Chicago World's Fair Research Paper

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In 1791 a beautiful thing happened. In 1893 that thing came to Chicago. That thing was a magnificent escape from your day to day life. It was almost too good to be true. It was like a sample plate of the world set before you. All the unfamiliar smells, sights, and tastes put your five senses into a reverie. That thing was The World’s Fair. The World’s Fair is a place where inventions, innovations, cultures, lifestyles, music, [Type text] technology, ideas, beliefs, you name it, they all come together from all over the world to one country for six months per year. The Chicago World’s Fair, aka the Colombian Expedition, was a very influential event; but which concept from the Fair had the biggest impact on the America that we…show more content…
Chicago obviously wanted to change people’s view about the City so they started to do something about it. The “father” or the director of the City Beautiful Movement was David Hudson Burnham. Burnham became an architect by apprenticing with William Le Baron Jenney and then in the office of Peter B. Wight. There he met his future partner, John Wellborn Root. They then developed what would come to be called the Chicago School of Skyscraper Architecture. Fredrick Law Olmstead had a big part in the Colombian Expedition too, which helped the City Beautiful Movement. Olmstead was the one that designed Central Park in New York and was also the one that designed the lagoons and big green expanses for Chicago during the World’s Fair. The Chicago World’s Fair wanted to replicate the Beaux-Arts style of Paris. Several of the fair’s architects had studied at the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts. All were imbued with the formal, ordered, and axially oriented imperatives generally associated with Beaux- Arts aesthetics. Chicago was nicknamed The White City because all the buildings…show more content…
City Beautiful created these environments by making cities atmospheres inspiring and full of morale by showing off monuments or putting in parks, “Great buildings or monuments were sited so as to become the terminal vistas of long, converging diagonal axes. The impact on the individual of this arrangement repetition, and ceremonial procession was, in the Baroque and in the City Beautiful, calculatedly powerful, impressive and moving.”4 – Thomas S. Hines. City Beautiful Movement made cities more than just a factory cesspool. It made them desirable places to live and start a family and attract tourists. “It focused on incorporating a civic centre, parks, and grand boulevards.”5, as stated by Naomi Blumberg. People not only had a work life but a social life too. People needed breaks from work, an outlet. Theaters, parks, places of entertainment were put in for residents. The City Beautiful Movement changed all of our lives, it changed America. The Movement was by far the most impactful thing that came out of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Adam Sowder agreed saying, “urban planning of the 20th century would know it developed out of the City Beautiful Movement.”6 City Beautiful put structure and [Type

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