skyscraper design marked the emergence of the first truly American style of architecture.
A concern for the economic use of materials in a speculative environment resulted in a
radically new solution for the high-rise building, quite removed from the historicism and
eclecticism of the past. Beginning in the mid-1870s and peaking in the early 1900s, the
skyline of Chicago underwent an amazing transformation, evoking the “Brown City”
designation made so famous in the critical work by Lewis Mumford. The so-called death
of the Chicago School style in 1922 resulted in part from the ever-increasing popularity
of the White City and coincided with the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition. Yet, with
the 1938 arrival of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Armour Institute of Technology
(later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology), a so-called Second Chicago School of
architecture emerged. This synthesis of late 19th-century structural efficiency and mid-
20th-century materials demonstrated the long-ranging contributions of Chicago School
architects, such as Louis Sullivan, on skyscraper design and modern architecture as a
whole.
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 458
In 1871 the Great Fire decimated the central business district in Chicago, destroying
18,000 buildings and causing over $200 million in property damage. An area four miles
long and nearly three-quarters of a mile wide was affected. Yet from this devastating loss,
Chicago arose like a phoenix, reborn from the ashes, as speculators funded an enormous
amount of commercial highrise building. Their desire for economical and functional
buildings contributed nearly as much to the aesthetic of the Chicago School as did the
architects who flooded there seeking to define the skyscraper. The primary characteristics
of the late 19th-century Chicago School included the economic use of and
experimentation with modern materials, resulting in little applied ornamentation and a
greater use of large glass windows.
As is the case in many urban centers, tremendous land costs made it desirable to build
tall and to build in a very concentrated area. Architects responded to the challenges
presented by speculators. In order to reap the greatest profit from their investment,
investors required maximum profitability from the interior space, so high-rent offices
with windows providing adequate natural lighting were preferred. The Chicago window
was developed and was repeated across the wall surfaces: a large central pane flanked on
either side by narrow, movable sash windows. In addition, as dictated by the building
plots and in the desire for greater interior light, Chicago School skyscrapers tended to be
either tall and narrow or to possess a U-shaped light court. Steel-cage construction
provided far greater fire protection than wrought- or cast-iron framing, a concern in a city
that had so recently suffered a catastrophic fire. The uniformity of the steelframe grid
improved construction time and aided in the ease of erection, yet the sodden soil
demanded the use of caisson foundations and limited the heights to which architects
could build. Masonry or terra-cotta encased the steel frame not only to express it clearly
but also to provide fireproofing. With restrictive budgets, speculators, such as the Brooks
brothers of Boston, also frowned on excessive and expensive ornamentation.
Most discussions of the Chicago School have emphasized the lack of exterior
ornamentation and have focused on the aesthetics of form. This is not entirely the case, as
recent scholars such as Bruegmann and Willis have argued. Speculators were willing to
pay for some degree of ornamentation if it appealed to prospective renters. Thus,
embellishments commonly appeared in lobbies or in courtyards, anywhere easily visible.
However, the overt large-scale application of historicism did not seem appropriate,
considering the use of modern technology. Thus, the bare-bones structural form of the
steel-framed building became primarily its own ornament, along with its curtain walls
filled with glass.
The most prominent Chicago School firms were Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn
Root, William Holabird and Martin Roche, and Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan.
These firms designed and built some of the best-known examples of Chicago School
architecture, mostly in Chicago, although some of Sullivan’s best work was in other
cities. The influential figure that drew most of these men together was the structural
pioneer William Le Baron Jenney, whose Home Insurance Building (1884–85)
masterfully handled a steel rather than an iron frame for the first time. Burnham,
Holabird, Roche, and Sullivan had worked in the office of Jenney during the 1870s. The
important aesthetic influence on these men was Henry Hobson Richardson’s tour de
force, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store (1885–87) in Chicago. The strong simplicity
and rationalization of form displayed by Richardson’s structure galvanized similar
Entries A–F 459
approaches by Burnham and Root in their masonry-block Monadnock Building (1884–
91, with its steel-cage addition, 1891–93), Holabird and Roche’s Tacoma Building
(1887–89), and Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium Building (1886–90).
Louis Sullivan in particular served as a strong proponent of the Chicago School style
not only through his buildings but also through his theoretical writings. In his “The Tall
Office Building Artistically Considered” (1896), Sullivan argued that the uniform
solution for high-rise form lies in organicism, “that the life is recognizable in its
expression, that form ever follows function.” Thus, the natural verticality of the
skyscraper, drawn by the steel-frame elements, should be articulated, and a clear
distinction should be made between the base of the building, its honeycombed office
middle, and its machinery top. In reality, Sullivan exploited mainly the vertical I beams,
although the horizontal elements also maintained the grid, and at times he simply added
decorative vertical elements that did not correspond to loadbearing members. He also
continued to employ ornament on his facades, mostly terra-cotta Art Nouveau-like
germinating seeds and leafy plants. Many European architects, such as the Adolf Loos,
eschewed such details and rejected ornamentation as “degenerate,” like the tattoos worn
by criminals. However, his practical approach to handling the skyscraper also inspired
European architects, such as the Dutchman Hendrick Petrus Berlage, who visited
Chicago in 1911. In addition, Frank Lloyd Wright transmitted Louis Sullivan’s ideas of
organicism, not only in ornamentation but also in terms of form, to Europeans through his
writings and work, as seen in his 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio. These important European
connections, particularly through the Dutch rationalists and the German Werkbund,
contributed to the spread of Chicago School ideals and helped facilitate the second
Chicago School by expatriates displaced by World War II.
