DANIEL BURNHAM: ARCHITECT OF THE CHICAGO SCHOOL AND PLANNER OF CITIES

Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846–1912) was one of the most consequential figures in the history of American architecture and urban planning — a man whose influence extended far beyond the buildings he designed to shape the physical form of cities themselves. Born in upstate New York and raised in Chicago, Burnham spent his career at the centre of the most explosive period of urban growth America had ever seen, working on a scale that few architects before or since have attempted.

As a designer, Burnham was a founding practitioner of the Chicago School — the movement that developed the steel-frame skyscraper and, through it, the modern city. As an organiser, he was the driving force behind the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 — the White City, which introduced Beaux-Arts classicism to a mass American audience and reshaped the course of American civic architecture for a generation. As a planner, he produced the Plan of Chicago (1909) — the most comprehensive urban planning document written in America up to that point, and still the foundation of how Chicago thinks about itself.

Burnham's buildings are characterised by:

  • Structural ambition — some of the first and most technically sophisticated steel-frame skyscrapers ever built, developed in partnership with John Wellborn Root and later with Charles B. Atwood and Frederick P. Dinkelberg
  • Classical grandeur — the influence of Beaux-Arts training running through his commercial buildings and civic work alike, expressed in limestone and terracotta façades of composed dignity
  • Urban scale — a consistent sense that individual buildings exist within larger urban ensembles, and that the city as a whole is the architect's proper subject
  • Collaborative vision — Burnham was, above all, an orchestrator: someone who could bring together engineers, designers, and clients to realise projects too large for any single mind to hold
  • The Chicago method — the steel skeleton that freed buildings from the constraints of load-bearing masonry, allowing them to grow taller, lighter, and more transparent with each passing year

Three of Burnham's buildings are in the Chisel & Mouse collection — one in Chicago from his partnership with Root, one in Chicago from his mature independent practice, and one in New York. Together they tell the story of the Chicago School's most productive decade, from the last great wall of load-bearing brick to the first glass curtain wall to the triangular Beaux-Arts tower that gave New York one of its defining images.

  • Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse based in West Sussex, England.
  • Last updated: 25-Mar-2026
Monadnock Building facade architectural scale model

Burnham buildings as architectural objects

Chisel & Mouse creates architectural models of three Daniel Burnham buildings, each representing a different aspect of his career and a different moment in the development of the Chicago School:

Monadnock Building, Chicago

The last great load-bearing masonry skyscraper — and simultaneously the founding work of architectural modernism. A 16-storey cliff of unornamented purple-brown brick, designed by Burnham's partner John Wellborn Root in 1891 and completed in its south half by Holabird & Roche in 1893. Root's north half is the tallest load-bearing masonry structure ever built; Louis Sullivan called it "an amazing cliff of brickwork, rising sheer and stark, with a subtlety of line and surface, a direct singleness of purpose." Mies van der Rohe sketched it when he arrived in Chicago.

Reliance Building, Chicago

The first glass skyscraper — completed in 1895, with a façade more than 85 percent glass, and a white glazed terracotta curtain wall that anticipated the International Style by fifty years. Designed by Charles B. Atwood for D.H. Burnham & Company, on a base begun by Root before his death. A National Historic Landmark, now the Staypineapple Hotel. Britannica calls it "a slim glass and steel tower that presaged Modernist skyscrapers."

Flatiron Building, New York

The building that made Burnham internationally famous — the 22-storey triangular tower at the convergence of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, completed in 1902 with Frederick P. Dinkelberg. A National Historic Landmark, celebrated for its Beaux-Arts terracotta façade and its 6.5-foot-wide northern prow. Alfred Stieglitz called it "a picture of a new America still in the making." Currently being converted to 38 luxury condominiums; completion 2027.

Biography

Early life and training (1846–72)

Daniel Hudson Burnham was born on 4 September 1846 in Henderson, New York, the son of Edwin Burnham and Elizabeth Keith Burnham. The family moved to Chicago in 1855, when Daniel was eight, and it was in Chicago that he would spend most of his working life and produce most of his significant work.

Burnham was not a natural student. He failed the entrance examinations for both Harvard and Yale, attempted briefly to go into business in Nevada, and returned to Chicago in his early twenties without a clear professional direction. In 1868 he found employment as a draughtsman in the office of William LeBaron Jenney — the engineer-architect who would later introduce iron-frame construction to American commercial building — and then in 1872 moved to the office of Carter, Drake, and Wight, where he met John Wellborn Root.

