Like other makers of history, architect Daniel H. Burnham is perceived by most of us as a one-dimensional character. He was the man who said ”Make no little plans,” then created a big one for Chicago. He supervised construction at the world`s fair of 1893. Many of the buildings designed by his firm (the Monadnock, the Rookery, the Reliance) are national landmarks. We`ve heard it all so many times, we know it by heart.
Yet we rarely, if ever, hear it truly said that Burnham was the first of American architecture`s great businessmen–a hustling and socially well-connected entrepreneur who created a design empire that survived his demise by many years. Largely ignored, too, is the fact that Burnham succeeded only with the help of designers who tend to get skimpy credit. Of Burnham`s personal life, little is ever mentioned.
It happens that Mondayis the 75th anniversary of Burnham`s death. The event will be commemorated by the Art Institute in September as part of a major effort to raise funds for the purchase of important Burnham documents currently for sale. The anniversary also makes this an appropriate time to clear away some of the fog that surrounds Burnham`s reputation and put his achievements in sharper perspective.
Burnham might never have attained his Chicago power base were it not for the nagging of his mother, Elizabeth, who in 1854 talked her husband, Edwin, into moving from their home in Henderson, N.Y., to a big city offering greater opportunities. Edwin, a man of no huge ambition, eventually joined a Chicago wholesale drug business and became successful.
Daniel was a slow starter like his father, and an unlikely candidate for fame. The lad got poor marks in Chicago`s Central High School, flunked entry exams at Harvard and Yale, took a losing fling at silver mining in Nevada and failed in a brief flirtation with politics in the same state.
Young Burnham excelled at drawing, however, and finally began an architectural apprenticeship under the talented Peter Wight in 1872, when designers could barely keep up with the deluge of work that followed the Great Chicago Fire. Burnham and a young but well-trained architect named John Root set up their own shop a year later. It was the beginning of what would become a world-famous partnership.
The partners got their first break in 1874, when Burnham talked stockyards executive John B. Sherman into building a fussy Victorian mansion on the then ultrachic millionaires` row along Prairie Avenue. That commission quickly led to inquiries from other rich Chicagoans. More importantly, it resulted in an instant romance and the marriage of Burnham to his client`s daughter, Margaret Sherman.
Some historians and jealous architects–Louis Sullivan among the latter
–long held that Burnham`s talents never went much beyond getting to know the right people in high society and politics (his friendships ultimately extended all the way up to the White House).
For all his lack of a formal education in architecture, however, Burnham was at ease behind a drafting table. And if he did not personally conceive the details of grand designs, he gave his more creative colleagues all the exhortation and support they needed while he played his role as expert administrator and promoter.
Burnham`s brilliant partner, Root, was thus the principal designer of the Rookery, the Monadnock, the Montauk, Masonic Temple and such smaller Chicago gems as St. Gabriel`s Church. With those Chicago buildings alone, the names of Burnham and Root took on formidable significance, and by the early 1880s they were designing buildings in other cities as well.
It came as no surprise when the partners were given chief responsibility for laying out the World`s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Burnham was chief of construction, Root the chief architect. Yet their effort at planning the fair had hardly begun when Root died of pneumonia in January 1891. Burnham was emotionally devastated by the loss of his colleague and worried about how he would replace the man who had meant so much to his career. And then he discovered Charles Atwood.
Rather peculiarly, Atwood is given only a few lines or ignored altogether in much scholarly literature. His work is worthy of far greater recognition.
Atwood was a talented and versatile New York architect who had won a number of design competitions and counted the well known W.H. Vanderbilt houses in New York among his major achievements. Sadly, his career began to sag after the typhoid fever death of his 5-year-old son in 1886. When Atwood read about Root`s passing in the New York newspapers, he applied for the vacant Chicago job through an intermediary.
Burnham got mixed references on Atwood. The dean of Columbia University`s architecture school called him first-rate, while New York architect Charles McKim expressed reservations about Atwood`s personality. Burnham himself had an odd experience with Atwood at the time of their first scheduled interview, when the applicant failed to show up. In the end, though, he was impressed enough to hire Atwood as the world`s fair`s new design coordinator.
