The Corn Latitudes

This near-book was but one chapter in four that made up one section of seven about Chicagolandia that made up one of the ten sections of the original manuscript version of See Illinois, my unpublished guide to Illinois history and culture. Chicago architecture has been written to death, and my account had no commercial future, but there is good stuff in this one for readers new to the topic.

Chicago means architecture to a fair portion of the world’s educated tourists. For a generation, tourists visiting Chicago have wandered the streets guidebooks in hand, or towed by guides, or rubbernecked from sightseeing boats on the river, at the downtown’s great buildings. the skyscraper is Chicago’s Alps, its Great Pyramids, its (here concessions to the times must be made) DisneyWorld. Tourists used to come mainly because the city’s buildings were tall—many still do—but the more discerning noticed that many were beautiful too; the last is not a term that Chicago likes to use about itself, but it is no less true.

A city known for its architecture must also be known for its architects. Critic Robert Bray is among those who noted that the best novels by Robert Herrick and Henry Blake Fuller cast architects as heroes who remade the city with their pencils the way the frontiersman had remade the Illinois wilderness with his ax. The region’s suburbs also have produced their Daniel Boone in the person of Frank Lloyd Wright, on whom (it was widely assumed) Ayn Rand modeled the architect-hero of her 1943 novel The Fountainhead.

The quality of its older large commercial buildings easily is the one field in which Chicago is No. 2 to no American city. It is no longer a center of architectural innovation but its stock of important commercial buildings from the 1880s through the 1960s—tall commercial buildings and suburban houses in particular—is among the best. In few other states would a WPA guide devote a chapter to architecture, but Illinois by 1939 had earned one. There have been appalling losses—the same urge to profit that creates buildings also destroys them if unchecked—but even so, parts of downtown one can scarcely there is scarcely a block that does not contain at least one structure worth risking a jaywalking ticket to get a better look at.

The Chicago Commercial Building

Given its commercial orientation, it was inevitable that Chicago’s most imposing buildings were not cathedrals, as in Europe. Chicago lacks even one religious building of real distinction unless one counts the Baha’i temple in Wilmette or Unity Temple in Oak Park—both, interestingly, conceived for fringe religions in the suburbs, and interesting mainly to the extent that they depart from the usual churchly norms.

Nor can the guide books point the architecture tourist to palaces; Chicago’s merchant princes were still, alas, only merchants. With very rare exceptions—the houses of James Charnley (out of the Adler & Sullivan shop, mostly designed by the young Frank Lloyd Wright) and John Glessner (by Henry Hobson Richardson) come to mind—the houses of Chicago’s rich were imitative at best and vulgar at worst.

Business was what Chicago did, and its business buildings were what received the attention of its best architects and its most daring developers. The centralization of production, sales, and management—the protoplasmic forms of the global enterprises of today—demanded new kind of buildings to house new kinds of work. Chicago, as the laboratory in which many of those new forms of enterprise were concocted, saw concomitant experiments in business building.

The boosters to the contrary, it is not quite true to say that “Chicago” created such monuments to the building art. The men who built and designed them were all born and trained elsewhere, and most packed their native aesthetic sense and method in their trunks when they prepared for the trains west. But Chicago’s innovations may owe less to Chicago architects than to the out-of-town developers who hired them. Most of what are now lauded as landmarks were not built for Posterity but for profit. The result was architectural “programs” that were pragmatic. Taller building squeeze more tenants on every acre, and steel frames were more fireproof—and thus cheaper to insure—than wood timbers. They exploited new materials to replace costly and hard- to-maintain stone ornament; terra cotta cladding, for example, was thought to be self-cleaning.

The skyscraper—the tall office building—is the icon of the Chicago style. The skyscraper’s physical form accommodated the demands of new forms of capitalism that were, as Donald Miller notes, cen­tralized, specialized, and thickly bureaucratic. But the building did not invent the modern office; rather, it was invented by it. In the old days, firms had to house administrative staff next to production facilities, there being no convenient way for the two functions to communicate with each other than face to face meetings. The telephone and graph made it possible for firms to separate location from task. As Miller notes, the telephone was invented in 1876, and as soon as the 1880s firms such as Pullman, Armour, and McCormick had moved their central headquarters to the Loop.

Innovations in public transit shaped building design too. The city’s factory hands lived near the factory because they had to; the white-collar staff, who enjoyed the luxury of choice in housing, lived all over the city. Putting offices in the downtown, where transit lines converged, made it possible to convene that workforce conveniently. This was merely a new form of a locational specialization already familiar in Chicago; workers funneled to the Loop by transit rails, much as the cunning chutes of the stockyards funnel animals into the stockyards from all over the Midwest. ”Bureaucratic capitalism, along with centralized retailing and mass transportation and communications, created Chicago’s downtown concentration,” explains Miller, “and this concentration made the skyscraper almost a creature of necessity.”

