Emblematic urban projects
Introduction
The City Beautiful Movement (in English: City Beautiful Movement; pronounced ) was an American architectural reform that emerged between 1890 and 1900 with the intention of revitalizing and making public spaces in American cities more emblematic. The movement flourished in Chicago, Detroit and Washington D.C. and later spread to other American states. Defenders of the movement credit that this architectural reform helped improve the social image of large American urban centers and the quality of life of the population.
The first movement in 1893 with the World Colombian Exposition in Chicago. Daniel H. Burnham, head of the fair in the city, known as those who attended the "White City", a semi-utopia in which visitors must be protected from poverty and crime. Burnham's plans for architects at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The landscape of the Columbian Exposition, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., famous for his successful design of the Oasis, New York City's Central Park, which began construction in 1857. Not only to improve the appearance of the city, but also the idea of building in a civic center, parks and grand boulevards. The holistic and multi-purpose approach to architectural planning and design for many years. Its impact is still visible in many cities across the United States.
In addition to making cities more livable and orderly, the City Beautiful movement sought to shape the American urban landscape in the manner of those in Europe, which were designed primarily in the Beaux-Arts aesthetic. Burnham especially thought of the movement as a mechanism by which the United States could establish visible and permanent links with European classical traditions. His opponents, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright among them, wanted to avoid borrowing and outright replication of European design and instead invent a new, truly American style.
The City Beautiful movement emerged at a time in United States history when the country's urban population began to outnumber its rural population. Most city dwellers perceived cities to be ugly, congested, dirty, and unsafe. As cities grew, an increasingly rapid condition augmented by an influx of immigrants at the turn of the century, public space was being encroached upon. With congestion increasing, city residents needed open outdoor areas for recreation like never before. Additionally, the chaotic approach to sanitation, pollution, and traffic found in most large American cities affected rich and poor alike, which is how the City Beautiful movement gained financial and social support. The movement's chief spokesman, Charles Mulford Robinson, a journalist from Rochester, New York, helped inspire politicians to perceive it as a movement toward increasing civic virtue and decreasing social evils. He published his first major book on the subject, The Improvement of Towns and Cities, in 1901. It later became the bible of the movement.