CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Although Chicago architecture has, within modernist architectural
histories, been conflated with the “Chicago School,” a term borrowed
from literary criticism and applied to the distinctive residential work of
Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and their contemporaries, Chicago
architecture is, in fact, more diverse and less insular than the modernist
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narrative suggested (Condit, Giedion, Hitchcock). Chicago School
scholars’ views were popularized in publications such as Chicago’s Famous Buildin gs (1965), which
asserted that “almost the whole history of what we call ‘contemporary
design’ can be examined in Chicago. For Chicago is the birthplace of
modern architecture” (see Siegel, 1993). More recently, however, some
architectural historians have debunked the myth of the Chicago School
and shown that other locales simultaneously witnessed similar design
shifts.
Architectural historians have studied a range of types and styles, some typically
American, some more innovative. Chicago designers, mostly recent migrants and
immigrants, set many trends and standards in the 19th and 20th centuries. Several factors
influenced the city’s prominence on the national and international scene. Chicago, grid
platted in 1830 and incorporated in 1837, grew rapidly into a great metropolis in large
part because of its auspicious location. The city lies near the geographic center of the vast
and fertile plains region, blessed also with abundant natural resources. Its location at the
southwestern tip of the Great Lakes system and near the Mississippi River allowed
Chicago to develop during the 19th century into a center of trade, finance, industry, and
rail and water transport, second only to New York City. From the beginning this urban
center attracted entrepreneurs. Their wealth and cultural aspirations supported skilled
professionals and artists in many fields, including architecture. In many respects, the
speculative fever of the 1830s persisted through the end of the millennium. Generous
patronage for significant architectural works abounded, although only at the end of the
century did preservationist ideals take root. Surviving works of special merit are
embedded in the more common fabric of Chicago’s built environment, which stretches
from the downtown Loop, where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan, across the flat
prairie through an ever-expanding fan of suburbs.
In Chicago’s Loop dozens of tall, speculative office buildings were constructed from
1880 through 1929 as investors sought to accommodate large and small businesses. The
Marquette Building (1895), developed by the Brooks brothers and designed by Holabird
and Roche, established a characteristic formula. This 16-story steel-framed structure has
a U-shaped plan and cladding of dark brick and terra-cotta. The flat classicizing ornament
is articulated into a base, shaft, and capital, thus giving the enormous block a sense of
order within the gridded streetscape. The Conway Building (1915), by Graham,
Anderson, Probst and White, is organized around a square light court, like many of
Chicago’s multitenant office buildings. Cream-colored terra-cotta ornament of classical
character forms the tripartite schema of the exterior cladding. This structure, developed
by the estate of merchant Marshall Field, became the model for premier commercial
structures throughout the country during the 1920s. The fact that it resembles the earlier
Marshall Field and Co. State Street Store (1902–14), by D.H.Burnham and Company,
illustrates how these large Chicago design firms estab-lished the nation’s business
vernacular in the first decades of the 20th century. More distinctive are the pre-
Depression-era corporate headquarters, such as the Wrigley Building (1924, Graham,
Anderson, Probst and White) and the Gothic Revival Tribune Building (1925) by New
Yorkers Howells and Hood. Another 1920s newspaper headquarters, the Chicago Daily
News Building (1929, Holabird and Root), was more innovative as the first Chicago
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building to utilize air rights over railroad tracks. It was designed in the moderne-style
stepped-back skyscraper type introduced in 1922 by Eliel Saarinen’s second-place
Tribune Tower scheme and replicated throughout the city and the nation.
Chicago’s suburbs host significant structures from every decade of the century. Lake
Forest, along the west shore of Lake Michigan, has possibly the nation’s first automobileoriented
shopping center, Market Square (1917), designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw
as a picturesque amalgam of European and American motifs. Oak Park, west of
downtown, was home to Frank Lloyd Wright; he worked there and in Chicago from 1887
to 1910. Wright’s suburban prairie house type, formulated around 1901, expressed a
sense of shelter without emulating any historic model. His house (1903) for
manufacturing company president Ward Willits in Highland Park extends in four
directions on a cross-axial plan, anchored at the center by a fireplace core.