There was still the problem of giving form to the new business machines—that’s what the tall commercial building was. According to the standard version, the "Chicago School of Architecture" was a proto-modernist style in which the rectangular outlines of a building’s steel underpinnings was reflected in the facade. By thus ‘fessing up to the basic nature of the building—it was a series of stacked boxes—the designers of the city’s classic skyscrapers were seen to be not only pragmatic but more honest. This resolve to make a building look like what it was rather than what it was not—a Greek column, a Gothic cathedral—was a big step toward the simplification (some call it frankness) of modern architecture.

The problem for engineers was how to make the new Chicago buildings tall; the problem for their architects was how to make them look tall. Early skyscrapers weren’t. (The Montauk Building, usually reckoned to have been the first, was ten stories tall.) Even when Chicago buildings became tall—within ten years the tallest had doubled in size—they didn’t look especially tall, only big. The Chicago practice of increasing apparent height by means of continuous projecting columns that cut through the interruptions of horizontal bands of windows was pioneered by Sullivan. Holabird & Roche used the trick in the Marquette, among many other examples, and it was emphatically revived in the Inland Steel Building, among others of lesser note, such the United States Gyp­sum Company building at Wacker and Monroe.

For example, the space between the upright columns (“expressed” as narrow piers) was spanned by broad windows—the three-part window with fixed center pane flanked by operable sash such as graces the Marquette Building is a Chicago classic—separated by spandrels that fronted each story’s beams. Such buildings were in fact built, and a few survive. Among the classic of the early Chicago style are the Manhattan Building (1891) in the South Loop, the Chicago Building (1904) on State (happily converted to loft housing for students of the nearby Art Institute), and the Marquette Building (1895).

But Chicago was never quite as bold as it likes to think. The downtown slate was wiped clean by the Great Fire in 1871, but the replacements hurriedly thrown up were mediocre imitations of the then-standard styles. Most of these “new” Chicago skyscrapers were old architecture—mainly classicism—adapted to a new kind of building. As the Guide notes, “More than half of the tall buildings on Michigan Avenue facing Grant Park, built during the eclectic period, attempt to hide the fact that they are skyscrapers. Their skeletons are disguised, the vertical lines are broken at intervals, traditional cornices are used.” Journalist Julian Ralph dropped by in the 1890s, and reported that the city’s new buildings were “so treated that the buildings look like heaps of masonry, but that is homage paid to custom more than it is a material element of strength.”

Miller notes that the amazing thing about Chicago’s post-fire recovery was that in less than two decades, two new cities were built, not one. The first was the old Chicago, reconstructed; the second, which did not begin going up until the 1880s, was a new Chicago that featured the innovative buildings for which the city became known.

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Design For the Dead

Cemeteries themselves are historic places—pioneering examples of landscape design. The Graceland grounds themselves are historic in their way. Historian Norton Newton called Graceland “one of the most remarkable park-like cemeteries in the Western world” thanks to the important Midwestern landscape architect Ossian C. Simonds. Simonds was one of the designers who used it as model to develop cemetery-like pleasure parks at the turn of the 20th century across the Midwest. (Springfield has a lovely Simonds-designed park.)

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Many of Graceland’s monuments and mausoleums were created by the city’s most adept artists and architects—so many that the AIA Guide to Chicago devotes four full pages to its treasures. Works by sculptors such as Daniel Chester French (he did the monument for Marshall Field’s tomb) and Lorado Taft may be seen. Architect Louis Sullivan (himself buried in Graceland) did the tomb for lumberman Henry Harrison Getty; it is one of the city’s most Sullivanesque buildings, happily erected on a spot not yet been cleared for redevelopment as so many other Sullivan building sites have been.

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“A Walk Through Graceland” is available at the Chicago Architecture Foundation bookstore at 224 South Michigan Avenue; the CAF also offers The Chicago Architecture Foundation offers walking tours of Graceland on selected Sundays during August, September, and October.

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Rosehill Cemetery at 5800 N. Ravenswood Avenue is the largest in the city, and the largest of its nonsectarian graveyard. The stone Gothic entrance gate to the grounds dates from 1864; it was designed by W. W. Boyington the architect of the Old Chicago Water Tower, which it resembles and today is an official City of Chicago landmark.

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Consider Chicago’s pioneering use of glass. Charles Atwood’s Reliance Building at State and Washington is today generally praised as a forerunner of the International Style glass box of the 1950s and ‘60s, but its extensive use of glass was meant to open the buildings to natural light so as to be able to charge doctors and dentists higher rents for interior offices. All the new building innovations of the age—creating more window space (and thus free light) and more interior room or improving fireproofing—had the crass motives of enhancing the property leasability. Chicago was a crass as place as they come in the latter half of the 19th century, so it was no wonder that so many were perfected here. Anders Nereim, in the authoritative AIA Guide to Chicago, writes that the Reliance Building “ex­udes the logic of engineering under clear commercial pressure.” Critic Ada Louise Huxtable made the same point with plain brick. In such buildings, she wrote, engineering allied with greed somehow produced art.

