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Home Insurance Building in 1931
Carson Pirie Scott Building
Montauk Building
Chicago Windows
Concrete Section
Fair Store construction
Fisher Building
Masonic Temple
Monadnock Floorplan
Chicago Building
Old Colony Building
Steel beam and column
Early Marquette design concept
Stock Exchange |
CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE In the aftermath of Chicago’s Great Fire of October 1871, the towering brick and cast-iron ruins of downtown were swept into landfill across Michigan Avenue that would eventually make up the western portion of Grant Park. But in addition to the newly cleared land, money had a major role in the new structural techniques starting in Chicago but also spreading across the world. A Blank Canvas Where once was a bustling central business district of wood block paved streets and plank sidewalks stood an expanse of newly vacant land bordered by the East/West and North/South branches of the river. Its Southern edge had wall-to-wall and unmoving railroad tracks once terminating in the now-destroyed depots and its last figurative wall was the shoreline of Lake Michigan to the East. Since the site was a real estate “island,” expensive vertical building was required for the rapidly growing city. As the residential areas encircling the river were mostly untouched by the fire, the remaining City of Chicago itself provided a huge local market for what was built downtown. A few of the waterfront industries relocated to cheaper land away from their old sites, leaving blank parcels and the singular idea of public ownership of the lakefront. Though it would be decades for this to come to pass, the “free and clear” concept of parkland, harbors, and beaches on Lake Michigan would eventually make Chicago unique among waterfront cities. Rebuilding Real estate speculators flooded in primarily from Eastern cities to build the new commercial structures quickly and cheaply on that newly vacated land. As long-time architects had more jobs than they could handle, commissions were given to the untested new twenty and thirty-somethings pouring in. The “Panic of 1873” paused much of the building and crippled commerce throughout the country for at least four years, but Chicago’s business district kept rebuilding. Coincidental to that epoch, the safety elevator had been perfected which led to taller replacements of up to eight stories. At the same time, the Bessemer steel process finally made steel truss work for bridges affordable and the soon-to-come electric light and the telephone made the new tall buildings cost effective. But, like the palazzos of the new rich, the new buildings, like those on the East Coast, were still clothed in historicist costumes of brick and stone. The new “Commercial Style” had to wait a few years before cheaper prices, revised building codes, and tenant demands on landlords jumpstarted what came to be called “The Chicago School of Architecture.” As no comprehensive history of it could possibly be reduced to one essay, a look at a few of its buildings might give an overview. Montauk Block By 1882, the Boston shipping entrepreneurs, brothers Peter and Shepherd Brooks, wanted to build a commercial office building modeled on their most austere warehouses back East in the boomtown of Chicago. The central city had been built on a morass of soft rubble and clay and was not a problem for buildings of six stories. But the usual bedrock to anchor footings for taller buildings was too far down for drilling to be affordable. So In order to build higher and to avoid driving piles 100 feet down, a new solution had to be devised. In February of that year, they hired another business mind, Daniel Burnham and his architectural and engineering partner, John Wellborn Root, to solve one of the most important problems for building tall in the quagmire under its downtown, which led to one of the most critical developments for what would become “The Chicago School of Architecture.” To anchor the cast-iron footings and load-bearing masonry, Burnham’s partner, engineering master, Root, first laid a concrete raft interwoven with grillage of iron rails to “float” on top of the mud. Though iron bars had been used to reinforce concrete, it had not been used to stabilize a ten-story building before and this became just another Chicago solution to a construction problem. Owen Aldis was the Chicago based real estate lawyer for the Brooks brothers since 1879. He counseled the Brooks and handled the day-to-day questions of the architects. His ability to anticipate the future, however, meant that though the Montauk would first be lighted with gas jets, the building would also be pre-wired for electric lights. Framing Iron framed greenhouses had been common since the turn-of-the 19th century. Though cast-iron supporting columns, with their higher carbon composition, had been used for retail window fronts and for the stamped façades for entire building faces since the 1850s, low carbon wrought iron was considered more useable and malleable for the horizontal beams. The 1855 Harper & Brothers Building in Lower Manhattan utilized this system of supports for every floor to make it fireproof for its enormous rolls of