DANIEL BURNHAM ARCHITECTURE MODELS

Daniel Burnham is best remembered today for the aphorism — almost certainly misattributed — that advises making no small plans. His buildings make the case more convincingly than the quote ever could.

The three buildings in this collection span the full arc of his career and, in doing so, trace the invention of the modern skyscraper. The Monadnock Building in Chicago (1891) is the final word in masonry construction: sixteen storeys of load-bearing brick pushed to the absolute limit of what that material could achieve, its tapering base and projecting cornice designed to handle a weight that no subsequent building would attempt. Four years later, the Reliance Building on State Street showed how completely the logic had changed. Steel-framed and clad almost entirely in glass and white terracotta, it anticipates the curtain-wall buildings of the mid-twentieth century with an uncanny directness. The Flatiron Building in New York (1902) carried that Chicago vocabulary east and gave it to the world — its triangular plan a response to the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, its facades as carefully composed as anything Burnham ever drew.

Three buildings. Three moments in the emergence of a new way to build.

Each model is cast in fine plaster and finished by hand in our West Sussex studio.