Works of architecture and of engineering built of cast iron, along with steel, concrete, and large expanses of glass are the emphasis of this chapter.

1. Buildings across Time, 4th Edition
Chapter Fourteen: Eclecticism,
Industrialization, and Newness
Introduction
Works of architecture and of engineering built of cast iron, along with steel, concrete, and
large expanses of glass are the emphasis of this chapter.
Dramatic progress in materials science, which began in the eighteenth century, eventually
enabled architects and engineers to address construction problems in fundamentally new
ways, contributing further to the diversity observable in nineteenth-century work.
Structural calculations were first applied to the design of the Pantheon in Paris, a building
discussed in the previous chapter. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was possible
to predict the behavior of most structural materials under specified loading conditions,
freeing builders from reliance on a process of trial and error.
By the end of the nineteenth century, architecture had changed radically, as exemplified by
such buildings as the American steel-frame skyscraper.

2. The Challenge of the Industrial Revolution
Cast Iron
Improved means of producing
iron were sought by refiners,
including Abraham Darby,
whose furnace at
Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, in
England, began production as
early as 1696. In an attempt to
advance his work, Darby
imported Dutch ironworkers
in 1704 and soon succeeded
in smelting cast iron for
commercial use.

3. The Challenge of the Industrial Revolution
Cast Iron
By 1713 Darby had pioneered
a method for producing cast
iron using coal instead of
expensive charcoal in his
furnace. The structural
properties of his cast iron
made it a suitable material for
columns, where its high
compressive strength could be
exploited.
If refined iron with a lower
carbon content is hammered
into shape instead of being
cast, it is known as wrought
iron, a material with
considerably higher
compressive and tensile
strength and so much better
than cast iron for beams.

4. The Challenge of the Industrial Revolution
Cast Iron
Abraham Darby III and
Thomas Pritchard, Bridge over
the river Severn, 1779-81.
With its multiple supporting
arches, this bridge uses
relatively brittle iron in a
condition of compression.
Subsequent bridges would
take advantage of the iron
alloy steel's considerable
tensile, as well as
compressive, strength.

5. The Challenge of the Industrial Revolution
Cast Iron
A water-powered
cotton mill in
Derbyshire England,
built by the Strutt
family, 1793-1795: Plan
and sections through
West Mill. With
masonry exterior walls
and a grid of interior
columns, this mill had
an open, flexible plan.
A challenge for
architects during the
late nineteenth
century would be
expressing this internal
skeleton on the
exterior, while covering
it with fireproof
materials.

6. The Challenge of the Industrial Revolution
Steel
In 1856, Englishman
Henry Bessemer (1813-
98) became known as the
inventor of the process
that made reliable
quantities of steel
efficiently and affordably:
he developed a converter
that burned off excess
carbon with a blast of air.
From 1875 onward, steel
began to replace both
cast and wrought iron in
construction because its
compressive and tensile
strengths exceeded those
of iron, and it was
cheaper to produce.
James B. Eads, Eads Bridge, St. Louis, 1869-74.

7. The Challenge of the Industrial Revolution
Steel
Steel was also employed for the major
suspension bridge of the nineteenth
century, the Brooklyn Bridge, con-
necting Manhattan and Brooklyn over
the East river with a 1600-foot clear
span. The bridge was designed by John
Augustus Roebling (1806-69) and
constructed under the supervision of
his son, Washington Augustus Roebling
(1837-1926). They sank two gigantic
caisson foundations for the bridge
towers, and spun galvanized steel wire
for the two main cables that supported
the roadway. Each cable contains over
5000 strands of wire, compacted and
wrapped with a continuous spiral of
softer steel. Its steel cables were not
raised intact but were woven by a
spider-like machine that passed
repeatedly from bank to bank.
J.A. and W.A. Roebling, Brooklyn Bridge, New York City, 1869-83.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyckL6HuL
RU

8. Applications of Iron and Steel
Crystal Palace
Among the greenhouse builders, horticulturalist Joseph Paxton (1801-65) is the most celebrated
as a result of his unsolicited design for a structure built in Hyde Park, London to house the first
modern world's fair in 1851. Joseph Paxton designed a building with prefabricated parts that
could be mass-produced and erected rapidly. It stood in stark contrast to traditional, massive
stone constructions.
His design proposed a 1851-foot-long structure of glass and iron at an estimated price of
£150,000; and, through negotiations with the suppliers of the materials, Paxton could guarantee
completion on time.

