Daniel Hudson Burnham’s directive to “make no small plans” remains a fitting
summary for a man whose life and work was defined by the expansion, growth, and
prosperity of well-to-do Americans in the decades that surround the turn of the 20th
century. Not only did Burnham house businessmen and statesmen who drove the
American commercial and political engine to its unmatched expansion, but he also
defined and gave architectural expression to the building types and urban forms they
brought to life.
Burnham was born into a family of modest means in rural New York. In 1855 his
family moved to Chicago, drawn by the thriving new city’s opportunities. At first,
seeking his fortune elsewhere, Burnham made unsuccessful attempts to get an Ivy League
education, mine for silver in the West, and run for public office in the late 1860s. Upon
returning to Chicago, Burnham fell into architecture, rather than having been led by a
muse to express himself in built form. From the start, Burnham saw architecture as a
business opportunity. After working briefly for a series of architectural offices that
included Loring and Jenney in 1872, Burnham settled in with Carter Drake and Wight,
where he met John Wellborn Root. In the following year, the two men channeled their
complementary interests and talents into opening their own firm. Root was more
aesthetically inclined and detail oriented, and became the firm’s primary designer,
whereas Burnham’s organizational and social skills were directed toward business
matters and planning efforts.
Their first projects were residences for wealthy Chicagoans, and were characterized by
an affinity for period styles and historical eclecticism. They included a house in 1874 for
stockyard mogul John B.Sherman that was built on fashionable Prairie Avenue. This
project was essential to Burnham’s later development and professional life, and offered
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him access to the board-rooms of high-powered patrons; it became his social entrée to
dinner parties following his marriage to Sherman’s daughter. From this point, Burnham
and Root were catapulted into the elite social and business circles in Chicago.
His patrons enhanced Burnham’s natural inclination toward the entrepreneurial.
Declaring that he was “not going to stay satisfied with houses,” Burnham envisioned
assembling a “big business to handle big things, deal with big businessman, and to build
up a big organization, for you can’t handle big things unless you have an organization”
(Hines, 1974). His growing firm focused on office-building projects, for which Burnham
laid out the plans, and they soon became the standard for this new building type; Root
was responsible for the detailed designs. Burnham’s functional, utilitarian designs were
based largely on H, U, or square plans accommodating interior light wells, while
exposing a maximum amount of the exterior walls to light and air. Their 11-story
Rookery Building (1887) is a square plan with one double-loaded corridor wrapping a
central light court; all of its offices opened onto either this court or the exterior. The
efficient plan was matched by an innovative, iron-curtain, wall structure not evident
under the building’s brick and terracotta shell, articulated into five heavy layers, with a
profusion of neo-Romanesque ornament. In contrast, the recently restored internal
court—a delicate web of cast- and wrought-iron skylights and cantilevered stairways—is
a dazzling display of late-19th-century building technology.
Whereas the Rookery showed indebtedness to 19th-century historicism, another office
building constructed in the following decade pointed toward the future. The Reliance
Building (1894) eschewed overt historical detail in favor of a more utilitarian, functional,
structure-expressing language for which the Chicago School is well known. The 14-story
steel frame was wrapped in fireproof terra-cotta and expressed clearly on the building
facade through the slender, ribbonlike spandrels that wrap each story at floor level,
leaving the greatest proportion of the facade open to glazing. Delicate foliate patterns in
the terra-cotta and the building’s original projecting cornice hearken to past traditions.
However, the startling quantity of glass, the sparkling whiteness of the glazed spandrels
with their pronounced horizontality, and the removal of vertical structural members from
the facade foretold a new spirit in office-building design: a functional, honest expression
of the structure that would reach fulfillment in the next century. Burnham’s office
buildings contributed to the development of the new building type, improving function
and comfort. Whatever the outward expression of these buildings, their decorous designs
made them impressive members of the urban landscape, suggestive of the growing wealth
and prestige of their patrons, and the importance of the activities within their walls.
With Root’s unexpected death in 1891, Burnham was forced to form other
partnerships; the firm’s name changed to D.H. Burnham and Co. and later to Graham
Burnham and Company. Each firm built on the original Burnham and Root model, with
Burnham overseeing every part of an increasingly hierarchical and specialized structure.
