On August 9, 2024, I had the pleasure of giving a talk on “Citizenship and Public Architecture” at First Things magazine’s intellectual retreat at the Union League Club in New York City. To quote:
[T]he classical tradition recrudesced in early American public buildings, but it also flourished in the era of Beaux-Arts. Beginning in the mid to late 19th century, American Beaux-Arts architects were trained in France in the classical tradition, which they adapted for their era. Using modern construction techniques such as steel skeletons, they demonstrated that the classical tradition applied to a wide variety of building types, including at every level of scale—even the skyscraper. Magnificent Beaux-Arts public buildings in America including the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, and the campus of Columbia University.
The great American urban planner and architect Daniel Burnham said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” The Beaux-Arts revolution in America was jolted into existence in in 1893, when Burnham orchestrated the World’s Columbia Exhibition, also known as the Chicago World Fair. It was a collection of enormous temporary buildings with a common classical vocabulary arranged on a grand plan. The architecture was inspired by ancient precedents, but also those from the Renaissance and more recent French design. The plan incorporated vistas punctuated by symmetry, eye-catching monuments, axial avenues, uniform cornice heights, and harmonious ensembles of buildings. The so-called White City had a tremendous emotional and intellectual impact and changed American architecture and planning; the classical once again became the correct style for American political values. The exhibition launched the City Beautiful movement, a period in which it was thought that the design of cities—including monumental architecture, public art, and planning, especially the incorporation of public parks—could encourage civic virtue, including the virtue of the common man.
The first and foremost example of the City Beautiful movement was the 1901 Plan for Washington, D.C. known as the McMillan Plan, named after the Senator who instigated and oversaw it. The McMillan Plan restored and extended Pierre L’Enfant’s rational, orderly design for the city by creating the National Mall and surrounding monumental core as we know it. Indeed, the McMillan Plan is arguably the greatest work of civic art in the modern era.
