Daniel Burnham and the City Beautiful Movement

Daniel Hudson Burnham FAIA (September 4, 1846 - June 1, 1912) was an American architect and urban designer. A proponent of the Beaux-Arts movement, he may have been, "the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced."

[@manatee2500]

A Wonderful lecture.

[@markvenaglia1548]

Your "City Beautiful" video needs to be required viewing for all 2024 presidential candidates.

[@Eye_Exist]

sure they give us hour long lectures of these fantasy architects knocking out palaces that we couldn't even dream of building today with all our technology and education, but look what happens when you ask how were they able to build them and where's all the blueprints and construction plans and pictures and videos and worker documentation that explain the flawless 3D detail of these buildings and how they were able to build them many times faster we build our glass and steel buildings today yes it looks very much just like they have simply attributed all this flawless stone architecture to some random people who didn't actually have anything to do with the drawing or construction of the buildings just to explain them away to cover where did this architecture actually originate from and when, in hope we never stopped to look at them to realize how none of this makes the slightest sense.

[@ciai7317]

Could someone please clarify what she said about the location and the trainer of the architects responsible for designing the city between the time frame of 24:28 and 25 in the video?

[@FlaglerMuseum]

The speaker is stating that the architects were trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, school of architecture in Paris, France: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_des_Beaux-Arts and: beauxartsparis.fr/fr

[@ciai7317]

Thank you for taking the time to answer my question.

[@dkennell998]

Jane Jacobs' take on the City Beautiful movement is that it contributed to the hollowing out of inner cities, demolished dense, human-scale, mixed-use, responsive neighborhoods in favor of stuff that looks nice driving through it but is no good for living in, and that it gave us our current innovation-stifling zoning laws and municipality-bankrupting suburbs. Pretty convincing, I have to be honest.

[@presumedeagle10]

That was more modernism and urban renewal, sure the city beautiful moment did lead to the demolition of “blighted” areas in the same way as urban renewal but it was focused on public space and community centers as opposed to the car dominated freeways of modernism. Like I wouldn’t exactly call the national mall “hollow and empty” most of DC was built around the city beautiful moment actually and is extremely walkable and mixed use