CHICAGO 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 Chicago Building 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 skyscrapers.

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, Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird,William
LeBaron Jenney, Martin Roche, John Root, Solon S. Beman, and Louis
Sullivan. Frank Lloyd Wright 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 Marshall Field, 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 400room 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 Sullivan Center, formerly known as the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company
[4]
Building or Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Store, is a commercial building at 1 South State
Street at the corner of East Madison Street in Chicago, Illinois. It was designed by Louis Sullivan for
the retail firm Schlesinger & Mayer in 1899, and expanded and sold to Carson Pirie Scott in 1904.
[5]
Subsequent additions were completed by Daniel Burnhamin 1906 and Holabird & Root in 1961.
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
[hide]

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 Buildings 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 faade 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
[6]
their business running during the Christmas season. 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
[7]
time of construction. 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
[8]
an elegant unique persona important to the competitiveness of the neighboring stores. 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 George Grant Elmslie 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
[9]
ground. 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
[10]
building. This was removed around 1948 and the 12th floor redesigned to replicate the lower floors.

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
[11]
metalwork and provided a sense of special entry to those who used it.
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
[10]
floor. 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
[12]
holding clearance sales, Carson's closed in February 2007.
2

The 600,000-square-foot (56,000 m ) 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
[13][14]
completed in August 2009 and the work on State Street in late 2010.
Tenants of the Sullivan Center include the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Gensler. In
December 2010, Freed and Associates announced it was in talks with retailer Target, who expressed
[15]
an interest in occupying part of the structure. On February 15, 2011, the retailer announced it would
2
lease 125,000 sq ft (11,600 m ) 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
[16]
character of the structure.

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
second-largest metropolis in the United States. The value of land in the Loop soared.
Quickly, the low buildings constructed just after the fire were seen as an inefficient us
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 mailorder retailing would now be the place where the tall office building would be perfecte
One of the keys to this development was the invention of the elevator. Chicago had a
special problem, however: it stood upon a swamp.

As early as 1873, Frederick Baumann had proposed that eac

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 Blo
(1882) on West Monroe Street. But Baumann's foundation occupied valuable baseme
space and could support only 10 stories.
MONTAUK BLOCK, C.1880

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 18
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 meta
skeleton frame that allowed the architects of the First Chicago School to perfect their
signature edifice, the skyscraper. William Le Baron Jenney constructed the world's fir
completely iron-and-steel-framed building in the 1880s. Jenney had in 1853 enrolled
Paris's prestigious cole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. (Among his classmates w
Gustave Eiffel.) During the Civil War Jenney had been assigned the task of demolishi
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 fo
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-Phip
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 Home Insurance Building
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 ev
larger expanses of glass, an important consideration in the early era of electrical light

While the technical innovations of the First Chicago School had been sensational, wh
needed to become a truly notable architectural movement was style. The exterior of th
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. T
First Chicago School found its inspiration for style in two totally disparate sources. On
was the Louisiana-born architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Although he was trained
the cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Richardson rejected the cole's dictum that the Gre
and Roman classical style was the ultimate standard of design. Instead, his ideal was
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 Sulliva
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 th
block bounded by Adams, Quincy, Wells, and Franklin Streets, that radically altered t
design of Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building. Sullivan's original sketches were fo
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, restrai
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 o
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 LaSa
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 adopt
steel. This, curiously, was in
contradiction to Richardson's aestheti
principles. He unequivocally rejected t
concept of the metal-framed building,
championing instead lithic structures
with load-bearing walls like his superb
Trinity Church, Boston, of 1873. When
VIEW OF SOUTH MICHIGAN AVENUE, 1935
the architects of the First Chicago Sch
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, an
the lower floors of Burnham & Root's Masonic Temple Building of 1890 at the corner
State and Randolph Streets are cases in point. But when the Chicago architects moved
metaliron and steelthey enthusiastically expressed the qualities of the material. T
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 art nouveau. Superb examples include the original design
the light court of the Rookery and the stairways and elevator grills in Adler & Sullivan
Chicago Stock Exchange.

The second aesthetic implication of iron and steel was the ri

angle, daringly expressed in Holabird and Roche's Tacoma
Building of 1889 at the corner of Madison and LaSalle Stree
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 control
factor in the upper floors of Adler & Sullivan's Stock Exchan
where the Romanesque arches of the base were eschewed
above for a soaring, simplified elevation whose sole decorati
element was the interplay of the planes of the flat wall surfa
against those of the rhythmic bays. This celebration of the ri
ROOKERY BUILDING, C.
1888
nature of metal is perhaps most brilliantly exemplified by
Burnham & Root's Reliance Building (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 tw
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 cole des Beaux-Arts was signaled by the World's Columbian
Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. Louis Sullivan and other architects of the school h
expected that the fair, under the architectural direction of Daniel H. Burnham and Jo
Wellborn Root, would be a showcase for Chicago's architecture. But the death of Root
January 1891 ended that hope. Burnham, then the most important architectural voice

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 th
cole des Beaux-Arts. Though Adler & Sullivan designed a spectacularly non-Beaux-A
Transportation Building for the fair, the style of The White City was overwhelmingl
Beaux-Arts.

Nonetheless, the First Chicago School was an astonishing and a profoundly importan
achievement. Its matchless tradition of technical prowess and aesthetic boldness wou
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.