Plate 137 from The Plan of Chicago, 1909: Chicago. View of the Proposed Development in the Center of the City, from Twenty-Second Street to Chicago Avenue, Looking Towards the East Over the Civic Center to Grant Park and Lake Michigan

Daniel Hudson Burnham · 1907

Medium

Gouache and graphite on toned paper

Original size

83.3 × 122 cm (32 3/4 × 48 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

This sweeping bird's-eye panorama captures one of the most ambitious urban visions in American history — a reimagined Chicago stretching from a grand civic center all the way to the shimmering edge of Lake Michigan. Daniel Burnham was the driving force behind the 1909 Plan of Chicago, the landmark document that would reshape how cities thought about themselves. The illustrations were rendered in gouache and graphite on toned paper, a technique that gave the scenes their characteristic warm, atmospheric glow — part architectural blueprint, part dreamscape. The toned ground was no accident; it unified the composition and allowed the muted greens and hazy blues to read as light itself rather than pigment. The Plan of Chicago is widely credited as the first comprehensive metropolitan plan in the United States, and its famous directive — "make no little plans" — has been attributed to Burnham ever since, though historians debate whether he ever said it. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates that luminous, layered quality into a durable medium, preserving the panoramic sweep and the soft atmospheric depth that make the original feel less like a drawing and more like a city already waiting to exist.