For those who wanted high-rise living without sacrificing domesticity or conventional
imagery, Chicago architects designed many elegantly detailed apartment buildings. Some
of Chicago’s richest men commissioned their friend Andrew Rebori to design for them
the 18-story luxury cooperative at 2430 North Lake Shore (1926), just one of many such
structures overlooking lakefront parks on the north and south sides of the city.
These parks form part of an extensive public works program undertaken in Chicago
following the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Civic designs were guided by the
1909 Plan of Chicago, sponsored by the Commercial Club. This ambitious document
epitomized the City Beautiful movement in its depiction of an orderly and monumental
urban region. Among the improvements that accorded with the plan were the south-side
neighborhood parks and field houses (1903–11, Olmsted Bros. and Burnham and Co.);
the bascule bridges across the Chicago River, notably Michigan Avenue Bridge (1920,
Thomas G. Pihlfeldt, Hugh E.Young, and Edward H.Bennett); and several museums,
including the Field Museum (1919) and Shedd Aquarium (1930), both by Graham,
Anderson, Probst and White. All these structures are neoclassical in style. Private
patronage also produced magnificent public buildings, for example, the Gothic Revivalstyle
campus of the University of Chicago, which includes the Rockefeller Memorial
Chapel (1928, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue).
The Great Depression slowed Chicago building for over a decade. During 1932 the
value of new construction shrank to 1 percent of the 1926 total. Nevertheless, some
projects kept designers and builders at work. The 1933 Century of Progress Exposition
was supported by magnates such as Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck and Company,
Philip Wrigley, and Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. It played a major part in the acceptance
of modern architecture in Chicago during the next decades. Non-Chicagoans led the
design team: Raymond Hood, Paul Philippe Cret, Ralph T.Walker, Harvey Wiley
Corbett, and Arthur Brown, Jr. Chicago architects who participated were Edward H.
Bennett, John A.Holabird, and Hubert Burnham. Louis Skidmore was selected to direct
exhibition design, and he appointed his brother-in-law, Nathaniel Owings, to oversee
concessions. They would later form Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), a design firm
that profoundly shaped the Chicago skyline. The theme of the fair was “Science Finds—
Industry Applies—Man Conforms.” The official guidebook emphasized practicality,
efficiency, and economy through the use of prefabricated and mass-produced materials.
Its rhetoric resembled that in the 1932 New York Museum of Modern Art Modern
International Style exhibition catalog. Less aesthetically precocious were the New Deal
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public works that saved Chicago’s economy. Projects included the expansion of Lincoln
Park, North Lake Shore Drive, public transit improvements, and large public housing
projects: the Jane Addams Houses (1938), Trumbull Park Homes (1938), and Frances
Cabrini Homes (1942 and later).
Rich and poor Chicagoans live in high-rise apartment buildings. Shortly after World
War II several innovative large-scale projects were constructed on the “Gold Coast” north
of downtown. Wealthy entrepreneurs, such as Herbert Greenwald and the McCormicks,
financed these towers and commissioned modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
His Promontory Point apartment complex (1949) used a reinforeed-concrete frame. In
collaboration with others, he designed two identical apartment towers (1949–52) at 860–
880 North Lake Shore Drive. Mies employed a distinctive vocabulary of form: a clearly
articulated structural grid based on an abstract mathematical order and filled by glass
walls. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s Miesian Lake Meadows Apartments (1950–60)
makes up one of the city’s largest postwar redevelopment projects. It was intended by the
New York Life Insurance Company to provide racially integrated housing for middleand
upper-income families and included a shopping center, community club, and office
building. The luxurious Lake Point Tower (1965–68), designed by George C.Schipporeit
and John C.Heinrich (both Mies protégés), used an undulating three-lobed design
inspired by a 1919 Mies project.