paper. However the load-bearing masonry of the loft building’s exterior kept it from complete innovation. Similar to the concurrent warehouses, Chicago’s architects began framing the entire interior within the load-bearing exterior walls with cast iron columns and wrought iron beams since at least Jenney’s First Leiter Building in 1879. But the city’s new office buildings approached the engineering in a new, hybridized way. Home Insurance Building What has since early in the 20th century been regarded as the first “skyscraper” with only a metal skeleton as its support, was in actuality a hybrid of iron, steel, and brick masonry. Its party wall spanning Adams to Marble Pl. (LaSalle alley) is load-bearing masonry and its street fronts along Adams and LaSalle are cast iron and steel columns embedded into brick piers. Above the sixth floor of the 1884 Home Insurance Building, architect William Le Baron Jenney switched to the new cheaper steel members on top of the iron columns he’d used below. But the real estate speculators also wanted more light in their new high-rises for the simple monetary return and Jenney’s brick piers were narrowed for that purpose. In an ironic twist similar to the 12th century building technique that turned Romanesque into Gothic simply to provide more light flooding into the church, the late 19th century “Commercial Style” appeared for those same reasons. Though Jenney’s framing innovation for his First Leiter Building of 1879 and aesthetics for his prettier 1891 Second Leiter Building on State Street seem to cast the Home in a different light, the self-supporting metal framing standing on ground and first floor granite piers made the Home Insurance Building an engineering feat.
While the Root method of “floating” a concrete pad on top of the unstable mud was a regional solution to a specifically Chicago soil problem, Jenney’s reputed use of a metal cage as the entire supporting structure for the Home Insurance was usable around the globe. A major byproduct was its comparative lightness (at least 70%) over heavy load-bearing masonry on the unstable clay. Rookery Building The Rookery (finished in 1888) was constructed in a dual technique using load-bearing, iron column-embedded piers on the street frontage and an interior cage of cast and wrought iron inside. Four wings surround a central light well with modern curtain walls of white glazed brick horizontally layered with ribbons of windows. The two alley walls of the cubic building were “curtain walls” of glass and iron for the first two levels and brick and glass to the building’s roof. Everything is built over a grillage pad of concrete. A lower glass roof just over the stunning white marble lobby at its center and the glazed white brick walls covering the court inside enable every part of the building to receive maximum sunlight. The simplicity and efficiency of the plan was, like all Burnham & Root collaborations, Daniel Burnham’s most important contribution.
It wasn’t long before a steel skeleton and the huge windows it allowed were filling the Central Business District along with the architectural history books. Soon Holabird & Roche’s 1889 Tacoma Building (even with a load-bearing north wall and masonry wind bracing) and Adler & Sullivan’s 1894 Stock Exchange added to LaSalle Street’s canyon.
Monadnock Block Though not as ornamental as the Rookery and known today as the tallest (sixteen stories) load-bearing high rise, its exterior simplicity was the result of the thrifty Brooks’ spare program. The 1889 version still seen has a vaguely Egyptian silhouette whose kernel may have been an earlier and more ornamental 1885 design. But to brace the cliff of masonry from the wind, Root placed visible steel trusses between interior walls. It is just a hint of its interior framing as it’s a veritable “cage” (and that is what the system is called) of steel I beams within those load-bearing walls. Laid by the Fuller Construction Company of brown Anderson Pressed Brick, there is only a minute layer of mortar giving the structure a taut fabric look. The South half was constructed by Holabird and Roche using the steel skeletal cage technique but hasn’t achieved the legendary status of the Northern Burnham & Root portion. Reliance Building One of the best of the “Chicago School” buildings and also one of the Burnham firm’s last before they were clad in Greco-Roman forms, was the Reliance Building at State and Washington. Because its lower floors seem to be from another building, the historical answer known to scholars is that it was constructed in two separate eras: Burnham & Root in 1890 and, after the death of Root in 1891, Burnham with Charles Atwood in 1894. The building was also one of the first to fully utilize the independent curtainwall. Derided as “veneered” construction, it nevertheless eliminated the need for brick pier masonry and instead could use panels of prefabricated glazed terra-cotta to streamline the process. After the owner, William Hale, decided to build a fourteen-story tower on the site but his tenant leases didn’t expire until 1894, he jacked up the top three floors of the existing four-story structure (to annoy the tenants) to wait it out and lay the spread grillage foundations