When you think of American cities you think of places built for maximum efficiency and commerce - not necessarily for beauty and harmony. This photo often does the rounds...
But in the early days, Americans prioritized great architecture for the very purpose of inspiring citizens. As Sir Christopher Wren once said, great public buildings are "the ornament of a country" - a way to establish a nation.
It wasn't only public buildings. Take the Erie County Savings Bank in Buffalo (since demolished in an attempt at "urban renewal"):
But then, something happened. The postwar years saw a brutalist style emerge - architectural elitists scoffed at traditional designs and replaced them with the avant-garde.
The public pushed back. The “Design Excellence Program” was established in 1994 to ensure higher quality public buildings. But the results weren't great: San Francisco's Federal Building is so bizarre that it almost defies analysis...
As modernism became postmodernism, buildings became the manifestations of selfish artistic vision - monuments to individual egos instead of monuments to America.
But something eroded American beauty more than this misguided artistry: efficiency. The US once had dense, more European-style cities, and workers commuted via public streetcars. These were soon to be sacrificed for the great highways...
This was how the 1939 New York World's Fair envisioned cities of the near future, in an exhibit sponsored by the General Motors Corporation...
Amidst a frenzy of industrialization in the 1940s, the US launched a decades-long project of freeway construction. Huge swathes of existing cities were demolished in the process, like in Kansas City:
@Culture_Crit Not the same locations in KC. Unfollowed.