SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

Chicago's architecture is famous throughout the world and one style is referred to as the Chicago School. The style is also known as Commercial style.[1] In the history of architecture, the Chicago School was a school of architects active in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. They were among the first to promote the new technologies of steel-frame construction in commercial buildings, and developed a spatial aesthetic which co-evolved with, and then came to influence, parallel developments in European Modernism. A "Second Chicago School" later emerged in the 1940s and 1970s which pioneered new building technologies and structural systems such as the tube-frame structure.[2]

The by Holabird & Roche(1904-1905) is a prime example of the Chicago School, displaying both variations of the Chicago window Historians such as H. Allen Brooks, Winston Weisman andDaniel Bluestone have pointed out that the phrase suggests a unified set of aesthetic or conceptual precepts, when, in fact, Chicago buildings of the era displayed a wide variety of styles and techniques. Contemporary publications used the phrase "Commercial Style" to describe the innovative tall buildings of the era rather than proposing any sort of unified "school".

Chicago School window grid

Some of the distinguishing features of the Chicago School are the use of :

 steel-frame buildings with masonry cladding (usually terra cotta),  allowing large plate-glass window areas and  limiting the amount of exterior ornamentation.  Sometimes elements of neoclassical architecture are used in Chicago School .

COLUMN:

Many Chicago School skyscrapers contain the three parts of a classical column.

The first floor functions as the base, the middle stories, usually with little ornamental detail, act as the shaft of the column, and the last floor or so represent the capital, with more ornamental detail and capped with a cornice.

WINDOW:

The "Chicago window" originated in this school. It is a three-part window consisting of a large fixed center panel flanked by two smaller double-hung sash windows.

The arrangement of windows on the facade typically creates a grid pattern, with some projecting out from the facade forming bay windows.

The Chicago window combined the functions of light-gathering and natural ventilation; a single central pane was usually fixed, while the two surrounding panes were operable.

ARCHITECTS:

Architects whose names are associated with the Chicago School include Henry Hobson Richardson, , , William Holabird,William LeBaron Jenney, Martin Roche, John Root, Solon S. Beman, and . started in the firm of Adler and Sullivan but created his own Prairie Style of architecture.

.

[edit]Origin and purpose

Ferdinand Peck, a Chicago businessman, incorporated the Chicago Auditorium Association in December 1886 to develop what he wanted to be the world's largest, grandest, most expensive theater that would rival such institutions as the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. He was said to have wanted to make high culture accessible to the working classes of Chicago.

The building was to include an office block and a first class hotel. Peck persuaded many Chicago business tycoons to go on board with him, including , Edson Keith, Martin Ryerson, and George Pullman. The association hired the renowned architectural firm of Dankmar Adlerand Louis Sullivan to design the building. At the time, a young Frank Lloyd Wright was employed at the firm as draftsman, and he may have contributed to the design.[5]

"The Auditorium was built for a syndicate of businessmen to house a large civic opera house; to provide an economic base it was decided to wrap the auditorium with a hotel and office block. Hence Adler & Sullivan had to plan a complex multiple-use building. Fronting on Michigan Avenue, overlooking the lake, was the hotel (now Roosevelt University) while the offices were placed to the west on Wabash Avenue. The entrance to the auditorium is on the south side beneath the tall blocky eighteen-story tower. The rest of the building is a uniform ten stories, organized in the same way as Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store. The interior embellishment, however, is wholly Sullivan's, and some of the details, because of their continuous curvilinear foliate motifs, are among the nearest equivalents to European Art Nouveauarchitecture." —Leland M. Roth. A Concise History of American Architecture. p. 179-80.

[edit]Design

Adler and Sullivan designed a tall structure with load-bearing outer walls, and based the exterior appearance partly on the design of H.H. Richardson's Marshall Field Warehouse, another Chicago landmark.[6] The Auditorium is a heavy, impressive structure externally, and was more striking in its day when buildings of its scale were less common. When completed, it was the tallest building in the city and largest building in theUnited States.[7]

One of the most innovative features of the building was its massive raft foundation, designed by Adler in conjunction with engineer Paul Mueller. The soil beneath the Auditorium consists of soft blue clay to a depth of over 100 feet, which made conventional foundations impossible. Adler and Mueller designed a floating mat of crisscrossed railroad ties, topped with a double layer of steel rails embedded in concrete, the whole assemblage coated with pitch.

The resulting raft distributed the weight of the massive outer walls over a large area. However, the weight of the masonry outer walls in relation to the relatively lightweight interior deformed the raft during the course of a century, and today portions of the building have settled as much as 29 inches. This deflection is clearly visible in the theater lobby, where the mosaic floor takes on a distinct slope as it nears the outer walls. This settlement is not because of poor engineering but the fact the design was changed during construction. The original plan had the exterior covered in lightweight terra-cotta, but this was changed to stone after the foundations were under construction. Most of the settlement occurred within a decade after construction, and at one time a plan existed to shorten the interior supports to level the floors but this was never carried out.

