Pilgrimage
- Now that Burnham has a place to put the fair, the fair's hundreds of buildings can finally go up.
- Burnham and Root need to quickly hire architects, but they find that nobody wants the job. Who wants to work on buildings that are only temporary?
- Root is especially perplexed because "he [feels] that this was the greatest opportunity ever offered to his profession in this country" (1.6.38).
- Burnham ultimately selects ten prominent architects to design the fair's major buildings, among them Louis Sullivan…who would later hire and then fire famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
- Burnham assures the architects under his guise that "Chicago's fair, unlike any other before it, would be primarily a monument to architecture. It would awaken the nation to the power of architecture to conjure beauty from stone and steel" (1.6.21).
- All ten architects Burnham hires are offered a formal commission of $10,000 each, or $300,000 in today's fun coupons.