Most analyses of the fair`s influence on design focus on Burham`s selection of eastern firms to do much of the work and reflect on how their neoclassical designs allegedly squelched creativity in American architecture for several decades. Clearly, however, the exposition buildings designed by Atwood himself were more important than most of the others.
Atwood`s almost forgotten temporary railroad station at the edge of the fairgrounds was an extraordinary structure whose huge waiting room was inspired by the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Its interior design influenced the look of practically every major American railroad station built in the next 30 years. The Atwood-designed Fine Arts Building was an astonishingly large-scaled neoclassical triumph and the only fair structure meant to be permanent. It survives quite handsomely as the Museum of Science and Industry.
As Burnham`s new partner, Atwood also designed such commercial structures as the Fisher Building and the Marshall Field addition at the northwest corner of Washington Street and Wabash Avenue. Still more important was Atwood`s Reliance Building at 32 N. State St., easily the best-known structure ever to carry the Burnham firm`s name.
The glassy, steel-framed Reliance is grimy and decrepit today, but scholars the world over still marvel at how it anticipated the work of Mies van der Rohe and formed a bridge between the muscular 19th-Century ”Chicago School” style of architecture and the International Style born in the 1920s. No sooner had the Reliance been completed, however, than Atwood fell into a strange lethargy and began failing to show up at the office. He became so intolerable that Burnham finally fired him on Dec. 10, 1895. Nine days later, Atwood died at the age of 46. Only then did a horrified Burnham discover that Atwood had long been a mentally ravaged drug addict.
Burnham`s world travels with his wife in the closing years of the 19th Century helped ease the strain he had been under. The journeys also inspired him and sharpened his visions of a greater beauty and order for American cities. Those interests, his talent and his political connections led to the selection of Burnham as chief of a team to create a master development plan for Washington, D.C.
The Chicago architect finished that plan in 1902 and in the next four years created similar plans for Cleveland, San Francisco and the Philippines cities of Manila and Baguio. During the same period, Burnham opened architectural branch offices in New York and San Francisco. As his top associates, he named Ernest Graham, Pierce Anderson, Edward Probst and H.J. White.
While Burnham became internationally known, his celebrity status in Chicago took on even greater luster. Burnham`s tall and increasingly portly figure (he loved to eat) was seldom missing from important civic and society events attended by Chicago`s power elite. He was generous with his time and money when it came to supporting cultural institutions, particularly the Chicago Symphony. Burnham raised most of the money for building Orchestra Hall and waived his firm`s fee for designing it.
Burnham`s elaborate Chicago Plan of 1909 has been endlessly chronicled, but too often making Burnham appear to have been its solitary creator. Actually, the Burnham plan as published might never have captured the city`s imagination had it not been for its glorious watercolors and drawings by Jules Guerin and Fernand Janin. Furthermore, a similarly grandiose Chicago plan was created a full six years before Burnham`s by a go-getter named James Gookins, who had the misfortune to drop dead of a stroke in New York while seeking financial backing.
On the other hand, Burnham`s fame as a planner brought him offers from many other cities that wished to manage their growth, among them Detroit, Montreal, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Atlantic City, Memphis and Nashville. Burnham turned them down because his health was not the best and he wished to concentrate on the design of buildings.
By 1910, Burnham`s architecture firm had become the largest in the world
–surpassing even the volume of design work by the mighty New York office of McKim, Mead and White. Burnham`s office skyscrapers, department stores, banks, railroad stations and other major structures were built in such cities as New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Boston, Washington, D.C., and London, England. The firm`s later Chicago work included the Insurance Exchange, People`s Gas and the Field Museum of Natural History.
Commissions poured into Burnham`s shop partly because its buildings were conservatively styled and dependably functional. Just as importantly, businessmen were reassured by the fact that Burnham structured and ran his company in the same way they ran theirs. He was one of them.
To this day, that variety of business rapport–developed to a science by Burnham–is essential to the nation`s most profitable design firms. And if some of the buildings created by Burnham`s team turned out to be rather eclectic because of bows to client quirks–well, that was part of the game and to a degree it still is.
