User:KXF/sandbox/KXF/sandbox/Burnham Kelly

Grandson of the prominent Beaux Arts architect Daniel Burnham, the urban planner Burnham Kelly (1912-1999) was dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University from 1960 to 1971. Born in Evanston, Illinois, Kelly received a diploma from the University of Paris in 1932 and an undergraduate degree from Williams College in 1933. He completed a law degree at the Harvard University School of Law in 1936 and practiced law for two years in Providence, Rhode Island before studying city planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), graduating with a master’s degree in 1941. During his military service in World War II, Kelly was a member of the Advisory Commission for the Office of Civil Defense and the Commission on Fortification; he also worked in army intelligence in Europe. After the war Kelly taught at MIT, where he remained until joining the Cornell faculty in 1960.

Kelly was assistant director and then director of the Albert Farwell Bemis Foundation on housing issues at MIT from 1945 to 1954. He wrote numerous articles on housing, technology, and urban design, and published two books, “The Prefabrication of Houses” (1950) and “Design and the Production of Houses” (1959; with others). He was active in many organizations related to planning and design, including the American Institute of Planning, the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Planning Officials, the Housing Association of Metropolitan Boston, the New York State Council on Architecture, and the American Law Institute Model Land Development Code Advisory Committee. He served as vice chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 1963 to 1967 and on the New York State Council on Architecture from 1968 to 1974. With architect Peter Eisenman, Kelly founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York in 1967. His papers are in the collections of the Cornell University Library.