Daniel Burnham

Daniel Hudson Burnham FAIA (September 4, 1846 – June 1, 1912) was an American architect and urban designer. A proponent of the Beaux-Arts movement, he may have been "the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced."

A successful Chicago architect, he was selected as Director of Works for the 1892–93 World's Columbian Exposition, colloquially referred to as "The White City". He had prominent roles in the creation of master plans for the development of a number of cities, including the Plan of Chicago, and plans for Manila, Baguio and downtown Washington, D.C. He also designed several famous buildings, including a number of notable skyscrapers in Chicago, the Flatiron Building of triangular shape in New York City, Washington Union Station in Washington D.C., London's Selfridges department store, and San Francisco's Merchants Exchange.

Although best known for his skyscrapers, city planning, and for the White City, almost one third of Burnham's total output – 14.7 million square feet (1.37 million square metres) – consisted of buildings for shopping.

Burnham was born in Henderson, New York, the son of Elizabeth Keith (Weeks) and Edwin Arnold Burnham. He was raised in the teachings of the Swedenborgian, also called "The New Church" which ingrained in him the strong belief that man should strive to be of service to others. At the age of eight, Burnham moved to Chicago and his father established there a wholesale drug business which became a success.

Burnham was not a good student, but he was good at drawing. He moved to the eastern part of the country at the age of 18 to be taught by private tutors in order to pass the admissions examinations for Harvard and Yale, failing both apparently because of a bad case of test anxiety. In 1867, when he was 21 he returned to Chicago and took an apprenticeship as a draftsman under William LeBaron Jenney of the architectural firm Loring & Jenney. Architecture seemed to be the calling he was looking for, and he told his parents that he wanted to become "the greatest architect in the city or country".

Nevertheless, the young Burnham still had a streak of wanderlust in him, and in 1869 he left his apprenticeship to go to Nevada with friends to try mining gold, at which he failed. He then ran for the Nevada state legislature and failed to be elected. Broke, he returned again to Chicago and took a position with the architect L. G. Laurean. When the Great Chicago Fire hit the city in October 1871, it seemed as if there would be endless work for architects, but Burnham chose to strike out again, becoming first a salesman of plate glass windows, then a druggist. He failed at the first and quit the second. He later remarked on "a family tendency to get tired of doing the same thing for very long".

At age 26, Burnham moved on to the Chicago offices of Carter, Drake and Wight where he met future business partner John Wellborn Root, who was 21 and four years younger than Burnham. The two became friends and then opened an architectural office together in 1873. Unlike his previous ventures, Burnham stuck to this one. Burnham and Root went on to become a very successful firm. Their first major commission came from John B. Sherman, the superintendent of the massive Union Stock Yards in Chicago, which provided the livelihood – directly or indirectly – for one-fifth of the city's population. Sherman hired the firm to build for him a mansion on Prairie Avenue at Twenty-first Street among the mansions of Chicago's other merchant barons. Root made the initial design. Burnham refined it and supervised the construction. It was on the construction site that he met Sherman's daughter, Margaret, whom Burnham married in 1876 after a short courtship. Sherman commissioned other projects from Burnham and Root, including the Stone Gate, an entry portal to the stockyards which became a Chicago landmark.

In 1881, the firm was commissioned to build the Montauk Building, the tallest building in Chicago at the time. To solve the problem of the city's water-saturated sandy soil and bedrock 125 feet (38 m) below the surface, Root came up with a plan to dig down to a "hardpan" layer of clay on which was laid a 2-foot (0.61 m) thick pad of concrete overlaid with steel rails placed at right-angles to form a lattice "grill", which was then filled with Portland cement. This "floating foundation" was, in effect, artificially-created bedrock on which the building could be constructed. The completed building was so tall compared to existing buildings that it defied easy description, and the name "skyscraper" was coined to describe it. Thomas Talmadge, an architect and architectural critic said of the building, "What Chartres was to the Gothic cathedral, the Montauk Block was to the high commercial building."