Legacy of City Beautiful

As time passed, the neo-Classical style associated with City Beautiful fell out of favor, but many of the basic tenets of City Beautiful lived on. The desire to bring order to the city and to use large scale plans to civilize and edify the populace was increasingly expressed through more Modern, minimal approaches. An example of this shift is Ernest Born’s Embarcadero Crescent. This project envisions a new terminus to Market Street’s grand boulevard. In doing so. Born followed the vein of urban designers before him to bring order and civility, but he does so in a style which is a world apart from the neo-Classical grandeur of the City Beautiful. 

Other designers went a step further and tried to bring housing back to the core of cities. In the 1950’s Vernon deMars designed a model of a new urban setting: one that featured and fostered human recreation, housing and true civic engagement in the enterprise of socialization and commerce.