No little plans

The city and utopia

‘The city’ has long held a special affinity with ‘utopia’ in the history of utopian thinking. Mumford has even gone so far as to suggest that it was the city itself which inspired the utopian literary genre:

The fact that utopias from Plato to Bellamy have been visualised largely in terms of the city would seem to have a simple historical explanation. The first utopias we know were fabricated in Greece; and in spite of their repeated efforts at confederation, the Greeks were never able to conceive of a human commonwealth except in the concrete form of a city…indeed, the first utopia was the city itself. (Mumford in Manuel, 1967: 3)

From the mid-19th century, utopian thinking as a purely literary genre had been eclipsed by the realm of social theory, as social thinkers grappled with the nature of changes wrought by the democratic, scientific and industrial revolutions. Utopian thinkers looked for concrete ways in which to shape the world. Utopia wanted to get real. But by the end of the 19th century, a brief resurgence of the utopian literary genre framed the city differently. Faced with industrialization, the options were to follow William Morris and abandon the city altogether as ‘the worst possible form of dwelling-place’ or to side with Edward Bellamy and imagine it differently, perhaps by rescuing nature in the form of the garden, to civilize the experience of urban life (Kumar 1987: 33–7; Morris 1889: 194–5; Beilharz 2004). Confronted too by the problems of urban industrialism, the newly emergent profession of urban planning took on a utopian dimension. The city, so long the focus of utopian writing, loomed large as a real world problem to be solved. How to imagine it, how to reinvent it, how to live in it and what it should symbolize became key concerns for architects and urban planners (Hall 2002b: 11–17).

City Beautiful and the White City

The City Beautiful movement emerged as one of the most influential responses to the problem of the city and the evils of urban industrialization. City Beautiful architects and urban planners drew on the aesthetics of classicism, offering Athenian/Romanesque grandeur as a response to the worst blights of industrial urbanism and poverty. City Beautiful planning was essentially monumental, and sought to bolster civic culture through aesthetic edification. Awe-inspiring architecture and planning would enshrine cultural ideals and stimulate civic pride, which would in turn induce social and economic improvement, serving as an ‘antidote to moral decay and social disorder’ (Freestone 2007: 3; Boyer in Rose 1996a). This style of design focused on classically-inspired structures grouped around open spaces, oriented to revere the natural beauty of a site. Streets were laid out with formal, axial geometry and wide processional boulevards which radiated outwards from the ‘civic centre’, the symbolic core and centrepiece of City Beautiful design. Grand parks and public spaces embellished with statues, fountains and triumphal arches, as well as impressive gateway railroad stations, were all typical of the City Beautiful style (Freestone 2007: 27–8; Fischer 1984: 11).

Aesthetically inspired by the Parisian Ecole des Beaux Arts, City Beautiful planning was exemplified by the monumentalism of the ‘White City’ at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Architect Daniel Burnham and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmstead created the ephemeral ‘White City’, an incredible feat of engineering and the centrepiece of the Fair. ¹ Designed to signal America’s (and Chicago’s) arrival as a major player in the architectural scene, its Beaux-Arts style declared that American architects could do neoclassicism at least as well as Paris, if not bigger and better. ² Almost 2-1/2 sq km in size, it featured enormous ornamental basins, canals and lagoons, dotted with gondolas, islands, and a massive ‘Court of Honor’. ³ Its effects were not only awe and aesthetics; as the first large-scale electrification project, it had major technological influence. Westinghouse won the supply contract for the White City over General Electric, and finally settled the ‘war of the currents’ standoff between direct and alternating current electricity, setting the latter as the industry standard (McPherson 2013: 6). ⁴ The White City’s dazzling display of electric lighting, moving sidewalks and other electrical technology was also instrumental in changing attitudes towards electricity use, with a quarter of America’s population visiting the fair to be impressed and reassured about the safety and convenience of electricity (Miller 1996: 494–6).