9. Applications of Iron and Steel
Crystal Palace
In constructing the building, the
contractors Fox and Henderson
made one of the first large-scale
demonstrations of prefabrication.
The repeated iron-and-glass
sections required a limited
number of different components,
which meant that supplying fac-
tories could easily mass-produce
the tremendous quantity of
material required for the eighteen-
acre building.
Materials arrived at the site
preassembled into subsections,
and final assembly proceeded at
an unprecedented rate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=lx2KIYFhD4M

10. Viollet-le-Duc and Rational Design
Assembly Hall
Eugene-Emmanuel
Viollet-le-Duc, Iron-
frame assembly hall
from the Entretiens sur
l’architecture (Discourses
on Architecture), 1863-
72, drawing. Viollet-le-
Duc was more successful
as a theorist than as a
practitioner. Interpreting
Gothic structure as a
highly rational response
to the problem of load
and support, he
proposed the
substitution of iron
members as a logical use
of the products of the
Industrial Revolution.

11. Applications of Iron and Steel
Bibliotheque Ste.-Genevieve
Henri Labrouste, Bibliotheque
Ste.-Genevieve, Paris, 1842-
50. On the interior at the
second-floor level one finds
an unprecedentedly large
reading room, which extends
the length and breadth of the
building and is spanned by
light semicircular cast-iron
arches comparable to those
illustrated in the essay on
railway stations. Sixteen
slender cast-iron columns
divide the long space into
two barrel-vaulted halves.
The ceiling vaults, consisting
of interlaced wires covered
with plaster, rest on the
delicately scrolled cast iron
arches.

12. Applications of Iron and Steel
Bibliotheque Nationale
Henri Labrouste, Bibliotheque
Nationale central reading
room, Paris, 1858-68.
Labrouste used masonry for
the NeoClassical exterior walls
and iron for the interior. The
most spectacular use of iron is
again in the reading room,
where nine domes, each
nearly thirty-five feet in
diameter, rest on a grid of
sixteen slender iron columns.
Illumination for the space
comes from clerestories and
glazed oculus openings in each
dome.

13. Applications of Iron and Steel
Eiffel Tower
Gustav Eiffel, Eiffel
tower, Paris, 1889.
Eiffel used his
experience with iron
construction to build
what was then the
world's tallest structure,
the 1,010-foot high
Eiffel Tower, erected for
the Paris International
Exposition of 1889
https://www.360cities.
net/image/view-from-
the-eiffel-tower

14. Skeletal Construction in Concrete and Wood
Ferroconcrete and Balloon Frame
By the late nineteenth century,
designers in America and Europe were
using concrete reinforced with steel -
ferroconcrete - for tensile strength
An innovative system of skeletal
construction that developed in the
nineteenth century, in wood, was the
American balloon frame. The balloon
frame consists of a sill plate from which
rise long studs, placed at fairly close
intervals, which are received by a top
plate. These wooden members are
nailed in place and braced laterally with
diagonal studs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q
1ZPw2cbxtc

15. The Gothic Revival
Contrasts
A.W.N. Pugin: Ancient and modern
towns compared, from Contrasts,
1836. In the lower view, the benign
medieval town appears in urban
harmony, announcing its values
through the silhouettes of its church
towers. In the upper view, the
malignant nineteenth-century city is
a deplorable cacophony of prison
and factories and almost-obscured
churches.
Many of the Romanticists chose as
an antidote to the detestable
degradation of contemporary society
a return to the past, particularly to
the perceived harmony of the Middle
Ages and to Gothic architecture.

16. The Gothic Revival
Houses of Parliament
Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin, Houses of Parliament, London, 1836-68. Barry and Pugin produced a
picturesque composition as seen across the river Thames, particularly through their use of many towers and
pinnacles, which yield a rich silhouette seen against the sky.
Pugin regarded the Gothic as the "only correct expression of the faith, wants, and climate" of England and
advocated its use for all buildings, including modem secular ones such as railroad stations. He collaborated
with Sir Charles Barry on this competition-winning Gothic design for rebuilding the Houses of Parliament,
which had been destroyed by fire in 1834.

