page_title: City Beautiful movement
section_title: McMillan Plan
hierarchical_section_title: City Beautiful movement / History / McMillan Plan
caption_attribution_description: English: The Fountain in St.James Court, Louisville, Kentucky. Originally installed in the center of St James Court in 1892.
context_page_description: The City Beautiful Movement was a reform philosophy of North American architecture and urban planning that flourished during the 1890s and 1900s with the intent of introducing beautification and monumental grandeur in cities. It was a part of the progressive social reform movement in North America under the leadership of the upper-middle class concerned with poor living conditions in all major cities. The movement, which was originally associated mainly with Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., promoted beauty not only for its own sake, but also to create moral and civic virtue among urban populations. Advocates of the philosophy believed that such beautification could promote a harmonious social order that would increase the quality of life, while critics would complain that the movement was overly concerned with aesthetics at the expense of social reform; Jane Jacobs referred to the movement as an "architectural design cult."
context_section_description: An early use of the City Beautiful ideal with the intent of creating social order through beautification was the McMillan Plan, (1902) named for Michigan Senator James McMillan. The plan emerged from the Senate Park Commission's redesigning of the monumental core of Washington, D.C. to commemorate the city's centennial and to fulfill unrealized aspects of the city plan of Pierre Charles L'Enfant a century earlier.
  The Washington planners, who included Burnham, Saint-Gaudens, Charles McKim of McKim, Mead, and White, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., visited many of the great cities of Europe. They hoped to make Washington monumental and green like the European capitals of the era; they believed that state-organized beautification could lend legitimacy to government during a time of social disturbance in the United States. The essence of the plan surrounded the United States Capitol with monumental government buildings to replace "notorious slum communities". At the heart of the design was the creation of the National Mall and eventually included Burnham's Union Station. The implementation of the plan was interrupted by World War I but resumed after the war, culminating in the construction of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922.
caption: The Fountain in Louisville's St. James Court was installed in 1892.
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