Daniel Burnham

Daniel Burnham: The Man Who Told a City to Dream Big

Daniel Burnham twice failed the entrance examinations for Harvard and for Yale. He never earned a design degree, never trained as a draftsman in any formal sense, and by his own account was better at baseball than books. That same man went on to run the largest building project North America had ever attempted, then handed Chicago a map for the next century of its life and told its businessmen, flatly, to "make no little plans." The gap between the failed student and the continent-shaping planner is the whole story.

A Reluctant Scholar Finds Chicago

Burnham was born on September 4, 1846, in Henderson, New York, and moved with his family to Chicago at age eight. He showed early talent as an athlete and an artist but struggled academically, and his rejections from Harvard and Yale sent him instead into a brief, unsuccessful stint prospecting out West before he drifted back to Chicago and into architecture — a field with no admissions committee to turn him away.

Sherman's Son-in-Law, Root's Partner

Burnham's break came through a commission to design a house for the stockyard magnate John B. Sherman. The job did double duty: it launched Burnham's professional reputation and introduced him to Sherman's daughter, Margaret, whom he married. It also coincided with the formation of his defining partnership, with the more technically gifted architect John Wellborn Root. Burnham & Root became one of the engines of the Chicago School, the mostly self-taught businessman supplying ambition and client relationships while Root supplied structural and stylistic invention. Together they raised the Rookery on LaSalle Street in 1886 — its lobby light court later remade by Frank Lloyd Wright — and the Monadnock Building, whose six-foot-thick masonry base walls made it, in 1891, the last of Chicago's great load-bearing-wall skyscrapers before steel framing took over. The firm also built the Reliance Building, whose thin terra-cotta piers and broad glass bays pointed straight at the glass curtain wall of the following century; it was finished by Charles B. Atwood after Root died suddenly in 1891, at the worst possible moment for the practice.

Running the White City

Root's death left Burnham to direct, alone, the most consequential commission of his career: the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Burnham was less its designer than its general contractor and impresario, coordinating a small army of architects, sculptors, and landscape designers, most working in a uniform neoclassical language, to raise an entire temporary city of plaster and steel on the Chicago lakefront on a fixed deadline. The result, nicknamed the "White City" for its bright Beaux-Arts facades and boulevards, drew millions of visitors and made Burnham a national figure. It was not uncontroversial: Louis Sullivan, the city's most original architectural voice, later blamed the Exposition's classicism for setting American design back a generation. Burnham's own office building on Michigan Avenue, the Santa Fe Building, was clad in white terra cotta as a deliberate nod to the fair that made his name — and it was in that same office that his next act took shape.

From Buildings to Cities

The Exposition converted Burnham from an architect who designed individual structures into a planner who redrew entire metropolitan regions. In the decade that followed he produced city plans for the monumental core of Washington, D.C. in 1901 — reviving and extending Pierre L'Enfant's original vision for the Mall — for Cleveland in 1903, and for San Francisco and for Manila in 1905, the last commissioned by the American colonial government in the Philippines. Each plan treated a city's parks, boulevards, and civic buildings as a single composition rather than a collection of separate projects, an approach that had barely existed as a professional practice before Burnham began doing it city by city.

Make No Little Plans

His culminating work was the 1909 Plan of Chicago, produced with the architect Edward H. Bennett after nearly three years of research into how other major world cities had handled infrastructure and growth. Commissioned and published by the Commercial Club of Chicago, the plan addressed six interlocking problems at once: the lakefront, highways beyond the city, railway terminals and transit, an outer ring of parks and parkways, the street grid feeding the business district, and a proposed civic and cultural center meant to give the city a symbolic heart. Burnham's own defense of the plan's scale became his most quoted line, urging Chicago's leaders to "make no little plans," since small ones lacked the power to stir men's blood. Much of the plan was never built — the civic center chief among the casualties — but its lakefront vision proved durable: 25 of Chicago's 29 miles of shoreline were eventually converted into public parkland, Wacker Drive was carved out of the plan's street proposals, and the document itself became a standing reference point for urban planners working long after Burnham's death.

Why Daniel Is Called a Genius

Calling Burnham a genius requires being precise about what kind. He was not, by the evidence of his own biography, a naturally gifted draftsman or a formal innovator in the way Root or Sullivan were — he failed his college entrance exams twice and leaned on more technically skilled partners for the buildings that bear his name. What he had instead was a rarer and less celebrated capacity: the ability to hold an enormous, fast-moving enterprise — hundreds of architects and workmen racing a fixed opening date at the 1893 fair, or a metropolitan region's worth of competing interests in the 1909 plan — in his head as a single coherent composition, and to keep it coherent while dozens of other people executed the pieces. That is an organizational and rhetorical genius as much as an artistic one; his gift for framing ambition in language people would repeat, "make no little plans" above all, did as much work as any drawing he produced. The honest counter-case, made by contemporaries like Sullivan, is that Burnham's taste ran conservative and imitative, and that his greatest triumph, the White City, achieved its emotional power partly by borrowing wholesale from European classicism rather than inventing an American architectural language. Both things can be true: a mediocre student and derivative stylist who was nonetheless one of the most effective large-scale organizers his profession has produced.

Legacy

Burnham finished the Chicago plan and largely withdrew from new commissions in his final years, his health declining. He died on June 1, 1912, in Heidelberg, Germany, at the age of 65. More than a century later, Chicago's lakefront parks, its widened downtown streets, and the planning departments of cities around the world still trace a direct line back to the man who couldn't get into Harvard.

Achievements

• Notable work: Washington Union Station
• Notable work: Flatiron Building
• Notable work: Reliance Building
• Notable work: Ellicott Square Building
• Worked as architect, writer and urban planner