Browse Exhibits (3 total)

Planning the City Beautiful

One hundred years ago, Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett published a vision of Chicago that reflected the early stages of big city planning. The City Beautiful Movement, spurred by Baron Haussmann's remaking of Paris in the 1860s, was intended to create a rational, classical city to replace the crowded, unplanned Victorian city common in the 19th Century. The 1909 Plan for Chicago, although never fully realized, is heralded as the apex of the City Beautiful Movement which found echoes in plans for the San Francisco Civic Center, Oakland's City Center, the Sunol Water Tower Temple, and urban planning from Manila to Canberra, Australia. This exhibit explores the City Beautiful Movement as manifested in the San Francisco Bay Area, and subsequent attempts to make its wide boulevards, Beaux Arts buildings and neo-classical domes welcome to urban inhabitants.

50th Anniversary of the College of Environmental Design, 1959-2009

The College of Environmental Design (CED) was conceived of in the 1950s and formally established in 1959. To differentiate their ideas from Modernist dogma, the founders William Wurster, Catherine Bauer Wurster, Jack Kent, and their Bay Area colleagues dubbed their vision “Environmental Design,” or what we might call a “New Modernism.” The CED was unique not only because it was one of the earliest colleges to combine architecture, city planning, landscape architecture, and the decorative arts, but also because it emphasized the important role of the social, natural, and physical sciences in informing teaching, practice, and research. Wurster Hall, completed in 1964, has become the emblem of the founders’ vision where, in 2009, it continues to emerge anew.

The exhibit focuses on seminal moments from 1959 to 2009 in the evolution of the CED founders' vision, whereby teaching, research, and practice were informed by the social and natural sciences and which, in recent decades, has significantly come to include the computer sciences. It features images of drawings, photographs, and documents drawn from the Environmental Design Archives, the Environmental Design Library, the Bancroft Library, the University Archives, IURD and CEDR, and private collections.