Daniel Burnham's Chicago

Original design drawings and blueprints by Burnham and Root for 19th and early 20th Century landmarks. 1890s engravings of the Loop and The World¹s Columbian Exposition and vintage photographs by Richard Nickel of the icons of Burnham's career.

Daniel Burnham envisioned Chicago as the new Rome. His blinding white world's fair of 1893 was built to an even bigger scale than the ancient capital, and was set in a landscape that would have dazzled Caesar. After building the Reliance building and other icons of the Chicago School of Architecture, Burnham turned his back on modernism, becoming the most influential architect of the early Twentieth Century.

Even Frank Lloyd Wright, disdainful of Burnham's classical obsession, eulogized him as "...a great man (who) made masterful use of the methods and men of his time...an enthusiastic promoter of great construction enterprises...his powerful personality was supreme."

While his stylistic impulses reached into the distant past, his business and construction techniques were fundamentally modern, transforming the profession of architecture into the highly organized corporate behemoth we know today. Daniel Burnham's great talent was as a planner, from arranging efficient traffic flow from room to room to spatial positioning of grand boulevards and railroad terminals.

ArchiTech Gallery has assembled a collection of rare drawings, blueprints and photographs of the greatest legacies of Burnham's career, all for sale in the first commercial exhibition of its type since his death in 1912. Original engineering drawings for Chicago's famous Rookery will be presented with a selection of working blueprints used to build structures for Marshall Fields, Otis Elevators and important banks in Chicago and the Midwest. And original photographs by Richard Nickel will be exhibited in addition to 19th Century engravings of the Loop and The World's Columbian Exposition.

Daniel Burnham's Chicago opens Friday, January 3rd, and continues through Saturday, March 22nd, 2003.

January, 2003 Burnham architecture By Alan G. Artner, Tribune Art Critic