Mar. 25 The Beaux-Arts and the City Beautiful

Like the Bauhaus, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1803-1968) was an extremely powerful institution; although it was established as a school to train French government architects, it was an important model as a way to design (note the importance of axial planning, composition, distribution, disposition, poché, parti, esquisse). A number of well-known North American architects (HH Richardson, WM Hunt, Louis Sullivan, McKim/Mead/White, Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Ernest Cormier) studied there and brought the Ecole "method" back to their practices.

The most obvious consequence of Beaux-Arts methods was the so-called City Beautiful Movement, which saw its start at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 in Chicago. The master plan, a grand example of Beaux-Arts planning, was done by Burnham and Root. The individual (temporary) buildings formed a carefully-grouped ensemble and were notably in the classical style. The idea was to show that America's past rivalled that of Europe. Louis Sullivan departed from the rigid planning rules in his Transportation Building. The great "white city" had a darker side, too; the midway or amusement zone featured ethnological exhibitions, which through their non-adherence to the classical style suggested that non-Europeans were barbarous.

Following the fair, many architects continued to work in the Beaux-Arts mode. Such works are sometimes referred to as the "American Renaissance"; our examples include McKim, Mead, and White's Penn Station (1907-13) in New York, Burnham's Union Station in Washington DC, Toronto's Union Station (1919-27) by Ross and Macdonald, HG Jones, and John M. Lyle Architects. The Beaux-Arts emphasis on axial planning, with the main paths of movement clearly laid out and secondary paths leading from them, was ideal for railway stations.

*Please bring a model or drawing (designed by you, if possible) to the discussion session this week (March 27/April 1) and be prepared to discuss how it fits in the history of architectural education: Beaux-Arts or Bauhaus?

Prof. Adams provides these slides immediately following each lecture as a courtesy to students for study purposes only. She takes no responsibility for their arrangement on this page or for any unintended use of the images.

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