APA's Daniel Burnham Conference Center

Chicagoans are gearing up for the centenary of Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan for Chicago. The event is of particular interest to APA's Chicago staff, which occupies a building designed by Burnham's firm. The American Planning Association's Daniel Burnham Conference Center was named for this famous architect and planner.

APA's offices are on the 16th floor of the 20-story, terra cotta and granite office tower at 122 S. Michigan Avenue, which was designed in 1911 by Daniel H. Burnham & Company for the People's Gas, Light and Coke Company. Burnham's office was just a block south in another building designed by his company for the Santa Fe Railroad.

The conference center encompasses four spaces: the Burnham Room; the Catherine Bauer Room, designed for larger meetings; and two smaller spaces, the John Hirten Room and the Israel Stollman Room.

Daniel Burnham Room
The elegant, wood-paneled Burnham Room was originally the office of the chairman of the board of the People's Gas, Light and Coke Company. The large space, with windows on the south and east sides, offers views of Lake Michigan, Millennium Park, and the Museum Campus (a Burnham legacy). Farther south is Jackson Park, site of the 1893 World's Fair.

Catherine Bauer Room
A second large conference space, the Bauer Room, is named for Catherine Bauer, who gained an international reputation as a housing advocate in the 1930s. Her 1934 book Modern Housing has become a classic. Bauer was named an AICP Planning Pioneer in 1988.

John Hirten Room
One of the two smaller conference rooms, the Hirten Room, is named for John Hirten, FAICP, executive director of the American Institute of Planners at the time of its 1978 consolidation with the American Society of Planning Officials. The consolidation resulted in the formation of the American Planning Association.

Israel Stollman Room
The second small conference room, the Stollman Room, is named for Israel Stollman, FAICP, who was the first executive director of the American Planning Association. Previously, Stollman headed the American Society of Planning Officials, which was consolidated with the AICP in 1978 to form the APA. He died in 2005.

Tuesdays at APA
The Burnham Conference Center hosts a variety of events, including the Tuesdays at APA lecture series, which is open both to staff and the community.

APA's Burnham Award
Every year, as part of its national planning awards program, APA honors a community or group for an outstanding comprehensive plan. In 2007, there were two winners of the Daniel Burnham Award for a Comprehensive Plan: PlanCheyenne, a comprehensive master plan for the Cheyenne, Wyoming, urban area, and the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, which covers the Toronto region (the first Canadian plan to be honored by this award).

A Banner Year
Planners will mark two milestones in 2009: the anniversary of the Burnham Plan of Chicago and the centenary of the First National Conference on City Planning, which was convened in Washington, D.C., in May 1909. "As the conference drew to a close," wrote Mel Scott in American City Planning Since 1890, "the participants could not but realize that the city planning movement had become, or would soon become, an integral part of American life." The conferees continued to meet annually and in 1917 incorporated as the American City Planning Institute, which later became the American Institute of Planners.

APA activities to mark the city planning centennial include special issues of the Journal of the American Planning Association and Planning magazine; special sessions at the 2009 National Planning Conference in Minneapolis; an oral history project; and a special awards program. In Chicago, activities to commemorate the anniversary of the Burnham Plan are being organized by the interdisciplinary Plan of Chicago Centennial Initiative. See www.planofchicago.org. A related effort, the Chicago Metropolis 2020 plan, received APA's Daniel Burnham Award in 2004.

More on Burnham
Daniel H. Burnham, who was born in 1846 and died in 1912, began his architectural career in Chicago in the early 1870s. In 1873, he formed the firm of Burnham and Root with noted designer John Root, who died in 1891. A few years later, after his much-lauded work as chief of on the Columbian Exposition of 1893, he established a new firm, D. H. Burnham and Company, with a staff of several hundred.

As chief of construction for the 1893 world's fair, Burnham was responsible for all aspects of its site planning and design. The six-month-long exposition drew worldwide attention to the city of Chicago.

After the fair closed, interest grew in applying some of its ideas to the city — and the region. Two clubs, the Merchants Club and the Commercial Club, formed committees to study the issues raised by the plan. It was the Merchants Club that officially commissioned Burnham to do "for the city of Chicago and its environs a comprehensive and logical plan, indicating those lines of convenience and beauty along which the city should develop in the decades to come." The plan was published by the Commercial Club. The two clubs merged in 1906, the year Burnham began work on the Chicago plan.

