Chicago - Birth of the Skyscraper

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

2. THE FIRST SKYSCRAPERS

3. WIND AND LIGHT CONDITIONS

4. IRON AND STEEL CONSTRUCTION

5. CHRONOLOGY OF ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES

6. LOUIS HENRI SULLIVAN
6.1 The Beginning of Sullivan's Career
6.2 The Auditorium
6.3 Skyscrapers

7. RAYMOND M. HOOD
7.1 Biography
7.2 Works
7.2.1 Tribune Tower
7.2.2 Rockefeller Center

8. THE CHICAGO LOOP

9. SOURCE
9.1 Internet
9.2 Background Information

1. Introduction

Skyscrapers did not only change the cities` topography, but they were a symbol for technology and business acumen. These buildings were the reflection of cultural changes which were taking place during a period when America questioned itself. The country did not want to have its art and architecture always seen in relation to European art and architecture. For many people skyscrapers stand for individuality, nationalism, a part of their own traditional culture and way of life. The following parts of this paper will deal with the beginning of the skyscrapers. Especially Chicago and New York became famous for these tall buildings. After the Great Fire in 1871, which burned down nearly one third of Chicago, a new tradition of constructing showed up. Most houses (about 90%) were made out of wood and it took two days to stop the fire. During this disaster the first houses of the pioneer period burned down and made place for something new. No other city shows the roots and development of modern architecture more clearly than Chicago.

A lot of changes took place between 1890 and 1931 and the architects were looking for something revolutionary and different. This was the time when the skyscraper became the new symbol for America. There were a lot of ideas about the decoration of buildings and also how to make them a delight for the eye. America needed something to contrast itself from Europe and to develop a new culture. The people wanted to have something which they could call their own "way of life". This way of life was born in Chicago...

The solution of problems which occurred when planning a skyscraper will be of interest as well. Especially the steel frames which were used to form the skeleton of such a building have to be mentioned. No walls were needed anymore to hold a house. This new way of planning was first encountered in Chicago and New York. An escalation in land prices forced a lot of owners to maximize available space. This, combined with advancements in engineering and services such as electricity and the elevator, saw architects starting to think vertically.

Two famous and vertically - thinking architects named Louis Henri Sullivan and Raymond Mathewson Hood will also be introduced. They were responsible for some great buildings in Chicago. Sullivan became famous because of his individuality and creativity. He was a very precise person when planning something. Raymond Hood is also a well known American architect. Two of his works are the Rockefeller Center in New York and the Tribune Tower in Chicago.

2. The First Skyscrapers

When the all-steel Brooklyn Bridge was opened in spring 1883 every draftsman knew that a revolution in building methods would be coming soon. Steel could carry heavier loads than iron ...

Bear in mind that the term "skyscraper" has changed in meaning dramatically over the last 100 years. Today we think of the Hancock Building and Sears Tower, buildings well over 100 stories and 1,000 feet high. The first so called American"skyscraper" was planed in 1867 by Arthur S. Gilman and Edward H. Kendall. It was the new business building for the New York Equitable Life Assurance Company. George B. Post, a young engineer and architect, who Equitable hired to save some money, completed the building. This house marked the beginning of the skyscraper boom. The vice president of Equitable, Henry B. Hydes, wanted to prove the elevator and doubled the height of the rooms. At this time it was more than two times higher than other buildings - the whole building was 40m high.

