10 “Open-air salon of the street” Voices for landscape: the 1900s and 1970s The landscape and architecture installed on Mass Ave from about 1900 on quickly transformed the bare roadway into an ideal City Beautiful grand avenue Robinson wrote extensively about “great avenues ” For example, in Modern Civic Art, or, the City Made Beautiful in 1903, he wrote: “These are the radials that bear the heavy traffic to and from the centre and the broad streets set aside for the grandest residences ” “[T]he great avenues will often have turf and rows of trees ” “[W]ith carefully tended nature he whole conception of the street changes . .. he way is no longer a mere means of communication . .. he new idea is to make an open-air salon of the street ”19 In the early 1970s preservationists argued for preserving the “coherence and unity” of Mass Ave’s landscape and buildings As argued by the brief nominating it for federal historic status in 1974: “In this linear district of unique Beaux Arts residential architecture the kinetic essence of Pierre L’Enfant’s Baroque plan for the city of Washington is admirably realized “The rhythm and proportions of this broad, tree-lined avenue dynamically interact with the scale and visual excitement of the architecture which abuts it “The grand radiating avenues of Le Nôtre are recalled Rock Creek Park, whose presence is felt creates an appropriate aura of rus in urbe ” “In these years [1890-1930] a remarkable degree of architectural quality, coherence and unity was achieved, creating a street facade unique in the city and perhaps the nation ”20 Fig. 15 Covers of two volumes by the US Commission of Fine Arts (1973, 1975) documenting Mass Ave’s architecture. See text on pages 18–19. Fig. 16 Robinson’s great avenue plan for Los Angeles (1907).
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