Incredibly, it was all built to be dismantled. Rendered in plaster over temporary timber and steel frames, it did not long outlast the fair – a mere seven months (Fischer 1984: 10). It lives on in a handful of photographs that testify to the dizzying scale and ambition of the project, ⁵ but more concretely, too, in the capital cities of New World settler societies. The White City’s Beaux-Arts design and its City Beautiful ideals are echoed in the design of Washington DC and Canberra, but not only there: Manila, Baguio, Pretoria, and New Delhi are also part of the story.

Washington DC and the National Mall

The City Beautiful movement and the success of the White City inspired the revitalization of Washington DC’s monumental core, the National Mall. The Mall had languished as an incomplete version of L’Enfant’s 1793 design. The American Institute of Architects Convention of 1900 assessed Washington DC and the Mall and found it badly wanting. The Potomac River’s proximity was wasted, the existing landscape design was too Victorian and needed modernization, and the vista of the Mall was ruined by railway tracks. Olmstead and Burnham were central figures in the Mall’s 1902 re-design, coined as the McMillan Plan. This transformed Washington DC’s National Mall into the nation’s ‘civic centre’ – a cultural monument declaring America’s fidelity to the principles of the founding fathers of the nation.

Burnham drew again on the City Beautiful rendering of the European Beaux-Arts style to add cultural legitimation to the comparatively new democracy with aesthetic gestures toward the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy in statues and monuments to the American founding fathers. The offensive railway was moved, the parkway and landscaping redesigned to double the Mall in width and length, including reclaimed floodplains from the Potomac (Hall 2002a: 191). The result was a more modernized, spacious and symbolically resonant vista designed to transform Washington DC from merely the nation’s capital into the nation’s soul. And yet, American nationalism and civic pride were not the only factors at play. Explicit reference to the classicism of Athens and Rome in the wider context of American foreign interests at the time suggests that this city building project was symbolically repositioning American identity in the same period as its imperial expansion into Panama and the Philippines. Despite the overt symbolism of democracy, the legitimation bestowed on America’s sense of mission by Burnham’s Beaux-Arts monumentalism was imperial and not only national,

reflecting the manifest destiny of imperial democracy and expanding capitalism…aimed at engendering [in] every citizen, even the slum-dweller, a feeling of aesthetic appreciation and thereby of civic pride, which would motivate him to recognize and to fulfil his role as a useful member of society. (Fischer 1984: 10)

Manila and Baguio

In fact, Burnham moved on from the Washington DC project to redesign America’s newly acquired colonial cities of Baguio and Manila along City Beautiful lines, although only parts of his plans were realized. In these city building projects, careful attention to use of local plantings would naturalize what was essentially an American imperial order being imposed upon these cities. In the difficult mountainous terrain of Baguio, the geometry of Burnham’s design was dictated by the landforms rather than imposed over them, an indication of the importance of ecology in his architectural vision. It also allowed him to design a formal street layout, even with the ‘warp and weft’ of the landscape (Vernon 2011: 3–12, 9). Using the steep topography of Baguio, Burnham’s plan for the summer capital also ensured that monuments to government occupied the summits and heights, subsuming other buildings below so that ‘Baguio’s rugged terrain became the medium for America’s colonial message’ (Vernon 2011: 10). In Manila, Burnham’s design began with Manila Bay and New Luneta, featuring a broad ocean-front facing the boulevard and promenade linked to a series of parks to soften the formal geometry of the City Beautiful street plan. He placed a good deal of emphasis on native planting, green areas and fountains. The design was exemplary of the City Beautiful ideal:

These parks were to be public ones. As such, they were to not only beautify the city, but encourage social interaction among ‘all classes of people’, ilustrados and ‘commoners’ alike. This, in turn, would ‘inspire citizens to equate civic beauty with pride, cultural cohesion and social equality’. (Vernon 2011: 9)

