Chicago School

Revision

Origins• This school appeared after the fire in Chicago that

created the need of rebuilding the city• Architects were encouraged to build higher

structures because of the escalating land prices• Conscious of the possibilities of the new materials

and structures they developed buildings in which:– Isolated footing supported a skeleton of iron encased in

masonry– There were:

• fireproof floors,• numerous fast elevators and • gas light

– The traditional masonry wall became curtains, full of glass, supported by the metal skeleton

– The first skyscrapers were born

Sources of the style

• The Louisiana-born architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Although he was trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Richardson rejected the école's dictum that the Greek and Roman classical style was the ultimate standard of design. Instead, his ideal was the rugged Romanesque of the South of France.

• The second source of style for the architects of the First Chicago School derived from the very nature of the material they so wholeheartedly adopted: steel.

Sullivan

• Sullivan was the main architect of this style• Sullivan provided his building with a firm

visual base, treated the intermediate office floors as a unit, and crowned the whole with a bold cornice

• The decorative ornamentation devised by Sullivan and used on some of his office buildings is based on floral motifs but organized in a manner closely resembling the Irish interlace of the early Middle Ages

• Sullivan designed with the principles of reconciling the world of nature with science and technology

Sullivan

• His buildings were detailed with lush, yet tastefully subdued organic ornamentation.

• His attempt to balance ornamentation into the whole of building design inspired a generation of American and European architects;

• the idea that ornamentation be integral to the building itself, rather than merely applied.

• He created a personal style that had few imitators or followers

• Sullivan is one of the few human beings to whom Frank Lloyd Wright publicly acknowledged a debt of influence in his career.

Characteristics

• Bold geometric facades pierced with either arched or lintel-type openings.

• The wall surface highlighted with extensive low-relief sculptural ornamentation in terra cotta.

• Buildings often topped with deep projecting eaves and flat roofs.

• The multi-story office complex highly regimented into specific zones or ground story, intermediate floors, and the attic or roof.

• The intermediate floors are arranged in vertical bands. Large arched window

Characteristics

• Large arched window• Decorative terra cotta panel • Decorative band • Vertical strips of windows • Pilaster-like mullions • Projecting eaves (the under part of a

sloping roof overhanging a wall)

Characteristics

• Highly decorated frieze • Enriched foliated rinceau (an

ornamental motif of scrolls of foliage, usually vine)

• Porthole windows • Decorated terra cotta spandrels

• Capital of pilaster strips

Characteristics

• Guilloche (a pattern of interlacing bands forming a plait and used as an enrichment on a moulding) enrichment

• Foliated and linear enrichments along jambs or entry

Architects

• Adler• Sullivan• Le Baron Jenney• Burham• Wellborn Root

Buildings

• Chicago’s Auditorium• Montauk blok• Chicago Stock Exchange• Home Insurance Building• Carson Store

Influences

• The First Chicago School was an astonishing and a profoundly important achievement.

• Its matchless tradition of technical prowess and aesthetic boldness would surface again in Chicago – in the 1930s with the arrival of the Bauhaus,

and – in the following decades in the work of

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his disciples.