The Birth of The Modern City

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Today, my goal was to explore Chicago’s lasting legacy to the world.

In 1871, as everyone knows, the city center burned to the ground.

Businessmen quickly rebuilt.

The unprecedented opportunity drew architects from all over the country.

They convinced those businessmen to support a new form of building, the skyscraper.

Tall buildings came of age in Chicago, and the city now has more styles of them than anywhere else in the world.

The Chicago Architecture Foundation specializes in showing that legacy, with a long menu of tours covering everything a visitor could ever want.

Michigan Avenue

My first glorious sight was the walk to the foundation along Michigan Avenue.

As bad as the view was yesterday, today made up for it.

The first building was the John Hancock Tower.

It is shaped like a very tall black cheese grater, reaching for the heavens.

The sides of the building show obvious cross bracing, put in to strengthen the tower against the wind.

Skidmore Owings and Merrill, whose name will come up often today, designed it in 1970.





South from this building are two stone water towers, which look like miniature medieval castles.

They were built to supply water to the city to prevent another fatal fire.

Architect W.W. Boyington designed them in 1876.





Just south of them is another landmark, Water Tower Place.

From the outside, it looks like a modernist white brick and nothing special.

Inside is something else entirely.

Built in 1976, this was the first attempt to create an urban mall in the country.

The idea was pretty simple: take the spread out version seen in the suburbs, fold it up like an accordion, and stick it in a skyscraper.

Chicago now has several of them along Michigan Avenue, but the idea never really caught on elsewhere.





Further down the avenue sits the site of the former McGraw Hill Building, one of Chicago’s stranger preservation stories.

The original building was an art deco masterpiece, built for the namesake magazine company in 1929.

It was especially known for its intricate façade covered in low relief sculpture.

In 1997, a developer planned to tear down the building are replace it with a hotel.

In order to get permission from the city, they agreed to remove the façade and attach it to the replacement.

They did the work well enough that many casual visitors believe the building is the original.





Almost across the street sits one of the most infamous buildings in the city, the Chicago Tribune Building.

The building looks like a gothic church turned into a skyscraper, with flying buttresses on the top and long thin windows.

It is infamous due to the circumstances of its construction.

The Tribune held an international competition to design the building in 1924.

The winner was the most conservative of all the entries, by New York architects Howells and Hood.

Adding injury to insult, one of the rejects was a groundbreaking modernist design from Eliel Saarinen, which has since become famous in architecture courses.

It is now considered the most influential building design of the 20^th century that was never built.

Oops!





Soon afterward, Michigan Avenue reaches the Chicago River.

The view is one of the most impressive urban landscapes in the world, with skyscraper after skyscraper along the riverfront.

On the corner of the river and the street sits the Wrigley Building from 1921, a masterpiece of Beaux Arts ornamentation.

Behind it is the Trump Tower Chicago, another masterpiece of curved minimalist glass from Skidmore Owings and Merrill, built in 2005.

When Donald Trump (yes, that Donald Trump) announced he was coming to Chicago, residents were very skeptical, but the design won them over.

Behind it is a pair of striking buildings with layer after layer of concrete curved balconies from 1964.

Their official name is the Marina City, but city residents call them the Corncobs.

The bridge over the river is also a landmark, a Beaux Arts beauty from 1920 designed by Edward Burnett.

The pillars have sculptures of the French explorers who first settled the area.





Continuing south, the Carbon and Carbide building from 1929 appears on the right.

The building is composed of black granite with beautiful gold art deco designs.

Finally, there is the Railway Exchange Building, a masterpiece of early skyscraper design from 1904 that was once owned by the Santa Fe Railroad (their sign is still in the roof).

The building is all white, because white buildings indicated the owner could employ a huge staff to keep the façade clean.

Skidmore Owings and Merrill, who are so responsible for the design of recent Chicago skyscrapers, have their offices in this building.

