1846-1912
Architect and City Planner

Forging the Chicago Style.

Burnham and Root was one of the most successful architectural firms in America in the late nineteenth century. Daniel Hudson Burnham and John Wellborn Root became partners in 1873 and designed many of Chicago's most notable buildings. Their early works, such as the Montauk Block (1882), the Calumet Building (1884), and the Rookery (1886), had cast-iron interior columns and load-bearing masonry walls. The first building in which they used an all-steel frame was the Rand-McNally Building (1890). Burnham and Root's creative partnership was abruptly ended in 1891 by the death of Root at the age of forty-one. The firm, renamed D. H. Burnham and Company, went on to build many important buildings, such as the Great Northern Hotel (1892) and the Masonic Temple (1892), the tallest buildings of their day, each at twenty stories. The Reliance Building (1895) gained praise with its steel frame and...