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Daniel Bluestone is the professor of architectural history at the University of Virginia whose 1991 book, Constructing Chicago, won the American Institute of Architects International Book Award and the National Historic Preservation book prize. In it, Bluestone makes clear that the Chicago skyscraper was a much more complex phenomenon in cultural terms than has usually been perceived. Through the 1920s at least, developers of large Chicago office buildings and the major tenants they catered to had a complex social agenda in addition to their economic one. Or rather their social and the economic agendas were linked in ways that brought forces other than profit to bear on design decisions.

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For example, Bluestone explains what so many of the surviving buildings of that generation exclaim, which is that for practical men their owners spent an awful lot of money on display, ornamentation, and other varieties of symbolic expression. What Bluestone reads in the entrances and lobbies even the elevators of buildings like the Rookery is an attempt to transcend commercialism via architecture, not to embody it. The tourist may not see the resemblance between the Rookery and workman’s compensation statutes, but they were both products of the same impulse. Their builders borrowed liberally from the symbolic kit bag to dignify (if not ennoble) what went on inside them, to figuratively civilize commerce.

Second Chicago School and After

Apart from the Monadnock, the stripped-down tall building had to wait until the 1920s to become the norm in Chicago with what the Guide rightly praised as “soaring, clean-limbed towers.” As was the case in the 1880s, non-aesthetic factors drove design—in this era, the set-back provisions of the zoning laws—but the result was 333 Michigan Avenue the Board of Trade, and Palmolive buildings (Holabird and Root) and the Field building, Merchandise Mart, and Civic Opera (all by Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White, the firm that probably did most to shape Chicago in its era, as Burnham and Root and, in the more recent decades, Skidmore Owings and Merrill).

But again, the modern favored by the critics was not always endorsed by local firms. The famous example here is Tribune Tower. Good times enabled the flush newspaper in 1923 to commit to the building of a new headquarters across Michigan Avenue from the Wrigley Building. Raising the corporate profile mattered more than lowering building costs. The firm staged a contest for the design with a handsome prize that drew hundreds of submissions from around the world. A panel of architectural wise men assembled to review them awarded the laurels to the design of Finnish modernist Eliel Saarinen, but the Tribune’s management ignored that recommendation and awarded the prize to the fanciful Gothic tower concocted by New York’s Raymond Hood and John Meade Howells.

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Saarinen’s rejected design for the Tribune tower is one of those influential buildings that was never built, at leats no for the Tribune, Saarinen’s scheme inspired the Powhatan Apartments that went up in 1928 on E 50th in Hyde Park and was flat-out imitated by Cesar Peli in 1990 for the PaineWeber Tower at 181 W. Madison; alas, neither building matches its model in gracefulness. The Tribune competition itself has acquired historical significance, being the subject of many books and exhibitions that made the submissions more famous than unbuilt buildings usually get a chance to be.

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It should be noted that even in Chicago, every great building boom—following the Civil War, again after the Great Fire in 1871, after World War II—saw a thousand mediocrities go up for every building of distinction. The 1939 Federal Writers Project Guide, for example, complained that most of the buildings even in the golden age reflected not a brash American style but  “a rest­less striving for grandiose formality, expressing itself in distorted imitations of the styles then popular in Europe.”

The antidote to Victorian frippery was for most clients was not Chicago-style modernism but classical revivalism, expressed most famously by the Beaux Arts desserts served up during the World Columbia Exposition in 1893. Good or bad, the style is not what people think of it as “Chicagoan.” The decision to look backward rather than forward for a design motif for the fair was made by the mainly New York architects in charge, but Daniel Burnham, who was in charge, made no objection to it.

Public buildings and mansions seemed especially prey to this virus, perhaps because both were so often commissioned by the same men. Today all of this work is labeled “Victorian,” a catchall term denoting bad taste, but two main classes: the Gothic style— “castellated” Gothic, exemplified by the Chicago Water Tower, and the Potter Palmer mansion by Cobb and Frost—and what the Guide called a florid version of the late French Renaissance, complete with the mansard roofs that are a trademark of the style. Such buildings moved Rudyard Kipling in 1882 to tell a Chicago audience, “It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary.” That many buildings in these styles are among the city's most beloved architectural icons—the Wrigley Building comes to mind, but it is hardly the only one—confirms the gap in taste between critics and public.