Mies’ Modern style, the basis of the second Chicago School, was employed for many
institutional and commercial projects. His structurally expressive Illinois Institute of
Technology Campus (1939–58) was based on a 24-foot module: the bay span of steel and
concrete frames. Mies designed Chicago’s Federal Center (1964, 1975), a grouping of
three buildings (a 30-story courthouse and office building, a 45-story office tower, and a
singlestory post office) oriented around a central plaza. In 1965 the combined firms of
C.F.Murphy Associates; Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett; and Skidmore, Owings and
Merrill employed a Miesian vocabulary for the Civic Center (now the Richard J. Daley
Center). Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed a host of office buildings in the Miesian
spirit, including the Inland Steel Building (1955–57). Its stainless-steel utility tower
contains service elements, allowing rental spaces in the adjoining blue-green glass tower
to be free of structural obstructions. The 19-story building was one of the first tall
buildings erected downtown after the Depression. This firm explored capabilities of
materials and structural systems to the fullest extent in multiuse projects, such as the John
Hancock Center (1965–70) and the Sears Tower (1974). The former building uses an
exterior bracing system to attain a height of 1,107 feet, whereas the latter has a unique
structural system of bundled tubes and rises to 1,454 feet. Its black aluminum-sheathed
steel frame was the tallest building in the world at the time of construction.
Other architects of the postwar period employed more expressive or symbolic forms.
The Crow Island School in suburban Winnetka, by Finnish immigrant architects Eliel and
Eero Saarinen with Perkins, Wheeler and Will (1939–40), is a low, brickclad structure.
The picturesque massing resulted from the articulation of functional units. This was one
of the first schools in the country to respond to the principles of progressive education.
Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City (1963) was realized as two circular, 60-story concreteframe
towers. Loads are carried mainly by cylindrical cores. Forty floors of apartments
rise above an 18-story parking garage and two-story utility space. Chicagoan Walter
Netsch, a designer in the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill office, applied his “field theory”
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of design at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus (1965–77). Netsch
developed a generative principle of design based on rotated squares, resulting in elaborate
and complex interpenetrations of space. Harry Weese’s sculptural Seventeenth Church of
Christ, Scientist (1968) was inspired by the designs of his friend Eero Saarinen. Its
semicircular reinforced-concrete form is sheathed in travertine and capped with a leadcoated
roof. Weese’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (1975), a federal prison
downtown, is an exposed reinforced-concrete building with a triangular footprint and
abstractly ordered slit windows illuminating perimeter cells.
The firm of Naess and Murphy (later C.F.Murphy Associates and Murphy/Jahn)
proposed a “new synthesis” of modern and historic elements. Their Prudential Building
(1955) was inspired by architectural forms of the 1920s. At O’Hare International Airport,
opened in 1963, their earliest Mies-inspired terminals were augmented in 1987 by
Munich-born Helmut Jahn’s United Airlines Terminal, whose forms recall railroad sheds.
Among the firm’s other projects are the Chicago Board of Trade addition (1981),
complementing the original 1930 Art Deco design of Holabird and Root, and the
controversial State of Illinois Center (1981–84), with its curvilinear glass exterior,
terminating in a truncated ellipse, and a 17-story atrium. In the 1980s responses to
specific sites and programs led to other signature designs in downtown Chicago. For
example, New Yorkers Kohn Pedersen Fox designed the 333 West Wacker Building
(1983) with a curved face, defining the bend of the Chicago River. Its green reflective
glass facade rises 36 stories. The same firm designed the 311 South Wacker Building
(1990), the world’s tallest concrete-frame building. Hammond, Beeby and Babka
employed a combination of forms drawn from Beaux-Arts classicism and 1880s
commercial buildings in their 1988 competition entry for the Harold Washington Library
Center, the country’s largest public library building. It is located in the south Loop and
was completed in 1991. In contrast, the firm of Tigerman, McCurry used a Gothic
vocabulary to articulate the exterior of their Chicago Bar Association Building (1990).
Among historical restoration projects since the 1960s are some of Chicago’s most
beloved monuments: the Auditorium Building (1889, Adler and Sullivan, restored 1967
by Harry Weese), Orchestra Hall (1905, D.H.Burnham and Company, renovated 1967 by
Harry Weese), the Art Institute (1893–1916, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, lobby restored
1987 by John Vinci), and Navy Pier (1916, Charles Sumner Frost, ballroom restored
1976 by city architect Jerome Butler). Since 1991 VOA Associates of Chicago have
worked with public officials to turn Navy Pier into a multifunctional festival
environment, containing diverse public, cultural, entertainment, and commercial
facilities. Navy Pier differs significantly from earlier modernist single-purpose
commercial projects, such as Old Orchard Shopping Center (1957, Loebl, Schlossman
and Bennett) in Skokie. The Navy Pier project typifies Postmodern urbanism in the
United States.