Design
When ‘Big Plans’ Could Change the World
A new exhibition looks back at the period of grand urban design and social reform in New York City, Boston, and Chicago.
This summer, visitors to Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are being treated to a grand, thoughtful, and beautiful exhibition that explores the social-reform work of landscape architects, planners, photographers, and others active in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“Big Plans: Picturing Social Reform” (on display through September 15) recounts the story of large-scale civic improvement plans in New York, Boston, and Chicago, and the dual births of the professions of urban planning and landscape architecture that emerged from these early successes.