Uncertain pioneers

By the 1930s, the revolution wrought by the “Chicago school” in commercial design was over. It starved to death; the Great Depression put a stop to skyscraper building, indeed to all major building. For a quarter-century after the Great Depression, no major commercial buildings went up downtown. So overbuilt was the Loop and environs that it was not until 1952 that a new one opened—the Prudential. Its then-massive 41 stories towered over the lakefront, was built from plans drawn up before the Depression; it was in some ways the last of Chicago’s 1920s skyscrapers.

Rather than radical innovators, Chicago builders have in fact been quite conservative, even—the word fairly stings—Midwestern. John Zukovsky makes the point. He notes that the buildings constructed soon after World War II were similar to those done in the late 1920s and ‘30s, that is, masonry modernist or moderne a la the Prudential Building.

Since the turn of the century, the image of Chicago has been that of a town on the cutting edge of architecture. But the record shows that it was always slightly less pioneering than that, and more a part of America than a unique case. Even the famed Chicago School of commercial building and the Prairie School of residential design were. . . less individualistic and pioneering than was first assumed.

For example, Modernism in architecture was a movement that began in the 1920s in Europe but it was not until 1938 that the news reached Chicago. That was the year that the Bauhaus-trained Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, missionary of modernism, landed here. A refugee from Nazism, Mies was installed as chair of the Department of Architecture at Armour Institute, Illinois Institute of Technology’s forerunner institution. For years, the only buildings Mies did in Chicago were those that made up the core of the new campus of IIT, Crown Hall, constructed in 1955-56 to house the departments of architecture, planning, and design, is acknowledged a modernist masterpiece. Such projects alerted the cognoscenti at least that Chicago had an architect to rival Wright and Sullivan among the pantheon of local greats.

Mies was not the only modernist architect in Chicago but was far and away the best and the best known, and incidentally the most prolific. Few architects of note did more buildings in the Chicago area than Mies; by the time he died Mies’s office had designed more than forty buildings (almost all of them in the city), including twenty-two buildings at IIT and the federal complex on Dearborn Street in the Loop.

Oddly, in the city known for its tall commercial building, Mies did very few, and those not among his best work. (Most experts agree the best example of his tall buildings is the Seagram Building in New York City.) His best Chicago work was more modest in scale—the ITT campus, and the impossibly severe and beautiful Farnsworth house in Plano, and the two apartment buildings at 860-80 North Lake Shore Drive, built from 1949-52.

The new style pioneered in Chicago by Mies transformed the local skyline and also the architectural histories. A new chapter, usually headed the Second Chicago school, or (more accurately) the Chicago School’s Second Period, had to be written. As was the case in the first period, the actual buildings were more varied than the label stuck on them suggested. It is not clear that Mies was a Chicago architect in stylistic terms; his buildings had little in common with the old Chicago school, save the expression of the frame. There were however modernists who rephrased old concepts in a new vocabulary. Harry Weese did an apartment building at 227 East Walton Street in the mid-1950s that re-used the vertical row of oriel windows or projecting bays that went back to the Monadnock.

Soon nearly everyone was trying to design like Mies. The City of Chicago early on recognized some of this generation of building as worthy of admiration; the first official list of architectural landmarks drawn up by the first Commission on Chicago Architectural Landmarks included such icons as SOM’s Inland Steel Building and Mies's Illinois Institute of Technology campus (1947) and Lake Shore Drive apartments (1951). Then these buildings were evidence of the city’s embrace of the new but the tomorrow they foretold is long past.

Modernism also took root in and around Hyde Park, one of the rare areas in Chicago whose residents enjoy affluence and adventuresome taste. In 1937 the Keck brothers—see elsewhere this section—did a version of that Chicago staple, the three-flat, in which they resided at 5551 S. University Avenue; the buildings is praised by the AIA Guide to Chicago as “timeless first-generation modernism” and has been properly designated a Chicago landmark. Indeed, the Kecks’ house was on the first official list of architectural landmarks drawn up by the first commission on Chicago architectural landmarks. Carl Condit, an admirer, wrote that Mies’s influence on the built environment of the region so profound that “one could find a parallel only in imperial Rome, or Florence under the Medici, or Paris in the heyday of the monarchy.”

The Miesian era is much boasted of—he was the only architect of international repute based in Chicago after World War I. But while Sullivan, Root, et al left behind buildings that ordinary Chicagoans—at least those that bothered to think about them at least—liked or loved, Miesian Modernism was, and is, widely deplored. No new architecture movement is without its social pretensions, but the Modernism perfected in Chicago by Mies van der Rohe and his disciples was more pretentious than most. Under Mies, houses were conceived less as machines to live in than machines, period. They were to be admired for their formal aesthetic qualities, and liveability be damned. His Farnsworth house in Plano is an extreme—his fans might say “pure”—expression of that approach. It is an art work, a sculpture of some quality, but it is unfit for habitation.

