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important themes that came from this exposition would have been the use of the Beaux-Arts Architectural styling, the concept of the White City and the harmony and balance with which the exposition was designed. However the main undercurrent theme of the entire exposition was the concept of American Exceptionalism[8], which the exposition was soon to become a symbol of, showing Americans, through demonstration, that the USA was the greatest nation on Earth.

 

Theory

 

The theory supporting the concept of the city beautiful movement was initially 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[9], and though this may seem aesthetically driven the reasoning for this lay in the French inspiration for the plans of these new cities.

 

Baron Haussmann, responsible for the plan of Paris designed through “seizing strategic points and opening up their approaches”[10]; his method of designing urban areas was to “make no little plans.”[11] From this Burnham and his colleagues knew that an effective city plan is one which details every area and aspect of the city. This they applied to their work, most notably in the regional plan created for Chicago in 1909 (Burnham and Bennett.)[12] Unknown to them was the fact that Pierre Charles L'Enfant, regarded by some to be the forefather of the City Beautiful movement, used a similar approach to his work in the planning of Washington D.C in 1791. In this he made the Capitol a strategic point, upon which all major routes lead out from; in his words “prolonging (The Capitol) on far distant points of view.”[13]

 

The image of the Chicago plan (Figure 1) shows how Burnham based the city around a central public area, which can be accessed along long boulevards which cut right through the city to ensure that the centre of the city remains both visible and easily accessible even from the urban fringe of the city. This was soon to become a theme intrinsically linked with the City Beautiful.

 

Added to this the City Beautiful manifesto strove to enforce the monumental. This however was not to be executed through the scale or mass of a building, rather through “Consistency, Proportion and Detail”[14] within their design. Examples of this may be the White house in the city of Washington D.C (Figure 2), or Grand Central Station, New York (Figure 3). In both it is easy to see that they are not the largest buildings in the surrounding area, however their detail, consistency and dominance of their site leads them to appear as a more defiant, almost stronger building than any of the surrounding buildings, thus creating a sense of true monumentality without the need for excessive scale.

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