CHICAGO SCHOOL

Named for the city in which it materialized and flourished, the Chicago School of
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.

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
Entries A–F 453
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
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 454
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
Entries A–F 455
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”
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 456
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.