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For others the first "real" skyscrapers were the Home Insurance Building of 1883 - 85 and the Tacoma Building of 1886 in Chicago. The Home Insurance Building was a ten story building at the southwest corner of La Salle and Adams Streets in Chicago. It was the world's first skyscraper especially because it was the first tall steel-frame building. The skeleton was formed with wrought iron up to the sixth story and upper stories were formed out of Bessemer steel beams. This proved that elevator-equipped business buildings were able to reach unconceivable heights. In 1857 the first passenger elevator had been installed in the cast-iron Haughwout Building in New York City. William LeBaron Jenney was the one who planned the Home Insurance Building, which was a Gothic building and could have been taken from the "Discourses in Architecture" by the French Gothic revivalist Eugene-Emanuel Violettle- Duc¹. That man was almost a prophet to most of the architects in Chicago. Some say the Tacoma Building on the northwest corner of La Salle and Madison streets was the first real skyscraper, built by the two architects William Holabird and Martin Roche. It was not the first wrought iron or Bessemer steel building, but it was the first example for a riveted skeleton. The L-shaped plan made an outer exposure for every office possible. Its demolition in 1929 was a far greater tragedy than the demolition of the Home Insurance Building two years later.

But it does not matter which of those two buildings was the first "real" skyscraper. The main point is that the Chicagoans were the first who showed that the walls were no longer needed to support a building. They could be thin as silk, as Violette-Duc argued in France, with his studies about the engineering of the Gothic cathedrals. One of the materials which is of good use is glass, for example. An all-glass-skyscraper was built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago at the Lake Shore Drive. For van der Rohe it was "the play of reflections" which was of importance. But that was after a lot of other skyscrapers had been built. Today there are still a lot of glass skyscrapers, especially business buildings.

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3. Wind and Light Conditions

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Which material is of good use if tall buildings act very much like a sail and need to have a very strong and deep foundation to resist wind loads ? When the walls of a building are made out of very thin material it is necessary to build massive, expensive, diagonal cross-bracing into the skyscrapers. If the "skin" would be more substantial and made of a material which could be better attached to the bones, there would not be any need for the expensive and massive foundations. Sears Tower, 527m

Tests on skyscrapers have shown, that on windy days a trip to the top of a building could alarm even an experienced sailor. Even though the buildings were largely faced with stone they swayed in storms or even on windy days, it could cause nausea for some people.

But there was (and still is) not only the problem of wind at the top of a skyscraper. When walking past tall smooth-skinned skyscrapers a kind of mini-tornado can occur. Some people called it the "Mary Poppins Syndrome". That is when the air stream of high winds is blocked by the broad side of the tall building and will be deflected in two directions. Some of the air goes upward but most of it is spiraling to the ground. Those "mini-tornado's" are called a vertex. The air can not lift someone off his or her feet, but it improves the quality of urban life.

Skyscrapers were built under certain laws also. In 1922 when Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells won the competition of the Chicago Tribune to build a new business building, the famous Chicago Tribune Tower, it was not yet possible to plan offices that were higher than 80 meters. From this level on it was only allowed to add decorative towers, walls or other things, but only up to the 120 meter mark. The reason for those kind of laws is easy to describe: because of the height of the skyscrapers the lower floors did not get enough light.

There had to be certain rules to keep good standards of living.

4. Iron and Steel Construction

Iron turned into a symbol of this specific time. The new material offered a lot of new features and took hold of every sphere of life. Especially for its physical features it is not surprising that new ideas were born in architecture. Iron has a high tensile strength and allowed totally new constructions of house building. In the beginning a limit was seen in the tradition, not in the opportunity. Higher, faster, wider... That is what we think of when talking about America today. Especially "higher" was popular at that time. Because of the urbanization the prices for land increased. New building styles turned up. The iron and steel skeleton formed houses up to 15 floors. After the Great Fire a lot of architects tried to create something different from the historical style. Chicago offered the opportunity of realizing new ideas and turned into a "Boom Town".

In the middle of the 19th Century the Bessemer- and the Siemens - Martin - procedure were developed in the USA. One of the disadvantages of steel was its fast deformation when heated. The architects knew that the new steel skeleton had to be covered to be fireproof. Buildings were designed where the construction was based on a fireproof, steel-covered iron skeleton (first used for the Home Insurance Building of William Le Baron Jenney). While this skyscraper looked like a brick building, other skyscrapers showed different characteristics of the steel covered skeleton. Like Sullivan once said: the skeleton was the foundation for the design of the outside. It was possible to add big window parts and make those houses look real different. Within the following years this structure showed up more and more.

