Okay, here's my compare and contrast, 500 WORD essay on Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan. It's still 200 words long believe it or not, but I believe in everything I wrote! I'll try and scale it down, but here it is in it's "form follows function" form, without any changes:
Daniel Burnham-
Daniel Burnham was born in 1846 and first moved to Chicago in 1854. He was always a good at drawing but remained a bit aimless in his youth. Flunking out of entry exams for Harvard and Yale, Burnham tried his hand at both mining and politics before being set up in the architectural firm of Peter Wight. There he met John Root, his amiable partner, and the two opened a business together one year later in 1874. Burnham was the business man and Root his expert designer. Burnham and Root went on to design the successful Rookery (1886) and Monadnock (1891) buildings, solidifying their names in Chicago business and society. Due to their successes, Burnham was given the title of chief of construction for the Worlds Fair in 1890 and Root was his chief architect. Burhnam was devastated when Root died in January 1891, but filled the position with his associate, Charles Atwood. Atwood & Burnham went on to design the Fine Arts building (the current Museum of Science and Industry), the Fisher Building (1896) and the Reliance building (1894). After extensive traveling, Burnham began working with Edward Bennett on city planning. Starting in 1906, Burnham and Bennet wrote the Chicago Plan of 1909.
Louis Sullivan-Born in 1856, Louis knew from a young age what he wanted to be, an architect. He attended the Institute of Technology and upon graduation entered the Ecole Des Beaux Arts and quit after the first year. He returned to Chicago to do freelance in Dankmar Adler’s office and became a full partner in 1883. The Auditorium building (1889), an architectural and engineering masterpiece, was the high point of his work with Adler. Soon after a young architect, Frank Lloyd Wright was fired in 1893 for “moonlighting”. Adler & Sullivan broke up their partnership in 1895 when Adler left to go work in an elevator company, afraid of the financial panic. Sullivan dissolved the partnership for good, going as far as taking Adler’s name off of previous work. His greatest achievment without Adler was the Shclesinger & Mayer (now Carson Pirie Scotts) department store finished in 1898.
Make no little plans-Daniel H. Burnham
Form follows function-Louis H. Sullivan
These two quotes by these two very different but talented men, tell much about their differences and philosophies of architecture.
Burnham was a businessman and society man. He had big ideas and big plans and he knew how to explain these big ideas to the money men. He could tell them what they wanted to hear, sometimes, to the artistic detriment of his own buildings. He wanted to create order out of chaos, beauty out of grime and smog, and he did that using the European based architecture of the Beaux Arts for the Worlds Fair. He inspired the American public with his “white city” and changed the face of architecture, as Americans across the country longed for the beauty and simplicity of life that he showed them. He was a charming, strategic problem solver with a strong vision, a strong plan and a strong personality. At the time of his death in 1912 he had created the most successful architecture firm in the city.
Sullivan was more of the lonely, genius, architect. He was a philospher and an artist, not a society man. He didn’t want to succumb to Europes’ familiar Beaux Arts Architecture, he felt that Chicago had a chance to form a new form of architecture; something original and organic, buildings that were created through nature, naturally. A building grew like a seed from a tree grew, exactly how it was supposed to. He was more interested in satisfying the building, not the customer, leaving the impression of an old cantankerous man. He felt his buildings had a soul, a life, a purpose and he wanted to change the face of the city through organic beauty, not through the tried and true facets of the “old school”. Sullivan died old, alone and in poverty, with his estranged but true friend, Frank Lloyd Wright, taking care of him till the end.
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