The Gilded Age by Alan Axelrod

Author:Alan Axelrod [Axelrod, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling

Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago was a visionary redesign of a city devastated by fire. His idea was to create a metropolis that lived up to the Latin motto on its corporate Great Seal, Urbs in horto: “City in a garden.”

THE GREENING OF THE CITIES

Architect Willis Polk often repeated an exhortation he attributed to his associate and colleague Daniel Burnham: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood. … Make big plans; aim high in hope and work. … Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.”14 As much as Burnham contributed to post-fire Chicago and the architecture of the Gilded Age, his most ambitious achievement came later, as a kind of coda to the Gilded Age, in 1909. It came not in the form of a single building, but as nothing less than a “Plan of Chicago,” a coordinated, integrated system of projects that included new streets and widened streets, revised rail services, and extensive harbor development.

An outgrowth of work Burnham did for the city’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (see chapter 15), the Plan of Chicago was an expression of Burnham’s belief that, whatever else they achieved, architecture and design served a moral purpose for civilization. In this belief, Burnham may be accused of flirting with the ultimately self-serving industrial utopianism of George Mortimer Pullman (see chapter 7), but the Chicago architect’s vision was much wider than that of the creator of the Pullman Palace sleeping car.

“The Plan of Chicago was an expression of Burnham’s belief that, whatever else they achieved, architecture and design served a moral purpose for civilization.”

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