On the one hand, according to critics, the skyscraper squelched the life of the individual. People were living in big groups and a part of their social life got lost because of the city's anonymity. But on the other hand these buildings were needed because of a rapidly increasing population. Chicago had been a small town in 1830 which had no more than a few hundred houses. In 1850 a population of about 30,000 people lived there. During the following two decades it increased up to 300,000 people. Then there were 500,000 in 1880 and by 1890 the population had grown up to one million citizens. Only ten years later two million people were living in Chicago. 75% were not born in the USA.

5. Chronology of Enabling Technologies

1853: safety elevator (Otis) 1876: telephone

1855: Bessemer process for steel 1879: electric light

1868: typewriter 1880: steel becomes cheap

1876: mimeograph 1885: skyscraper

6. Louis Henri Sullivan

The unchallenged master of the skyscraper⁴

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Louis H. Sullivan was a founder of the Chicago School of architecture and may be regarded as America's first modern architect. He perfected a personal "American style" of architecture in which there were no intentional references to European styles of the past.

He was born on September 3rd, 1856 in Boston. His father was an Irish dancing master and his mother, a gentle pianist, came from Geneva, Switzerland. Her origins were half Swiss-French and half German. Sullivan went to Boston's English High School and after his graduation he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He quit M.I.T. after one year and went to Philadelphia looking for a job. The young man found work in the office of two architects, namely Frank Furness and John Hewitt (1873). Sullivan admired Furness, because he "made buildings out of his head"². During the depression in 1873 he was dismissed from Furness and Hewitt. For a few months Sullivan found work at the office of William Le Baron Jenney (1873 / 1874), also a well known architect in Chicago.

6.1 The Beginning of Sullivan's Career

In the summer of 1874 Sullivan went to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux - Arts, a famous school for Architecture. It was known for having the highest standards in architectural training in the whole world. But Sullivan did not find the ardent creativity he was looking for. He was searching for something special, a challenge. Sullivan returned to Chicago to work in the office of Dankmar Adler as his chief draftsman (1881), later becoming a full partner (1883). Dankmar Adler, a German-born Jew, was the one who designed the Central Music Hall, which became famous for the upward curve of its orchestra floor.

illustration not visible in this excerpt Adler acted as manager and engineer while Sullivan focused on designing. Together they created several buildings, which were recognized for their functional form, beautiful ornamentation and importance in the development of the skyscraper. Some examples are Chicago's Auditorium Building (1886-1889), the Stock Exchange Building (1893-94) and the Wainwright Building (1890-1891) in St. Louis. Subsequent to the dissolution of his partnership with Adler (1895), his practice waned and he turned to writing. The famous axiom "form follows function" was first postulated in Sullivan's "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" (1896). His last major commission was the Schlesinger And Mayer Store (1898-1903), currently the Carson, Pirie, & Scott Building, in Chicago. In his later years, he published several works on his theories of a "new" architecture in which he insisted that American Architecture should express the democratic foundation of the nation and be aligned with the forces of nature. These ideas were later expanded upon by his greatest student and disciple, Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Wright worked for Sullivan for several years, becoming the "pencil in Sullivan's hand" (as Wright put it). He became chief draftsman for Sullivan, and eventually was responsible for all of the firm's residential contracts (including the Charnley house completed in 1892). Louis Sullivan even asked Wright to design his own (Sullivan's) house. Wright was forced to leave in 1893 after moonlighting houses under his own name while working for Adler and Sullivan; a betrayal of trust (the Harlan house, built in 1892, was the one that caused the rift). While Wright was usually very positive and enthusiastic about Sullivan and the role Sullivan had in shaping him as an architect, he was to have no contact with Sullivan for 20 years.