In the center of the building was a 4,300 seat auditorium, originally intended primarily for production ofGrand Opera. In keeping with Peck's democratic ideals, the auditorium was designed so that all seats would have good views and acoustics. The original plans had no box seats and when these were added to the plans they did not receive prime locations.

Housed in the building around the central space were an 1890 addition of 136 offices and a 400- room hotel,[7][8] whose purpose was to generate much of the revenue to support the opera. While the Auditorium Building was not intended as a commercial building, Peck wanted it to be self-sufficient. Revenue from the offices and hotel was meant to allow ticket prices to remain reasonable. In reality, both the hotel and office block became unprofitable within a few years.

The , formerly known as the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building or Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Store,[4] is a commercial building at 1 South at the corner of East in Chicago, . It was designed by Louis Sullivan for the retail firm Schlesinger & Mayer in 1899, and expanded and sold to Carson Pirie Scott in 1904. Subsequent additions were completed by Daniel Burnhamin 1906 and Holabird & Root in 1961.[5]

The building was used for retail purposes from 1899, and has been a Chicago Landmark since 1975. It is part of the Loop Retail Historic District.

Contents

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 1 Architecture

 2 See also

 3 References  4 External links

[edit]Architecture

Decorations to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's 100th Birthday in 1909

The Sullivan Center was initially developed because of the Chicago Great Fire of 1871. In 1872, the partnership of Leopold Schlesinger and David Mayer began after their immigration from Bavaria. In 1881 Schlesinger and Mayer had moved their dry-goods store into the Bowen Building that was on the corner of State and Madison. In 1890, Schlesinger and Mayer hired Adler and Sullivan to prepare plans for the removal of the Bowen Building’s attic story and the addition of two stories across the Bowen Building and the adjacent four-story structure to the south. The facades were added to match the bottom stories of the building and the building was painted white. In 1892, Schlesinger and Mayer hired Adler and Sullivan to do further remodeling and add a new entrance to the corner of State and Madison. In 1886, Sullivan, no longer working with Adler, was asked back by Schlesinger and Mayer to redesign the façade and add two stories to the newly leased four-story building on Wabash avenue, as well as connecting it to the State Street store. That never happened because Schlesinger and Mayer changed their minds to make it a ten-story building, which also never happened. It eventually got painted white and then a bridge was added that connected the second story of the building to the elevated railroad. In 1898, Schlesinger and Mayer decided to remove the original building located on State and Madison replace it with a new building designed by Sullivan. Sullivan had both a nine and twelve-story proposal made up for this new building. They eventually started with a nine-story portion of the building that was made on the Madison Street side next to the original portion of the Adler and Sullivan renovations. In 1902 Schlesinger and Mayer came back to Sullivan wanting a twenty-story building on State and Madison, eventually settling for the final twelve stories. The Madison Street portion that was added earlier did not structurally support twelve stories so it was left as is. Sullivan came up with a three-stage plan to finish the new building and allow Schlesinger and Mayer to keep their business running during the Christmas season.[6] The building is remarkable for its steel-framed structure, which allowed a dramatic increase in window area created by bay-wide windows, which in turn allowed for the greatest amount of daylight into the building interiors. This provided larger displays of merchandise to outside pedestrian traffic creating the idea of the sidewalk showcase. In between the windows were lavish bands of terra cotta that replaced the earlier plan for white Georgia quarries because it was light weight and inexpensive. Another reason for the change in what type of marble they would use in construction was that stonecutters were having a strike in 1898 during the time of construction.[7] The lavish Bronze-plated cast-iron ornamental work above the rounded tower was also meant to be functional because it was to be as resilient as a sheet of copper. Both the use of bronze and terra cotta was important to setting the building apart from others because it was essentially fire resistant. It created a sense of monumentality. Sullivan thought the building would be an asset to the city for a long period of time. To ensure this great building would last and be resilient against the threat of fire, there was a 40 ft water tower put on the roof to supply the sprinkler system with enough water, after the city of Chicago had a great fire.

