Pasadena's Civic Center: A Grand Vision Realized, Despoiled, and Revived

Abstract

The story of Pasadena's civic center parallels the broad outlines of developments in twentieth-century American architecture and city planning. Beginning with the City Beautiful movement in the early 1900s that was driven by civic improvement organizations, often preponderantly female and led by a cultural elite, several Beaux Arts civic center plans were produced, most notably in Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco. City planners and civic elites envisioned ensembles of public buildings that emulated the squares of Europe, with the important difference that in America the focus would be a civic building, a state capitol or a city hall, in place of the church or cathedral that dominated the European public square. For the most part, the medieval town did not allow Renaissance and Baroque thinkers to impose their plans for grand axial vistas on existing cities, although these visions were worked out in garden designs. At the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where Haussmann had transformed the medieval city in the nineteenth century, American architects learned the precepts of Beaux Arts planning and design and saw with their own eyes the visual effects of broad tree-lined boulevards terminated by monumental works of architecture to create grand urban vistas.