Canberra and the Griffins

As these ideas about what capital cities could and should be were being built into existing sites in Washington and the Philippines, in the Antipodes an entire city would be built to order. In April 1911 – ten years after Federation had birthed the new democratic nation – the Australian government launched the Commonwealth Federal Capital Design Competition. The idea of a separate federal capital was nascent as part of the planning of Federation, but the real push for a new federal capital was famously a response to the ongoing antagonism between the competing cities and economies of Sydney (the country’s first city and free-trade powerhouse) and Melbourne (a protectionist bastion already operating as the federal capital at the time) (Freestone 1997: 3; Vernon 2007: 146). The rivalry necessitated a separate capital, easily accessible to both cities and located between them. Various sites were surveyed and lobbying was energetic. ⁶ Amongst the contenders, Canberra had all the elements considered necessary for the intended capital: a central plain, a conveniently situated water supply and, of course, natural beauty and impressive vistas (Freestone 1997: 8; Fischer 1984: 11–12). Unlike Burnham’s transformation of Washington DC, and his plans for Baguio and Manila, this was an untouched site which offered a unique planning opportunity, as well as the promise of international recognition for the successful designer.

Why a competition and not a commission, as with the American city building projects? The cost of a commission over a competition may have been a factor, but there was also a groundswell of professional support within Australia for a competition. The idea of a design competition for an Australian capital had been raised first in 1908 at a planning conference and was later taken up by the Minister for Home Affairs, King O’Malley. Australian town planner John Sulman was a vocal advocate of the international competition. In a fairly damning assessment (not least of himself), Sulman declared it unlikely that ‘the best result would be attained by local effort owing to lack of experience (Sulman in Fischer 1984: 17). Hoping to utilize the best and latest developments in city design and planning for the construction of the new capital, the ‘worldwide’ competition was announced almost exclusively across the Anglophone world: Cape Town, Chicago, London, New York, Ottawa, Pretoria, Washington DC and Wellington (though also Berlin and Paris) (Fischer 1984: 17). The instructions for submission contained only a few requirements: panoramic city surroundings and ornamental water, with the parliamentary building to be a dominating feature of the city (Freestone 2007: 95).

But professional suspicion of the competition galvanized into an outright boycott by The Royal Institute of British Architects and a handful of associated groups when it was made clear that the scheme’s champion, a government minister, would have the final say rather than an architect. Wary that plans wouldn’t be implemented as designed, The Royal Institute forbade its members from taking part on professional grounds (Fischer 1984: 19). Neither Lutyens nor Baker, the British architects of settler society capitals, would have a hand in Canberra. Burnham’s lack of interest is more enigmatic ⁷ but may be explained by the fact that commissions were more attractive and likely to be easier in implementing – or that his reputation was well established and needed no boost from a competition in a small backwater British dominion.

The contest between the final short-listed plans was close. They were evaluated practically in relation to hygiene, economy and possibilities for expansion, as well as aesthetically for architectural and general effect, with special attention paid to their use of trees, ornamental water, parks, and the allocation of public buildings. Among the final contestants was a group called the Australia Consortium, the only local entry to make the shortlist, in fourth place. The Consortium was a Sydney-based group comprised of two public work engineers, Charles Caswell and Robert Coulter, together with Walter Scott Griffiths, a draughtsman and town planner. Their image of Canberra was of a waterside capital with a romantic, almost medieval feel and haphazardly grouped public buildings.

The next finalists were more famous international architects. Third prize went to Professor Alfred Agache of Paris for his design of a city adorned with hybrid Paris-Versailles monuments, complete with statues of imperial lions, columns, and an airport. Second place went to Eliel Saarinen of Helsinki, Finland, for his meticulously planned and formal geometry, which included a parliament house fronted by a ‘Court of Honour’. A very close second, Saarinen’s work was ultimately rejected as ‘oppressively formal’ and severe (Freestone 2007: 97; National Archives of Australia et al. 1995; Fischer 1984: 12, 20, 28; Reps 1997: 100, 110; Taylor in Reps 1997: 226).

