IND 383 : HISTORY OF ART & ARCHITECTURE

The Chicago School

The Chicago School : 1880-1900

‘It must be proud and impressive to the last inch, rise up in joy so that it forms a
unit from the ground to the roof without a single deviating line.’
“Form follows function” : Louis H. Sullivan, c.1894.

INTRODUCTION

The rule of optimizing the use of available floor space was also applied in the
construction of residential and administrative buildings. Sites available for
construction became increasingly rare and more expensive. This is particularly
true of the economic and administrative centers in the USA and, in particular,
Chicago. In 1850 the city had only 30,000 inhabitants. By 1870 this number had
increased tenfold; it reached half a million by 1880 and finally exceeded one
million by 1890. Chicago had by this time become the main city of the American
Mid-West. It was the main junction for railway and shipping traffic, the
transhipment center for grain and timber, the site of major metal processing
works and the biggest slaughterhouses in the world.

In 1871, the harshest possible lesson demonstrated that iron was not as fire-
resistant as had originally been believed ; the city’s iron structures melted like
butter in a great fire which destroyed almost the entire city. In view of the
economic boom, ways of building increasingly higher buildings were constantly
being sought. However, the Monadnock Building by Burnham and Root, the
highest brick building in the city, constructed between 1884 and 1892, required
two-metre-thick walls at ground floor level. This was in order to support the 15
floors and at the cost of valuable shop-window space on the ground floor. The
design of the building as an unadorned red-brick slab, solely articulated by flat,
house-high bays and the deep insertion of the windows into the wall, was
indicative of future developments.

Chicago was the center of architectural progress in the United States from the
1880s onwards, and Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were the two
giants who gave it international significance. William le Baron Jenney and other
experimenters with steel-framed office buildings had laid the foundations, while
H.H. Richardson, although not an innovator of structural technique, simplified
the forms of large commercial buildings, giving them, notably with his Marshall
Field warehouse of 1887, a new monumentality.

In Chicago, following the disastrous fire in 1871, importance was attached to

fireproof construction, and this gave an impetus (dorongan) to the new styles
then being evolved for the office buildings so much in demand in the expanding
Middle West. A metal frame, sheathed (disarung) in stone and brick, seemed to
Louis Sullivan and to several others to require a form that kept frame and infill
visibly separated and that owed nothing period precedent. Although Sullivan was
a prolific (produktif) designer of free flowing ornament, his early skyscrapers
were a striking geometrical answer – on which other architects developed further
after his early retirement.

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 IND 383 : HISTORY OF ART & ARCHITECTURE
The Chicago School

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1 & 2. A breakthrough in the evolution of the skyscraper occurred in 1890, when Louis Sullivan used a framework
entirely of steel in his St. Louis office building known as the Wainright Building.

FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION

Chicago, the metropolis which revelled (berpesta) in euphoria (kegirangan) for the
future, showed greater openness to simple and more economical design than, for
example, New York. Here the skyscrapers were adorned with heavy, historicised
exteriors. There was no desire to imitate motifs from European architectural
history, but a strong impulse to develop a self-confident individual style. As early
as 1897, W. Jenney merely covered the supports and cross girders on the façades
of his First Leiter Buildings, which were supported by cast iron columns, and filled
in the resulting grid with enormous windows. This architect, who designed the
Home Insurance Building of 1883-85, the first ten-storey skyscraper with an
exclusively steel skeleton, used the same principle for the Second Leiter Building.
A stone-faced exterior was almost completely plain and was articulated (teratur)
solely by horizontal and vertical masonry bands ; only the suggested capitals at
the heads of the wide masonry bands at intervals of four windows were vaguely
reminiscent of pilasters. Bessemer steel, later to play an important role in the
development of construction technology, was used for the first time in this metal
frame.

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3. Home Insurance Building, 1883-85 by W. Jenney

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The Chicago School

4. The Carson, Pirie, Scott Store in Chicago was the climax of Louis Sullivan’s career as an architect of big
commercial buildings and a masterpiece of the Chicago School of steel framed design.

By inserting a projecting perpendicular strip of masonry between the windows on

the Wainright building in St. Louis, 1890-91, and the even more famous Guaranty
building in Buffalo, 1894-95, Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan emphasized the
vertical thrust of rectangular buildings. Sullivan had the following comment to
make on the design of a skyscraper. “It must be proud and impressive to the last
inch, rise up in joy so that it forms a unit from the ground to the roof without a
single deviating line.” He repeated his motto “form follows function” until it
became a guiding principle of all of modern architecture. Thus the function of
different floors can be distinguished on the basis of the differentiation of the
façade design into socle, shaft and capital. The ground and first floors are fitted
with large windows and hence are suitable for retail trade. Above these lies the
regular grid of the main floors which are used as offices. Finally, beneath the
projecting flat roof, there is an almost sealed surface with bull’s eye windows
which contains the technical equipment. There is some Art Nouveau decoration
but this contributes little to the overall impression of the building’s exterior.

5. Detail of the cast iron free flow motifs on the Scott Store building.

THE CHICAGO SCHOOL

Sullivan’s department store Carson Pine Scott in Chicago is similar. Here,

however, he emphasized only the rounded corners of the building with
perpendicular masonry strips. The main floors, which were for retail use, are fitted
with wide “Chicago Windows”. If one ignores the decoration added in the socle
zone, this building already looks like something built in the 1920’s or 50’s. Such
buildings, whose consistently simple design was derived from constructive
conditions and functional requirements, gave Chicago the most modern
architecture in the world at the turn of the century. This was evident in the
“Loop”, the business quarter of the city. This approach to the construction of
skyscrapers became known as the “Chicago School”. However it did not set a
trend. On the contrary, one of its main representatives – Daniel H. Burnham –
‘betrayed’ its aggressive modernity by turning back to a more communicable neo-
Classicism, as can be seen in his historical façade design for the Flatiron building
in New York.

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The Chicago School

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6. D. Adler and Louis Sullivan, Guaranty Building, Buffalo, New York, 1894-95

7. Daniel Hudson Burnham : Flatiron Building, New York, 1902

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

When Frank Lloyd Wright broke with Sullivan, whom he always regarded as his
master, to set up his own practice in 1893, he first devoted his effort to houses.
The horizontal emphasis and spatial flexibility of his many houses in the Chicago
suburbs were brilliant innovations, but their quality was little recognized locally. In
1909, however, his series of Prairie style houses culminated in the Robie House.
Thereafter, their impact on European architects was dramatic. As early as 1901,
Wright began to take an interest in the possibilities of concrete, and in such

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The Chicago School

buildings as the Larkin office building at Buffalo and the Unity Church at Oak Park,
he electrified Europe with his bold, expressive treatment of his hitherto (hingga
sekarang) despised (dihina) material. He also experimented with concrete-block
construction in a group of houses in California.

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8. Robie House, Chicagi. 1909, most celebrated of Wright’s early, Prairie-style houses, epitomized his revolutionary
contribution to a new, American, domestic architecture.

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9 & 10. Unity Church at Oak Park, Chicago.

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The Chicago School

11. Prairie-style houses advertisement

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12 & 13. Taliesin, Wisconsin, 1911. (Right & below)

Wright’s fame eventually spread through America, too. His own house in Taliesin,
Wisconsin, 1911, a rambling romantic structure in a mixture of materials related
to the landscape in which it stood, became a center of pilgrimage. Here, he
gathered disciples (pengikut) around him and became the patriarchal figure that
the world recognized as a genuine, if sometimes outrageous and loquacious (suka
bercakap), genius.

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