FIRST CHICAGO SCHOOL
THE FIRST CHICAGO SCHOOL
Most buildings within the downtown area of Chicago were destroyed by a huge fire in 1871 and this area was largely rebuilt in the years which followed.
Beginning in the early 1880s, architectural pioneers of the Chicago School explored steel-frame construction and, in the 1890s, the use of large areas of plate glass to create buildings which were among the first modern skyscrapers. While the term "Chicago School" is widely used to describe buildings in the city during the 1880s and 1890s, buildings displayed a wide variety of styles and techniques. Architects associated with the Chicago School include Henry Hobson Richardson, Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, William LeBaron Jenney, Martin Roche, John Root, Solon S. Beman, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Louis Sullivan was perhaps the city's most philosophical architect. Realizing that the skyscraper represented a new form of architecture, he discarded historical precedent and designed buildings that emphasised their vertical nature. This new form of architecture became known as the "Commercial Style," but it was called the "Chicago School" by later historians.
Daniel Burnham led the design of the "White City" of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition which some historians claim led to a revival of Neo-Classical architecture throughout Chicago and the entire United States. Burnham developed the 1909 "Plan for Chicago", perhaps the first comprehensive city plan in the U.S, in a Neo-Classical style, many of Chicago's most progressive skyscrapers occurred after the Exposition closed, between 1894 and 1899. Louis Sullivan said that the fair set the course of American architecture back by two decades, but even his finest Chicago work, the Schlesinger and Meyer (later Carson, Pirie, Scott) store, was built in 1899—five years after the "White City" and ten years before Burnham's Plan.
Some of the distinguishing features of the Chicago School are:
1. steel-frame buildings with masonry cladding (usually terra cotta), allowing large plate-glass window areas and limiting the amount of exterior ornamentation
2. The "Chicago window" - a three-part window consisting of a large fixed center panel flanked by two smaller double-hung sash windows creating a grid pattern, with some projecting out from the facade forming bay windows.
3. Occasional elements of neoclassical architecture. Many Chicago School skyscrapers contain the three parts of a classical column. The first floor functions as the base, the middle stories, usually with little ornamental detail, act as the shaft of the column, and the last floor or so represent the capital, with more ornamental detail and capped with a cornice.
Sources
Edward Keegan, Chicago Architecture: 1885 to Today
Judith Paine McBrien, Pocket Guide to Chicago Architecture