O’Malley’s final decision fell in favour of the work of an American couple: the Chicago-based Walter Griffin and Marion Mahony. ⁸ Their plan for a new capital drew together a number of influences, with Chicago’s architectural scene being formative: the impressive style and civic emphasis of City Beautiful planning; the Prairie School style of Frank Lloyd Wright’s practice in Chicago, where the Griffins had first met and worked together, which in turn fed into their own ‘landscape architecture’ approach; and finally a ‘Garden City’ approach to residential areas, more fully realized later in the Griffins’ plan for Castlecrag, Sydney, but also in Eaglemont, Melbourne.

Walter Griffin had visited the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and had been transfixed by Burnham’s White City. He later wrote that it was here that he got his first lesson in town planning, and a deep commitment to the civic idea that people’s surroundings mattered, that architecture was an art which shaped people’s lives and which ought to enhance them (Fischer 1984: 27). The careful attention in Burnham and Olmstead’s design to landscaping as well as building, echoed later in Burnham’s Philippines designs, would continue to resonate powerfully with the young architect whose deep love of nature was confronted by the restless and destructive urbanization of Chicago’s industrialization.

Not only was Walter Griffin’s experience of the White City and the Chicago context important to the later work he and Marion produced, but Burnham’s influence generally on the Griffins’ work was profound, especially on the layout of the design for Canberra (see Vernon 2011). The landscape dimension of Burnham’s plans in the Philippines, in Baguio and in Manila; his exacting attention to planting in his Manila Bay revitalization; his geometric City Beautiful template with axial street layouts, grand parkway boulevards and vistas – all these echo in the Griffins’ design for Canberra (Vernon 2011: 12–16). And like Burnham’s design for Washington DC, the City Beautiful emphasis on the civic centre, its symbolism and the importance of civic culture also feature as key elements of the Griffins’ plan for Canberra.

The influence of the Chicago architectural scene wasn’t limited to Burnham. Aesthetically, the Griffins’ buildings were more modernist than Burnham’s neo-classical designs, and often contained stylistic references to other cultures. Here we see the influence of Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park Studio, together with the Griffins’ spiritual appreciation of nature and the diversity of human cultures. Griffin had graduated from the University of Illinois in 1899 and met Marion when he joined Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural practice at the Oak Park Studio in Chicago. Marion was already an accomplished draftswoman, having worked with Lloyd Wright since 1895, perfecting her style of watercolour painting, which had become a hallmark of Lloyd Wright’s designs. Both Marion and Walter were well versed in the Prairie School style of building design that Lloyd Wright made famous. But the Griffins intensified the idea that the character of buildings should fit their surroundings. Rather than imitating the landform like the low, flat prairie buildings, the Griffins’ design aimed to meld landforms and buildings together. Again like Burnham, their emphasis on landscape was crucial, although with different inflections.

The Griffins shared a deep and spiritual appreciation of nature. As residents of Chicago, they witnessed industrial urbanization up close and shared a ‘uniquely American fascination with the natural world, if not wilderness, and the desire to conserve it within urban environments’ (Vernon 2007: 171). Philosophically their ideas ran the gamut of transcendentalism, the ‘civil religion’ of freedom and democracy as expressed by Whitman and Jefferson, later theosophy and Steiner’s anthroposophy – all schools of thought through which the Griffins expressed a spiritualized understanding of the universality of human cultures and the unity of humanity and nature (Weirick 1998: 59–63, 80–81).

These ideas fired an intellectual and design partnership that re-imagined how modernism could be expressed architecturally. Resisting the easy binary of modern and natural, their designs were an attempt to imagine how the two might work together harmoniously rather than acrimoniously, and sought to express universal forms that recurred across time and place. Allowing the natural features of a site to orient their plans, they augmented this with garden design so that the effect was a building which appeared to be an outgrowth of the natural site as a whole, enhanced with modern geometric design and abstract symbolism. The idea was that these would then fit both their physical and social context – natural and simultaneously modern. This romantic ecological approach, which the Griffins called simply ‘landscape architecture’, fused with their ideas about democracy and their enthusiasm for Australia’s native ecologies and botany to produce a romantic ecological nationalism in their design for the federal capital. This take on Australian nationalism would prove to be somewhat out of step with a country still attached to its dominion status with the British Commonwealth.