17. The Arts and Crafts Movement
William Morris
While Pugin was reacting to the
decline of moral and spiritual
values that he associated with the
Middle Ages, others were
becoming concerned about the
decline of artistic standards in
manufactured goods because
trained designers were not
involved in creating such wares for
industrial production.
The leader of this activist group in
England was William Morris.
Morris founded the firm of Morris,
Marshall, Faulkner and Company in
1862, establishing workshops
where artist-craftsmen created
wallpaper, textiles, stained glass,
utensils, furniture, and carpets
using handicraft techniques.
https://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=CBq73yxha0o

18. The Arts and Crafts Movement
William Morris
It was intended to be an
alternative to the factory system,
where mass-produced elements
were assembled by workers who
had become little more than cogs
in a machine and had no interest
in, control over, or love for the
goods produced . Morris believed
that the provision of well-
designed, handcrafted products in
the homes of ordinary working-
class people would raise them
above the level of disinterested
bread-winning employment.
Unfortunately the prices of Morris’
well-made objects tended to be
higher than comparable factory-
made goods, so his vision of
supplying quality furnishings to
ordinary people was never
realized.

19. The Arts and Crafts Movement
Red House
Philip Webb: Red House,
Bexleyheath, Kent, 1859-60. This
house near London appears to be
no more than a comfortable
composition of forms familiar in
the mid-nineteenth-century
English countryside. What sets it
apart is Webb’s attempt, following
the prescriptions of client William
Morris, to produce a design true to
its materials and means of
construction and expressive of the
site and local culture. Morris then
outfitted it completely with
furnishings of his own design.

20. The Arts and Crafts Movement
Red House
Webb: Red House,
Bexleyheath, Kent. The plan
seems even less exceptional
than the exterior
appearance. However, its
direct response to light and
ventilation and to everyday
needs anticipates the
functionalism of twentieth-
century modernists.

21. The Arts and Crafts Movement
Richard Norman Shaw
Shaw: Leyswood, Sussex, 1870. Richard Norman Shaw trimmed away the excesses of the
Victorian Gothic to produce a rural vernacular known as “Old English.” Picturesque Leyswood
appears to have grown over time in response to functional needs and the exigencies of site.

22. The Arts and Crafts Movement
Richard Norman Shaw
Richard Norman Shaw, New
Zealand Chambers, London,
1871-73. Shaw looked back to
both the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in creating
his "Queen Anne" style for urban
buildings. Characteristics include
red brick, white window sash,
and carefully controlled
ornament.
Shaw designed it to be extremely
efficient, including some eighty
small offices and a suite for the
owners, and composed the
facade using tall oriel windows

23. Art Nouveau
Graphic Art
In considerable contrast to Voysey's
unornamented designs, a new and highly
decorative style arose during the latter two
decades of the twentieth century, known as
the Art Nouveau.
In the hands of Art Nouveau artists, linear,
sinuous lines like those found in Late Baroque
and Rococo work became free flowing
compositions based loosely on plant and
animal forms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4luPnOb
QYo

24. Victor Horta
Tassel House
Art Nouveau architects
turned structural necessity
into a language of
organically derived curves.
The earliest architectural
innovator was Victor Horta,
a Belgian architect and the
designer of the Tassel
House in Brussels, built in
1892-93. Horta
incorporated swirling tendril
designs not only in surface
patterning on floors, walls,
and ceilings, but also in
wrought iron structural
elements such as the stair
case, balustrades, and
balcony railings.

25. Hector Guimard
Metro Entrances
Hector Guimard (1867-1942)
was the French architect
most celebrated for his Art
Nouveau designs. The most
famous of his works were
made from 1899 to 1904 for
the entrances to the
Metropolitain, or Metro, the
Paris subway system. These
are canopies over staircases
that descend from the
sidewalk, and Guimard
provided several designs that
employ wrought-iron swirls
and curves, some of which
support glass roofs. The unity
of these little projects is
remarkable, for all the
elements are deftly
integrated in the plantlike
forms.

