This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
In today’s New York Times, Nicolai Ourussoff writes about the end of the 20th-century visions for urban spaces:
The more influential of these was the City Beautiful Movement in the late 19th century. Modeled after the Beaux-Arts grandiosity of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the movement was an expression of a newly confident, ascendant America — a country of national monopolies and sprawling rail networks. The homogeneity of the architecture, with its classical facades typically arranged around formal parks, reflected the desire to create a symbolic language of national unity after the Civil War. Emulated in cities like Washington, Cleveland, Denver and Detroit, the movement gave the country its first uniform vision of city planning.
The urge returned during the cold war in New YorkÂ’s Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Los Angeles Music Center. These sprawling cultural complexes, cut off from their surrounding neighborhoods, not only reflected tabula rasa planning orthodoxies of their time, but all of them used a mix of modern and imperial styles and themes to portray a progressive vision of America rooted in classical ideals.
Seattle never got its City Beautiful (the Bogue plan was defeated in 1912), but we did get the “sprawling cultural complex” in the form of Seattle Center. Like Lincoln Center, Seattle Center is still trying to adapt itself to a changing urban environment.
It seems unlikely that we’ll see any more of these grand urban development projects for a while. Many are being cancelled or scaled back (see Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn or CityCenter in Las Vegas) due to financing or local opposition.
So what will the 21st Century bring? If we are to adapt to a post-carbon economy in time to avert the worst effects of climate change, we’re going to need to think big again. What that will look like, though, is anybody’s guess.