6.2 The Auditorium

Dankmar Adler was widely respected because of his knowledge of acoustics and therefore the two partners got the commission to remodel the Exposition Building in Grant Park. It should become a temporary grand opera house combined with a four-hundred-room-hotel and business offices. The hall itself should be able to seat four thousand people. The greatest civic project of America since the founding of Washington had been put in the hands of Adler and Sullivan.

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The planning and designing began in the summer of 1886. Sullivan and Adler created the Auditorium without any steel frames which they used so confidently for their skyscrapers. The stories of the facades were grouped perfectly under high elliptical arches and the stage had a golden frame. One of the most important problems Adler and Sullivan were confronted with was the seventeen-story tower on the Congress Street side. It weighed fifteen thousand tons. They solved the problem by using pig iron and brick and the acoustic part was solved successfully as ever by Adler.

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The tower on this building housed the offices of Adler and Sullivan. On December 9, 1889 the Auditorium was opened and it became Chicago's most important advertisement and Sullivan's originality and individuality became famous. Currently this building is the home of the popular "Auditorium Theatre" and Roosevelt College.

6.3 Skyscrapers

From there on Sullivan concentrated on skyscrapers. His buildings can be described best by himself as he said the tall office building "must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line"³. This description can be used for almost all his skyscrapers. Sullivan is called "the unchallenged master of the skyscrapers"⁴ and a "superb individualist"⁴.

His buildings were detailed with lush, yet tastefully subdued organic ornamentation. His attempt to balance ornamentation into the whole of building design inspired a generation of American and European architects; the idea that ornamentation be integral to the building itself, rather than merely applied.

One of his first and greatest skyscrapers was the Wainwright Building in St. Louis. It was completed in 1891 for one of the cities brewers named Ellis Wainwright. Sullivans intention was to build something new. He designed massive lower stories and emphasized the corners. The whole building was a vertically accented block. Sullivan once said that "form follows function"⁵, but this time his intention had been to dramatize the function. The red brick piers were decorated with terra cotta panels beneath the windows and by doing this the bareness of the building was removed. Sullivan had a gift for decorating and no one was more accurate in designing buildings or criticizing his work or the work of others. The architects aim was always to make things perfect and to reach the best of the best. He once said that `the intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if man will live the life of nature and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his`⁶.

Louis Sullivan ended his partnership with Dankmar Alder in 1895, and his practice turned from skyscrapers (such as his last Chicago design, the Carson, Pirie, Scott store in 1899) and very large buildings in the big Midwestern cities to small buildings in small towns. After Sullivan died on April 14, 1924 in a hotel on Chicago's South Side there were no longer such individualistic buildings.

7. Raymond M. Hood

U.S. architect

7.1 Biography

Raymond Mathewson Hood, an internationally known architect, was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on March 29, 1881. He studied at the Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 1903. After working for the firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson in Boston, he left to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1911 Hood received a diploma from the school. He traveled extensively between Europe and America before establishing a practice in New York in 1914. Hood did not receive his first major commission (with John Howells) until eight years later when he designed The Chicago Tribune Tower, a building with Gothic Revival detailing.

Many commissions followed, each one moving further away from a Gothic vocabulary until his works had attained a simple geometric monumentality. He became well known for his unconventional treatment of the modern skyscraper. His firm of Hood & Fouilhoux executed the Daily News and McGraw-Hill Buildings ( The first major building to be clad with machine-made terra-cotta. The blue-green terra-cotta spandrels make up about half of the building's exterior wall surface and it is 33 stories tall.) and collaborated on the buildings of Rockefeller City in New York. He was responsible for much of the work of the Commission of Architects for the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago and designed the Electrical Building. His later buildings predict the Miesian tower blocks of the 1950s and 1960s.

Hood was president of the Architectural League of New York from 1929 to 1931 and received its Medal of Honor in 1926. He was a member of the international jury for the Memorial to Columbus at Santo Domingo in 1929, a trustee of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York, a member of the Groupe Americain des Architectes Diplomes, and a Chevalier of the Order of the Crown of Belgium.

