Chicago's Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis

12. The Chicago School of Architecture

237 N12 O The Chicago School of Architecture On the very first day of 1893, the Chicago Tribune published an article titled “Chicago’s Great Buildings,” in which it proudly noted, “The remarkable down-town building activity of 1890 and 1891 was equaled if not outclassed by that of the year just closed. There has not been a month during the year in which a half-dozen prominent corners in the business district were not blocked by building operations. The demand for structural iron in the tall office buildings has been greater than the supply.” The story noted that the buildings erected in the downtown area alone were valued at more than $10 million. Among the buildings it listed as being either completed or in the course of construction were the Art Institute, the Marshall Field Annex, the Auditorium Addition, the Old Colony Building, the Illinois Central Depot, and the Monadnock Addition. The 1880s had witnessed a staggering upsurge in office building construction in Chicago. Architect Louis Sullivan wrote that “the progress of the building art from 1880 onward was phenomenal.”1 At the time of the Great Fire of 1871, there were an estimated three hundred thousand square feet of prime office space in the Loop; by 1893, there were almost two million.2 In just the three-year period from 1889 to 1892, no fewer than twenty -one high-rise buildings were built.3 Chicago’s developers had found ways to raise large amounts of capital by forming investment groups, and money poured in not just from Chicago but 238 The Chicago School of Architecture also from outside the city. However, the author of that Tribune article could not have known that the first great age of Chicago architecture was reaching its apex. It was in 1893 that the city put a limit on building heights of 130 feet, or about ten stories. Considering that Chicago’s tallest building, the Masonic Temple (1892), stood a bit over three hundred feet and had twenty-two floors, that was quite a comedown. A few tall buildings did open after 1893; building permits issued before the height restriction remained valid after it. But even without the height limit, the depression that began in 1893 would have curbed the real estate market anyway. Nevertheless, 1893 was still a year of great events in Chicago architecture. The Monadnock Building, at the time the largest office building in the world, was finished; Charles Atwood completed the Marshall Field Annex and began designing the Reliance Building; Adler and Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange was constructed; and Frank Lloyd Wright opened up his own business. Chicago: City of Great Buildings When people come to Chicago, the city’s celebrated architecture is a must-see. In 2008, an independent study conducted by the architectural firm RMJM Hillier concluded that Chicago was the best city for architecture and design in the United States, and the first edition of the AIA Guide to Chicago begins, “Chicago ’s eminent position in the history of architecture has been so firmly established that it borders on cliché.”4 William Le Baron Jenney, Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright, all of whom either launched or carried out their careers in Chicago in the nineteenth century, are still famous, and many equally celebrated architects came after them, from Mies van der Rohe to Bertrand Goldberg to Helmut Jahn to the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM). The innovative Aqua, a residential tower by Chicagoan Jeanne Gang, was named the 2009 Skyscraper of the Year by Emporis, a company that gathers data on tall buildings. SOM has gone far beyond Chicago, being the designer of the eighty-eight-story Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai (1999) and the Cartoonist John T. McCutcheon’s view of Chicago’s architectural boom in the 1890s. (The French Emissary Studies Our Industrial Methods; originally printed in the Chicago Record-Herald) 240 The Chicago School of Architecture Burj Khalifa in Dubai (2010), which is as tall as the John Hancock Center and the Willis Tower stacked atop each other. And in August 2011, it was announced that the Chicago firm of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG) were designing for Saudi Arabia a building named the Kingdom Tower that would be more than five hundred feet taller than the Burj Khalifa. The world’s tallest buildings might no longer be...