The World City
Andersen’s sculpture, paintings and writings demonstrate a fondness for large monumental classically inspired pieces, which, he believed, stirred in the viewer a desire for self-improvement. Much of his work was done in contemplation of the single idea of designing a perfect “World City,” filled with art, which would motivate humanity to achieve a near Utopian state. His urban planning philosophy is evident in his 1913 A World Center of Communication. This enormous tome (the text weighed over ten pounds) was written with Ernest Hébrard and grew out of Andersen’s earlier writing, The Fountain of Life. Central to the work was Andersen’s belief that art, more specifically monumental Beaux-Arts architecture, could bring about world peace and international harmony. The plan called for the creation of a central world capital. In his words, the city would be "a fountain of overflowing knowledge to be fed by the whole world of human endeavour in art, science, religion, commerce, industry, and law; and in turn to diffuse throughout the whole of humanity as though it were one grand, divine body conceived by God, the vital requirements which would renew its strength, protect its rights, and enable it to attain greater heights through a concentration of world effort.”
Evident in the treatise is Andersen’s philosophy that art could change humanity and produce perfection. While roundly criticized by urban planners of the time for its political naïveté coupled with an over emphasis on the monumental, the work demonstrates an appreciation of the political and social conflicts necessitated by the rampant nationalism of the early 20th Century and sought to use art to bring about an Utopian world. Andersen’s view of the power of art and architecture to transform society can be seen as a precursor to similar concepts advanced later in the 20th Century by a variety of urban planners including Le Corbusier in his Contemporary City.
Read more about this topic: Hendrik Christian Andersen
Famous quotes containing the words the world, world and/or city:
“One of the last of the philosophers,—Connecticut gave him to the world,—he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“Hell is a city much like London—
A populous and a smoky city;
There are all sorts of people undone,
And there is little or no fun done;
Small justice shown, and still less pity.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)