Canberra as a ‘bush capital’

The Griffins’ vision for Canberra as a ‘bush capital’ used the landscape itself as the central design feature. The design was not simply oriented using the landforms, but was planned out to venerate and sacralize the site itself so that the city and is landforms were joined together to embody the ideals and dreams of a young, energetic and modern democracy in the South:

The Griffins appropriated the physical site itself as Australia’s primal, enduring monument. They had, in effect, fashioned a nascent national history from the continent’s geological antiquity. (Vernon 2011: 13)

The design for Canberra was distinctively sensitive to the landscape and topography of the site, deliberately oriented to fit it perfectly. The surrounding mountains and the river were used to lay out the key lines and geometry of the city, which was dominated by two central axes. The summit of Mt Ainslie dictated the main axial line, the land axis, which was cut at a right angle by a water axis of geometric lakes, constructed using the Molonglo River (Vernon 2011: 12–13).

The axes met in front of the planned Parliament House, so the result would be a visual pathway down from Mt Ainslie, tracing a central line down a broad gardened avenue, over the geometrical lake to Parliament House before rising up to a stepped pyramid, the Capitol. Significantly, in the Griffins’ design this would be a monument to the achievements of the Australian people rather than a monument to government, so that symbolically ‘the people’ occupied the apex of the design. It was, they said, a design for the ‘newest and most advanced democracy in the world’ (Fischer 1984: 21–27; Griffin in Vernon 2006).

The Griffins had planned out the city and its use meticulously, separating government, civic, commercial, industrial and residential centres. The design featured a monumental centre which echoed Burnham’s National Mall design, with the same Beaux Arts formal lines and broad avenues. Indeed, the Griffins explicitly imagined Canberra as an Australian equivalent of Washington DC’s symbolic importance as the embodiment of American democratic ideals. The Griffins’ plan was as sensitive to the everyday uses of urban space as to the landscape and political importance. Indeed, they hoped that:

By simply moving about the city, engaging in everyday life, the powers and responsibilities of government institutions together with the rights and responsibilities of each individual would become manifest. (Griffin in Vernon 2011: 13)

The idea was more fully realized later in the design of the Griffins’ own utopian community, the suburb of Castlecrag in Sydney, noted for its lively and close-knit bohemian populace, and in which they lived together for 10 years (see Walker 1998: 74–87). Their Eaglemont ‘Glenard’ and ‘Summit’ Estates were also significant as experimental designs for neighbourhood units, with localist bush gardens which preserved mature eucalypts, unfenced plots and homes designed facing common parklands – all now considered valuable real estate (Navaretti 1998: 112, 139).

The anti-urban radical nationalist tradition, made so popular first by William Lane and later Russell Ward, would have thought the term ‘bush city’ very odd – oxymoronic. But, as with other utopians like Bostonian Edward Bellamy and the Melbourne writer Joseph Fraser, who each criticized the cities of the industrial age, the Griffins’ ‘bush city’ was not a rejection of urban space but a reimagining of it (see Beilharz for a discussion of Bellamy’s ‘Machine in the Garden’, 2004). Their ‘bush city’ was really a style of Garden City with a City Beautiful layout and core. It was a city to be lived in, to enhance the rhythms of everyday lives and nurture communities, joined to a powerfully symbolic core designed to inspire a nation. For the Griffins, the excitement of the Canberra project was that it was a nation-building project. They had designed a capital to express the egalitarian character and aspirations of what they felt to be the newest and most advanced democracy in the world, the same nation which so many had looked to as part of the ‘social laboratory of the world’. They imbued their design with the sense of democratic mission which they believed Australia represented. When he heard that his plan had won, Griffin declared breathlessly, almost incredulously:

I have planned a city not like any other in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I expected any governmental authorities would accept. I have planned an ideal city – a city that meets my ideal of the city of the future. (Griffin in Freestone 2007: 100)

Utopia dismantled

Less committed to the Griffins’ singular vision and more concerned with what might be ‘necessary’ (or rather, affordable) to get the capital built, King O’Malley declared in the Melbourne Argus (24 May 1912):

as Minister for Home Affairs, [I] would be justified in using all the designs if necessary in order to produce the working design on which the capital would be built. A park might be taken from one, a boulevard from another, and a public square from a third.

