The Chicago that Daniel Burnham confronted in 1909 still mirrored the one described by Rudyard Kipling back in the 1880s: “I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago. The other places do not count. . . . Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hugli, and its air is dirt.”
He was also a great motivator. His first partner, John Wellborn Root, was a bit of a dreamer, a social charmer who loved to improvise on the piano. Burnham’s burning ambition, his ability to inspire, and his closeness to his partner were all expressed in what Thomas S. Hines’s biography says he uttered as he paced below the bedroom where Root had just died: “I have worked. I have schemed and dreamed to make us the greatest architects in the world. I have made him see it and kept him at it—and now he dies—damn! Damn! Damn!”
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Burnham was completely dependent on his design partners—even the Plan of Chicago, though popularly remembered as the Burnham Plan, was cowritten by the young architect and city planner Edward Bennett. Because of Burnham’s need for collaborators, the quality of the work careens wildly over time. With Root he created trailblazing works of genius, including what is possibly Chicago’s single greatest building, the original Monadnock. After Root died unexpectedly in 1891, Burnham partnered with Charles Atwood to create a few more masterpieces, above all the Reliance Building, a gleaming glass jewel box at State and Washington. But Atwood, sickly and an opium addict, soon died too, and after that it was a decidedly mixed bag. There were any number of good buildings: the Butler Brothers warehouses on Canal, the sparkling Railway Exchange (the Reliance writ large) on South Michigan, Washington’s majestic if overblown Union Station. But genius had abandoned Burnham, and the years to come also produced such curiosities as the pompous Peoples Gas Building across from the Art Institute.
In Root’s original designs, the buildings for the 1893 World’s Fair were to be a refinement of the type of progressive architecture that came to define Chicago after the fire, polychromatic and human-scaled. After Root’s death, however, Burnham fell under the spell of Charles McKim, one of the great east-coast architects he’d persuaded to join his design team. McKim’s work was defined by the Beaux Arts style, which mimicked classical architecture, and he turned out to be even more obstinate and forceful than Burnham, soon convincing him that this was the only possible template for the fair’s design.
But none of these sections made it into the published plan, nor, as best Schaffer could tell, did he express these opinions anywhere else. The price of being an insider is that you have to respect the limitations and prejudices of the crowd you run with and not get too far ahead of them. That said, with the plan Burnham demonstrated his capacity to forge broad coalitions that encompassed not only the powerful but also the public.
In actuality, the diagonal boulevards were a failed component of the plan. The prime executed example, the Ogden Avenue extension from North Avenue to Clark Street, was torn out in the 1960s; it was deemed a disruption of the flow of Chicago’s traditional street grid, and sparsely used to boot. The very idea of the grid is poison to contemporary architects, who believe it eviscerates the imagining of bold new architectural forms. Yet the grid is inherently democratic. Everyone gets the same tabula rasa. Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, who won this year’s Pritzker Prize, understands the dynamic. “The buildings,” he writes, “packed densely in their right-angled grid, looming up in the sky, individualistic, in love with themselves, anonymous, reckless, tamed by the straightjacket of the grid.”
At a June symposium, Rosa, curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute, laid out their basic premise: since “Burnham interpreted Parisian streetscapes and Hausmann’s way of thinking, we thought the most logical thing to do [would be to] invite two European designers to come and look at Burnham, misread what he did, learn from what Burnham was about. . . . We compiled a list of avant-garde, buildable architects that we thought would be a great asset for a temporary pavilion in the city.”