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Mies's Chicago was not the average Chicagoan’s Chicago. The modernists, happily, has scant effect on the ways that Chicagoland lived. Their effect on the commercial city and the campus has been less happy. They sought to divorce the contemporary city from history, from moldy notions of style, relying on new materials—and new architects—to create not only new buildings but a new way of life. Manifestations in Chicago include public housing, towers in windswept plazas, sterile glass-walled streetscapes. Most of the movement’s major buildings are unpopular, and its ideals discredited; Frank Gehry’s first proposal for the new band shell in Millennium Park was an homage to Mies, and it was rejected.. 

Ross Miller, in his 1996 history of Loop development, Here’s the Deal, sums up the complaints of a generation of critics and citizens:

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Since Mies van der Rohe in the 1950s perfected glass-and-steel buildings on stilts, modern architects had learned to use the first thirty feet of a high-rise simply as a formal entrance piece . . . . Nothing went on at the bottom of a Miesian skyscraper. . . . Sanitized neu­tral spaces, these were simply attenuated entrances that led to the elevators and the floors, where the building really started. No distracting clutter or disorder was experienced on the ground . . . . ”

Franz Schulze, a doyen of Chicago architecture criticism, wrote of Mies, “Since the city’s building tradition was manifestly commercial and pragmatic, its practitioners were better prepared to admire the look and logic of Mies’s buildings than to pursue him into the rar­efied atmosphere of German idealist philosophy.” There are plenty of people in Chicago who are glad they did not. After a Crain’s reader suggested that a Chicago with fewer Mieses in it would be a handsomer, happier Chicago, a spokesman for Mies’s successor firm defended the “logic, reason, and discipline” of the master’s buildings. In the hands of any but the master (indeed, often enough in his), logic meant narrow functionality, reason meant cost-efficiency, and discipline meant not letting architectural purpose be swayed by human needs. If Sullivan was a poet of Democracy, Mies was the poet of Bureaucracy; his two important large downtown buildings were done for the feds and for IBM.)

Geniuses should not be held liable for the failure of mere mortals to match their standard, but Mies has much to answer for. Mies came closer to realizing Sullivan’s maxim that form follows function, the function in this being the provision of simple enclosed space, adaptable for whatever purposes commanded the highest rents at the moment. His fans—Carl Condit is one—argued that Mies created a classic building form that could neither be altered nor subjected to further refinement, only repeated with subtle variations in proportions and dimensions. Trouble is, his successors did that repeating with less rigor than he did, and the Miesian ideal became expressed by the banal glass box that proved to be the ruin of the lake shore and much of the Loop in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Poet Dave Etter in 1984 spoke for most of Chicago’s average guys when he wrote in “Chicago:”

Chicago, build yourself a building even half as handsome and dignified as the Wrigley building and I will hop aboard the next train and go see it. But don’t expect me to get ex­cited about a monstrosity such as the Hancock building, let alone the Equitable building and the rest of those boring sky­scrapers that keep shooting up like tall weeds in some crazy farmer‘s onion patch.

Modernism led many critics to assume that the war for architecture’s high ground was over and that the modernists had won. Frederick Koeper in his 1968 guidebook of Illinois architecture, went well out on a critical limb and wrote, “The practice of historical eclecticism seems forever dead.” Pity the critic who outlives his predictions. Modernism was popular among developers and corporati because it was cheap, or fashionable, or “forward-looking” and thus good for image. It was not the style, as was assumed by Condit and Koeper and too many other critics who should have known that fashions in buildings like fashions in anything else, eventually pall.

Developers began abandoning modernism by degrees as early as the 1980s, mainly because all new buildings were beginning to look alike, which was death in a crowded market. An exception was the Crate & Barrel store that opened on Michigan Avenue at Erie in 1990; a product of Solomon Cordwell Buenz & Associates, it proved that it was not Modernism that was incapable of producing handsome buildings, but most Modernist architects.

By the 1990s it was back to historical eclecticism—now called postmodernism—with a vengeance. Post-modern architecture offers a conventionally modern “program” encased in an historicist shell, reflecting the developers’ desire for novelty and, perhaps, the architects’ paucity of invention. Not only is the old being made new again, the new is now being made old; for a time after it opened in 1892, Burnham & Root's Masonic Temple at Randolph and State was not only the tallest building in the world but "one of the handsomest," in the opinion of historian David Lowe, which is why architects Johnson & Burgee imitated it in their 1983 design for 190 S. LaSalle. The AT&T Center, NBC Tower, and 190 South LaSalle also explicitly incorporates elements of the designs of earlier Chicago skyscrapers. Booth Hansen Associates dormitory for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at 162 North State Street Residences, which opened in 2000, was intended to see a “bookend” matching the Reliance Building a block up the street.