The land use allocations and other symbolic content of the design were discarded, and only the street layout retained. Street names like Federal, State, Australasia and Oceanic Circuit were replaced with Kings, Dominion, Empire and Captain Cook Crescent, which was justified by being ‘more in keeping with Australian sentiment’ (Vernon 2012: 57). Australia’s place in the world was defined not just by its promise as a fledgling democratic nation but also by its place within the British Commonwealth. And so the centre held; it was simultaneously an imperial and national moment. The carefully considered democratic symbolism of the Griffins’ design was eventually altered in favour of a number of other imperatives – primarily the practical need to lower costs during wartime and scarcity, as Australia prioritized its duty to defend the Empire over the national capital project. Walter Griffin eventually resigned from the project in 1920. It was no longer the Griffins vision.

The Griffins’ grand design was essentially a misrecognition – not least of the Federal Capital Competition’s purpose – but primarily of Australian nationalism. Australia’s capital then was not a nation-building project in the same sense as Washington DC, and rather than the idealistic southern republic that the Griffins had imagined themselves building for, they found a country of ‘independent Australian Britons’ (Vernon 2006; Deakin in Macintyre 1999: 146). As Belich (2009) suggests, America’s settlement history progressed from nationalism (borne out of a colonial revolution) to imperial expansion – first westward and then outwards. Australia lacked that sense of national mission, of destiny. Australia’s economic and cultural ties with Britain remained firm and affectionate, leavening its nation-building ambitions. American imperialism looked stridently outwards to the ‘newlands’, whilst Australia’s looked back cosily to the ‘oldlands'.

For the Griffins, the plan for Canberra was unashamedly utopian, a democratic symbol not only for the new nation but also for the world. But Australia was no greenfield. It was not built on an empty site in 1913 (nor in 1788), as Canberra could be. The nation carried a longer history, with the identity complexities of a settler society that retained affective, cultural, and economic connections to its homeland, as well as regional colonial histories. Federation didn’t resolve these complexities into a strong national sense of mission, and it isn’t clear that the national capital project was utopian for the Australians that selected its design and built it – Burke’s recent claims about the ‘utopian ideals of federation’ notwithstanding (Burke 2013: 9). The planning board was full of bureaucratic intrigue; their approach was explicitly practical and eclectic, not utopian. Less of an idealistic expression of the spirit of Federation and nationhood, Canberra was decried as ‘a good sheep paddock spoiled’ and was resented by those who faced moving to the ‘middle of nowhere’ with the shifting of Parliament (Grieg 2012: 59). Neither was it considered utopian for those who subsequently inhabited it, although it has had its lyrical defenders since (see McGrath 1992; Slessor 1966; Thwaites 1987).

Following the Depression it languished, short of funding for several decades, until Menzies established the National Capital Development Commission (1958–88) and it began to fulfil the symbolic role of a national capital (Burke 2013: 5). By 1972, it had become sufficiently important to warrant symbolic re-appropriation with the establishment of the Aboriginal tent embassy on the lawns outside of Parliament House, protesting the exclusion and marginality of Aboriginal Australians from the formal seat of national power (Vernon 2006: 146; Banivanua Mar and Edmonds 2010: 253). Later, Commonwealth Place (2000) and Reconciliation Place (2001) offered contemporary representations of citizenship and the Aboriginal histories formerly excluded (Vernon 2006: 144–6). More recently, Canberra’s centenary year in 2013 was marked by a year-long celebration and a new round of consideration about what exactly it represents. ⁹ Re-imagined over the course of the 20th century, and perhaps now more central to the nation’s sense of self, Canberra has never ceased to be a contest, the central symbol of an ‘imaginary nation mapped over the land space now called Australia’ (Beilharz 2005: 74). What it should and does mean has been continuously debated, and the city continues to negotiate the frictions between its symbolic role and the pragmatic realities of everyday life. But if Canberra represents an ongoing conversation about nationhood, one which resists being closed up and evades a singular myth or narrative, perhaps this is the kind of living democracy that was hoped for – perhaps the Griffins would be happy after all.