Adopted from the world of business, this approach led architectural practice away from
the atelierbased system, and toward the now common architectural practice. By 1910
Burnham’s was the largest architectural firm in the world, with 180 employees, branch
offices in New York and San Francisco, and buildings rising from Houston to London.
Burnham was long an advocate for professionalism in architecture, and he lobbied for
professional rights and served the American Institute of Architects (AIA) as president in
the 1890s.
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His growing fame and prominence in social and professional circles made Burnham an
appropriate choice to direct the architectural planning of the World’s Columbian
Exposition of 1893 held in Chicago. It was not only a fair; the exposition was a city in
miniature and inaugurated Burnham’s practice as an urban planner. As director, Burnham
took control of virtually every aspect including the hiring of workers, laborers, artists,
and architects, and overseeing their work and the construction of all buildings. Burnham
led the team of prominent architects in arranging a series of buildings around a
centralized Court of Honor. To encourage harmony among the designs in response to the
classical taste shared by many of the École-trained architects, the committee agreed to a
uniform cornice height and a classical vocabulary for their individual buildings, which
were to be grouped around the central Court of Honor. References to imperial and
Renaissance Rome, Versailles, and post-Haussmann Paris were manifest in the fair’s long
axial boulevards, water elements, and monumental classical architecture. Although a
variety of building styles were employed in the peripheral buildings, it was the images of
the Court of Honor that made the fair famous, and influenced city planning afterward.
Aesthetics were not all that concerned Burnham in the planning of the Columbian
Exposition. Although it was to be temporary, the grounds were needed to operate like a
small-scale city: electrical, steam, gas, water supply, sewage, and transportation all had to
be accommodated, which further prepared Burnham for the practical considerations of
city planning. However, in this case, other urban challenges were conspicuously absent.
For example, there were no slums, and no housing at all was designed or was to be
included. Many questioned the appropriateness of this model for real, working cities, and
it was deemed irrelevant by later historians and critics. However, the fair was enormously
successful with the thousands of visitors who flocked to it, as well as the city officials
across the country that were moved to inject some of the model into their own
municipalities.
Following the success of the fair, Burnham’s well-known administrative
and planning skills were in great demand at the turn of the century. His
most prominent commission was the Washington Plan of 1902. It was
prompted by the capital city’s centennial, renewed hope and prosperity
following the depression of the mid-1890s, and the conclusion of the
Spanish-American war. The plan began as a revival of Pierre Charles
L’Enfant’s 1793 scheme, from which departures had been made for timeand
cost-saving reasons. The design team (Burnham and other alumni of
the Columbian Exposition) studied such
Interior (waiting room), Union Station,
Washington, D.C., designed by Daniel
Burnham (1907)
precedents as Paris, Rome, and Versailles, focusing their attention on the Mall area. The
main axes of the original plan had been abandoned with the placement of the Washington
Monument. Burnham’s reconfigured Mall disguised this imperfection by redrawing the
axes to meet at the Monument. Burnham cleansed the Mall of its previous functions as
pasture, lumberyard, and railroad center, making it a wide swath of elm-lined green
space, bordered by cultural institutions. Office blocks and parks were planned for prime
locations nearby. The next four administrations drew from Burnham’s plan the
groundwork for future development in Washington, and architects followed his precepts
for layout and style. Significant additions to Washington that remained in keeping with
the plan include Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial (1912), John Russell Pope’s National
Gallery of Art, and Burnham’s Union Station (1907). Burnham’s classicized plan for the
capital—successor to and embodiment of the fulfillment of the westward march—suited
the nation’s cultural and political vision.
Burnham’s plans for Cleveland (1903) and San Francisco (1905) proved, on smaller
scale, the national influence of his city-planning ideals. His vision affected foreign
countries as well; in 1904 Burnham designed the colonial Philippine cities of Manila and
Baguio. These designs also paid homage to Beaux-Arts planning, with the city grid cut by
diagonal boulevards and dotted with a citywide park system. However, within this
imported framework, Burnham preserved local Spanish-Philippine building traditions. As
such, his urban plans encourage comparison with other early-20th-century imperial
capital planning, such as Sir Edwin Lutyens’s design for the Viceroy’s House (1913) in
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New Delhi, where Mogul and Buddhist features meld into an otherwise abstractly
classical design.
