Daniel Burnham documentary on PBS tomorrow (Labor Day, September 6th)

Washington DC's Union Station.

See ""City Beautiful" Comes Alive in Daniel Burnham Documentary" from the Architectural Record. We like Burnham in DC because of the McMillan Plan and Union Station. From the article:

“Burnham was interested in the city not only as a physical artifact,” says Howard Decker, FAIA, a planner and project director with Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects, “but as a social and cultural artifact.” Decker, who appears on-camera, notes that Burnham addressed many of the challenges that face architects and planners today: population growth, sprawl, environmental degradation. “It’s another reason to go back and look at the city Burnham was interested in—it’s the city before the Modern city. Maybe it’s an appropriate model to undo some of the damage we’ve done.”

But I don't agree that the City Beautiful movement, unmodified, is the best example for urban futures.

Jane Jacobs is critical of the City Beautiful movement in Death and Life of Great American Cities. Originally, I didn't understand why. But now I do. The monumentality of the buildings is beautiful from a distance but except for certain exceptions, it fails to work at the ground level in terms of fine grained urbanism and vitality at the level of the storefront, building, sidewalk, and street. The big beautiful buildings are usually accompanied by big, beautiful, and very empty if not forlorn spaces.

You really can see this with the Mall in Cleveland, also done by Burnham. It's very much empty of people and activity. But very beautiful.


This isn't the case with Union Station because it is a transit center and surrounded by activity centers--office buildings and is a short walk to the U.S. Capitol Complex--and abuts the Capitol Hill residential neighborhood. So more than 20 million people move through the station and the area every year and the area around the complex is active.

It's also a reasonably successful shopping center ("Ground lease for Union Station changes hands from the Washington Business Journal), although the food court has had its ups and downs and is the subject of a controversial proposal to cut a hole in the center hall of the station to provide more visual and direct access, and the movie cineplex has been closed (the station managers didn't like the clientele I think).

Although by comparison on the weekends when the office buildings are empty, Union Station can have a somewhat forlorn quality. For example, the bikestation, where the concessionaire makes most of its income from bike rentals, is closed on Sundays.

David Barth, a planner at AECOM, has a model for updating the City Beautiful's approach by adding to it the principles of new urbanism. He calls his model "City Revival" although it hasn't yet received a textbook treatment. City Revival doesn't just focus on grand civic buildings. It considers and links community buildings, neighborhoods, town centers (commercial and entertainment areas), streets, the environment, and parks and open space into one integrated system.

In the meantime, Cy Paumier's primer, Creating a Vibrant City Center, is a better model for advice for how to improve cities than that provided by Burnham.

But we should still watch the documentary.