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 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 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 automobile- oriented 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 Revival- style 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 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 middle- and 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 concrete- frame 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” 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 lead- coated 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.

JOAN DRAPER AND ROBERT NAUMAN

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.1 (A-F).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

INTERNAL LINKS

MIES VAN DER ROHE, LUDWIG; SKIDMORE OWINGS AND MERRILL; SKYSCRAPER; WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD;

FUTHER READING

Bluestone, Daniel M., Constructing Chicago, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1991

ChicagoArchitectsDesign:ACenturyofArchitecturalDrawingsfrom theArt InstituteofChicago, Chicago:ArtInstituteofChicago,andNewYork:Rizzoli,1982

Condit, Carl W., Chicago, 1910–29: Building, Planning, and U rban Technol ogy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973

Condit, Carl W., Chicago, 1930–70: Building, Planning, and U rban Technol ogy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974

Mayer, Harold M., and Richard C.Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969

Siegel, Arthur (editor), Chicago’s Famous Buildings: A Photographic Guide t o the City’s Archi tectural Lan dmarks and Other No table Buildings, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965; 4th edition, revised and enlarged, edited by Franz Schulze and Kevin Harrington, 1993

Stamper, John W., Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue: Planning and Developmen t, 1900–1930, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 Willis, Carol, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995

Zukowsky, John (editor), Chicago Architecture, 1872–1922: Bi rth of a Metr opolis (exhib. cat.), Munich: Prestel Verlag, and Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1987

Zukowsky, John (editor), Chicago Architecture and Design, 1923–1993: Reconfi guration o f an Amer ican Metropolis (exhib. cat.), Munich: Prestel Verlag, and Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1993