Burnham and his wife were on another European trip in 1912, when the architect suddenly fell ill in Heidelberg, Germany. He died on June 1 of colitis made acute by food poisoning and by the diabetes he had suffered for many years.
Yet while the death claimed one of the giants of Chicago architecture, it did not mean the end of his huge design organization. Two of Burnham`s sons, Hubert and Daniel Jr., had been architects with their father`s firm and continued the practice. Their single best-known work is the gold leaf-topped Carbide and Carbon Building at 230 N. Michigan Ave., completed in 1929.
It remained for four other Burnham partners to break away and form a separate firm that fully sustained their reputation for bigness. Graham, Anderson, Probst & White–an organization still active today–was by far the most prolific Chicago design firm between the two world wars. Its work in that period included the Merchandise Mart, the Wrigley Building, Union Station, the Civic Opera House and Shedd Aquarium. Partner Ernest Graham became a millionaire, and after his death in 1936 part of his estate endowed the prestigious Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts.
Burnham the philanthropist would have approved of that bequest. He would have been interested, too, in how his style of architecture-as-big-busi ness has been made to work for other design firms including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill–founded 50 years ago in Chicago and now the world`s largest. ”Make no little plans” is still a slogan taken seriously in Chicago, even if no longer applied to utopian visions of the City Beautiful.
Seventy-five years of hindsight makes it possible to assign new priorities to Burnham`s achievements. We see today that his grandiose if occasionally impractical city planning was of some enduring value to Chicago and Washington, even though its European roots were never fully accepted in America. We understand clearly that some of the brilliant work by Root and Atwood might never have happened were it not for Burnham, the well-connected organizer, bringing in the commissions.
Architecture is an art, a science and a business. Burnham`s grasp of all three was firm, pragmatic and occasionally inspired. He personally turned out no single structure that assured him a place in history–no Robie House, no Auditorium Theater, no Board of Trade Building. But he was a whole architect who disdained no aspect of his profession. And by excelling at it in so complete and exuberant a manner, he became one of its giants.
BURNHAM`S MONUMENTS ARE STILL STANDING IN CHICAGO
Any tour of the best-known Chicago buildings by Daniel Burnham and his colleagues would have to include:
— The Monadnock, 53 W. Jackson Blvd. Burnham and his partner, John Wellborn Root, designed the north half of this landmark in 1891; the south half was done two years later by Holabird & Roche. The exterior masonry bearing walls are nearly 6 feet thick at the base to carry the immense weight of 16 stories.
— The Reliance, 32 N. State St., a glassy, thin-walled 1895 office tower that anticipated, quite astonishingly, what Germany`s Bauhaus architects would be dreaming about a quarter of a century later. The antithesis of the Monadnock, its weight is carried by an internal steel skeleton of much the same sort used now. Credit Burnham partner Charles Atwood for this one.
— The Marshall Field store, a State Street merchandising bastion, made all the more impressive by its ruggedly handsome facades and interior topside mosaics.
— Chicago Title & Trust Co., 111 W. Washington St., a handsome, terra cotta-clad 1913 building recently refurbished and modernized to splendid effect.
— Peoples Gas Co. Building, 122 S. Michigan Ave., built in 1912 and restored not long ago. The building`s big granite columns create a sweeping, almost intimidating presence along the avenue.
— Santa Fe Building, 80 E. Jackson Blvd., created in 1904, is another Burnham beauty that lent itself to recent modernization without disturbing the integrity of the original design. Be sure to see the lobby.
— Orchestra Hall, 220 S. Michigan Ave. Burnham, an enthusiastic music patron, executed this one in Neo-Italian Renaissance style 82 years ago.
— The Rookery, 209 S. LaSalle St., is 101 years old and fully leased to prestige tenants who like its robust forms and its lobby remodeled by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905.
— St. Gabriel Church, 4501 S. Lowe Ave., is stark, powerful and strongly suggestive of the personal Romanesque style developed by Boston architect H.H. Richardson. It was completed in 1888.
— The Museum of Science and Industry, 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive. It was built as a ”fine arts palace” for the 1893 World`s Columbian Exposition and intended to be the only permanent residual structure on the grounds. Its immense size and Greek Revival detailing make it a showplace still.