Honoring the city’s rich design tradition is one thing; embalming it quite another. Such projects threaten to turn downtown Chicago into the architectural equivalent of Madame Tussaud’s, well-decorated but dead. The new versions lack the vigor of the 19th century originals, perhaps because where the originals strove to impress, the imitations strive merely not to offend. Occasionally, Chicago’s postmodern pastiches have proved more than dull; the Harold Washington Library Center, for one, is a painful failure.

The Chicago School Reconsidered

The Chicago School as used by tourism promoters is a term of expansive meaning. In its loosest applications, it means any building that was built in Chicago. They are not troubled by the fact that many of even the classic buildings of the Chicago school are not very Chicago school as defined by critics. Most of the buildings from Chicago’s golden age of tall commercial architecture are not especially modern, nor especially expressive of the structural systems that support them, nor especially unadorned.

Consider the issue of ornament. A walk around the greater Loop will make plain that the talk in the book about the stripped-down Chicago style is relative. All have echoes of the old conventions, most commonly by giving the building facade—whatever was happening behind it—a base supporting (visually if not in fact) an upward thrusting column topped by cornice that emulates the classical column. Louis Sullivan never abandoned the classical tripartism he learned in school in Paris; his dictum was “form follows function” —so widely quoted and so widely misunderstood—but in his Chicago buildings form seldom followed function in any literal way.

In their eagerness to claim Chicago as the fount of Modernism, the mavens saw in the classic Chicago buildings what they wanted to see. The spareness of certain Chicago tall buildings was taken to embody the city's pragmatism, its freedom from received notions of taste. Because it was important that it be there, this spareness was seen even when it wasn’t there. Only a handful—the Monadnock building in particular—seem to anticipate the Bauhaus, and that building’s pared-down aesthetic was in response to the owner’s demand for easier maintenance and lower building costs.

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Architects

John Mills Van Osdel was the Daniel Burnham of pre-Fire Chicago. He founded the city’s first architecture firm (in 1844) and designed many of the buildings in the first “State Street,” the retail strip along Lake Street. He also designed hotels (including its two most famous, the Palmer House and the Tremont) churches, the first city hall, and houses for several of the city’s first generation of swells, such as William B. Odgen.

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Van Osdel was not an innovator in building design—his works, such as the Illinois Executive Mansion in Springfield, were competently designed in the Greek Revival style of the day. However, buildings were not all he designed. He also designed the first two grain-trade vessels built in Chicago, the first bridge across the North Branch of the Chicago River, and the pumps that moved water into the Illinois and Michigan Canal—a very handy man to have in a growing mercantile city. They don’t make ‘em like that any more—whether because the work gotten more complex or the architects less so, we will leave to others to decide.

Astonishingly, given the toll that the Great Fire took of his ouvre, more than a dozen of Van Osdel’s projects survive in some form, among them the north-facing cast-iron facade of the restored Page Brothers Building at State and Lake Streets (1872), which is one of only two cast-iron facades left in the Loop.

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Most of the observers who have tended to see things more clearly have been, interestingly, historians rather than architects or architecture critics. One is Garry Wills, who in a 1993 article got to the point: “Stripped down, functional, revealing their structure, these buildings have often been presented as forerunners of Bauhaus modernism,” Wills wrote. “Yet it is hard to experience these qualities when one looks at the well-preserved specimens in the modern downtown—The Rookery (1888), the Auditorium (1889), the Carson Pirie Scott (originally Schlesinger and Mayer) store (1899). Far from revealing their structure, they hide it in heavily rusticated bases, ornate attic punctuations, surfaces elaborately patterned.”

The architects that Chicago businessmen hired adorned their buildings with decorative materials and motifs borrowed from more respectable realms such as the cathedral and the courthouse. This appropriation of symbols was not as preposterous as it might have seemed. Other world cities may have begun as ceremonial centers, but it was Business that put Chicago on the map. American 19th century materialism was as fervent a creed as any Old World religion, and Chicagoans worshipped money as devotedly as any god. The skyscraper was the most awesome realization of this creed. They were America’s new cathedrals, in effect, and were decorated as such.

There is room for demurrals here too. The richly adorned building owes to economics too. The more costly the building, the more attractive it had to be made to justify—or rather to make certain that tenants could justify—the higher rents that the developers were obliged to charge. You can’t charge cathedral rents for space in a warehouse. Such building confirmed Sullivan’s famous dictum: in an era in which classical forms (both of structure and ornament) served to dignify a building and thus the reputations of its builder and tenants—or at the very least differentiated these commercial properties in a crowded marketplace—form was very functional indeed. Sullivan, it must added, argued for ornament whose symbolism was more appropriate to a democratic people than that of emperors or kings or popes, but to nearly everyone his symbolism—lately interpreted as private and sexual—was scarcely less exotic than the classical ones it replaced; it did however make his building look expensive, which is what really impressed the tenants.

