Twentieth-Century Architecture

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Chapter 1 the proposal of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950) for the expansion of Helsinki in 1917, is achieved through the creation of grand boulevards lined by uniform blocks of buildings and punctuated by monumental architecture and imposing civic spaces (images). In the imagery associated with these plans, the city is designed to be apprehended as a coherent, integrated whole structured by the clear, hierarchical relationship of civic, cultural, commercial, and domestic domains. In this urban hierarchy the public realm of civic and cultural affairs receives a more monumental architectural treatment than the commercial or private worlds of business and family life. The endemic problems of dense urban centers that prompted Garden City advocates to seek an alternative to the traditional city could be resolved, according to Burnham, Bennett, and their colleagues, through the skillful adaptation of traditional planning principles to contemporary situations. Despite the emergence of alternative planning strategies for the modern city, the grand urbanism of the City Beautiful movement would prove to be an enduring ideal in the twentieth century, and we shall note its continuing influence in subsequent chapters.

The Industrial City: Tony Garnier The debate concerning the fate of the modern city was not, of course, confined to the alternatives of the Garden City or the City Beautiful. Other architects proposed different ways to conceptualize the task of city planning. In 1917 the French architect Tony Garnier (1869–1948) published Une Cite industrielle: etude pour Ia construction des villes, in which he described the design of an imaginary industrial center (images). The concept of demonstrating planning ideas through the description of an imaginary city was hardly a novel idea. In 1804, for example, the French

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