Burnham and Root’s Reliance Building in Chicago, 1894

Maybe it’s obvious, but humans built organizations because they helped them achieve things. Networks are nice, and very useful, but the Organization (which is a subtype of network) works in more specific ways.

Daniel H. Burnham, the famous Chicago architect, felt something of this. Donald L. Miller, in City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (1996), notes that Burnham and Root started building a large organization, unlike most architectural firms before it in the city.

“From the hour that the ground for a new building is put at his disposal the work of construction must go on at the highest rate of speed,” sid Montgomery Schuyler fo the time pressures on Chicago architects. “And so the successful practitioner of architecture in Chicago is primarily an administrator.” And that is what Daniel Burnham became. “My idea is to work up a big business,” Burnham told Louis Sullivan when they first met, “to handle big things, deal with big business men and to build up a big organization, for you can’t handle big things unless you have an organization. Peter Wight would later describe his former draftsman as “one of the greatest businessmen of all time. . . . As an organizer and promoter he stands with the commercial and financial giants of the day.”

Even as he worked on the Montauk project, [probably the first modern high-rise office building,] Burnham was putting together the largest, most professionally run architectural practice in the city, with an extensive research library and a team of draftsmen and consulting engineers, a growing practice he housed in the top story of the Montauk. “He was the dictator,” an associate captured him in his prime, “who organized the work of various mechanical and technical experts who contributed to the making of tall buildings.”

[pp. 325-6; ellipsis in original]

It’s interesting because Burnham is both part of his time, when organizations were growing beyond their Level 3 state to something larger, and yet also showing something of a general truth.
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