Chicagoland’s untall buildings

It is the tall commercial building that put Chicago on the architectural map, but the city had made contributions to other genres. Apart from a few houses and the odd factory or church there is not much of architectural note in the neighborhoods, but there is some. Two good examples are Louis Sul­livan’s facade of the Kelmscott Building (4611 North Lincoln Avenue) in Lincoln Square on Chicago’s Northwest Side, and the Conrad Sulzer Library (4455 North Lincoln).

Rapp and Rapp were, with Chicago’s John Eberson and New York’s John Lamb, were pre-eminent movie house architects of the day when movie houses meant Architecture with a capital A. The firm was founded by George Rapp and brother Cornelius. Trained initially at the University of Illinois School of Architecture, George went with Cornelius to study in France. Rapp and Rapp drew heavily for their movie house designs on the Louis XIV era they absorbed there; through them, ornament meant for the delectation of royals was appropriated for the amusement of the American mob.

The firm designed over 400 theaters, most of them during the 1920s. The roster included several of Chicago’s classic theaters from the era, such as the Tivoli, which brought a bit of Versailles to Cottage Grove Avenue—not an easy task—and the Uptown. David Lowe praised them for delivering “stunning opulence without vulgarity.” The Rapps’ theaters were not merely decorated boxes, however—they offered excellent sightlines and acoustics—but their decoration was pure escapist fantasy, making them perfect venues for movie showings. Sadly, only one of these marvels, the Chicago, survives in anything like its original, astonishing condition.

For the architect, doing a tall commercial building is what starring in Shakespeare used to be for an actor—the pinnacle of the profession, the chance to make a name, the ultimate test of skill. As a result, many designers added substantially to the quality of the region’s built environment in other ways have been undervalued. The non-profit advocacy group Preservation Chicago, for example, has praised Clarence Hatzfeld, who designed field houses and like structure for the Chicago Park District. “His solid and well-crafted buildings never fail to enrich their environments,” stated Preservation Chicago in 2003. “This architecture should be recognized as a part of what distinguishes Chicago from other cities – it is solid, well crafted, honest, and reliable. The strong forms and materials speak ‘Chicago’ as can little else.”

Most building designs in Chicagoland’s suburbs strive to be inoffensive, and are, except in their Tastefulness. However, the suburbs occasionally produce interesting architecture, just as they occasionally produce poets worth reading. A school building here, a shopping center there rises above the rest. In Riverside it is a water tower—personally designed by William LeBaron Jen­ney in 1871—that has since become a town icon. (The building appears on the village logo.)

The Sullivan, Root, and Mies of the North Shore were Shaw, Arthur Gerber, and Adler. Architect Gerber designed nearly three dozen train stations on the North Shore and other nearby towns in the 1920s. Howard Van Doren Shaw did the R.R. Donnelly and Sons Co. Calumet printing plant, which has been praised as “one of the city’s—and perhaps the nation’s—finest essays in Industrial Gothic.” It was in the suburbs, specifically the North Shore that Shaw left his mark. His Market Square in Lake Forest (1916) is a landmark in mixed-use commercial complexes. Shaw also was to the Lake Forest College what Mies was to IIT or Walter Netsch was to UIC’s Circle Campus, having contributed seven buildings to that modest institution.

However, Shaw devoted his prime professional years 1905 to 1915 to doing country houses for the gentry, most in the suburbs of Chicago but also in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the Midwest. He designed more than forty-five in all, such as Havenwood for Edward L. Ryerson in 1914 in Lake Forest, and nearby a version of the English Arts & Crafts country house for Finley Barrell, a rich grain and stock trader.

Working for such clients makes demands on an architect but seldom on his inventive powers. Shaw is proof that the eminence of a designer varies with the eminence of his clients. One exasperated critic called Shaw “the godzilla of the 1900s building boom,” an architect who created “some of the most grotesque, inchoate, ill-thought-out, ludicrous, bombastic—and downright vulgar—buildings in the history of mid-west American architecture.” Such opinions are exaggerated perhaps, but not mistaken.

The fact that architects work mainly for rich people is dirty little secret that the profession has always been keen to conceal. (Stanley Tigerman, long-time head of the University of Illinois at Chicago architecture program, told the New York Times in 2006, “I no longer care about working on suburban villas for princes and princesses. I’d rather retire than do more of that.”)

Most architects are obliged to take such commissions, but those who do only such work tend to be derided by their colleagues. One such was David Adler. Ask a Lake Countian for the name of Chicagoland’s greatest architect and you will be given the names not of Sullivan or Mies but Adler, perhaps America's premier "country house" architect. His career of 38 years coincided with one of Chicago’s periodic booms, from the 1910s to the late 1930s—the Depression hardly existed for the city’s very rich—when families such as the Donnelleys, Fields, Palmers, Armours, Ryersons, and McCormicks were building.

