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Chapter 7 Steel, Light, and Style: The Concealed Frame, 1905–1918 a rigid frame clad with a curtain wall composed primarily of solid elements instead of glass, and with smaller windows that responded to a different set of lighting criteria, suggests that architects of this era were no less responsive to the technical, economic, and functional criteria than they were a decade or two earlier. The state of skyscraper art showed a profound and sudden shift during the era, transforming the expressed grids and broad windows of “Chicago construction” into something nearly the opposite. Steel, G l ass, and Terr a-co tta— Chang ing Cond itions Steel’s growing affordability alongside encouraging economic news rebuilt momentum in real estate between 1900–1910. After the market bottomed out around 1898, Chicago built more high-end skyscrapers each year for a decade. By 1910 inexpensive building materials, agreements between labor and capital, well-organized design and construction regimes, and continued improvements in construction meant that commercial real estate was, once again, enormously profitable. Tenants gradually abandoned older buildings with slower elevators, smaller offices, and darker corridors for newer, more efficient buildings. “Old Chicago is being torn down,” one journalist reported in 1910, “and new Chicago erected in its place.”1 The Calumet, first Insurance Exchange (at LaSalle and Adams), RandMcNally , and the Opera House—all major achievements in the 1880s—were demolished between 1910 and 1913. They were replaced by buildings aimed at tenants seeking greater efficiency, comfort, and pretense. Chicago exhibited a new and “very encouraging tendency on the part of builders . . . to The expressed frame defined Chicago’s commercial architecture for nearly fifteen years. But like the curtain wall and other types before it, it was surpassed by a new tectonic formula as material and performance technologies evolved. The type’s large windows and gridded facades faded in importance after 1910, and in their place came building elevations of remarkable solidity —overtly classical in appearance and detail, with small windows and vast expanses of cut, trimmed, and elaborately ornamented stone and terra-cotta. To many historians, these buildings were not worthy of the name “Chicago School.” Yet these solid skins and concealed frames were also the result of specific technical vectors— new technologies, newly available materials, and continuing pressures for efficiency in both construction and operation . That these vectors now implied 126 • Chapter 7 construct a more attractive and ornamental type of structure,” according to the city’s Building Commissioner in 1910. “I can now suggest to a man who is putting up a building in Chicago,” said one anonymous architect in 1910, “that by adding 3 or 10 or even 13 per cent to the cost he can make something that will be a distinct credit to the city, although it will not bring in a cent more rental, and he will listen to me. A few years ago he would not.”2 Popular tastes and civic pride merged with fantasies of antiquity during this era, influenced but hardly determined by distant recollections of the 1892 Columbian Exposition. Classicism was given a prolonged life by the impact of the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts on American education and tastes, but such tendencies were stymied in commercial architecture by the ongoing need for daylighting, which continued to require large apertures. The slender proportions of light-gathering curtain walls combined with the high cost of ornamental elements such as columns and archways mitigated against classicism ’s full flowering in the generation after the Fair, though a latent tendency toward the Beaux-Arts emerged between 1892 and 1910 in hotels, banks, and clubs—all building types that had different functional and economic strictures than commercial construction . This tendency failed to thrive in commercial architecture, however, until lighting technologies and material availabilities changed in its favor. The expressed frame’s demise came alongside changes in glass prices and availability , frustration with the environmental penalties for large windows, and the replacement of daylight by electric illumination . Collectively, these factors influenced a new conception of the frame/skin dialogue that had been so richly explored by architects in the previous decade. The midwestern plate glass boom that had influenced the curtain walls of the 1890s and the large tripartite windows of the 1900s ended as quickly as it had begun. Pittsburg’s takeover of Diamond Plate Glass in 1895 began a slow easing of the material’s price collapse . Automated polishing and continuous annealing kept prices low even as the glut eased, but the...

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