| 1682 |
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William Penn's design for Philadelphia is a rectangular grid with a central park and four smaller parks, one in each quadrant. |
| 1733 |
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Founder James Oglethorpe's Savannah, Georgia, is a more complex gridiron with a main axis and interlinking gardens and squares. |
| 1785 |
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The Ordinance of 1785 providing for the rectangular survey of the Old Northwest will influence the structure of many future American cities. |
| 1791 |
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Pierre L'Enfant's baroque design for the new nation's capital adds grand radial avenues and ceremonial spaces to a street grid. |
| 1859 |
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Central Park in New York, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, opens to the public and becomes a model for many other American city parks. |
| 1873 |
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In his seminal book, Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West, H.W.S. Cleveland advocates laying out the streets of towns according to the land's natural contours, rather than by the mechanical replication of the rigid grid. |
| 1878 |
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Frederick Law Olmsted inaugurates his city-shaping system of Boston urban parks, the "emerald necklace." |
| 1885 |
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The 10-story Home Insurance Building is completed in Chicago. Made possible by the use of a steel frame and the invention of the elevator, it is reputed to be the first skyscraper. |
| 1890 |
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The year conventionally regarded as the beginning of the Art Nouveau period, an international style that flourished until about WWI, and which affected all arts including architecture (curvilinear ornamentation on building facades based on natural forms-leaves, flowers, vines). Louis Sullivan's designs for many buildings and banks are representative of that style in America. |
| 1893 |
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The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World, is a source of the City Beautiful Movement, emphasizing beauty over utility in the design of American cities. |
| 1898 |
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Ebenezer Howard's famous Garden City diagrams appear in his book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. |
| 1901 |
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The McMillan Commission is formed to update and complete L'Enfant's plan for Washington, D.C. Among its accomplishments is a legal 160 foot height limit to preserve the city's skyline. |
| 1913 |
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A chair in Civic Design, first of its kind in the U.S., is created in the University of Illinois's Department of Horticulture for Charles Mulford Robinson, one of the principal promoters of the World's Columbian Exposition. |
| 1916 |
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The Lake Forest (Illinois) Improvement Trust is established to build Market Square. It is reputed to be the first automobile-centered shopping district in the U.S. |
| 1916 |
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The nation's first comprehensive zoning resolution is adopted by the New York City Board of Estimate. Zoning soon spreads nationwide and influences urban form and design by setting legal limits to allowable land use. |
| 1920 |
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A year conventionally regarded as the beginning of the Art Deco era, the era between the two World Wars that left its mark (streamlining, angles, neon, etc.) on the look of many American cities. Among its iconic structures are New York's Rockefeller Center, Miami Beach Hotels, and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. |
| 1922 |
|
J.C. Nichols Country Club Plaza, a group of leased stores planned as a unit and under single ownership is created in the vicinity of Kansas City, Missouri. |
| 1929 |
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Architect Robert H. H. Hugman presents a plan to the civic authorities of San Antonio for the redevelopment of the San Antonio River, the seed of the city's famous Paseo del Rio (Riverwalk). |
| 1932 |
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In The Disappearing City, Frank Lloyd Wright elevates America's penchant for urban sprawl into a design principal. He calls it Broadacre City. |
| 1947 |
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Communitas by Paul and Percival Goodman explores three alternative community paradigms and their possible expressions in physical-spatial forms. |
| 1950 |
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Pittsburgh is the first major American city to demolish and reshape a large part of its downtown. The finished project, comprising parks, office buildings, and a sports arena, is called The Golden Triangle. |
| 1956 |
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Southdale Center Mall, the first fully covered shopping center with climate control, is built in Edina, Minnesota by Victor Gruen. |
| 1956 |
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Convened by Jose Luis Sert, some of America's foremost architects, city planners, social scientists, and public intellectuals gather at a conference at Harvard's Graduate School of Design to define urban design. |
| 1958 |
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The Seagram Building by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is erected on New York's Park Avenue. Considered a masterpiece of the international "glass box" style, it is widely imitated and influences the appearance of many American cities. |
| 1959 |
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Construction of the nation's first outdoor pedestrian mall begins in Kalamazoo, Michigan. |
| 1960 |
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The Philadelphia Comprehensive Plan is published. It proposes a hierarchy of roads, centers, and other community facilities ascending from the neighborhood to the metropolitan level. |
| 1960 |
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In his book The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch identifies the basic elements of a city's "imageability" (paths, edges, nodes, etc.). The book represents a new and growing emphasis by the design professions on the way city dwellers perceive and use their urban environment. |
| 1961 |
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The Nation's Capital: A Plan for the Year 2000 is published. The metropolitan form it proposes is sectoral and directional: alternate corridors of growth and conservation. |
| 1961 |
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In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs critiques Ebenezer Howard's Garden City concept and the modernist Radiant City ("towers-in-a-park) idea of Le Corbusier. She takes them to task for confusing urban design with suburban design. |
| 1967 |
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In Design of Cities, Edmund Bacon explains his philosophy of design, derived in part from his study of great urban design achievements of the past, and shows how it applies to the revived design of mid-twentieth century Central City Philadelphia. |
| 1969 |
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Design with Nature by Ian McHarg, reflecting the rising tide of environmentalism, presents a method for tying urban land-use planning to underlying natural features (soil type, contour, etc.). |
| 1970 |
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Arcosanti, an experiment in designing a whole, humane, and ecologically sound city in the form of a single structure, is begun by Italian architect Paolo Soleri, in the Arizona desert 70 miles north of metropolitan Phoenix. |
| 1970 |
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The Uses of Disorder by historian and social critic Richard Sennett advocates the lifting of all current codes, statutes, ordinances, and other legal constraints as a means of arriving at a more just and viable municipal physical and social urban form. |
| 1971 |
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Learning from Las Vegas, the product of a study by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour, finds aesthetic order and value in America's commercial strips. |
| 1976 |
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Faneuil Hall in Boston, an early festival marketplace on the site of the old Quincy Market stimulates like projects in many of the nations obsolete central business districts. |
| 1976 |
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Water Tower Place opens on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. It is the nation's first vertical mall. |
| 1977 |
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Postmodernism is widely popularized by the publication of Charles Jencks's book The Language of Postmodern Architecture. |
| 1982 |
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The Portland (Oregon) Public Services Building (Michael Graves) is completed. It is considered by some to be the first postmodern building. Postmodernism is defined, among other characteristics, by its difference from modernism: it is eclectic rather than monolithic, ironic rather than idealistic, ornamental rather than functional. |
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