Chicago Architecture and Design (3rd edition)

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• Publisher: Abrams
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781683354215
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The birthplace of the skyscraper, Chicago is famous for an architectural tradition that has influenced building around the globe. It is the cradle of modern architecture. It gave rise to the urban office building and to the flowing, open floor plans of today's homes. Chicago Architecture and Design chronicles the city's architecture from the 19th through the early 21st century: from the structural simplicity of Chicago School commercial building to the low-slung Prairie School house, from the streamlined Art Deco skyscraper to the minimalist Miesian tower of glass and steel, and all the way through to the strikingly original, diverse designs of the present day's second modern period. It examines the evolution of modern architecture in the context of broader historical, social, technological, and artistic currents and explores innovations that pushed buildings ever higher. This third edition adds 10 new buildings from the last decade, including Renzo Piano's Modern Wing of the Art Institute, John Ronan's Poetry Foundation, and Helmut Jahn's Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago.

GLESSNER HOUSE

1800 SOUTH PRAIRIE AVENUE

1887

H. H. RICHARDSON

At Glessner House, Richardson achieved his objective of truth and clarity with a monumental granite design. The front door, like the rest of the milestone building, reflected impregnable strength and love of craftsmanship.

CHAPTER 1

THE ROOTS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Chicago’s reputation as the creative center of American architecture stretches back well over one hundred years. The nation’s most fertile architectural minds headed for Chicago in the 1870s, seeking fortune and fame in a city poised to grow as no city had grown before. Since then the city has produced generations of important architects and a host of influential styles. It spawned the first skyscrapers and fostered the evolution of the urban office building; it nurtured Frank Lloyd Wright’s earliest dreams and provided a canvas on which Mies van der Rohe defined the modern architecture of his time.

In the twenty-first century Chicago continues to captivate ambitious architects, attracting them to visit, perchance to build. Today architecture’s reach is global, and the art is less reflective of individual cities than once it was. But Chicago remains an architectural environment of rare power. Both Chicago’s own architects and those with towering reputations established elsewhere find the city’s grand spaces and big ideas irresistibly challenging. Chicago’s claim to being one of the world’s great centers of urban design—bolstered by a long list of architectural milestones—remains uncontested.

Yet Chicago’s destiny as a great architectural center would have seemed far-fetched in the early 1800s. New York was one of the world’s great ports and Boston the so-called Hub of the Universe, while Chicago—named after the Indian word for a native onion, checagou—was a marshy, unpromising place on the shores of Lake Michigan. It was sparsely settled and relatively distant from the bustling river towns of Cincinnati and Saint Louis, then considered the gateways to the American West. But change came swiftly after 1829, when the Illinois legislature voted to build a canal at the site to connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River.

Prospects of the canal triggered Chicago’s first real estate boom. Records show that one small lot sold for $100 in 1832 and for $15,000 three years later; builders, hot in pursuit of riches, built neither for the ages nor for aesthetics, simply throwing up dwellings and warehouses as needed. The real estate bubble soon burst, but the waterway became a reality in 1848, the same year the first railroad train steamed west out of Chicago. Those two breakthrough developments nourished an explosion of growth unprecedented in any city anywhere. Meat packers and farm equipment manufacturers made Chicago an industrial center. Warehousers and merchants arrived. So did assorted vagabonds and, in time, architects.

A TRADITION OF INNOVATION

Although early Chicago, in its rush to build, was little disposed to architectural niceties, it did embrace inventive building techniques. In terms of innovation the city began to distinguish itself as early as 1833, architectural historians agree. That was the year a local builder named Augustine Deodat Taylor created what is regarded as the first balloon-frame structure, Saint Mary’s Church.

WATER TOWER

MICHIGAN AVENUE AT CHICAGO AVENUE 1869

WILLIAM W. BOYINGTON

One of the oldest structures still standing in Chicago, the Water Tower’s own water supply probably saved it from the Great Fire. Its turrets and rusticated limestone reflect Boyington’s admiration for medieval builders. Oscar Wilde called it a “monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it,” but it became a popular landmark. In this classic Hedrich Blessing photo from 1930, it provides a rare glimpse of the city’s early architecture.

THE HOMESTEAD

SHERIDAN ROAD AT COLLEGE ROAD, LAKE FOREST, ILL.

1860

ARCHITECT UNKNOWN

This image of Arcadia was the home of Devillo Holt, one of the city’s many wealthy merchants. Architects of the day used pattern books to build houses for the bourgeoisie in Greek Revival or Italianate style-Generally constructed of lumber, which was plentiful, most such houses in Chicago were leveled by the fire; outside the city, several, like this one, remain.

Balloon frames were a revelation at a time when standard wood-frame construction relied on posts and beams of heavy timber, laboriously assembled with hand-carved mortise-and-tenon joints. Balloon frames, which used newfangled factory-made materials, such as milled two-by-fours and common nails, were light and quickly made. That type of construction has changed little even to this day: Narrowly spaced studs and beams run the length of the building, held together by nails, and relatively thin joists hold up the floors. “A close basket-like manner of construction” was how balloon frames were described when they were introduced to a congress of professional architects at the American Institute in 1855.

Traditional builders sneered at “balloons,” as they called them, for their lightness and presumed fragility, but they caught on quickly in Chicago, where carpenters were chasing the real estate boom. Ironically, balloon-frame construction became widespread elsewhere but was not to last in the city where it had been developed. Shortly after the Great Fire of 1871, the mayor—who had been elected on the Fireproof ticket—outlawed wood construction. The balloon frame vanished from the city of its birth, by banishment or burning—even Augustine Deodat Taylor’s pioneering project had been consumed by the flames. What remained, though, were the conditions that created the innovation in the first place. They included ambition, impatience, a willingness to improvise, and what seemed like a limitless future.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE

Like any frontier town, old Chicago had been designed primarily by builders, not architects. But elements of architectural style began to infiltrate the city as it gained size and wealth. The first known to impart a sense of such aesthetics in Chicago was the remarkable John Van Osdel (1811–1891), regarded as the city’s first trained architect. At the time, professional training probably meant little more than a skill at reading plans and understanding specifications. Van Osdel was in fact largely self-taught, but as his career progressed he developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the building styles fashionable in more refined places.

