City Beautiful

ORIGIN
• A transformation movement in North
American architecture and urban planning
that grew in 1890 and 1900.
• Beaux-arts and neoclassical architectures.
• World Columbian Exposition
• Industrial Revolution
• Burnham believed that a city needed a grand
entrance and that was the railway depot.

• The grand boulevard was justified as a

solution to traffic problems encountered by
suburban commuters and a way to provide
housing for higher income people in the city.
 • Burnham also wanted all the
bridges over the rivers
rebuilt to be more
attractive.

The Grand Boulevard

• The wall to wall development of mansard
roofed apartments he foresaw in the city
contrasted sharply with the single family
homes in the existing neighborhoods. He
dismissed these structures as a great solution
for small towns but not a good solution to the
needs of the regional capital.
 GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
• To introduce beautification and monumental
grandeur in cities.
• To sweep away social ills
• To have a cultural resemblance with their
European competitors through the use of
Beaux-Arts Idioms.
• To prevent upper classes back to live, but to
work and spend money in the urban zone.
CITY BEAUTIFUL IN THE PHILIPPINES
 CITY BEAUTIFUL IN THE PHILIPPINES
• Manila

Department of Tourism. Copied from Post Office. American-Style postal

Washington D.C. service
 CITY BEAUTIFUL IN THE PHILIPPINES
• Baguio City
- “…the parkway will be separated from the
mainland by lagoons, to be used for boating,
rowing, and pleasure craft.”
 DECLINE
• The movement weakened in 1909 because
planners and critics find it expensive and
impractical and disliked its obviously
discriminatory and artificial characteristics.
• Burnham's plan was never implemented, and
the real estate companies built a city that
would yield high profits, adopting the
skyscraper design and technology developed
in Chicago by Sullivan and others.
 Introduction
• Conceptualized by Frank Lloyd Wright (1932-
1959)
• vision of multi-centered, low density (supposedly
5 people per acre), auto-oriented suburbia
• each family would be given one acre (4,000 m2)
from the federal land reserves
• Land would be taken into public ownership; then
granted to families for as long as they used it
productively.
• 12 x 12 ft. model that illustrated the Broadacre City
concept as it might be applied to a representative 4
miles2 plot of land.

• ‘Usonia’ was based not on cooperation but fierce

individualism.
• "romantic isolation and reunion with the soil" (Lewis
Mumford)
 Origin
• because of technological advancements,
Wright came to believe that the large,
centralized city would soon become obsolete
and people would return to their rural roots.
• Wright despised the city, both physically and
metaphorically
Aspects of Broadacre City that became realities
• Prevalence of urban sprawl
• Modern suburbia may have many differences
with Broadacre, but there are also many
similarities.
• single-family homes on larger parcels of land with smaller
roads connecting to larger roads connecting to freeways.
• Being able to own land, build a home, and do what you
please with it were important in Broadacre City .
• Wright believed that modern man had the right to own a car
and to burn as much gasoline in driving it as he desired.
• The City Plan
• Agrarian Urbanism
 Goals and Objectives
• Broadacre City each family is give one acre
(4.000 m2) of land on which to build a house
and grow food. The city was considered to be
(almost) fully self-sufficient.
• “more light, more freedom of movement and
a more general spatial freedom in the ideal
establishment of what we call civilization.”
 Failures and Disadvantages
• Too real to be Utopian and too dreamlike to
be of practical importance.
• demands motor transportation for even the
most casual or ephemeral meetings
• didn’t see the large population increase from
2B in 1930 -7B present time, increase in fuel
prices, environmental repercussions
 Lessons from the Broadacre City
• Urban sprawl has become a reality
• Decentralization, both physically and
economically; being more independent.
• American Dream: land and home ownership
 References:
• http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/citybeautiful/
city.html
• http://www.greatmirror.com/index.cfm?navid
=904