Daniel H. Burnham was a very influential American architect in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s. He helped rebuild Chicago after the Great Fire, helped develop the modern skyscraper, and helped revolutionize urban planning. His plan to redesign Chicago still influences designs today of modern cities, and his “Flat Iron” building is still one of the most well-known buildings of the twentieth century.
Daniel H. Burnham was born just outside of New York City on September 4, 1846. When Daniel was nine years old, he and his family moved from New York to Chicago, Illinois where he would finish out his childhood and graduate from a public high school. In his early years of adult hood, Daniel applied for college but was rejected. After that, he worked as a retail salesman, mined for gold in Nevada and even tried running for a seat in Illinois’ State Senate.
In his early twenties, Burnham started working as an apprentice for William Le Baron Jenney, a leading architect in Chicago. In 1872 Burnham moved from Jenney’s firm to Carter, Drake, and Wight Firm, where he worked as a draftsman. During this time, he met his future business partner, John Wellborn Root. After a year of working at the Carter, Drake, and Wight firm, Burnham and Root started their partnership, and business flourished after the Great Chicago Fire. They were the main firm that helped rebuild Chicago, and from 1873 to 1891 they designed and helped construct 165 private residences and 75 buildings of varying purposes. Many of their buildings were heavily influenced by European designs. Exteriors were derived from the lavish yet simple ideas of ancient Greek and Roman monuments. Due to the high demand of office space in central Chicago, the firm adapted more modern desi...
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... cities could be and they helped revolutionize urban planning. Even today his ideas about urban and regional planning “remained influential as a way to accommodate work, home, and recreation in close proximity to each other” (Gale Encyclopedia).
Works Cited
"Burnham, Daniel Hudson." Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History. 1999. Retrieved April 10, 2011 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406400128.html
Daniel H. Burnham. (2011). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/85650/Daniel-H-Burnham
Daniel H Burnham. (2011) Flatiron Building. Retrieved from
http://www.aviewoncities.com/nyc/flatiron.htm
Sullivan, Louis, The Autobiography of an Idea, Press of the American Institute of Architects, Inc, 1924. Retrieved April 10, 2011 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham#cite_note-7
The period of time running from the 1890’s through the early 1930’s is often referred to as the “Progressive Era.” It was a time where names such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller stood for the progress of America and their great contributions to American industry and innovation. This chapter however, has a much darker side. Deplorable working conditions, rampant political corruption and power hungry monopolies and trusts threatened the working class of America and the steady influx of European immigrants hoping to make a better life for themselves and their families. What started as a grass-roots movement pushing for political reform at the local and municipal levels soon began to encompass
By giving the biographies of architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, Hines does nothing to remedy his aimless writing. He writes that Neutra had a variety of experience as an archi...
Scheiber, H., H. Vatter, and H. Underwood Faulkner. American Economic History. New York : Harper &
Economic History, edited by Thomas Riggs, 2nd ed., vol. 1, Gale, 2015, pp. 132-133. U.S. History in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3611000096/UHIC?u=olat15213&xid=7ad49c26. Accessed 29 Oct. 2017.
The "Mixed Metaphors in Chicago. " Architectural Review August, 1933. v. 74 pp. 47-49.
Dell Upton is a historian and renowned professor of architecture and Urbanism at the University of California. He has published several books on architecture; one of them is “Architecture in the United States”, published in 1998. In this book, Upton analyzes the architecture of the United States in different aspects, such as nature, money and art, thus depicting the great variety in architectural forms, and how throughout the decades, different interests have lead communities to different ways of building, different purposes and materials, thus reflecting their way of thinking and their relationship with the environment. By exploring so many different architectural styles, Upton reveals the great diversity and richness that has always, and continues to characterize American architecture.
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In Chicago, he worked for architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Wright drafted the construction of his first building, the Lloyd-Jones family chapel, also known as Unity Chapel. One year later, he went to work for the firm of Adler and Sullivan, directly under Louis Sullivan. Wright adapted Sullivan's maxim "Form Follows Function" to his own revised theory of "Form and Function Are One." It was Sullivan's belief that American Architecture should be based on American function, not European traditions, a theory which Wright later developed further. Throughout his life, Wright acknowledged very few influences but credits Sullivan as a primary influence on his career. While working for Sullivan, Wright met and fell in love with Catherine Tobin. The two moved to ...
James F. O'Gorman, Dennis E. McGrath. ABC of Architecture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Document. October 2013.
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One story describes the planning of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that had been proposed to celebrate the four hundred years since Columbus landed in America. The idea didn’t get much attention until a year earlier, when Paris held a world fair and unveiled the Eiffel Tower. Not to be outdone, America decided now it was a matter of who would hold a fair that would put France’s fair to shame. There was a dilemma of where the fair would be built New York or Chicago, but votes were tallied up and the majority of the vote was Chicago. Among the many architects in Chicago, the main job of the designing the fair was given to Daniel H. Burnham. He needed a companion to help him with the design and other features of the fair, so he chose John Root, a very close friend of his and former associate. Because of the amount of time it took to decide where to build the fair, The White City was believed to be impossible to construct because of time con...
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