The relationship between Beaux-Arts city planning and the municipal reform movement in the United States
Date
1977
Authors
Franklin, Douglas
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Abstract
This thesis addresses the history of architectural city planning in the United Stat~s between the early 1890's and the mid 1920's. It offers evidence for the relationship between the municipal reform movement and the Beaux-Arts city planning style. In establishing this relationship the fundamental problem is one of iconography: to demonstrate why the adherents to the municipal reform movement adopted the grand planning style as an institutional image for that reform.
The thesis presents a historical summary of the municipal reform movement as the first political manifestation of progressivism in the United States. This summary includes a description of late nineteenth-century urban politics and the reform cause, together with a brief sociological profile of the urban progressive. The chief American reform organization, the National Municipal League, established a program for political and administrative reform; both professionalism in the urban civil service and institutional reform are cited as the main reasons why architectural city planning became part of the program of the National Municipal League.
A discussion of the emergent Beaux-Arts city planning style centres on the Columbian Exposition or Chicago World's Fair of 1893. While the "White City" became an immediate model for urban physical reform, the progressive attitudes of its chief builders, Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham, were closely connected with those of contemporary liberal urban reformers. The thesis thus offers evidence for a continuity in planning after the Chicago Fair.
The historical and stylistic stage set, the thesis elaborates upon the iconography of Beaux-Arts city planning. The source of iconographical evidence is literary, embracing both theoretical polemics as well as commentaries and actual explanations of Beaux-Arts plans. The. leading planning theorist within the municipal reform movement was Charles Mulford Robinson and the major Beaux-Arts practitioner was Daniel Burnham.
Finally, this thesis discusses the high point in Beaux-Arts planning and the conco111itant·widest, acceptance of municipal reform principles. The grand planning and reform movements became strongly interrelated in City Planning, a textbook published by the National Municipal League. The reform cause and Beaux-Arts planning waned simultaneously, and by 1920 the relationship effectively ended. This disparate final condition, which saw Beaux-Arts planners continue their work outside institutional patronage, is tested on a scheme for examining the social function of the arts.