26. Art Nouveau
Sagrada Familia
Antonio Gaudi, Facade of
the Nativity, Church of the
Sagrada Familia, Barcelona,
begun 1882. In Spain, the
Art Nouveau reached its
most idiosyncratic
expression in the work of
Antonio Gaudi (1852-
1926), a Catalan influenced
by the writings of Ruskin.
The Sagrada Familia retains
Gothic structural overtones,
yet has such a heavy,
towering, sculptural
presence, enriched with
lovingly crafted details, that
it is clearly not Gothic.
https://www.youtube.com/wat
ch?v=xIZEsXEMnxA

27. Art Nouveau
Sagrada Familia
In the course of work on the
Sagrada Familia and on the
Colonia Guell Chapel, where he
hung sandbags on ropes and
covered them with canvas to
determine ideal vault cross-
sections, Gaudi moved away
from the Gothic Revival style to
an intensely personal one that
he used for apartment
buildings, houses, and
landscape designs as well as
ecclesiastical works.

28. Art Nouveau
Sagrada Familia
In the course of work on the
Sagrada Familia and on the
Colonia Guell Chapel, where he
hung sandbags on ropes and
covered them with canvas to
determine ideal vault cross-
sections, Gaudi moved away
from the Gothic Revival style to
an intensely personal one that
he used for apartment
buildings, houses, and
landscape designs as well as
ecclesiastical works.

29. Art Nouveau
Park Güell
The Park Güell is a public park system composed of gardens and architectonic elements located on Carmel
Hill, in Barcelona, Catalonia. It was begun in 1900 and opened to the public in 1926.

30. Art Nouveau
Casa Batlló
Casa Batlló is a renowned building located in the
center of Barcelona and is one of Antoni Gaudí’s
masterpieces. A remodel of a previously built
house, it was redesigned in 1904 by Gaudí and has
been refurbished several times after that.

31. Art Nouveau
Casa Mila
Antonio Gaudf, Casa
Mila, Barcelona, 1905-
07. Gaudi's design for
Casa Mila, a large apart-
ment house in
Barcelona, has an
undulating plasticity in
its facade and a
curvilinear plan that is
made possible by its
expressive exterior load-
bearing wall. There are
no bearing walls inside,
giving the designer the
freedom to sculpt
individual, non-
orthogonal spaces.
https://www.youtube.c
om/watch?v=yiabIQ-
KlZU

32. Art Nouveau
Glasgow School of Art
Gaudi's highly individualistic
interpretations of the Art Nouveau
have a Scottish parallel in the work
of Charles Rennie Mackintosh
(1868-1928), a gifted designer
whose architectural career was
brief. His buildings tend to have
bold massing deftly composed,
with light and airy interiors
accented by subtle attenuated
curves or linear patterns that are
usually symmetrical. The Glasgow
School of Art (1897-1909) was
Mackintosh's first and largest
commission.
This is the main façade on Renfrew
Street. The huge windows gather
northern light for painting and
design studios. The central entry
includes motifs drawn from
Glasgow's medieval vernacular.

33. Art Nouveau
School of Art
Charles Rennie
Mackintosh, Library
interior, Glasgow School of
Art, Glasgow, 1897-1909.
The supporting columns
are heavy timber with a
dark finish typical of late
nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century
interiors. Mackintosh
designed the reading
tables and light fixtures as
well.

34. Art Nouveau
Hill House
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Hill House, Helensburgh, 1902-04. Hill House (Fig. 14.34 ), designed for a
Glasgow publisher, stands like a castle on rising ground, reflecting the influence of the Scottish vernacular in
its turrets, expressive chimneys, and dominant roof. The monolithic character of the exterior is achieved by
pebble-dash stucco (a coarse plaster surface that consists of lime and cement mixed with sand, small gravel,
and often pebbles or shells).

35. Viennese Secession
Postal Savings Bank
Otto Wagner,
Postal Savings
Bank, Vienna,
1904-12. Marble
veneer attached
by means of
aluminum-capped
bolts creates the
pattern of
Wagner's facade.
Aluminum also
appears at the
columns and the
roof supports of
the entry canopy.
A process for inexpensively extracting aluminum metal from bauxite ore was developed in 1854,
and the cost of aluminum plummeted from $500 per pound to just $40 per pound.

36. Viennese Secession
Postal Savings Bank
Wagner designed a glazed
vault for the banking room,
suspended from masts and
cables above it, resulting in a
space filled with light.
Against the rear and right-
side walls are cylindrical
aluminum air-supply
standards. A process for
inexpensively extracting
aluminum metal from bauxite
ore was developed in 1854,
and the cost of aluminum
plummeted from $500.00 an
oz. to $40.00 an oz.
Aluminum became known as
the metal of the future.