He died in Stamford, Connecticut on August 14, 1934.

7.2 Works

7.2.1 Tribune Tower

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Address: 435 N. Michigan Ave.

Chicago

Year Built: 1922-25

Architect: Raymond M. Hood and John Mead Howells

Entrance

This design was the result of an international competition for "the most beautiful office building in the world," held in 1922 by the Chicago Tribune newspaper. The various competition entries proved extremely influential for the development of skyscraper architecture in the 1920s. The winning entry, with a crowning tower with flying buttresses, is derived from the design of the French cathedral of Rouen and gives the building its striking silhouette. The base of the building is studded with over 120 stones from famed sites and structures in all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries. They range from the Parthenon (Greece) and Taj Mahal (India) to Bunker Hill (Massachusetts) and Mark Twain's "Injun Joe Cave" (Missouri).

7.2.2 Rockefeller Center

Location New York, New York

Date 1932 to 1940

Building Type skyscraper complex, commercial office towers

Construction System steel frame, stone cladding

Climate temperate

Context urban

Style Corporate Modern

Notes Family of forms example, a fine urban ensemble, with a famous sunken plaza with outdoor skating rink. With others, including Wallace K. Harrison, Max Abramovitz, the firms of Reinhard & Hormeister and Corbett, Harrison, & MacMurray.

The construction of the Rockefeller Center began in 1931. It is America's largest privately owned business and amusement complex of the pre-war period. In total, ten different units were constructed on the twelve-acre site, the last of which (the National Cash Register Company's offices) was completed in 1940. It is situated on a block which lies between New York's busy 5th and 6th Avenues and 48th and 51st Streets The development represents the culmination of pre-war skyscraper design and comprehensive planning.

Public and private activities are brought together in the scheme and the whole design creates an atmosphere that is a direct and positive contribution to urban life. The great RKO motion picture theatre was the first building completed (designed by the main architects with Corbett, Harrison and MacMurray, Hood and Fouilhoux) and opened in 1932. It seats over 3,500 patrons and has a full stage.

The sunken plaza was originally a failure, unable to retain the intended retail tenants, and it remained a problem until the skating rink, a great novelty made possible by new refrigeration technology, was added as a somewhat desperate experiment. The skating rink is now a renowned and beloved focus of the complex.

8. THE CHICAGO LOOP

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1. Page Brothers Building 10. Manhattan Building
2. Delaware Building 11. Monadnock Block
3. Washington Block 12. Old Colony Building
4. Haskell-Barker-Atwater 13. Marquette Building Buildings
5. Rookery Building 14. Fisher Building
6. Auditorium Building 15. Carson Pirie Scott
7. Reliance Building 16. Gage Group
8. Leiter II Building 17. Chicago Building
9. Ludington Building 18. Brooks Building

9. Source

9.1 Internet

- page 1 Reliance, Santafe and Monadnok Building
- page 5 Home Insurance Building
- page 6 Skyline
- page 7 Sears Tower
- page 9 Ornamentation
- page 10 Sullivan, Audtorium Ornamentation
- page 11 Carson, Pirie & Scott Building, The Auditorium
- page 12 Inside of Auditorium
- page 15 Tribune Tower and Entrance
- page 16 Chicago Loop

9.2 Background Information

- Dennis Sharp. Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History

- National Public Radio news report, April 1994.

- J. Carson Webster.

"The Skyscraper: Logical and Historical Considerations" in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1959

- P. Blake. Form Follows Fiasco

- Merrill Schleier. The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890 - 1931.

- Wayne Andrews.

[...]

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¹ p. 140;

² p. 208

³ p. 210;

⁴ p. 206 - 207 ; Architecture, Ambition & Americans

⁵ p. xi; Architecture in Chicago & Mid-America

⁶ p. 207; Architecture, Ambition & Americans