Background

At the turn of the nineteenth century, America was facing cultural and economic change like never before. America’s cities were changing particularly rapidly, as industrialization and big-business motivated more people to work and dwell in urban centers. This same promise of prosperity encouraged a new influx of immigration to America. All this change prompted an architectural response, one that aimed to redesign the city to be a beautiful and prosperous place for all to enjoy. The response was called the City Beautiful Movement and one of its largest and most detailed results was the Plan of Chicago, published in 1909 by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward Bennett for Commercial Club of Chicago.

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Daniel Hudson Burnham, after a circuitous education, established himself as a prominent architect in Chicago in his partnership with John Root. “In their eighteen years together Burnham and Root built over $40,000,000,000 worth of buildings, including residences, office buildings, railroad stations, hotels, schools, churches, warehouses, stores, hospitals, and miscellaneous structures…”[1] Their success was in large part the result of the great number of building opportunities available in the wake of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Together, their greatest architectural legacy was their skyscraper designs. Daniel Burnham’s architectural success in the city of Chicago and across America and his many connections with prominent business owners in Chicago earned him the position of architectural advisor for a project that would come to define the rest of Burnham’s career, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

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In 1890, Chicago was chosen by the U.S. Congress as the location of the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair in celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America. As Director of Works, Burnham had oversight of the design and construction of the Exposition. After much debate and deliberation the fair was officially located along Lake Michigan in Jackson Park on the southern end of the city, and a unified architectural style of classicism was chosen.[2] Architects from all around the country were invited to design temporary structures that would be a part of the Exhibition. With the help of landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmsted, Burnham orchestrated and oversaw the construction of the fair.

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The most influential and the area of the Exposition from which the fair earned its name the “White City” was the Court of Honor. The court consisted of massive buildings dedicated to technology, industry, and art, displaying all that American industry was accomplishing and what the future might hold. The architecture was just as dazzling as the exhibits. The Board of Architects for the exhibition had designed each of the buildings in the Court of Honor to have a cornice height sixty feet high and a matching bay spacing of twenty-five feet.[3] The buildings were all painted white and they surrounded a lake at the center of the Court which was crossed via gondola or electric boat. The design of the Court of Honor utilized principles set forth by Beaux-Arts neoclassicism while taking advantage of modern amenities such as electric lighting.[4] Gold plating, statues, flags, domes, and towers all ornamented the tops of structures, turning what was once marshland into a shining example of what a great American city-center could look like.

Burnham’s White City showed America, at a small scale, a beautiful city, something of which many Americans had seen very few. Most American cities were grungy, smelly, crime-ridden places, but the World’s Columbian Exposition demonstrated that cities did not need to be like that. They could be beautiful and inspiring places and lots of American cities loved that idea. For the next sixteen years, Burnham focused much of career on city planning using principles set forth by his design of the World’s Columbian Exhibition.[5] Thus the city beautiful Movement was formed. Cities across the United States including, Washington D.C., Cleveland, San Francisco, and the cities of Manila and Baguio in the Philippines (a territory which the U.S. had taken control of following the Spanish-American War) all contracted Burnham to develop new urban plans for their cites. While working on these plans, Burnham was also heavily involved in the redesign of Lake Park in Chicago, which would later be named Grant Park. This work established Burnham’s reputation with the Merchant’s Club and the Commercial Club and in 1906, the former hired Burnham to create a plan for the urban renewal Chicago.[6] In the years that followed, Burnham worked diligently to create a plan that would improve the city of Chicago, to make it a more beautiful and more economically successful city.

 

[1] Thomas Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 16.

[2] Ibid., 76-79

[3] "Arnold, The Court of Honor at the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893)," Newberry Publications, accessed February 19, 2019, https://publications.newberry.org/makebigplans/plan_images/arnold-court-honor-world%E2%80%99s-columbian-exposition-1893

[4] Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 19

[5] Ibid., 22.

[6] Ibid., 26-30, 68.