Buckingham Fountain: The Piece of Burnham's Plan That Got Built

Buckingham Fountain sits on the centerline of Grant Park, between Columbus Drive and the lakefront, framed on its long axis by the Chicago skyline on the west and the lake on the east. Of everything Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett drew for the interior of their 1909 Plan of Chicago, this is the single object most fully realized: the Plan's Beaux-Arts grandeur built at the scale and on the centerline the Plan called for. The basin is 280 feet in diameter. The central tier rises 25 feet to a final spray that, at full thrust, climbs another 150 feet into the air. The pumps move 14,000 gallons of water per minute through 134 jets. From the right vantage, on a summer afternoon, the fountain reads as a stack of sun-lit moving water with a city behind it and a lake beside it.

The fountain opened on May 26, 1927, and was formally dedicated on August 26 the same year. John Philip Sousa conducted before an audience of fifty thousand. The donor was Kate Sturges Buckingham, who gave the fountain in memory of her brother Clarence Buckingham, a Chicago industrialist who had died in 1913. The architect was Edward Bennett, born 1874, British-born, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The model was the Latona Fountain at Versailles, designed by André Le Nôtre for Louis the Fourteenth in the 1660s. Bennett's Buckingham is roughly twice the size of the Versailles original and recirculates about three times the volume of water.

That is what the fountain is. What the fountain represents is a 1909 plan that mostly did not get built.

The Plan and what it asked for

In 1909, the Commercial Club of Chicago published Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett's Plan of Chicago, an oversized presentation volume with elaborate watercolor illustrations and a comprehensive proposal for the city's physical future. The Plan is often called the Burnham Plan, but Burnham was the public face and the fundraiser; Bennett was the partner who drew the actual layouts and elevations. Burnham died in 1912. Bennett continued working through and beyond the Plan's implementation period.

The Plan proposed a Chicago organized along a Beaux-Arts armature. A continuous public lakefront from north to south. A chain of five offshore islands in Lake Michigan, of which only Northerly Island was ever built. A network of forest preserves around the city's edge, which was largely realized. A widened Michigan Avenue with a bridge across the river, which was realized in the 1920s. A diagonal boulevard system cutting across the city's grid, which was partly realized. A monumental civic center plaza near the river, anchored by a domed administrative building, which was never built.

The interior of the Plan, the part that proposed a ceremonial Beaux-Arts civic Chicago of plazas, monuments, and grand axial vistas, is largely the part that did not happen. The forest preserves got built. The lakefront stayed public. The Michigan Avenue Bridge cleared the bridgehead and made the Magnificent Mile possible. But the domed civic center, the radial boulevards in their full extent, the diagonal vista terminations, the formal grand axes through the central business district, all of it stayed mostly on paper. The 1920s and 1930s built a Chicago, but they built a commercial Chicago, not the ceremonial Beaux-Arts Chicago the Plan had drawn.

The single object on the Plan's central interior axis that was realized at full scale, in the spirit and at the level of grandeur the Plan called for, is Buckingham Fountain.

Bennett's return

In 1925, Kate Sturges Buckingham decided to commission a fountain in memory of her brother. She had inherited a substantial fortune from the family's grain and railroad businesses. The site she chose, in negotiation with the South Park Commissioners, was the centerline of Grant Park, on the east-west axis that connected Congress Parkway through the park to the lake. The location was exactly where the Plan of Chicago had called for a major civic terminus.

The architect she chose was Edward Bennett. Bennett had spent the sixteen years since the Plan working on smaller pieces of the Chicago commission, including the design of Wacker Drive and the Michigan Avenue Bridge approach. He had not, in that time, had the opportunity to build a major piece of the Plan's civic-monumental program. The Buckingham commission gave him that opportunity. The donor wanted a monument. The site was the Plan's intended grand-axial location. The architect was one of the Plan's authors. The conditions for a faithful execution of a 1909 idea were rare and specific. They aligned in 1925 to 1927.

Bennett designed the fountain in the French Beaux-Arts vocabulary the Plan had specified. The model was Versailles. The sculptural program (four pairs of sea horses around the central basin, representing the four states bordering Lake Michigan) was executed by the French sculptor Marcel Loyau. The hydraulic engineering was managed by Jacques H. Lambert. The pumps and electrical-control systems were the largest civic fountain installation in North America when they were commissioned. Buckingham paid for the construction and endowed a trust for its perpetual maintenance.

