Like Burnham, We’re Making No Little Plans

Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Burnham 100 Bulletin, your official source of information for the 2009 regional celebration of Daniel Burnham’s sweeping, world-famous Plan of Chicago that will inspire big new Burnham-like ideas to make our region one of the world’s great places to live and work in the 21st Century.

Interest in Burnham’s Plan of Chicago was confirmed at this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival when more than 1,500 people attended two panel discussions examining the Plan’s origins and its future.

At “The Plan of Chicago: 100 Years of City-Building” panel, Northwestern University historian Carl Smith focused on the origins of the Plan and described how 20th Century, Chicago was choking on its own success when the Burnham Plan set the stage for finding regional solutions to pressing urban problems. [MORE]

On December 9 and 14, WTTW's documentarian Geoffrey Baer turns his cameras and insights toward Lake Michigan in Chicago's Lakefront, on Channel 11. Airs Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, December 14 at 12:30 & 7:00 p.m. The story of Chicago's Lakefront spans 10,000 years, and Baer explores its full history including the Burnham Plan's essential role in protecting it for future generations [MORE]

Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago: The year-long rotating exhibition presents 32 prized illustrations that gloriously realized Burnham’s ideas in the Plan of Chicago. Rarely displayed publicly because of their fragility, these illustrations from the collection of the Department of Architecture and Design represent the innovative concepts that created the public spaces that continue to breathe life into our community. [MORE]