Burnham & Root (1873–91)

The meeting with Root was the most important of Burnham's professional life. Root (1850–1891) was everything Burnham was not as a designer: formally trained, widely read, fluent in historical ornament, and possessed of an inventive architectural intelligence that consistently pushed beyond the prevailing conventions of commercial practice. Burnham was the businessman, the client-getter, the organiser, and the man who could hold a large and complex practice together. The two men formed Burnham & Root in 1873 and the partnership proved immediately productive.

Their early commissions were modest. But the Brooks brothers — Boston real estate developers Peter and Shepherd Brooks, who had amassed their fortune in shipping insurance and were investing heavily in Chicago real estate — became their most important patrons, commissioning a sequence of buildings that placed Burnham & Root at the centre of the emerging Chicago School. The Montauk Building (1882, demolished 1902) was the ten-storey commercial block that first established the firm as masters of the new building type. The Rookery (1888) — an eleven-storey building at LaSalle and Adams Streets with a spectacular skylit interior court later remodelled by Frank Lloyd Wright — remains one of the finest commercial buildings of the 19th century. And the Monadnock Building (1891), commissioned by the same Brooks brothers with an explicit instruction to use no ornament, became Root's last and most radical work: a 16-storey cliff of pure brick mass that anticipated modernism by three decades.

Root died suddenly from pneumonia in January 1891, aged 41, while the north half of the Monadnock was just coming out of the ground. It was one of the great losses in American architectural history. Burnham, writing to a friend, said simply: "I have worked and planned with him for twenty years. What am I to do?"

Portrait unattributed, licensed by public domain.

The World's Columbian Exposition (1891–93)

What Burnham did, in part, was turn his grief and energy into the most ambitious organisational project of his career: the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, staged in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas.

Burnham was appointed Director of Works for the Exposition in 1890 — responsible not for designing the buildings himself but for coordinating the entire effort: selecting the architects, managing the engineering, overseeing the construction of a 690-acre fairground on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Jackson Park, and ensuring that everything was built on time. The task was extraordinary, and Burnham performed it with characteristic total commitment.

The Exposition's principal buildings were designed in a unified Beaux-Arts classical style — white-painted stucco on steel frames — and the ensemble became known as the White City, a name that captured both the visual shock of its brightness (Chicago in the 1890s was coal-black with industrial soot) and its character as an ideal urban vision. Burnham assembled the leading architects of the day: Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan (who dissented furiously from the classical consensus), Adler & Sullivan, and many others. The Fine Arts Building — the one permanent structure — was designed by Charles B. Atwood, the man Burnham had recruited to replace Root.

The Exposition attracted 27 million visitors in six months. It transformed American attitudes to urban design, architecture, and civic life, inspiring what became known as the City Beautiful movement — the belief that great cities could and should be planned to the same standard of grandeur and visual coherence as the White City. Burnham became the most famous architect in America.

The historian Erik Larson, in his book The Devil in the White City (2003), used the Exposition as the setting for a double portrait of Burnham and the serial killer H.H. Holmes — a juxtaposition that gave the building campaign a new and enormous popular audience.

D.H. Burnham & Company (1891–1912)

After Root's death, Burnham reorganised the practice as D.H. Burnham & Company. With Charles B. Atwood as chief designer, the firm produced some of its most technically audacious work.

The Reliance Building (1895) — its upper thirteen floors designed by Atwood on a base begun by Root — was the most radical: a 14-storey tower of white glazed terracotta and plate glass whose façade was more than 85 percent transparent, anticipating the curtain-wall skyscrapers of the mid-20th century by fifty years. The Fisher Building (1896), also in Chicago, pushed steel-frame construction further. And then, in 1901, came the commission that would produce Burnham's most famous single building: the headquarters of the George A. Fuller Company in New York, to be built on a triangular wedge of land at the convergence of Broadway and Fifth Avenue.

The Flatiron Building (1902), designed with Frederick P. Dinkelberg, was Burnham's first New York commission. At 22 storeys and 285 feet, clad in limestone and glazed terracotta in a Beaux-Arts style that reflected the influence of the World's Columbian Exposition, it was called "Burnham's Folly" by sceptics who predicted the wind would blow it over. Its steel frame was designed by Purdy and Henderson to withstand four times the expected wind load. The building has stood for over 120 years. Alfred Stieglitz photographed it in a snowstorm in 1903 and called it "a picture of a new America still in the making." It remains, by any measure, one of the ten or fifteen most recognisable buildings on earth.

In the years following the Flatiron, D.H. Burnham & Company expanded its practice internationally, with major commissions including Union Station in Washington D.C. (1907), the Railway Exchange Building in Chicago (1904), the Selfridges department store in London (1909), and the planning of Manila and Baguio in the Philippines for the American colonial administration. Burnham was thinking, increasingly, not about individual buildings but about cities as wholes.

