Architecture & Grandeur 

The 1929 speech that Hoover gave to the AIA in support of public buildings in the Capital marked a contemporary shift from the architectural concept first laid out by architect Pierre Charles L'Enfant. L ‘Enfant, a French Major who volunteered to fight for the liberty of the United States in the American Revolutionary War, was called upon by President George Washington in 1791 to develop a grand plan for the new national Capitol. L’Enfant did not last long due to his coarse nature and overspending. Languishing for over a century, a new Senate Commission revisited and reformed the L’Enfant plan in 1901. Hoover, a mining engineer, met the continuing building crisis by endorsing a plan consistent with the Gilded Age classical form and as he stated, “its dignity and architectural inspiration... we stimulate pride in our country.” 

The development of the United States as an industrial economic power during the latter half of the 19th Century created a nation with men of great wealth and influence who built industries and desired their homes to be grand structures that reflected their own greatness. Great homes started to rise along Fifth Avenue in New York City, by then already a major national and international metropolitan, industrial city, while the street was still made of dirt. Teams of architects, sculptors, and muralists worked to fill both the need for new municipal buildings and the demand for these grand homes. 

This approach to constructing grandeur that melded city planning and decorative arts made its national debut with the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition. Daniel H. Burnham, the lead architect of the Exposition, represented the firm of Burnham and Root, and supervised the construction of the “White City”, a cluster of buildings with characteristics of Greek and Roman forms and elements such as columns, balustrades, and other elaborate ornamentations all in a form referred to as the Beaux-Art style. This temporary city within a city was predominantly constructed of stucco and painted white. After his business partner John Root's death in 1891, Burnham served as the sole consulting architect with oversight to many of the best architectural firms of the times to help build the vast area built around Jackson Park and the lakefront of Chicago. His expertise in planning helped to establish the “City Beautiful Movement” across the country. 

Architecture was just one part of this beautification movement. The creation of beauty considered an entire locale, including the environment. Structures were spectacularly enhanced with landscape planning and design by Fredrick Law Olmsted, Sr., along with visual art elements like grand sculptures, paintings, and murals. The national impetus for such magnificent public structures and homes was supported by sculpture societies, municipal art societies, and the National Society of Mural Painters, formed in 1895. It was Burnham and other men - Charles McKim (architect), Augustus Saint-Gaudens (sculptor), F.L. Olmsted Jr. (landscape architect) - who took this largely neoclassical concept of urban planning to foster citizen pride, strong moral development, and reform to the District of Columbia by creating the 1901 Plan for Washington. They and their peers became the soul of the Commission on Fine Arts (CFA) established by Congress in 1910. 

In the end, the purpose of installing beauty within the cities was to counter the gritty downside of industrialization. Public health did see improvements by separating some industrial areas from residential areas, but the cost was often to tear down and build anew without creating support for the people who were forced to move out of their homes or neighborhoods. The Great Depression would bring out a different perspective to reform and the role of the Arts. 

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