Keep the whole shore of the lake as public park, with lagoons, beaches and harbours, and set the city’s museums and libraries along it as its cultural forecourt.
The Plan proposed a continuous park along some twenty miles of shore, made largely by landfill, and a redesigned Grant Park at the foot of the Loop as the city’s front garden. The Art Institute (1893) already stood there; the Plan placed the Field Museum at the centre of the park on the axis of Congress Street, with the Crerar Library nearby. Court rulings won by the merchant Aaron Montgomery Ward kept most buildings out of Grant Park, and the museum was built at its southern end instead (1921).
Lay the whole island out in a single rectangular grid regardless of the ground: avenues 100 ft wide running its length, cross streets 60 ft wide across it, and blocks 200 ft deep between them, the houses to be straight-sided and right-angled because such houses are cheapest to build and most convenient to live in.
avenue 100 ft (30 m) · street 60 ft (18 m) · block 200 ft (61 m) deep, 600–900 ft long
Do not leave the fronts of houses to the whim of each builder: let the authorities fix their line, height and design so that a street or square is composed as a whole, and vary the designs from one street to the next so that uniformity does not become tedium.
Cut new straight streets through the old city to join its railway stations to one another and to its centre, and end each one on a monument (a station, a church, an opera house) so that it has an object as well as a use.
Tie the height of every house front to the width of its street: on streets 20 m wide or more the cornice may stand at 20 m, on narrower streets lower; above the cornice the roof must stay inside a line rising at 45°.
street ≥ 20 m → cornice ≤ 20 m; street < 20 m → cornice ≤ c. 17.5 m (older rule); roof inside 45°
Build every house on a new street to the same alignment, in dressed stone, with its floors, balconies and cornice at the levels of its neighbours, and keep the fronts clean, so that the street reads as a single wall.
Where many avenues meet, make a round place with a monument at its centre, bring the avenues to it at equal angles, and wall the place with uniform buildings between them.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The lakefront belongs to the people”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/burnham-lakefront. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.