The fountain opened in 1927 on the centerline the Plan had drawn in 1909. Eighteen years between the watercolor and the water.

Why the Plan otherwise did not get built

The interior pieces of the Plan that did not get built failed for a mix of reasons. The Great Depression of 1929 closed the window for the largest civic projects before most of them had even reached the design stage. World War One had already deferred work on the most ambitious pieces. Public finances tightened across the 1920s in ways the Plan's authors had not anticipated.

There was also a political and legal constraint specific to Grant Park. The 1836 Illinois canal commissioners had marked the lakefront strip in their map as "Forever Open, Clear and Free." That phrase, sometimes mistakenly attributed to Burnham, predates the Plan by seventy-three years. It carried legal force across the nineteenth century, and the Chicago mail-order businessman Aaron Montgomery Ward enforced it across four lawsuits between 1890 and 1911. Ward sued the city repeatedly to prevent buildings from being erected on Grant Park. The most consequential of his cases, Ward versus Field Museum, was decided by the Illinois Supreme Court in October 1909, the same year Burnham and Bennett published the Plan. Ward's victory is the reason no major museum stands on Grant Park itself; it is why the museum cluster you can see to the south, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, was located south of Grant Park rather than within it.

Ward's legal protection of the open park is the reason Buckingham Fountain is on the park's centerline and there is no building behind it. The Plan's call for a major civic monument at the lake-axis terminus could be honored as a fountain because a fountain is not a building. A fountain is open, clear, and free in the sense the 1836 commissioners and Aaron Montgomery Ward meant. A building on the same spot would not have survived the lawsuits the building behind the museum cluster, the Field Museum, had to settle by relocating south.

The fountain is the architectural form the Plan's civic ambition could take inside the legal constraint Aaron Montgomery Ward had imposed on Grant Park. Without Ward's lawsuits, the centerline might have been crowned with a domed civic building. With them, it had to be water.

What it does

The fountain operates from spring through fall, typically April through October, depending on weather. The display cycle includes a twenty-minute basic loop, with the central jet rising to its full 150-foot height once per cycle. After dark, the fountain runs a coordinated water-and-light show, with colored lighting on the basins and timed musical accompaniment. The original 1927 mechanical timing was replaced with computer control in 1994. The fountain has been substantially refurbished multiple times since its dedication, including a major 1994 restoration and another in 2008. The pumps and control systems are contemporary; the visible architecture and sculpture is essentially the 1927 work.

The water source is Lake Michigan, drawn through filtration, recirculated through the system continuously during operating hours, and returned to the lake at the end of each operating season. The total volume in circulation during operation is roughly one and a half million gallons.

What to look for

Stand at the southwest basin of the fountain, looking northeast toward the lake. The fountain frames the lake horizon at this angle. Walk slowly around the basin clockwise. Each corner of the lower basin has one of Marcel Loyau's pairs of sea horses, representing Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The figures are oversized, monumental, slightly more naturalistic than the Latona Fountain originals. The four pairs face outward from the center, marking the cardinal directions.

Walk west to the southwest corner of the park near Congress and look back east at the fountain. The skyline rises behind it on the west, and the lake horizon stretches behind it on the east when viewed from the opposite direction. The fountain sits on the axis that connects the central business district to the lake. That axis is what the Plan drew. The fountain is what got built on it.

Now walk one block south and look back. From a distance, the fountain reads as a single architectural object: a low concentric basin with a rising central spray. From a closer distance, the sculptural program becomes legible. The fountain is designed to work at both scales, which is the Beaux-Arts manner: a monument is a silhouette from far away and a sculpture from close in. The far-scale silhouette is the Plan. The close-in sculpture is the Bennett-Loyau execution.

If you arrive after dark during the operating season, wait for the colored-light show. The fountain becomes something the 1927 designers could not have fully realized: a moving sculpture of light and water in choreographed sequence. The musical accompaniment is contemporary, the lighting program is contemporary, but the architecture they animate is the 1927 design, on the 1909 centerline, in the form the Plan of Chicago had asked for. The Plan's interior pages mostly stayed on paper. This one page got built.