Daniel Burnham

Daniel Hudson Burnham (September 4, 1846 – June 1, 1912) was an American architect and urban planner. He worked in the Beaux-Arts style and has been called perhaps "the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced."

A prominent architect in Chicago, Burnham served as Director of Works for the 1892–93 World's Columbian Exposition, known as "The White City." He helped create development plans for several cities, including Chicago, Manila, Baguio, and downtown Washington, D.C. He designed many famous buildings, such as Chicago skyscrapers, New York City's triangular Flatiron Building, Washington Union Station, London's Selfridges department store, and San Francisco's Merchants Exchange. Though best known for skyscrapers, city planning, and the White City, nearly one-third of his work—14.7 million square feet—was shopping buildings.

Burnham was born in Henderson, New York, to Elizabeth Keith Weeks and Edwin Arnold Burnham. Raised in the Swedenborgian faith (the New Church), he learned that people should strive to serve others. At age eight, he moved to Chicago, where his father built a successful wholesale drug business. Burnham was a poor student but skilled at drawing. At 18, he moved east for private tutoring to pass Harvard and Yale entrance exams, but failed both, apparently due to test anxiety. In 1867, at 21, he returned to Chicago and apprenticed as a draftsman under William LeBaron Jenney at Loring & Jenney. Architecture seemed his calling, and he told his parents he wanted to be "the greatest architect in the city or country."

Still restless, Burnham left his apprenticeship in 1869 to try gold mining in Nevada with friends, but failed. He then ran for the Nevada state legislature and lost. Broke, he returned to Chicago and worked for architect L. G. Laurean. After the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871, there seemed endless work for architects, but Burnham left again, first selling plate glass windows (failed) and then working as a druggist (quit). He later noted "a family tendency to get tired of doing the same thing for very long."

At 26, Burnham joined the Chicago offices of Carter, Drake and Wight, where he met John Wellborn Root, then 21. They became friends and opened an architectural office in 1873. Unlike earlier ventures, Burnham stuck with this one. The firm became very successful. Their first major commission came from John B. Sherman, superintendent of the Union Stock Yards, which supported one-fifth of Chicago's population. Sherman hired them to build a mansion on Prairie Avenue. Root made the initial design; Burnham refined it and supervised construction. On site, he met Sherman's daughter, Margaret, and married her in 1876 after a short courtship. Sherman also commissioned the Stone Gate, an entry portal to the stockyards that became a Chicago landmark.

In 1881, the firm built the Montauk Building, then Chicago's tallest. To handle the city's water-saturated sandy soil and bedrock 125 feet below, Root designed a "floating foundation": a 2-foot concrete pad overlaid with steel rails in a lattice "grill," filled with Portland cement. This created artificial bedrock. The building was so tall it defied easy description, and the term "skyscraper" was coined. Architect Thomas Talmadge said, "What Chartres was to the Gothic cathedral, the Montauk Block was to the high commercial building."

Burnham and Root built more early skyscrapers, including Chicago's Masonic Temple Building. At 21 stories and 302 feet, it was the tallest building of its time but was torn down in 1939. The partners' talents complemented each other: both were artists and gifted architects, but Root conceived elegant designs and saw the whole structure quickly, while Burnham excelled at bringing in clients and supervising construction. They valued each other. Burnham kept employees happy with a gym, fencing lessons, and handball at lunch. Root, a pianist and organist, gave piano recitals on a rented piano. Paul Starrett, who joined in 1888, said the office was full of work but "delightfully free and easy and human."