Adler was born in 1882 in Milwaukee to a German-Jewish family and studied at Princeton, in Munich and Paris before coming to Chicago in 1911. Adler had tried and failed to graduate from Ecole des Arts in Paris, then the finishing school for architects of pretension. Unhandicapped by education, he was free to design in all styles to fit the setting and the mood of his clients. He did houses in all the flavors then popular—Georgian, American Colonial, French and Italian Renaissance—and he did them with style. He was good at staircases—an architect in that milieu had to be as good with staircases as a hospital architect has to be with plumbing. (Among his more famous: Attic Club staircase in Chicago's Field Building and the grand staircase from the Reed House in Lake Forest.) A Chicago Daily News society editor later would write "as status symbols go, a David Adler house makes a Rolls Royce look like a dimestore purchase."

Unlike the city’s more famous architects, Adler was neither a Personality nor a Thinker. While handsome enough, his were comfortable and safely conventional in appearance, being designed to make no statement other than the wealth and taste of the owners. By the time he died he was widely reckoned to be the nation’s top "country house" architect, and successful enough to be able to buy have his own 240-acre estate in Libertyville.

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Of course, what looks like the judgments of History are usually only the fashions of a later day. It is not quite clear whether Adler and Shaw are considered important in the history of American domestic architecture because their houses were important or his clients. In any event, scholars and critics need new subjects to talk about, and the country house architects, after decades in which they were dismissed as hacks, are being talked about by scholars as well as real estate agents.

The International Style that debuted locally at the Century of Progress shaped new house design in only a few adventuresome upscale suburbs. Churches and synagogues were more enthusiastic for the style, as it suited the forward-looking image they wanted to convey. One of these is North Shore Congregation Israel, which hired Minoru Yamasaki to design a new synagogue in 1963—“sacred space made palpable”—on Sheridan Road in Glencoe. (A 1982 addition was by Thomas Beeby.) Few of even these buildings were distinguished, except by the low standards of religious buildings. and even they were not easy to get built. Architects of the time recall that it was difficult getting a loan to build anything that was too modern.

The Lake County Tuberculosis Sanatorium at 2400 Belvidere Street in Waukegan was designed by Bauhaus-inspired William A. Ganster and William L. Pereira in 1939; the old sanatorium is now used by the Lake County Health Department as a medical facility.

Helmut Jahn’s Oakbrook Terrace Tower, a thirty-one-story tower that dates back to the mid-1980s office boom, is the tallest in Illinois outside of the downtown Chicago market. But the skyscraper is not the model for the vast majority of suburban commercial structures. The college campus is the template that suburban developers handed their architects when they want corporate facilities designed. Most are loved only by local tax collectors, but a few bear looking at, such as the G. D. Searle and Com­pany offices and laboratories in Skokie or the 1966 Glenview headquarters by Perkins and Will at 1900 East Lake Avenue of Scott, Foresman and Company, which is to textbooks what McDonald’s is to meals.

Retail developers tend more toward the village square as a model. The village square survives in the form of many a suburban shopping mall, most agreeably in the Old Orchard Shopping Center which opened in Skokie in 1954. Designed by Loebl, Schlossman, and Bennett, Old Orchard was one of the first, and still one of the better landscaped pedestrian shopping malls.

Schoolhouses With Advanced Degrees

There are school buildings of respectable age and comely mien in Chicagoland—River Forest School from 1860 is an example—but few are interesting architecturally. For generations school buildings were indistinguishable from factories, save that most factories were better lit.

The design of better buildings for children to learn in was one of the many ills tackled by the progressives at the turn of the 20th century. The Chicago school board, in one of its reformist spasms, named architect Dwight H. Perkins (late of Burnham & Root) as head of the architecture department. For a decade beginning in 1908, Perkins made schools that were better to learn in—lots of light, mainly—and better to look at. His Carl Schurz High School (1908) at 3601 N Milwaukee still graces that neighborhood. Other Perkins schools include Tilton Elementary (1908) and Albert Lane Technical High School (1908-1910). The fabled Lane Tech is recommended by the AIA Guide for its sculpture and frescoes—not usually reasons to visit a public school.

The North Shore, where education mattered in the way that religion mattered in working class districts, was a center for innovative school design. The Joseph Sears School, Kenilworth (1912) was done by Wright-disciple George W. Maher in his signature style. The most famous is Crow Island Elementary School, Winnetka. 1939—40 was a too rate instance of collaboration between open-minded s local school officials and innovative architects in the persons of Fuel and Eero Saarinen and Perkins (Lawrence, son of Dwight), Wheeler, and Will. The town had adopted a progressive child centered curriculum—see Education—and, in shocking departure from standard practice, the architects actually asked teachers how the new building could facilitate Winnetka’s innovative, child-centered curriculum.