Court of Honor at center of World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, 1893.
Henry Hope Reed, who wrote The Golden City in 1959 and led the opposition to modern architecture in the mid-20th century and helped to found the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in 1968 (originally called Classical America), was not totally infallable. In his exaltation of Greco-Roman classical styles, he fell into an ill-fated opposition to Gothic and other styles that were opposed by architects in the previous two or three centuries. This was a mistake, and it somewhat undermined his strength in arguing for tradition as the basis for architectural style. So imagine how I must have felt when I stumbled on this post of mine from 2014:
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Radiant Garden City Beautiful
If wizards like Henry Hope Reed can be wrong on occasion, so can Jane Jacobs, who in our era is even more famous for her own pathbreaking 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Its chief claim to fame is to have thrown the active life of the best city streets into the face of the city-deadly megaprojects of Robert Moses, king of development in New York for almost half a century.
Jacobs spends some time toward the beginning of her book describing the horror brought to cities by the ideas of Le Corbusier and his book, The Radiant City. (We do not marvel at the mistakes of Corbu – he got everything wrong.) This was the idea that city streets were bad and should be replaced by towers in a park. In 1925 he proposed razing central Paris to carry out his totalitarian idea. She then describes the Garden City movement, originating in Britain, which was basically the idea that cities were bad and should be replaced by, in essence, suburbs. She combines these concepts into what she calls the Radiant Garden City, a catchall for bad ideas. How convenient.
But then she ropes in another concept, one that was basically flawless, of which Henry Reed was a strong proponent – the City Beautiful movement. Jacobs exaggerates and misconstrues it, referring to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 as “a sort of squat, decorated forecast of Le Corbusier’s later repetitive ranks of towers in a park.” She notes that it fizzled stylistically but that its core concept of the “Monumental Center” remained, leading to America’s great civic plazas, which Jacobs did not really appreciate because she saw them as countervailing her preferred animated small streets of many shops and eyes looking out from windows. This is indeed a powerful concept – one that Moses sought to eradicate and replace with the Radiant City model – but Jacobs was mistaken, I think, in believing that a great city could not have both her animated street life and a monumental city plaza or two with a sort of Benjamin Franklin Parkway-like monumental boulevard linking them together.
Anyway, I wonder whether Jacobs was compelled to rope the City Beautiful into her catalogue of woes by the elegance and charm and wit of the phrase she invented to combine them into a single monolithic pox of modern planning on all houses. Here is that passage:
The architecture of the City Beautiful centers went out of style. But the idea behind the centers was not questioned, and it has never had more force than it does today [1961]. The idea of sorting out certain cultural or public functions and decontaminating their relationship with the workaday city dovetailed nicely with the Garden City teachings. The conceptions have harmoniously merged, much as the Garden City and the Radiant City merged, into a sort of Radiant Garden City Beautiful[.]”
I suspect that as a lively writer Jacobs was so captivated by the phrase Radiant Garden City Beautiful that she twisted the last part into something more awful than she knew to be the case. Or maybe not. Still, the excitement of words can sometimes get in the way of the excitement of ideas. Maybe this is one example of that.
By the way, the World’s Columbian Exposition had over 27 million visitors over a period of six months, which was almost half the 63 million population of the United States at the time, and they could not get to Chicago anywhere near as easily as we can today. On one day over 700,000 visitors attended. In terms of “animated streets,” it would be hard for Jane Jacobs to argue with those numbers.
Architecture Here and There 
Lazy you keep telling the story of how ugliness in the form of modern architecture came to dominate America. You do not tell us why. As it happens, none of the given reasons make any sense. WWI did not cause Europe and America to change the way architects and builders did their jobs. The modernists took the PR tactics they had learned under the Nazis in Germany and applied them in America. The result is what you can see all around us, which you seem to find satisfactory. Think again, Lazy! – David
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Lazy, you keep retelling the story of how America took modern architecture on the chin and learned to like it. Why don’t you say anything about why that happened? The reasons given are bogus. WWI did not force America and Europe to change the way they built cities. Rather, modern architects took the PR tactics they learned from the Nazis in Germany and applied them here. Now you see what they wrought, and how much they like it. Thank you, Lazy!
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Wrong. Modernism emerged in 1880s with advent of industrial revolutions which unleashed wide array new building materials. Including drywall, reinforced concrete, large plate glass and cast iron. early Examples as the Glasgow School
https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/dd08bd5badf337f466cda7be1f8ae542?impolicy=wcms_crop_resize&cropH=678&cropW=1016&xPos=4&yPos=0&width=862&height=575
And industrial design ethnic like Fagus factory
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaBQlf9WAAEPWrc?format=jpg
From 1890s to early 1900s modernists emerged in Germany, France, USA, Italy, Spain and did array of projects before rise in fascism. Let us not forget craftsman style, Prairie House, Art Nouveau that emerged in USA/Europe.
Even “Parkitecture” of US national parks…
When Hitler came to power in early, Bauhaus and modern schools were being forced out business, many architects, Van Der rohe, Gropius, etc, jewish, slavic or east european descent were cast from public circle or rejected from commissions unless they designed buildings i.e. Status Quo towed along party lines.
So they moved US/West. When Fascists did rise to power, they enlisted the public, how do you corral public tendencies? Harkon their traditionalist spirit,
Fascistic architecture across Germany/Italy/Spain, burrowed all classicism’ design elements. https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/ehrenhof-neue-reichskanzlei-berlin-wilhelmstrasse.jpg?width=1400&quality=55
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With the advent of cheap to produce iron and electric elevator, cities grew quickly. When 1st classical skyscrapers emerged, less than 10 stories, even so; as they went up in NYC/etc and continued to grow; they began RIGHT at edge of sidewalk. https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AAMDJY/1890s-1900s-turn-of-century-new-york-city-street-scene-pedestrians-AAMDJY.jpg
The problem became more and more apparent, the city beautiful movement, was meant correction for the very problem city leader ushered in commerce. By 1916; City enforced building height/floor setbacks to permit additional light. While the setback zoning allowed more light; but result was much the same; the claustrophobic stone/concrete canyons and narrow streets that inundate many cities.
When the Modernists came to town; they introduced “corporate plaza” in mid 1950s; decluttering the canyon, chose open, airy materials and by 1960 incentivized by government of NYC to repeat the same permiting setback in exchange for additional floor counts. “Corporate chic”; created thousands of mini-parks Open space available public enjoyment.
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Big factor:
the twentieth century and the current century are the century of the masses, of collectivism. THe presence of masses do not allow for human scale, mass society is subhumane.
Capitalism: with its striving after efficiency and profit.
Democracy, dictatorship of the masses, and social and economic mobility of the inferior.
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Big factor:
the twentieth century and the current century are the century of the masses, of collectivism. THe presence of masses do not allow for human scale, mass society is subhumane.
Capitalism: with its striving after efficiency and profit.
Democracy, dictatorship of the masses, and social and economic mobility of the inferior.
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Big factor:
the twentieth century and the current century are the century of the masses, of collectivism. THe presence of masses do not allow for human scale, mass society is subhumane.
Capitalism: with its striving after efficiency and profit.
Democracy, dictatorship of the masses, and social and economic mobility of the inferior.
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Sorry for the triple reply, something must have went wrong.
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