ABSTRACT
The City Beautiful movement developed in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. The immediate ancestor of the city beautiful designs was the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893—held to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492 in what was the New World to European explorers. The generic city beautiful design is remarkably simple when presented in a two-dimensional diagram. Design proposals for San Francisco and for Philadelphia saw only minor components of citywide designs implemented. The completed portions of the scheme include the great east–west city axis that involved broadening Charlottenburger Chaussee and placing the old Prussian Victory Column at its center. The designs of Canberra and New Delhi, while essentially city beautiful schemes, have garden city attributes. City beautiful designs were carried out under the direction of authorities who wished their cities to be regarded as modern and culturally important in emulation of Paris.