In the first decade of the 20th century, the Chicago School reached its zenith, especially
in such works as Holabird and Roche and Louis Sullivan’s Gage Group (1899–1900) and
Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott store (1898–99, 1902–04). The empha- sis on modular
design, with large amounts of glass surface and still somewhat historicist masonry,
dominated the Chicago skyline and crept into other midwestern cities, such as St. Louis,
Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Yet the aesthetic changed, as American architects just
could not quite make a total commitment to modernism and reverted to a Beaux-Artsinspired
classicism that affected form, ornamentation, and materials. The event that
spurred on this architectural reversal was the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,
coordinated by Daniel Burnham. Burnham’s firm, D.H.Burnham and Company, and its
successor firm, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, came to dominate major high-rise
design in the period leading up to the Great Depression in the style known as commercial,
or BeauxArts, classicism. Replacing the characteristic flat roof was a more ornamental
top, and the emphasis on heavy masonry over glass returned. New zoning laws in
Chicago as well as other cities encouraged the setback style over the tall narrow or even
U-shaped Chicago School type.
860–880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments
(1948–51), designed by Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe, Chicago
The 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower Competition substantiated the comeback of
historicism in skyscraper design as Raymond Hood’s winning Gothic-inspired creation
beat out Eliel Saarinen’s modernist design in the most important international
architectural competition of the early 20th century. Instead of being a showcase for the
Chicago School style, the competition ended up displaying the new conservatism of
American design and hinting at the future ascendancy of European modernism.
Interestingly, European entries, such as Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s, demonstrated
a far greater appreciation for the Chicago School aesthetic than did those of native-born
architects by referencing motifs such as the Chicago window. These Europeans had
virtually no experience (except on paper) in designing commercial high-rise buildings, a
primarily American phenomenon up until the post-World War II era. Thus, they were far
more willing to embrace technological developments and imaginatively pursue new
aesthetic solutions.
The German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had demonstrated a substantial
understanding of the Chicago School style in his Friedrichstrasse Office Building Project
(1921) in Berlin with its honeycomb repetition of offices and lack of ornamentation. His
early, unexecuted designs for office buildings possessed a rather organic sculptural
quality, with undulating curves rather than straight lines, but he quickly moved away
from this. By the time he arrived in Chicago to teach at the Armour Institute in 1938, he
had begun to synthesize his ideas of material integrity and structural honesty with the
Entries A–F 461
tenets of the Chicago School. What he rejected was the use of heavy masonry or terracotta
cladding over the steel cage. For him, the pure expression of materials meant
exposing the frame and making it flush with the glass curtain wall, as visible in his Lake
Shore Drive Apartments (1948–51) in Chicago. His masterpiece Seagram Building
(1954–58) in New York, done with Philip Johnson, reveals the refinements that Mies
made to the Chicago School style. He tempered the “proud, soaring” structure by
emphasizing the monotonous horizontal banding of windows wrapping around the entire
building. The steel grid dominates, creating a precise exercise in modulation heavily
influenced by classical rhythms and order.
Coincidentally (or perhaps not), at the same time that Mies was reevaluating the
Chicago School style, architectural historian Carl Condit published his landmark study The Ris e o f the
Skys craper (1952), which appraised the original Chicago School. With subsequent revisions and
expansions by the author, now retitled The Chicago School of Architecture, Condit’s remains the best work on this
commercial style.
The so-called Second Chicago School, centered in Chicago and led by Mies until his
death in 1969, emphasized bold structural form and expressive use of modern materials.
The skeletal quality inherent in steel-cage construction was worshiped, not hidden behind
masonry. Often International Style elements, such as pilotis or ribbon windows, merged with
the Miesian glass block, creating a hybrid of modernism unique to American cities and
American-based firms. The early work of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill adheres to these
tenets, as visible in their early masterpieces the Lever House (1952) in New York and the
Inland Steel Building (1954–58) in Chicago. Here, the glass box revealed the full
maturation of the first Chicago School in the economic use of materials and modernist
aesthetics that reject all historicism and ornamentation.
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s John Hancock Tower (1970) in Chicago, with its
exoskeletal cross bracing and clearly vertical articulation of structural members, signaled
the ending of the Miesian manifestation of the Chicago School style. Postmodernism thus
emerged, reconnecting with pre-Chicago School historicism. Yet, even in this form, a
demonstration of the Chicago School heritage continued to manifest itself in either overt
or subtle ways. Often these were found in Chicago-trained or Chicago-based architects,
suggesting a form of architectural osmosis occurring. A prime example is Helmut Jahn,
whose Xerox Center (1977–80) in Chicago appears very much like a stripped-down
version of Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott store. In a contextual way, Postmodern structures
in Chicago and elsewhere have attempted to visually embrace the older Chicago
Schoolstyle structures through the use of reflective plate glass and complementary height
lines.
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