Sullivan designed the corner entry to be seen from both State and Madison, and that the ornamentation, situated above the entrance, would be literally attractive, which would give the store an elegant unique persona important to the competitiveness of the neighboring stores.[8] The building is one of the classic structures of the Chicago school. The ornate decorative panels on the lowest stories of the building are now generally credited to who was Sullivan's chief draftsman after Frank Lloyd Wright left the firm. When Elmslie left the firm himself the same distinct intricate scrollwork panels left with him and appear in his own designs; and Sullivan's style proceeds elsewhere. These ornamental additions originated from the influence of Celtic metalwork. The way this technique was used by Elmslie on the lower floors of the building were so elaborate that it used the natural lighting and shadows to seem almost as if it were magically floating above the ground.[9] The top floor of the 1899 and 1904 sections of the building were recessed to create a narrow loggia topped by an intricately detailed cornice that projected beyond the facade of the building. This was removed around 1948 and the 12th floor redesigned to replicate the lower floors.[10]

The building's northwest entrance

In the early years of development there was an addition that grew to be very valuable in spotting the building from afar. This addition was the pedestrian bridge that connected the train station, behind the store on Wabash Avenue, to the second floor of the Sullivan Center. This too was coated in elaborate metalwork and provided a sense of special entry to those who used it.[11]

In February 2006, the first phase of a multi-year restoration of the building's upper facade was completed. In addition to cleaning, the cornice and supporting columns were recreated on the 12th floor.[10] A 2001 report put the budget at $68.9 million for this renovation. In August 2006 the parent company of Carson Pirie Scott, (Bon-Ton Stores Inc.), announced that after the 2006 Christmas season, the department store in the building would close. There were no immediate announcements as to what would occupy the building after the store's closure. After holding clearance sales, Carson's closed in February 2007.[12]

The 600,000-square-foot (56,000 m2) building, now renamed the Sullivan Center, is currently owned by Joseph Freed and Associates LLC, a real estate developer based in Palatine, Illinois.

In 2008, a second renovation project of the decorative iron work on the lower three floors began. This included the State Street facade as well as rear portions of the building which face Wabash Avenue. Part of the funding for this renovation was provided by the City of Chicago. The Wabash facade was completed in August 2009 and the work on State Street in late 2010.[13][14]

Tenants of the Sullivan Center include the School of the and Gensler. In December 2010, Freed and Associates announced it was in talks with retailer Target, who expressed an interest in occupying part of the structure.[15] On February 15, 2011, the retailer announced it would lease 125,000 sq ft (11,600 m2) spread over two floors of the building. The new store opened July 26, 2012 and was met with favorable reviews for its clean design while being sensitive to the historic character of the structure.[16]

Architecture: The First Chicago School

It is no mere accident that in the 1880s Chicago produced a group of architects, now known as the “First Chicago School,” whose work would have a profound effect upon architecture.

Within a decade after the fire of 1871, Chicago was a boomtown. By 1890 it had a population of more than a million people and had surpassed Philadelphia to become the second-largest metropolis in the . The value of land in the Loop soared. Quickly, the low buildings constructed just after the fire were seen as an inefficient use of valuable space.

Chicago was ready to experiment with daring solutions. The city that had stood at the center of innovations like the Pullman sleeping car, the McCormick reaper, and mail- order retailing would now be the place where the tall office building would be perfected. One of the keys to this development was the invention of the elevator. Chicago had a special problem, however: it stood upon a swamp.

MONTAUK BLOCK, C.1880 As early as 1873, Frederick Baumann had proposed that each vertical element of a building should have a separate foundation ending in a broad pad that would distribute its weight over the marshy ground. It was this type of foundation that Burnham & Root used for the Montauk Block (1882) on West Monroe Street. But Baumann's foundation occupied valuable basement space and could support only 10 stories.

Adler & Sullivan developed a far better solution. Dankmar Adler's experience as an engineer with the Union army during the Civil War helped him devise a vast raft of timbers, steel beams, and iron I-beams to float the Auditorium Building (1889). In 1894 Adler & Sullivan developed a type of caisson construction for the Chicago Stock Exchange which quickly became routine for tall buildings across the United States.

The early structures of the First Chicago School, such as the Montauk and the Auditorium, had traditional load-bearing walls of brick and stone, but it was the metal skeleton frame that allowed the architects of the First Chicago School to perfect their signature edifice, the . constructed the world's first completely iron-and-steel-framed building in the 1880s. Jenney had in 1853 enrolled in Paris's prestigious École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. (Among his classmates was Gustave Eiffel.) During the Civil War Jenney had been assigned the task of demolishing buildings and bridges. In the process he had mastered the nuances of metal construction.

In 1868 Jenney established an office in Chicago which became the training ground for a number of leading architects of the First Chicago School, including, among others, Martin Roche, William Holabird, and Louis Sullivan. When, in 1884, the Home Insurance Company asked Jenney to design an office tower, the architect designed an iron skeleton to bear the weight of the structure. After work began, the Carnegie-Phipps Steel Company, realizing the potential of a vast new market, informed Jenney that it could supply him with steel instead of iron beams. Thus the at the northeast corner of LaSalle and Adams Streets became a truly seminal structure.