Pretoria’s Union Buildings

Like the Washington DC Mall revitalization, Herbert Baker’s work on Pretoria’s Union Buildings didn’t encompass an entire capital city, but as the seat of government and the primary monument to South Africa’s Union it was a significant architectural declaration of the values of the newly formed union. The cornerstone was laid in 1910, with the buildings completed in 1913. Designed to ‘give dignity and beauty to the instrument of government and the symbol of the Union’, it enshrined a new harmony between the four colonies of the English and Afrikaner people after the bitter fighting of the Boer Wars (Baker in Irving 1981: 278). Baker selected the hilltop site of Meintjieskop but deliberately placed the buildings within the natural amphitheatre rather than on the hilltop, incorporating the entire vista as a part of the monument itself, rather than seizing the more imposing position above. As with Baguio and Canberra, this was simultaneously aesthetic and political: appropriating the rough kopje backdrop to symbolize British and Boer history, Baker’s design made ‘the ground itself…indigenise imperial rule’ (Vernon 2007: 158). The buildings incorporated the local architectural vernacular with both Edwardian and Cape Dutch styles (but privileged the former), ¹⁰ and although Pretoria isn’t usually noted as a City Beautiful site, the buildings do exhibit the same classicism and hallmark grandeur, with their columns, domed towers, temples, geometric roads, monumental scale and careful attention to landscape. Baker’s references were a more direct experience of Mediterranean neoclassicism rather than the Beaux-Arts lens, with landscape and gardens in picturesque style, producing an effect very similar to the monumental classicism of the City Beautiful style, but also shaped by a different mix of colonial histories (Vernon 2007: 152–5, 149).

Baker’s disappointed hopes that Pretoria might become the sole capital of the South African Union, and that his project there might expand beyond just the Union Buildings into a broader capital building mission, is an indication of complex tensions encoded in the South African nation-building project. British and Boer imperialisms were not neatly resolved aesthetically or politically into the project but continued to jostle, alongside the exclusion of a diverse number of black African ‘nations’. The Union Buildings were – originally at least – monumentalism in the service of a unified white imperialism, without reference to indigenous Africans:

The Victory was, of course, illusory: the architect’s stylistic reliance upon classicism and monumentality camouflaged the precarious reality of Britain’s hold over the hearts and minds of the defeated Boers. (Vernon 2007: 150)

New Delhi: A new imperial capital

In 1911, King George V announced that a new imperial capital would be built in Delhi. The plan for New Delhi, a collaboration between Lutyens and Baker, also drew on City Beautiful Athenian/Romanesque formal classicism, and followed a similar design to Washington and Canberra. It featured the same axial geometry and a long, grand avenue punctuated by monuments of civic/governmental significance: beginning with the Viceroy’s House, the Jaipur Column and up to the All India Memorial Gate. But this was a very different use of City Beautiful monumentalism. Designed to instil awe, like Pretoria’s Union Buildings, this plan made none of the symbolic gestures towards democracy so central to Washington or Canberra. It was to be an ‘Asian Rome’ – imperialism sublime (Joardar 2006: 187). There was, at the Viceroy’s insistence, some very sparing engagement with local architectural flavours – domed chatris and Indian motifs – but this was a minor political gesture at best. Griffin would later characterize it as ‘essentially roman even to the togas of the statues of the viceroys despite the effort to supply local colour in all the details’ (Griffin in Rubbo 1998: 40). The city’s planned purpose was to consolidate power and inspire those under British rule to see it as the ultimate embodiment of authority. This was the City Beautiful as undiluted imperialism; a colonizing project entirely disconnected from Old Delhi and the concerns of the Indian populace, aside from the ambition to impose a sense of British majesty and political acquiescence upon them (Hall 2002a: 199).