37. Wagner's most notable
designs in this mode were
thirty-six stations for the
Vienna subway system, the
Stadtbahn (1894-1901).
While not as exuberant as
Guimard's work for the Paris
Metro, Wagner's designs do
employ the characteristic
stylized ornament in cast and
wrought iron.
Viennese Secession
Stadtbahn Stations

38. Viennese Secession
Wagner’s Renderings

39. Joseph Maria Olbrich,
Secession Building, Vienna,
1898-99. The Secession
Building is a Neo-Classically
inspired mass, crowned by a
pierced metal dome. Olbrich
covered the dome with a
laurel motif symbolic of
Apollo, god of poetry, music,
and learning. The building
served as a meeting and
exhibition space for the
Secession.
Viennese Secession
Secession Building

40. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts
School of Architecture
French architectural teaching was
reorganized during the French
Revolution and again under
Napoleon Bonaparte. By 1819 the
Section d'Architecture of the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts was well
established, with its own faculty
and with quarters in a building
adapted for its use by Felix Duban.
The name "Ecole des Beaux Arts"
became synonymous with
architectural education in France,
to some extent in England, and
eventually in America, and the
Ecole continued to operate in this
location until 1968.

41. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts
School of Architecture
While details of the educational
system changed over time, the
general philosophy did not. Would-
be students had to pass a challenging
qualifying examination that included
diverse subjects from drawing to
history.
Architecture students had to enter
design competitions, or concours
d'emulation, in the form of either an
esquisse ( a sketch problem) or a
projet rendu (a fully rendered
project), with these two types being
held in alternate months. For both,
the student received a precis, or
program describing the essential
elements. He then entered en loge,
that is, into a cubicle, and worked
alone for twelve hours to produce a
proposal.

42. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts
School of Architecture
At the appointed time, projects were picked
up throughout Paris by a cart or charrette;
students sometimes jumped on board to
apply finishing touches, hence the term
charrette used today by architectural
students to describe an intense period of
focused design work on a specific project.
The highest award given at the Ecole
was the "Grand Prix de Rome" which
paid for a winner to live and study in
Rome for an extended period.

43. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts
Richard Morris Hunt
Richard Morris Hunt, The Breakers,
Newport, Rhode Island, 1892-95.
Richard Morris Hunt was the first
American to attend the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts in Paris. The knowledge
he gained there of academic planning
and monumental design made him
the architect of choice among the
late nineteenth-century American
elite.

44. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts
Frank Furness
Furness and Hewitt, Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts,
Philadelphia, 1871-72. In partnership
with Victorian Gothicist George
Hewitt, Furness produced an Anglo-
French design for the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts (1871-72)
in Philadelphia. Its front façade has
stone elements seemingly slid and
slotted like the moving parts of a
huge nineteenth-century machine,
flamboyant textures, neo-Greco
moldings, Venetian Gothic coloring,
and Victorian Gothic and Islamic
arches beneath Second Empire
mansard roofs.

45. Richardsonian Romanesque
H.H. Richardson
Henry Hobson Richardson, Trinity
Church, Boston, Massachusetts,
1872-77. H.H. Richardson (1838-86)
followed Richard Morris Hunt as the
second American to attend the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts.
He gained national acclaim for his
competition-winning design for
Trinity Church (1872-77) in Copley
Square.
Trinity Church was to become the
most celebrated building of its age; a
national poll of architects in 1885
identified it as the best building in
the United States. In many respects
the design is a pastiche, very much in
the tradition of nineteenth-century
eclecticism.

46. Richardsonian Romanesque
H.H. Richardson
Despite these borrowings, an
abundance of original thinking gives
Trinity Church its distinctive
character. Richardson conceived of
the building as polychromatic, both
inside and out, and his design shows
a true flair for scale and texture.
Ashlar stonework in warm gray
contrasts with the red-brown
sandstone trim, and slate roofs on
the parish house set off the red clay
tiles prominent on the tower roof.
Richardson was a romantic who was
inspired by the abundant stone of
New England, and he worked to
evolve a style worthy of its rugged
massiveness and load-bearing
capacities. That style has come to be
known as Richardsonian
Romanesque.

