ATDTDA (2): The Chicago Plan / Pynchon's error? (38.30 - 31)
David Morris
fqmorris at gmail.com
Wed Feb 7 15:32:30 CST 2007
The essence of the Burnham Plan, and its spawn, the City Beautiful
movement, was not so much the city grid - the grid being the neutral
background for large civic gestures - but in spaces (parks, plazas),
monumental civic structures, and sweeping vistas between these civic
monuments and space, often cut through the grid on diagonals. See
below:
The City Beautiful Movement
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/61.html
Daniel Hudson Burnham was indisputably the "Father of the City
Beautiful." As director of works of the World's Columbian Exposition
(1893), he effectively launched the movement that 15 years later would
reach its apogee in his epochal Plan of Chicago (1909). Burnham's
importance as an architect and planner lay chiefly in his ability to
direct and stimulate the design efforts of others. His own credo
captured the essence of his life and work: "Make no little plans, they
have no magic to stir men's blood. ... Make big plans ... remembering
that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long
after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself with ever
growing consistency." In his various architectural and planning
pursuits, Burnham choreographed large efforts indeed.
[...]
The central ideological conflict surrounding the City Beautiful pitted
invention and innovation against continuity and tradition. The newness
and cultural nationalism espoused by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd
Wright lay in their quest for a uniquely "American" culture, one with
maturity and confidence enough to cease relying so heavily on Old
World traditions. Burnham and his allies, by contrast, believed that
the sometimes frantic quest for "American-ness"—the obsession with New
World originality and horror of all things European—was itself a kind
of insecurity, and that maturity would consist in an acknowledgment
that America was not culturally isolated from the rest of the world.
Burnham and his associates saw the United States as a rightful heir to
the traditions of Western culture and chose thus to recall, celebrate,
and use those traditions themselves.
"Procession" is an apt metaphor for the City Beautiful. However
eclectic it became in its borrowings and whatever the style of
particular buildings within its plans, the provenance and thrust of
City Beautiful planning was classical and Baroque in its emphasis upon
processions of buildings and open spaces arranged in groups. For the
parallax effect, it depended on the movement of the individual, or the
human procession, through space from one specific point to another.
Great buildings or monuments were sited so as to become the terminal
vistas of long, converging, diagonal axes. The impact on the
individual of this arrangement, repetition, and ceremonial procession
was, in the Baroque and in the City Beautiful, calculatedly powerful,
impressive, and moving.
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