Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the numerous picnic areas and the picturesque artificial pond constructed
alongside the historic Pierce Mill.
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The next major attempt to reinvent the nature of nature in Washington
was crystallized by the Senate Park Commission plan of 1901-02. This
influential compendium of proposals epitomized the goals and methods of
the City Beautiful movement, which exercised a powerful influence on
American urban development from the 1890s through the 1930s.The basic
tenet of the City Beautiful movement was that American cities were ugly,
chaotic, and inefficient, and that coordinated planning improvements based
on European models could transform them into models of civic achieve-
ment worthy of a great and powerful nation. City Beautiful spokesmen
urged architects, landscape architects, sculptors, artists, and businessmen to
work together to improve the appearance of American cities.
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The City Beautiful movement is usually identified with ostentatious
neoclassicism and associated with grandiose architectural projects and civic
center developments rather than with attempts to reconfigure urban nature.
City Beautiful reformers were strongly influenced by the nineteenth-
century park movement, however, and their proposals generally included
plans for comprehensive systems of informal parks and parkways that were
intended to spread the benefits of nature throughout the city and its sub-
urbs. These new parks were cast not simply as Arcadian retreats, but as
multi-faceted contributions to urban improvement. Parks systems were
proposed as means of transforming under-utilized and often menacing
urban wastelands into sanitary, attractive, and profitable civic amenities.
They were also seen as benefiting their surroundings, as improving the
character of adjoining districts, and, according to the Darwinian notions of
environmental determinism that informed the growing science of urban
sociology, as elevating the habits of neighboring residents, as well.
The City Beautiful movement had an enormous effect on Washington.
It was bad enough that the average American city was ugly and amorphous,
but politicians, architects, and reformers of many stripes expressed outrage
that the nation's capital was disorganized and with a few notable excep-
tions, unattractive.There were a few grand mansions and impressive public
buildings, along with the smattering of minor parks embellished during the
preceding quarter century, but Rock Creek Park was all but inaccessible
and the Mall remained a major disappointment.The Smithsonian area and
the monument grounds were attractively landscaped in the gardenesque
style advocated by Downing, but railroad tracks and a train station marred