No urban scheme of Burnham’s was as sweeping as his Chicago Plan of 1909. Here,
he accepted the challenge that included not only a city center or fairgrounds, but a
complete city. Taking only the most general clues from the existing street grid and
lakeshore, Burnham reorganized the city into a 20-mile-long recreational, lakefront park,
backed by virtually endless commercial districts, with consistent cornice heights
punctuated by interior parks. The existing grid of streets was improved functionally and
aesthetically, railroad terminals were regrouped for better communication and reduced
industrial sprawl, and the Chicago River was straightened for more effective water and
riverside transportation. A great domed civic center dominated the skyline; from it, radial
boulevards reached into the suburbs miles away.
While the Chicago Plan’s aesthetics are often noted—particularly the seeming
incongruence of Burnham’s Beaux-Arts imposition on the existing industrial, commercial
nature of the jagged city, a consistency remains with his earlier vision, to ennoble the
businessman and his commercial empire. Burnham’s Chicago was a commercial
enterprise, aggrandized in a way that lent recognition to commercial activity as Chicago’s
primary cultural export. As early as the mid-1890s, Burnham had revealed the genesis of
the plan as the city’s moneymaking potential: an improved physical structure would
increase productivity and wealth, and a fine-looking city would encourage the spending
of travel dollars at home rather than abroad. Burnham’s optimistic and, ultimately
unrealistic vision, populated it with wealthy and successful business leaders with little
room for anyone else. Even so, the grandeur of Burnham’s vision directed much of
Chicago’s development in coming years: his double-decker boulevard was built as
Wacker Drive, Michigan Avenue, was broadened in the 1920s, and various lakefront
amenities were constructed in a landfill along the shore, now known as Grant Park.
Burnham’s plans served the society that he knew best: the industrialists and politicians
who endeavored to improve society through cultural gifts. With honorary degrees from
Harvard, Yale, and Northwestern; membership in exclusive social and business clubs;
extensive foreign travel; and a supporter of the arts, Burnham was among the elite of the
architectural profession, who could afford to live as their clients did. Just as businessmen
presented the city with museums and libraries, Burnham gave the gift of his talents to the
people. Most of the city plans he completed were presented free of charge. Although
some might judge this beneficence as misguided, Burnham was convinced of
architecture’s role in the improvement of society. In Century Magazine, he described the plan of
Washington as complementary to the reformation called for among progressive
politicians. He believed that aesthetic unity among buildings encouraged social harmony.
He felt the ennobling forms of classical architecture were a language meant to uplift the
populace, and express the strength and permanency of the political and social order. In
his report for the Cleveland Plan, he wrote that the “jumble of buildings” present in most
cities disturbed social peace. Architectural uniformity and harmony, as seen in ancient
cities of the world, would encourage social harmony in modern America.
Attitudes about Burnham changed radically after his death in 1912. While once he was
regarded as a powerful visionary, by the 1920s he was decried as a megalomaniac.
During the 1930s, the threat of Fascism and its orderly, uniform architecture brought a
chill to reviews of his grand designs. The aesthetic of classicism fell out of favor as
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modernism swept through the architectural academies and journals, and the few who
discussed Burnham did so with derision, grieving his renunciation of the honest
architecture of the Chicago School to follow classical, elitist, historicist, and irrelevant
flights of fancy. Recent years have been kinder to Burnham, bringing an increased
appreciation for the role of ornament in architecture after mid-century. It has lead to a
reevaluation of Burnham’s career. During the 1970s, the first serious biography of
Burnham was written, as were a flurry of dissertations on his work and planning. His
many contributions to architecture are appreciated today. Burnham’s role in the
development of the skyscraper, the planning of the modern office building, and cityplanning
concepts that were employed throughout the United States affects nearly every
architectural office in operation today.