Van Osdel had moved west from New York in 1836 at the behest of William Butler Ogden, Chicago’s first mayor. Ogden had earlier moved to Chicago from the East, with the express purpose of getting rich from the resources of the wilderness. Once he did he had no intention of living in a log cabin. So he hired Van Osdel to build him a Greek Revival mansion of wood, “a palatial residence with cupola and classical porticos,” as described by the press at the time. It was a successful commission by all accounts and led to more. In the years that followed Van Osdel built prolifically and in nearly every style for which he could locate a pattern book. In 1851 he designed the Second Presbyterian Church at Wabash Avenue and Washington Street in Gothic Revival style. Later he fixed on the French Second Empire style, with its steeply pitched mansard roofs. That caught the eye of the tycoon Potter Palmer, who was in the process of relocating Chicago’s fashionable shopping district to his own real estate holdings on State Street. In the 1860s Palmer hired Van Osdel to design a great department store, which he rented to Marshall Field, and the Palmer House Hotel, the closest approximation of a Parisian hostelry on the American frontier.

State Street soon became the city’s rialto, a pocket of elegance amidst the slapdash construction of a fast-growing city. The palatial Marshall Field’s emporium and the grand Palmer House Hotel, which Van Osdel had designed in elaborate mansard style, attracted an increasingly refined clientele. Despite the muddy roadway that soiled the skirts of the carriage trade, State Street did all it could to mimic the boulevards of Napoleon III.

CHICAGO’S FIERY APOCALYPSE

Although mid-nineteenth-century Chicago had touches of European-style gentility, the prevailing impression was of a chaotic frontier settlement on the make. Chicago could awe with the bustling commerce and ambition that led it brashly to claim to be the epicenter of the growing nation. But, like other early American cities, it had a dark side. “Wolves during the night roamed all over where the city now stands,” wrote an early history of the prefire period, perhaps metaphorically describing the thieves and panderers who had the run of the town. So mixed was this image of a powerful yet fundamentally amoral place that when the Great Chicago Fire cut its wide swath through the city, leaving some ninety thousand people homeless, many commentators viewed it as a blessing. In articles and books published after the disaster writers sought to describe a physical force of almost unbelievable power. The perception that stuck was of hellfire and brimstone. Most Chicagoans understood the fire to have had a cleansing purpose; those who remained were meant to rebuild something glorious.

Enthusiasm in the fire’s wake was in no way illusory. Within days new buildings were going up. Within a month five thousand new houses had been constructed, and new commercial blocks were soon established on the charred downtown streets. Land values quickly caught up to prefire levels, then surpassed them. Even the rubble that workers hauled away was put to good use as landfill to extend buildable land out into the lake. Three weeks after the fire Harper’s Weekly wrote that Chicago “will be made a better city than it ever could have become but for this fire.” One result would be a “better building system.”

FIELD, LEITER & COMPANY

STATE STREET AT WASHINGTON STREET

1868 (DESTROYED 1871)

JOHN VAN OSDEL

Van Osdel mastered the French Second Empire style, which he imagined would remind Midwesterners of Paris. This store, which later became Marshall Field’s, was one of the new “palaces” lining State Street, Chicago’s shopping district. Its exterior of Connecticut white marble led it to be known as the “Marble Palace” but did not save it from the fire.

RELIANCE BUILDING

STATE STREET AT WASHINGTON

STREET

DANIEL H. BURNHAM & COMPANY

The Reliance Building is an iconic link between the traditional masonry of old Chicago and the transparent weightlessness to come. Its terracotta is marvelously detailed; its expansive glass windows presage the technical and aesthetic accomplishments of Mies van der Rohe. Richard Nickel, pioneer preservationist, took this photo in the early 1960s, when the building had been relegated to low-end tenants. It has since enjoyed a splendid restoration.

CHICAGO STOCK EXCHANGE

LASALLE AND WASHINGTON STREETS

1894 (DEMOLISHED 1972)

ADLER AND SULLIVAN

As the Stock Exchange made clear, office buildings could be large and utilitarian and still maintain a palatial dignity. Underlying its restrained ornament was a sense of proportion that eluded the builders of more elaborate structures in this period.

This slant on the news did not pass unnoticed by Eastern architects, and many bought tickets for Chicago with all due haste. Yet most of the newcomers had neither the disposition nor the skill to provide Chicago with a building system even remotely better than the one that had burned. New buildings, like the old ones, were mostly dark and clumsily ornamented. Streets remained clogged. The most stirring innovation, some people believed, was the addition of salt to mortar, which kept it from freezing and allowed bricklayers to work year-round.

In fact, had Chicago’s postfire history gone differently, the apocalypse might have been used to explain not an architectural renaissance but an aesthetic disaster. The need to rebuild as quickly as possible far outpaced the development of a homegrown architectural sensibility. Innovators at the time were understandably more interested...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: The Roots Of Modern Architecture
• Chapter Two: The Chicago School
• Chapter Three: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School
• Chapter Four: From Arts and Crafts to Art Deco
• Chapter Five: The Meaning of Mies and the Rise of Modernism
• Chapter Six: Modern and Postmodern Chicago
• Chapter Seven: Chicago’s Second Modern Period
• Chapter Eight: In Harmony with Nature and the Past
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index of Searchable Terms
• Photograph Credits