47. Richardsonian Romanesque
H.H. Richardson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1lCPf3oISU

48. Richardsonian Romanesque
H.H. Richardson
Henry Hobson Richardson, Marshall
Field Wholesale Store, Chicago,
Illinois, 1885. At the Marshall Field
store, Richardson chose not to
express its internal steel skeleton,
but he eschewed ornamentation and
historical trappings, leaving the
unadorned rusticated masonry and
the great arched openings of the six-
story block to convey power and
monumentality. Notice the vertical
unity of each window bay, which
begins with a rectangular opening
lighting the basement, and
terminates with four vertical
rectangles over two round-headed
windows.
Richardson succeeded in creating a
design as bold and monumental as
the architecture seen in the Roman
engravings of Piranesi.

49. Richardsonian Romanesque
H.H. Richardson
Henry Hobson Richardson, Watts
Sherman House, Newport, Rhode
Island, 1874. Close observation of
the textures created by the mock-
heavy timber and the shingles of
the roofs and gables reveals the
similarity in feeling to Richardson's
compositions in stone. The
treatment of the wood members is
also comparable to the Queen
Anne style of Richard Norman
Shaw in England.

50. McKim, Mead, and White
Boston Public Library
McKim, Mead, and White, Boston
Public Library, Boston,
Massachusetts, 1887-95. The firm
of McKim, Mead, and White
established the model for the large-
scale American architectural
practice. Charles McKim looked
back to Henri Labrouste's
Bibliotheque Ste.-Genevieve for his
facade composition.
Boston Public Library faces H.H.
Richardson's Trinity Church across
Copley Square.

51. McKim, Mead, and White
Penn Station
McKim, Mean, and White:
Pennsylvania Station, New
York City, 1904-10. Of all
of McKim, Mead, and
White’s planning
accomplishments, none is
more impressive than this
train station. Here they
looked to the Roman
baths for inspiration in
managing the huge
crowds that passed
through these vast spaces
each day.

52. McKim, Mead, and White
Penn Station

53. McKim, Mead, and White
Penn Station
McKim, Mean, and
White: Section and
elevation of
Pennsylvania Station,
New York City. Like the
plan, McKim, Mead, and
White’s elevation and
section were inspired by
the Roman baths. The
dominant features were
the great thermal
windows that lit the
groin-vaulted waiting
area.
The destruction of this
terminal must be
considered a tragedy for
American architecture.

54. The First Skyscrapers
Structural Steel Framing
From about 1865 onward, architects in New
York and then Chicago developed an original
building type, the skyscraper, on a scale and
at a level of sophistication unmatched by
Europeans.
Tall buildings were a response to rising
urban real-estate values and the desire of
businesses to remain dose to established
centers of commerce.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqAZ0-
GsOZk

55. The First Skyscrapers
Structural Steel Framing
A whole range of technical improvements-
including mass-produced structural
components, the safety elevator, and fireproof-
ing techniques-made skyscrapers feasible, and
their structural systems were most logically
executed in steel frames.
James Bogardus introduced the European iron
I-section, now universally employed in the
form of wide-flange sections, for steel framing.

56. The First Skyscrapers
Home Insurance Building
William Le Baron Jenney,
Home Insurance Company
Building, Chicago, Illinois,
1883-85. William Le Baron
Jenney was only one of the
many architects searching for
effective ways to fireproof
steel· frame construction for
late nineteenth-century
buildings. His Home
Insurance Company Building
was among the first
successful solutions.

57. The First Skyscrapers
Chicago School
Architects who produced the
high-rise buildings of Chicago
dating from 1875 to 1925 are
collectively termed the Chicago
School, indicating their common
design attitudes and construction
technologies. Innovative as the
structural systems of these
buildings are, they do not
necessarily express their metal
frames on the outside; most are
clad in masonry, which gives the
impression that this is the
structural material.
Their facades tended to be
derived from classical
precedents, which posed an
aesthetic problem for the
architect: what should a tall
building look like?

58. The First Skyscrapers
Chicago School
Daniel H. Burnham and John
Welborn Root, Monadnock
Building, Chicago, Illinois,
1890-91. Built using
traditional masonry bearing
walls, rather than the new
steel frame, it is highly
expressive in its use of
materials. The need for
economy precluded external
ornament. As handsome as it
is, the Monadnock Building
signaled the end of the
bearing-wall skyscraper
because its thick walls were
not economical – they were
6-feet thick at the first floor.

