Toddlin' Town.(Daniel Burnham)

In the mid-eighteen-nineties, Daniel Burnham, then the most prominent architect in Chicago, met with a young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright. Burnham had been impressed by Wright's talent but felt that he could use some seasoning. He offered to pay Wright's tuition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, to support his family, and to give him a job when he returned. Wright turned him down. It was one of the few times that Burnham, who was probably the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced, didn't get his way, and he told Wright that he was making a mistake: the Beaux-Arts style, of which Burnham was a leading exponent, was taking over the country, and Wright was deluded if he thought that his modern approach, with its open spaces and horizontal lines, would ever amount to much.

Burnham and Wright went their separate ways, but their paths kept crossing, because if you had anything to do with American architecture around the turn of the century you inevitably ran into Burnham. He designed the Flatiron Building, in New York; Union Station in Washington, D.C.; Orchestra Hall in Chicago; Selfridges department store, in London; and more banks and office buildings than you could count. He got the train tracks that had despoiled the Mall in Washington for much of the nineteenth century removed and headed a Washington planning commission that, among other achievements, set the location for the Lincoln Memorial. Most important of all, a hundred years ago, in 1909, Burnham completed work on a document with the unassuming title "Plan of Chicago" that remains the most effective example of large-scale urban planning America has ever seen. Assisted by the young city planner Edward H. Bennett, he laid out the shorefront of Lake Michigan, quadrupling the amount of parkland and thus insuring that the lakefront would forever be public open space. He created the Magnificent Mile, the double-decker roadway of Wacker Drive, and the recreational Navy Pier, which extends into Lake Michigan. Envisioning Chicago as the anchor of an enormous region, he drafted a rough outline of highways to connect the city to the places around it. Quite simply, Burnham determined the shape of modern Chicago.

Chicago is marking the centennial of the Burnham plan with a yearlong festival of exhibitions and public events, including the construction, this June, of architectural pavilions in Millennium Park by Zaha Hadid and Ben Van Berkel--odd choices, given that their avant-garde allegiance would have been anathema to Burnham. Still, the scale of the celebrations seems apt. Burnham is famous for the line "Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood." There is little evidence that he really said this, but everything he did suggests that he believed it. If Theodore Roosevelt had been an architect, he would have been Daniel Burnham.

Burnham was born in 1846, grew up in Chicago, and never went to architecture school. After trying his luck as a salesman, he fell into an apprenticeship in the office of William Le Baron Jenney, who built the first steel-framed skyscraper, and then set up a firm with John Wellborn Root. He and Root proved to be perfect partners: Root was a far more sophisticated architect, but Burnham excelled at bringing in business. The firm flourished in the construction boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and, in 1890, the partners were retained to advise on the plans for Chicago's first World's Fair. Burnham turned himself into an impresario, assembling a team of architectural rivals, including Richard Morris Hunt, Charles F. McKim, and Louis Sullivan, and assigning them each a building. (Root died of pneumonia early in the planning stage.) Chicago's 1893 World's Fair was a historic success. At a time when even the most prosperous American cities were dirty, squalid, and dangerous, the fair seemed to offer the promise of another kind of urban world entirely. Known as the White City, it launched the City Beautiful movement, giving the country a seemingly insatiable appetite for monumental courthouses, museums, libraries, and train stations that made every city look as if its roots went back to ancient Rome.

Burnham decided to make the fair a template for the future of Chicago, and trumpeted the virtues of the City Beautiful to anyone who would listen. He had the instincts of a politician, and skillfully worked himself into Chicago's power structure. In 1906, he secured the backing of an association of prominent businessmen, which paid for a staff; Burnham himself worked for nothing. He set up a ...