Daniel Larson Quotes

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood. Daniel H. Burnham

An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes, with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills." — Daniel Burnham talking about Frederick Law Olmstead

I find it all infinitely sad, but at the same time so entrancing, that I often feel as if it would be the part of wisdom to fly at once to the woods or mountains where one can always find peace. - Dora Root in a letter to Daniel Burnham

I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I. Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word.' The same happened at Yale, Both schools turned him down. He never forgot it.

I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I. Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word," Burnham said. Larson wrote, "The same happened at Yale. Both schools turned him down. He never forgot it.

I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I. Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word.' The same happened at Yale, Both schools turned him down. He never forgot it.

I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I. Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word." Burnham said. Larson wrote, "The same happened at Yale, Both schools turned him down. He never forgot it.

College students were asked to rate the humor of cartoons from Gary Larson’s The Far Side while holding a pencil in their mouth. Those who were “smiling” (without any awareness of doing so) found the cartoons funnier than did those who were “frowning.” In another experiment, people whose face was shaped into a frown (by squeezing their eyebrows together) reported an enhanced emotional response to upsetting pictures—starving children, people arguing, maimed accident victims.

Daniel Burnham arrived in Chicago to find the city’s architects and members of the exposition board outraged that he had gone outside the city—to New York, of all godforsaken places—to court architects for the fair; that he had snubbed the likes of Adler, Sullivan, and Jenney. Sullivan saw it as a sign that Burnham did not truly believe Chicago had the talent to carry the fair by itself. “Burnham had believed that he might best serve his country by placing all of the work exclusively with Eastern architects,” Sullivan wrote; “solely, he averred, on account of their surpassing culture.” The chairman of the Grounds and Buildings Committee was Edward T. Jefferey. “With exquisite delicacy and tact,” Sullivan said, “Jefferey, at a meeting of the Committee, persuaded Daniel, come to Judgment, to add the Western men to the list of his nominations.

In their offices in the top floor of the Rookery, Daniel Burnham, forty-three, and his partner, John Root, newly forty, felt the electricity more keenly than most. They had participated in secret conversations, received certain assurances, and gone so far as to make reconnaissance forays to outlying parts of the city. They were Chicago’s leading architects: They had pioneered the erection of tall structures and designed the first building in the country ever to be called a skyscraper; every year, it seemed, some new building of theirs became the tallest in the world. When they moved into the Rookery at La Salle and Adams, a gorgeous light-filled structure of Root’s design, they saw views of the lake and city that no one but construction workers had seen before. They knew, however, that today’s event had the potential to make their success so far seem meager

William Stead recognized the power of the fair immediately. The vision of the White City and its profound contrast to the Black City drove him to write If Christ Came to Chicago, a book often credited with launching the City Beautiful movement, which sought to elevate American cities to the level of the great cities of Europe. Like Stead, civic authorities throughout the world saw the fair as a model of what to strive for. They asked Burnham to apply the same citywide thinking that had gone into the White City to their own cities. He became a pioneer in modern urban planning. He created citywide plans for Cleveland, San Francisco, and Manila and led the turn-of-the-century effort to resuscitate and expand L’Enfant’s vision of Washington, D.C. In each case he worked without a fee. While helping design the new Washington plan, Burnham persuaded the head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander Cassatt, to remove his freight tracks and depot from the center of the federal mall, thus creating the unobstructed green that extends today from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Other cities came to Daniel Burnham for citywide plans, among them Fort Worth, Atlantic City, and St. Louis, but he turned them down to concentrate on his last plan, for the city of Chicago. Over the years many aspects of his Chicago plan were adopted, among them the creation of the city’s lovely ribbon of lakefront parks and Michigan Avenue’s “Miracle Mile.” One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed. The park runs south in a narrow green border along the lakeshore all the way to Jackson Park, where the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts, transformed into a permanent structure, now houses the Museum of Science and Industry. It looks out over the lagoons and the Wooded Island, now a wild and tangled place that perhaps would make Olmsted smile—though no doubt he would find features to criticize.

The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For Burnham personally the fair had been an unqualified triumph. It allowed him to fulfill his pledge to his parents to become the greatest architect in America, for certainly in his day he had become so. During the fair an event occurred whose significance to Burnham was missed by all but his closest friends: Both Harvard and Yale granted him honorary master’s degrees in recognition of his achievement in building the fair. The ceremonies occurred on the same day. He attended Harvard’s. For him the awards were a form of redemption. His past failure to gain admission to both universities—the denial of his “right beginning”—had haunted him throughout his life. Even years after receiving the awards, as he lobbied Harvard to grant provisional admission to his son Daniel, whose own performance on the entry exams was far from stellar, Burnham wrote, “He needs to know that he is a winner, and, as soon as he does, he will show his real quality, as I have been able to do. It is the keenest regret of my life that someone did not follow me up at Cambridge … and let the authorities know what I could do.” Burnham had shown them himself, in Chicago, through the hardest sort of work. He bristled at the persistent belief that John Root deserved most of the credit for the beauty of the fair. “What was done up to the time of his death was the faintest suggestion of a plan,” he said. “The impression concerning his part has been gradually built up by a few people, close friends of his and mostly women, who naturally after the Fair proved beautiful desired to more broadly identify his memory with it.

THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city’s willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world’s fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. The more I read about the fair, the more entranced I became. That George Ferris would attempt to build something so big and novel—and that he would succeed on his first try—seems, in this day of liability lawsuits, almost beyond comprehension. A rich seam of information exists about the fair and about Daniel Burnham in the beautifully run archives of the Chicago Historical Society and the Ryerson and Burnham libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. I acquired a nice base of information from the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library, one of the finest and most efficient libraries I have encountered. I also visited the Library of Congress in Washington, where I spent a good many happy hours immersed in the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, though my happiness was at times strained by trying to decipher Olmsted’s execrable handwriting. I read—and mined—dozens of books about Burnham, Chicago, the exposition, and the late Victorian era. Several proved consistently valuable: Thomas Hines’s Burnham of Chicago (1974); Laura Wood Roper’s FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (1973); and Witold Rybczynski’s A Clearing in the Distance (1999). One book in particular, City of the Century by Donald L. Miller (1996), became an invaluable companion in my journey through old Chicago. I found four guidebooks to be especially useful: Alice Sinkevitch’s AIA Guide to Chicago (1993); Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s Graveyards of Chicago (1999); John Flinn’s Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893); and Rand, McNally & Co.’ s Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Hucke and Bielski’s guide led me to pay a visit to Graceland Cemetery, an utterly charming haven where, paradoxically, history comes alive.

An artful critique focuses on what a person has done and can do rather than reading a mark of character into a job poorly done. As Larson observes, “A character attack—calling someone stupid or incompetent—misses the point. You immediately put him on the defensive, so that he’s no longer receptive to what you have to tell him about how to do things better.

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