Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
I don't know why people always project their modern philosophies onto Burnham. Two passages from The Plan of Chicago:
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That's kind of what I thought the proponents of this plan were doing. Well I would not have guessed that in 1909 Burnham would have had any interest in, or even the opportunity to travel to and examine, the transportation needs of so many exurbs flung far across the compass rose. If you were going to picture Burnham planning infrastructure beyond the city you'd picture a couple commissions within certain suburbs convenient to the city by train but not a swath of unrelated burgs spanning 100 miles (distance Kenosha to 3K) of fields. Impressive.
But getting back to this expressway name: I do maintain that it's bizarre to honor a historical figure for an act of modest caliber that in some sense represents the opposite of the highly consequential oeuvres he's most celebrated for (organizing the civic and commercial and cultural spaces of the modern city, Chicago to D.C. and beyond, in addition to his individual buildings). If Mick Jagger had written a decent symphonic soundtrack to some documentary in the 1960s we would still never, say, name a classical music school after him today.