to a revolutionised USA, it remained so for only a few
decades. Too few were able to see the core values of the movement; the principle
of urban composition, and an appreciation of the symbolic power of art.

The movement was also effected by advancements in technology and fashion. In the words
of Christopher Tunnard, “...too often technology, fashion or ignorance dictates form, the
movement is thus lost.”
Despite this, the movement had a long lasting impact, and it could be argued that it initiated
the thoughts that lead to radical movements such as modernism, the Utopian theories.

FROM CITY BEAUTIFUL TO THE 21ST CENTURY

Throughout the early 20 th  century, cities across North America- and the globe- began
to implement Olmsted and Burnham’s ideas. Chicago, San Francisco, Manila, Regina,
Ottawa, Seattle, Denver and more all utilized City Beautiful concepts to boost civic
moral. During the Great Depression, ornate City Beautiful projects were put to rest,
but the movement remains a central influence to urban planners and designers. The
City Beautiful Movement brought light to the aesthetic relationship between the social
and physical architecture of the city, an idea that persists at the core of human-
centered planning and design today.

City Beautiful movement, American urban-planning movement led by architects, landscape

architects, and reformers that flourished between the 1890s and the 1920s. The idea of
organized comprehensive urban planning arose in the United States from the City Beautiful
movement, which claimed that design could not be separated from social issues and should
encourage civic pride and engagement. Its influence was most prominent in cities such as
Cleveland, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
Aside from making cities more livable and orderly, the City Beautiful movement was meant
to shape the American urban landscape in the manner of those in Europe, which were
primarily designed in the Beaux-Arts aesthetic.
FEW EXAMPLES OF CITY BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT

McMillan World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The columbian exposition.  The "White City"

SUBMITTED BY- SHARANYA CHETHI (1701030) SAISREE KOMPERLA (1701013)

SOURCES:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Beautiful_movement#:~:text=The%20City%20Beautiful
%20Movement%20was,and%20monumental%20grandeur%20in%20cities.

https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/city-beautiful-movement/

http://chicagoplanninghistory.weebly.com/urban-design.html