ancient cities

154 City Beautiful Movement
logical diagram once recorded will never die, but
long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting
itself with ever growing consistency.” All of his
plans were indeed the materialization of his own
philosophy.
Even if not all City Beautiful plans were consistently
brought to completion, their built legacy of
grand parks, public squares, panoramic boulevards,
and prominent civic buildings would forever
change the shape of major American cities. The
arrangements and transformations adopted by
Burnham, and the legacy of grandeur and order
these plans impressed on the urban fabric, are still
widely appreciated by the public.
Burnham, together with Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.
and Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., was also a major
advocate of parks and green spaces integrated in the
urban fabric. According to Burnham, public parks
would provide a healthy outlet for those citizens
stuck in the misery and congestion of the tenements;
the parks would enrich their lives through recreation
and entertainment and through a salutary
contact with nature: “Fifty years ago,” Burnham
explained, “before population had become dense in
certain parts of the city, people could live without
parks, but we of today cannot.” Parks and public
spaces would thereby contribute to cementing
together different social strata of the population.
Following in the footsteps of his father, Frederick
Law Olmsted, Jr.’s work massively contributed to
advancing landscape architecture to an honorable
status in city planning. His work was directly
inspired by what he saw as the harmonious integration
of parks, avenues, and residential areas
typical of European cities. In his view, replicating
the European model would provide American cities,
severely lacking in recreational and public
space, with a much needed antidote to their congestion
and density and, in his own words, to “the
restraining and confining conditions of the town,
which compel us to walk circumspectly, watchfully,
jealously, which compel us to look closely
upon others without sympathy.” In 1902 he
joined the McMillan Commission (together with
Burnham, architect Charles F. McKim, and sculptor
Augustus St. Gaudens) and redesigned the
Mall area of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in
a successful attempt to bring to completion what
had remained unfinished in the 1791 plan of
Pierre L’Enfant.
The movement’s built legacy is still universally
appreciated and enjoyed by citizens and visitors
alike. Monumental squares and parks, as well as
grand boulevards, prominent civic centers, museums,
and most university campuses are a product
of this movement.
The emphasis on intra- or extra-urban transportation
planning was also a distinctive feature of City
Beautiful endeavors. Grand public boulevards,
malls, and parkways were designed as scenic corridors,
while rail stations connecting urban areas with
outer villages (such as Union Station in Washington,
D.C., by Burnham) were designed in magnificent
proportions as monumental gates to the city.
The Burnham plan for Chicago, although
uncompleted, created an impressive network of
grand parks, boulevards, bridges, and civic buildings
and fully redesigned the lakefront area as a
public space. The recent landscaping of the lakefront
and the design of Millennium Park embody
the spirit of the unfinished plan by Burnham.
In Washington, D.C., the McMillan plan sought
to emulate the grandeur of European capitals such
as Paris and Rome and brought to completion the
vision of L’Enfant. It insulated the federal government
area from the rest of the city, creating a
monumental core featuring white marble federal
buildings designed in the Beaux Arts style, a vast
public mall, and a series of public gardens.
Downtown Cleveland, Ohio, has inherited an
impressive array of City Beautiful buildings and
public space: Massive prominent buildings of similar
height, scale, and proportion, each featuring
slightly different historicist revival vocabularies,
were placed around a central mall area. The mall
and civic center, the University Circle buildings,
the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Case Western
Reserve University are still widely appreciated.
The Columbia University campus in New York
City, built between 1891 and 1913 by McKim,
William Rutherford Mead, and Stanford White,
was conceived as a miniature version of the
World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago. John
Russell Pope’s 1919 plan for Yale University in
New Haven, Connecticut, was another distinctive
endeavor of the movement.
However, City Beautiful plans reached far
beyond the U.S. borders: After American troops
had invaded Manila in 1898 and waged war
with the Spaniards and Filipinos, the new colonial