Baker noted the similarity between their New Delhi plan and the L’Enfant plan for Washington DC, and the ‘predominant notes of American Beaux Arts planning were stuck’: the wide open spaces, low density zone, gardens, the cross-axial geometry of the street layout and the central focus on symbols of governance (Hall 2002a: 201; Irving 1981: 88). But both Baker and Lutyens were silent on the influence of the Griffins’ Canberra plan, leaving its role ‘impossible to determine’ – rather implausibly, given that India’s Viceroy had specifically requested a copy of Canberra’s plan in 1913 and the Delhi town planners had studied its layout (Irving 1981: 87). The direct comparison to Washington may have been more savvy, though: in 1931, the year that New Delhi was finally completed and inaugurated, the New York Times was suggesting that the Canberra project might still be abandoned (Vernon 2012: 57, 59). And yet New Delhi itself remained a British capital for only 16 years before its monuments were given over to a newly independent Indian republic, which appropriated the Viceroy’s house as Rashtrapati Bhavan, and Kingsway and Queensway as Rajpath and Janpath (Hall 2002a: 198).

Other threads of this story connect to India too. Walter Griffin’s career following his exit from the federal capital project further underlines the traffic in architectural ideas at the time. He gained a commission through his anthroposophical contacts, and went to India to design the Lucknow University Library. Mahony later joined him there and together they were prolific in creating a kind of modernist Indian style of architecture, true to their mission of making modern design fit both people and place. Mahony wrote that the design for the Lucknow Library ‘looks and feels quite Indian, and yet is the last word in modernism’ (Mahony in Griffin 1939: 9). It was this grasp of ‘this complex relationship between universal modernism and the specificity of locality’ that became the Griffins’ legacy to India and to landscape architecture (Sherrington 2006).

Utopia revisited

Canberra’s inception was a high point in this wave of utopian architectural design and urban planning which shaped cities across New World settler societies. The Griffins’ vision of a capital for a vigorously democratic nation with a self-conscious sense of mission was an American interpretation of Australia as a nation-building project. They drew on utopian ideals of design that had travelled from Paris via Chicago to Washington DC and from there traced out other lines of cultural traffic – in Baguio, Manila, Canberra, Pretoria and New Delhi. Each had a particular moment built into the landscape with City Beautiful style design. Washington DC’s re-design was heavy with symbolic Athenian reinvention, with cultural legitimation of the new world democracy set to expand outwards. Canberra’s design reflects the ambivalence of settler capitalism. Its moment was not only a national one; colonial ties to the British empire also played a role in shaping the city, effacing some of the planned gestures towards nationhood and democracy. But Canberra remains distinct as the most fully realized, large-scale version of City Beautiful design. Pretoria’s Union Buildings are an insertion, an attempt to elevate a narrative of unified British and Afrikaans colonial power amongst a long history of English, Afrikaans and African conflict. The ‘two faces’ of Pretoria represented in the building, originally designed to represent the two white colonial powers of South Africa, were reinterpreted as black and white with the end of apartheid to accommodate changing ideas of South African nationhood. New Delhi’s design was less concerned with capturing the soul of a people and often more centred on symbolizing unmitigated imperial power and colonial grandeur, although the project turned out to be British imperialism’s last gasp before Indian independence appropriated the capital for its own national project.

These buildings and designs are a testament not only to the circulation of people and ideas within empire, but also within a global network of settler capitalist states operating across or between empires: an indication that the histories of utopian and architectural ideas are ‘richer, more complex and more geographically diverse’ than a single vantage point would suggest (Lochhead 1999: 201). These cities are also monuments to the complex overlays of imperial interests, national projects and regional identities.

All of this is also part of a larger story too, of modernity and the particular shapes of modern dreams. Utopian striving is ubiquitous under modernity, and its expression was never limited to literary imaginings or political struggles. Modern utopian ideals are built right into our landscapes, and their actual, uneven or misbegotten embodiment continues to affect us concretely, in sometimes painful ways, as issues of development, population density and sustainability all testify. Even as utopia itself recedes from popular favour and discussion, its presence echoes.