for a steel skeleton and ground floor of a taller and browner building. As the World’s Fair’s pristine white was still fresh in his mind, lead design architect, Atwood, designed a glass and cream colored glazed terra cotta structure, albeit with neo-Gothic reliefs, whose transparent modernity pre-dated glass high-rises of the middle of the 20th Century. The economic depression of the time slashed glass prices and since Hale wanted to market the finished building to doctors, he saw an economic opportunity. Bays of seven-foot square panes framed at the sides with traditional sash windows constituted a type of “Chicago Window” that more brightly lit offices for clinical use. To keep free of obstructions for connected offices and eliminate cross-bracing, a tightly rigid frame of latticed steel columns (actually ladders) and wide girders substituted for the diagonal wind braces needed for a fourteen-story building. Resembling a series of stacked tables and acting as a type of vertical “box-girder,” this structural system was stronger and less rickety than a skeleton of cast and wrought iron. Chicago Stock Exchange Adler & Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building would not only be too big for the grillage within concrete pad system, Adler in fact preferred the driven pile to bedrock approach for the foundation support. Sullivan’s design was beautifully monumental, but its engineering challenge was equally novel. To avoid the noisy pounding of timbers for footings through the site’s hardpan clay near the presses of Burnham’s Herald Building next door, his partner, Dankmar Adler, quietly poured construction history’s first concrete caissons at the Western lot line. Since the lofty Trading and Banking Rooms starting above the ground floor meant their design would extend the base to three levels. That larger base and use of the traditional “Chicago Window” above for the expanse of offices through the next ten stories would have presented the façade as too horizontal for a monumental and mainly vertical elevation. So Sullivan emphasized its height by alternating continuous vertical pleats of bay windows cantilevered from its steel skeleton between the long three-part Chicago Windows. Marquette Building In 1891, the architectural firm of Holabird and Roche raced to get the zoning approval for sixteen-story buildings over 130 feet before the city planned to ban them. And Bostonians Peter and Shepherd Brooks’ five-story Honoré Block at Dearborn and Adams would be the perfect site at the heart of the Loop to do one.
But over the next few years, the replacement building’s look would evolve from a mishmash of Victorian details to the more “Neo-Renaissance” simplicity for the 1895 building seen today. Directed by Owen Aldis, the Brooks had overturned their original thoughts of 1882 in instituting an austere program for maximizing profit constructing their Montauk. By 1895 the Marquette could build extravagantly instead. But that more magnificent look together with the prevailing architectonic approach of finding beauty in structure led to what some see as the finest of all the Chicago School buildings. Built on “floating” grillage pads under the basement, the eighteen-level (counting basement and attic) steel skeleton coated in dark chocolate terra cotta and brick resembled a huge, Roman palazzo in Chicago’s Commercial Style. As well, the Tiffany mosaics, mahogany railings, Carrara marble and bronze reliefs and grills gave the visitors an extravagant first impression leading to a roster of secure, top-level tenants. Death of the Chicago School Economics also caused Chicago’s Commercial Style “School” to collapse in a pile of Corinthian and Ionic columns. Clients of the next office buildings had been so impressed by the 1893 World’s Fair that its Classicism became the new language of civic construction. Though some office buildings were built in the Commercial Style as late as 1908, most of the paying clients after 1893 wanted their offices and banks to look like Roman temples and the most influential architect/businessman, Daniel Burnham, was ever obliging in that look. After World War II, the “Second Chicago School of Architecture” was also known around the globe. Primarily spearheaded by the simple black high-rises of Mies van der Rohe, it, too, receded in popularity when structure, itself, was taken for granted and replaced by the cosmetic fireworks of “Post-Modernism.” But the actual innovations of the Chicago School of Architecture never went away. They still exist just under the skin of every tall building to this day. Caissons are the first signs of construction. Steel or concrete skeletons continue to hold up large structures. And while cosmetics have changed through the ages, each exterior has remained a “curtainwall” of lighter weight weatherproof materials, whether under an exoskeleton, Corinthian columns or smooth sheets of glass. The contemporary critics regarded Chicago’s Commercial Style buildings as unrelentingly plain. But enough history has passed that we look on Chicago’s early skyscrapers as bellwethers of Modernism. In fact, any time beauty is to be found in structure itself, the “Chicago School of Architecture” is where it all started. |
