Daniel Burnham

Daniel Hudson Burnham, who lived from 1846 to 1912, was an American architect and urban designer, a leading proponent of the Beaux-Arts movement and a famously effective organizer of large projects. Born in Henderson, New York, he grew up in Chicago and began as a draftsman apprenticed to William LeBaron Jenney. With John Wellborn Root he built the firm of Burnham and Root, which produced modern buildings of the Chicago School, and he served as Director of Works for the 1892-93 World's Columbian Exposition, the neoclassical White City. His later career gave him a central place in American city planning through the Plan of Chicago and plans for Manila, Baguio and downtown Washington, D.C. His buildings include notable Chicago skyscrapers, the Flatiron Building in New York, Washington Union Station and Selfridges in London. Louis Sullivan criticized him for dependence on classicism, while Frank Lloyd Wright, a sharp critic of his Beaux-Arts influences, still admired him.