This new construction, while costly, had overwhelming advantages. It was almost fireproof; the thin curtain walls hung from the steel frame allowed for more interior rental space; new floors could be added easily; and since the exterior walls were no longer essential to holding up the building, they could be cut away and replaced by ever larger expanses of glass, an important consideration in the early era of electrical lighting.

While the technical innovations of the First Chicago School had been sensational, what it needed to become a truly notable architectural movement was style. The exterior of the Home Insurance Building, with its gray and green stone columns and its brick upper floors embellished by stone stringcourses and pilasters, was, to say the least, banal. The First Chicago School found its inspiration for style in two totally disparate sources. One was the Louisiana-born architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Although he was trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Richardson rejected the école's dictum that the Greek and Roman classical style was the ultimate standard of design. Instead, his ideal was the rugged Romanesque of the South of France. In 1870 on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue, Richardson designed the trailblazing Romanesque revival Brattle Square Church, whose tower fired the architectural aspirations of Boston native Louis Sullivan when he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And it was the revelatory presence of Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store of 1885, filling the block bounded by Adams, Quincy, Wells, and Franklin Streets, that radically altered the design of Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building. Sullivan's original sketches were for an eclectic structure terminating in a high, gabled roof. After the appearance of the Field edifice, Sullivan swept away his original plans and replaced them with a virile, restrained Romanesque revival structure with a single massive tower. Louis Sullivan was not the only member of the First Chicago School to fall under the spell of Richardsonian Romanesque. It was essential to the designs of Solon S. Beman for the brick and granite Pullman Building of 1883 on Michigan Avenue and the Fine Arts Building of 1885, also on Michigan Avenue. Burnham & Root embraced the Romanesque for the Art Institute next to the Fine Arts Building and for the Rookery on LaSalle Street, completed in 1888. But it was Sullivan, with his interior of the Auditorium Theater and the entrance to the Chicago Stock Exchange of 1894 on LaSalle Street, who brought Chicago Romanesque to its most complete and impressive development.

The second source of style for the architects of the First Chicago School derived from the very nature of the material they so wholeheartedly adopted: steel. This, curiously, was in contradiction to Richardson's aesthetic principles. He unequivocally rejected the concept of the metal-framed building, championing instead lithic structures

with load-bearing walls like his superb VIEW OF SOUTH MICHIGAN AVENUE, 1935 Trinity Church, Boston, of 1873. When the architects of the First Chicago School built in stone they generally did so in a Richardsonian Romanesque style. Adler & Sullivan's Walker Warehouse of 1888, which stood on what became Wacker Drive, and the lower floors of Burnham & Root's Building of 1890 at the corner of State and Randolph Streets are cases in point. But when the Chicago architects moved to metal—iron and steel—they enthusiastically expressed the qualities of the material. This led in two directions. One of the realities of the material was that it lent itself to the sinuous curve, which led Chicago architects, as it did their European contemporaries such as Hector Guimard, to . Superb examples include the original design of the light court of the Rookery and the stairways and elevator grills in Adler & Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange.

The second aesthetic implication of iron and steel was the right angle, daringly expressed in Holabird and Roche's Tacoma Building of 1889 at the corner of Madison and LaSalle Streets. The 13-story office tower, the first building constructed by using rivets, revealed in its sharp angles the steel structure beneath its curtain walls. This aesthetic was also the controlling factor in the upper floors of Adler & Sullivan's Stock Exchange, where the Romanesque arches of the base were eschewed above for a soaring, simplified elevation whose sole decorative

element was the interplay of the planes of the flat wall surface , C. against those of the rhythmic bays. This celebration of the rigid 1888 nature of metal is perhaps most brilliantly exemplified by Burnham & Root's (1895) on State Street, completed by Charles B. Atwood after Root's death. There is about the Reliance a marvelous sense of the sharp, almost dangerous, edges of the steel frame lying just beneath its thin, white terra cotta walls. This sensation is enhanced by the fact that two- thirds of the walls are of glass, producing a structure of rare, brittle beauty.

The eclipse of the First Chicago School by an architecture based upon the classical as interpreted by the École des Beaux-Arts was signaled by the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. Louis Sullivan and other architects of the school had expected that the fair, under the architectural direction of Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root, would be a showcase for Chicago's architecture. But the death of Root in January 1891 ended that hope. Burnham, then the most important architectural voice of the fair, turned for direction to New Yorker Richard Morris Hunt, dean of American architects, who was the first American to graduate from the architectural section of the École des Beaux-Arts. Though Adler & Sullivan designed a spectacularly non-Beaux-Arts Transportation Building for the fair, the style of “The White City” was overwhelmingly Beaux-Arts.

Nonetheless, the First Chicago School was an astonishing and a profoundly important achievement. Its matchless tradition of technical prowess and aesthetic boldness would surface again in Chicago in the 1930s with the arrival of the Bauhaus, and in the following decades in the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his disciples.