In the years following the fair, Burnham was asked to prepare City Beautiful plans for some 20 other cities, including the District of Columbia (1902); Cleveland (1903); San Francisco (1904); and Manila (1905).

The Chicago plan which, was presented to the public on the Fourth of July, reflects the broad view both of Burnham and his colleague Edward Bennett, a design associate in the firm and the plan's coauthor. Its frontispiece, a rendering by artist Jules Guerin, is an aerial view of Chicago region, including parts of Wisconsin and Indiana. The plan proposes broad networks of boulevards, transit systems, and open spaces in the six-county area. The 164-page document includes 143 illustrations.

The Chicago plan was introduced to eighth and ninth graders in the city's public schools through Wacker's Manual of the Plan of Chicago, the work of Charles H. Wacker, chair of the City Plan Commission.

More on Bauer
On two trips to Europe in the 1930s, Bauer became convinced of the need for a government housing program that combined social and physical planning and that involved participants in a public forum. Her ideas were expressed in her 1934 book Modern Housing.

Bauer, who was married to architect William Wurster, taught at the University of California at Berkeley until her sudden death in 1964. She was honored by both the American Society of Planning Officials and the American Institute of Planners for her contributions to U.S. housing, including her work on the 1937 public housing act.

Bauer is the subject of a biography titled Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer, by H. Peter Oberlander and Eva Newbrun (published by the University of British Columbia Press in 1999). "She demonstrated that one person can make a difference," said Oberlander, a student of Bauer at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

In 1968, a statue of Bauer, by planner-sculptor Oscar Stonorov, was unveiled at the Washington headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. "Behind the physical fact of a building, she never forgot the human needs that the building was meant to serve," said Robert Weaver, HUD's first secretary, on that occasion.

For more, see "Catherine Bauer: Ahead of Her Time," by H. Peter Oberlander and Eva Newbrun (Planning, May 1995).

More on Stollman
Israel Stollman, FAICP, presided over the 1978 consolidation of two planning groups into one national organization, the American Planning Association. He served as APA's executive director from 1978 to 1993. He died in 2005 at age 81.

Stollman began his planning studies at the City College of New York. After service in World War II, he enrolled in the master of city planning program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For his thesis he considered the applicability of Clarence Perry's neighborhood unit concepts to Manhattan's Greenwich Village.

Stollman's 45-year-long career began at the Cleveland Planning Commission, where he worked on the city's capital improvement program and later helped to launch the new urban renewal program. In 1951, he moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where he eventually became planning director. In Youngstown, he directed the city's first capital improvements program and helped to write new housing and zoning regulations.

In the mid-1950s, Stollman led the effort to establish a graduate program in city and regional planning at Ohio State University. He chaired the new department until 1968. In that year, he was asked to take over as executive director of ASPO after the sudden death of the previous director, Dennis O'Harrow.

After retirement, Stollman remained active in APA, particularly in the area of ethics, a long-time interest. He worked on the AICP Code of Ethics and on the Israel Stollman Ethics Symposium, a feature of APA's National Planning Conference.

More on Hirten
John Hirten has had a distinguished career as a professional planner, manager, and administrator in urban planning and development, with a major focus on urban transportation. In the 1950s, he worked for urban renewal agencies in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Stockton, California. In the late 1950s, Hirten was one of the founders of SPUR — the nonprofit San Francisco Planning and Research organization. He became the group's first executive director in 1959.

In 1971, Hirten was appointed assistant secretary for environment and urban systems at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Two years later, he was named deputy administrator of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, making him the highest ranking certified planner in the federal government. He led the agency's efforts on behalf of the landmark 1974 transportation bill. Later, he directed Honolulu's transportation department. Between 1991 and 1997, he headed RIDES for Bay Area Commuters, Inc., San Francisco's regional ride-sharing agency. On the international front, he has worked in Iran, Southeast Asia, and China, and participated in U.S. Information Service programs in India, Mexico, and Europe.

Hirten was executive director of the American Institute of Planners in 1977-78, the period of the group's consolidation with the American Society of Planning Officials. He lives in San Francisco, where he serves as a senior adviser to SPUR. For more on Hirten, see "Up Close: APA Charter Members" (Planning, July 2004).

Ruth Eckdish Knack, AICP
Executive Editor, Planning