The Chicago Architecture Foundation is on the first floor.

Chicago Architecture Foundation

The foundation offers an incredibly wide range of tours.

For an overview of skyscraper evolution, the two most important are the two tours of the Loop, the central business district.

One covers pre-World War II, and one covers afterward.

It’s possible to take them back to back, for an intense half-day architecture fest.





Both tours begin in the foundation’s gallery.

They have set up an incredible scale model of downtown Chicago, with every important building featured.

Signs along the perimeter list each building and what makes it important.

Importance is not just from height; many started important design or engineering trends.





The Loop provides an opportunity to test the depth of a guidebook.

Some books, and many visitors, think the name comes from the elevated subway loop around the district.

The subway has been there since 1897, and is listed on the national register of historic places; its fame is probably the only reason it hasn’t been moved underground at this point.

That impression is wrong!

The name predates the construction of the subway, and actually comes from the streetcar route that the subway replaced.

Chicago Loop Modern

The modern tour happened first.

The tour first discusses, of all people, Mayor Richard J Daly.

Mayor Daly is mostly remembered as the ultimate modern example of a corrupt machine politician, but he also had some important ideas about the city.

The most far reaching its effects was how to do urban renewal.

In the core, at least, it was done building by building rather than tearing out whole blocks.

This kept the overall culture of the area intact.

Daly also believed if the government set a good example by hiring modern architects for renewal projects, private builders would follow.

He was proven correct.





Daly’s vision shows itself in the federal complex in the heart of the loop.

In the 1960s, this area was occupied by a beautiful but outdated Beaux Arts courthouse.

Daly intended to tear it down and replace it with modern buildings.

A federal judge refused.

Daly successfully steamrolled the judge with the General Services Administration, and the project went ahead.





The complex was designed in 1964 by one of the most important architects of the era, Meis van de Rohe.

He was a German architect who helped develop the International Style in the 1920s (see Days of Future’s Past) and was forced to flee when the Nazis took power.

He ultimately settled in Chicago, and designed several buildings around the city.

This complex shows the style at its most severe.

The buildings are precisely designed blocks of black metal and plate glass.

They could be anything, from office towers to a cement plant.

In reality, they are courthouses.

The only ornamentation on the buildings is welded vertical iron rails, which are precisely aligned with the blocks of granite in the plaza below.

Everything here is geometric, impersonal, and exact.

The buildings look oppressive by modern taste, but they influenced a generation of architects.





Next to the courthouses sits a tall triangular tower made of precisely aligned concrete blocks.

It has no ornamentation at all except for very narrow windows in a random pattern on the walls.

This building could also be anything, and the effect this time is deliberate.

The building is the holding cells for prisoners awaiting trial next door, designed by Harry Weese in 1975.

People in downtown Chicago do not want to live next to a prison, and the building design makes it far less obvious that they do.





The next important building in the Loop is the Inland Steel Building.

On one level, it doesn’t look that groundbreaking.

It’s only twenty stories high.

The International Style design consists of steel plates over concrete columns, separated by glass windows.

The upper levels are cantilevered over a glass lobby.

On another level, it’s very important.

It was the first skyscraper privately built in the Loop since World War II, in 1958.

Equally important, it was the first skyscraper designed by local firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill, who ultimately became kings of the format.





The three tallest buildings in Chicago were all designed by people associated with the firm.

The John Hancock Tower and Trump Chicago Tower were mentioned earlier.

The Trump Tower was originally planned to be the tallest building in the world, at nearly a third of a mile.

After 9/11 happened, Donald Trump himself ordered the size of the building cut in half.

The third building, of course, is the Sears Tower (its official name is now the Willis Tower, but everyone still calls it the Sears).

The tower is taller than the former World Trade Center, but dominates the skyline less because it is surrounded by other tall buildings.

The tower is composed of nine tubes of different heights that are bound together to increase wind stability.