Portrait by unknown photographer, licensed by public domain.

The Plan of Chicago (1906–09)

The Plan of Chicago — commissioned by the Commercial Club of Chicago and published in 1909 with spectacular illustrations by Jules Guerin — was the culmination of Burnham's urban ambitions. Working with Edward H. Bennett, Burnham produced a 164-page document that addressed the entire metropolitan region: a comprehensive vision for how Chicago could grow, organise its transportation systems, create a continuous lakefront park, develop its street grid, and locate its civic institutions to maximum visual and practical effect.

The Plan was explicitly modelled on the grand European precedents — Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris, the Ringstrasse in Vienna — and shared their confidence that cities could be planned to a unified design vision without sacrificing commercial efficiency. Its most celebrated image was Guerin's rendering of the proposed civic centre: a great domed building on the lakefront, the kind of image that could inspire a city's imagination for decades. Much of it was never built, but Chicago's celebrated lakefront parks — Grant Park, Lincoln Park, the continuous public greenway along Lake Michigan — are the direct result of the Plan's insistence that the lakefront belong to all citizens.

The Plan was accompanied by one of Burnham's most famous sayings — almost certainly not written by him in exactly this form but widely attributed to him and perfectly capturing his spirit: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realised. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work."

Burnham died on 1 June 1912 in Heidelberg, Germany, while travelling in Europe. He was 65. His obituaries described him as the most influential architect and planner America had produced.

Legacy

Burnham's legacy is complex, because his achievements are so various. As an architect, his finest work belongs to the partnership with Root: the Monadnock above all, and the Rookery. The Reliance Building, largely Atwood's design under his direction, is perhaps the most architecturally prophetic building D.H. Burnham & Company produced. The Flatiron is the most famous.

As a planner, his legacy is the City Beautiful movement — for good and ill. The movement's faith in classical order, civic grandeur, and comprehensive planning produced some of the finest public spaces in American cities; it also, in later corrupted forms, justified urban renewal programmes that demolished viable neighbourhoods in the name of civic improvement. Burnham himself, working in the first decade of the 20th century, was innocent of these later distortions.

As an organiser and visionary, he has no American peer. The World's Columbian Exposition was the largest construction project undertaken in the United States to that date, built in less than three years from a swamp. The Plan of Chicago was the most ambitious urban document America had produced. Both were conceived and realised by a man who had failed his university entrance examinations and never received a formal architectural degree.

Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City introduced Burnham's story to a new generation. The 2023 Hulu adaptation — with Keanu Reeves as Burnham and Tom Holland as the killer H.H. Holmes — extended that audience further, and has generated renewed interest in the Exposition and in Burnham's career.

Frequently asked questions about Daniel Burnham

Who was Daniel Burnham?

Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846–1912) was a Chicago-based architect and urban planner, co-founder of Burnham & Root and later principal of D.H. Burnham & Company. He is known for the Chicago School skyscrapers he designed with John Wellborn Root, for directing the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and for the Plan of Chicago (1909).

What buildings did Daniel Burnham design?

His most significant buildings include the Monadnock Building (north half, with Root, 1891), the Rookery (with Root, 1888), the Reliance Building (Atwood for D.H. Burnham & Co., 1895), the Flatiron Building (New York, with Dinkelberg, 1902), the Fisher Building (Chicago, 1896), and Union Station (Washington D.C., 1907).

What was the World's Columbian Exposition?

A world's fair staged in Chicago in 1893, on a 690-acre site in Jackson Park, to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. Burnham directed its design and construction. It attracted 27 million visitors and introduced Beaux-Arts classicism to a mass American audience.

What is the Plan of Chicago?

A comprehensive urban planning document produced by Burnham and Edward H. Bennett for the Commercial Club of Chicago, published in 1909. It addressed transportation, parks, civic buildings, and the organisation of the entire metropolitan region. Chicago's lakefront parks are its most lasting physical legacy.

Did Daniel Burnham have formal architectural training?

No. He failed the entrance examinations for Harvard and Yale, and never received a formal architectural degree. He learned his trade as a draughtsman in architectural offices. His partner John Wellborn Root provided the formal design training that balanced Burnham's organisational and commercial abilities.

What is "Make no little plans"?

A saying widely attributed to Burnham, often quoted as: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realised. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work." Historians have not been able to identify a primary source in Burnham's own writings, and it was almost certainly compiled or paraphrased by others after his death — but it captures his spirit accurately.

What other buildings are in the Chisel & Mouse collection?

The three Burnham models — the Monadnock, the Reliance, and the Flatiron — form a Chicago School trilogy spanning 1891 to 1902. See each building's architecture guide for the full story.

Sources and further reading