Community Aesthetics and Planning
by Laurence C. Gerckens
Historian Larry Gerckens explains how city plan commissions were formed in response to the "City Beautiful Movement" and turn-of-the-century America's belief in the value of improving the quality of the physical environment.
This article is also available as part of our
collection of articles; delivery by 1st class mail.
Read excerpts from article:
... Architect Daniel Hudson Burnham, Director of Works for the
Chicago World's Fair of 1893 (The World's Columbian Exposition),
undertook to realize the first city-scale unified design of
buildings, pedestrian plazas and public monuments in America.
Painted all in white, this "Great White City" thrilled visitors
with its beauty, cleanliness and order. It initiated the City
Beautiful Movement in the United States and catapulted Burnham
into leadership of the newly emerging city planning profession.
Thousands of visitors left Chicago with the belief that things
could be made better back home. They began to organize local
groups to plan for a visually and functionally unified new
"civic center," for metropolitan park systems and tree-lined
boulevards with coordinated public benches, street lights and
transit stations. They sought to realize architecturally
integrated streets through laws regulating building heights and
setting building setback lines.
Led by major businessmen,
unofficial City Plan Committees undertook to raise the quality
of the public environment to make physical America a fitting
subject for public-spirited support and patriotic respect,
capable of inspiring both the ambitions of youth and the visions
of the industrious. The idea of America would take positive
physical form through the effort of community planning
commissions; it would be realized in community actions directed
toward shaping and protecting the public environment.
When the first official, permanent and local American planning
commission was created at Hartford, Connecticut in 1907, the
aesthetic purposes of community planning -- realizing an
inspiring good order in the public environment while protecting
the positive qualities of both the natural environment and the
cultural heritage -- were clearly dominant forces in the
emerging community planning movement.
...
The full article can be ordered & downloaded. Click lightning bolt icon at top left.