The design lowered the amount of steel needed, and the cost, significantly.

It also suited the needs of Sears.

They wanted large floors on the lower levels so their employees could easily mingle with each other; and small floors on the upper levels so there would be more views and the offices would fetch higher rents.





The next building on the modern tour is the Prudential Building.

Even though it was built in 1952, it looks like an art deco building from the 1920s, down to the large carving of the Prudential logo on the side.

This is the type of conservatism that Mayor Daly rebelled against a decade later.





The last building on the modern tour worth mentioning is the Blue Cross Blue Sheild of Illinois Tower.

It is a tall thin building that looks like a classic of the International Style.

The façade is blue glass between white vertical and horizontal columns.

Blue and white are the corporate colors of Blue Cross.

The building was designed by Meis Van de Rohe’s grandson.

The building is really notable because it was originally designed to be half the height!

The architect knew it would probably be expanded, and designed the bottom half to fit seamlessly with what eventually became the top.

Chicago Loop Historic

The historic tour follows the modern tour immediately.

The first thing the tour guide talked about was the Chicago fire.

The fire, as noted above, gave architects an unprecedented opportunity to design big buildings.

The next thing they mentioned was ornamentation.

Before the International Style became popular buildings were known for their heavy design elements (which Le Corbusier referred to as frillyness).

On the inside, most of the design work was plaster.

On the outside, it was mostly stucco, which can be formed in molds when wet but dries hard as a rock.





The most important of the early architecture firms was Burnham and Root.

They did not invent the steel frame skyscraper, but they brought the design to new heights with Beaux Arts decoration.

Their style shows itself fully in a building called the Rookery, designed in 1888.

The outside shell of the building is red granite.

The windows and doors have incredible detailed elements surrounding them, nearly all in stucco.

The client had the last name Rook, and did not like the building name.

The architects ensured he could not do anything about it by placing owls and other birds all around the doorway!





A building near the Rookery, also by Burnham and Root, perfectly shows the contrast between steel frame construction and older masonry methods.

The Monadnock Building was the last major office building designed with masonry load bearing walls, in 1891.

The first floor walls are over two feet thick, and oppressive in their massiveness.

The walls visibly shrink in thickness as one moves up the building.

The outer walls have neoclassical elements like columns and capitols but are otherwise plain compared to the Rookery.





Next up is the Marquette Building from 1895 by Holabird and Roche, which may be the most beautiful old building in the city.

It is named for Jacques Marquette, the French explorer who first settled the area that became Chicago.

The front doors of the building are cast iron.

They contain sculptures telling his story and what happened after he arrived (sadly, it did not go well).

Inside contains an equally stunning lobby.

The elevator doors are made of brass, as are the light fixtures.

The second floor walls contain a mosaic that surrounds the lobby, which tells the history of Chicago’s settlement.

It reminded me of a smaller version of the mosaic on the walls of Union Station in Cincinnati (see The Glory of an Industrial Age).

The lobby also has an item that historians know meant no cost was spared, a mailbox; most buildings at the time did not have mail delivery.

Geeky types will appreciate this building for another reason: it is owned by the MacArthur Foundation, who hands out the famous genius grants.





The next important building is the Chicago Board of Trade.

The organization formed in 1848 to standardize sizes for crops and grains, and manage the resulting market.

Eventually, it developed the concept of commodity futures, which made Chicago the center of this part of the financial industry.

The Board has now merged with three other exchanges, and the building is busier than ever.





The building is one of the most important examples of art deco in Chicago.

It was designed by a different Burnham and Root in 1930, the sons of the architects who did the buildings mentioned earlier.

The building façade is covered in symbolism.

Wheat and corn plants are incorporated in the frieze, and a statue of Ceres (Roman god of the harvest) sits on the roof.

The front of the building has an enormous clock.

Businessmen mostly did not wear watches in the 1930s, so big clocks were highly useful.

Finally, and tellingly, the entrance of the building is very hard to find.