59. The First Skyscrapers
Chicago School
Daniel H. Burnham and John
Welborn Root, Reliance Building,
Chicago, Illinois, 1894-95. The
Reliance Building's external skin
of terracotta and glass clips onto
an internal steel skeleton. This
construction method anticipated
the curtain walls of the 1950s
and '60s.

60. The First Skyscrapers
Curtain Wall
Subsequent high-rise
construction makes extensive use
of glass curtain walls, where the
lightweight frames holding the
glass are brought forward of the
structural members, a technique
first employed by W.J. Polk in the
Halladie Building (1918) in San
Francisco.

61. Louis Sullivan
Auditorium Building
Dankmar Adler and Louis
Sullivan, Auditorium Building,
Chicago, Illinois, 1886-90. The
Chicago Auditorium Building
was one of the most complex
multi-use buildings
constructed in the country up
until that time. Its name
derives from the huge 4,237-
seat concert hall located at its
center, but the building also
contained a ten-story hotel
and a seventeen-story office
tower, with additional offices
at the rear
Obviously Sullivan was
influenced by Richardson's
Marshall Fields Wholesale
Store. The projecting block
above the triple arches is the
hotel lobby.

62. Louis Sullivan
Auditorium Building
Alder and Sullivan: Plan of the
longitudinal section through the
Auditorium Building, Chicago.
Sullivan was as original an architect
as Richardson. While traces of Neo-
Classicism and Romanticism appear
in his work, he directly engaged the
rapidly emerging building
technologies of Chicago and
expressed them architecturally.
His most famous dictum was "form
follows function."

63. Louis Sullivan
Wainwright Building
Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan,
Wainwright Building, St. Louis,
Missouri, 1890. Romantic that he
was, Sullivan turned to classical
precedent for inspiration when he
tackled the problem of artistic
expression appropriate to a tall
building. In 1890 a commission from
a St. Louis brewer, Ellis Wainwright,
gave Adler and Sullivan their first
opportunity to design a skyscraper,
and Sullivan's treatment of the
exterior became the exemplar for
much of later high-rise construction.

64. Louis Sullivan
Wainwright Building
Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan,
Wainwright Building, St. Louis,
Missouri, 1890. Romantic that he
was, Sullivan turned to classical
precedent for inspiration when he
tackled the problem of artistic
expression appropriate to a tall
building.
In 1890 a commission from a St.
Louis brewer, Ellis Wainwright, gave
Adler and Sullivan their first
opportunity to design a skyscraper,
and Sullivan's treatment of the
exterior became the exemplar for
much of later high-rise construction.

65. Louis Sullivan
Wainwright Building
Rather than a layering of horizontal
elements drawn from one or more
historical periods, the Wainwright
Building has a base, a middle section,
and a top, like a classical column.
Sullivan, in his essay "The Tall Building
Artistically Considered" (1896), explained
his reasons for this organization.
He expressed the ground floor (where
easy access could be made from the
street into banks, shops, and the like)
and mezzanine or second floor (still
conveniently reached on foot) as a unit;
he placed stacked offices on the third-
through-top floors, where repetitive
windows illuminated floor areas that
could be subdivided to suit the
requirements of various tenants; and he
located the mechanical systems, from
tanks and pumps to elevator machinery,
behind a deep cornice.

66. Louis Sullivan
Wainwright Building
Sullivan’s swirling patterns were generally designed for ease of production from a master mold or cast in
terracotta, iron, or plaster. Terracotta ornament is located in the spandrel panels under each window, and at
the deep cornice.

67. Louis Sullivan
Guaranty Building
Dankmar Adler
and Louis Sullivan,
Guaranty Building,
Buffalo, New York,
1894. This office
structure exhibits
the same tall-
building
composition as
the Wainwright
Building.

68. Louis Sullivan
Carson Pirie Scott Department Store
Louis Sullivan, Carson Pirie
Scott Department Store,
Chicago, Illinois, 1899-1904.
At the Wainwright and
Guaranty buildings, Sullivan
chose to emphasize the
vertical. Here he balanced
horizontals and verticals and
inserted "Chicago windows"
- windows that have large
fixed panes between
operable sash windows.