The general public is not really welcome inside the exchange, then or now.





The next building was originally called the Continental Illinois Bank Building, but is now named for Bank of America.

It was built in 1924, making it one of the last skyscrapers built in Chicago before the Depression killed the building boom.

The building is a subtle version of the art deco design with small windows between vertical columns.

It bears a striking resemblance to the Prudential Tower built thirty years later.

Inside, it has a large lobby of white marble.

Light reflects everywhere.

This lobby also has a brass mailbox.





The next building on the tour worth mentioning is not old at all, the Harold Washington Library from 1991.

It is on the tour because it is a postmodern building that references dozens of Chicago’s older structures.

The library is the largest in the world.

It was deliberately designed to look like a warehouse to symbolize Chicago’s historic role as a transportation center.

The upper portion is vertical black columns to reference Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Center.

The bottom portion is slanted red bricks to reference the Rookery.

The façade is covered in carved motifs that reference any number of buildings.

The roof corners have flowing metal sculptures to reference Beaux Arts building decoration.

These sculptures are owls reading books.

Personally, I found the building to be a mishmash that states “look how clever we are”, and it looks nothing like a library.

It should be no surprise that the design caused considerable controversy when it was first unveiled.





The last building on the tour is one of the most important, the Auditorium Building designed by Louis Sullivan in 1889.

He was an MIT trained architect who is best known as the first employer of Frank Lloyd Wright.

He believed in replacing the heavy neoclassicism of Beaux Arts design with geometric patterns, which presaged art deco and heavily influenced Wright.

The Auditorium Building shows this clearly in the lobby, with patterned wallpaper everywhere which is reflected in the marble floor.

Everything is precisely designed to create balance.

Marshall Field

After the tour ended, I went to see one last Chicago architecture masterpiece, which is also a historic landmark.

After his store burned to the ground in the fire, Marshall Field vowed that he would build the finest department store in the world in its place.

He built the store in four phases over twenty years starting in 1879, and hired Burnham and Root to design all four parts.

The end result is that the building has a consistency that many other department stores of the era lacked.

It now takes up a full city block, and is the third largest department store in the world (Macy’s Herald Square and GUM Moscow are larger).

Two of the corners have large clocks, which have turned green with age.

One of them was featured in a famous Normal Rockwell painting where a workman is setting the time from his pocket watch.

I need to point out that the store is officially a Macy’s at this point, but I’m going to call it Marshall Field’s the way many Chicago residents still do.





Inside, the building is a wonderland, the way people imagine old department stores should look.

The building is arranged around three grand courts, one of which has a mosaic dome by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

On upper floors, those courts produce vertigo.

The floors have high ceilings.

Most of the columns have neoclassical capitols on top.

The building has been renovated several times, so the rest of the architecture is fairly modern, but it was done with taste.

As for the store itself, it is one of the few left that tries to carry everything possible.

One can get a haircut, buy toys for the kids and a new suit for themselves, get a bottle of wine for a party that night, a book for the train home, and then have dinner in the Oak Room (one of the city’s best looking restaurants) without leaving the building.

Cloud Gate

My final item for the day was the city’s most talked about work of public art.

The Cloud Gate is a large sculpture of reflective steel created by Anish Kapoor.

It was his first major commission in the United States.

It is shaped like a fat rounded arch, so most residents call it The Bean.

As the artist intended, the sculpture reflects the environment around it, making the entire city part of the sculpture.

The reflection is distorted due to the shape, with things further away appearing much smaller than they are in real life.

The piece works remarkably well.

People can’t resist walking around it, and taking pictures everywhere.

Underneath the arch lies a special treat.

The bottom is a parabolic mirror, turning everything inside into a funhouse.

Many people lay on the ground to take yet more pictures.

I’ve never seen so many people interact with a piece of public art before in my life.





I had dinner tonight at Tavern On Rush .

Chicago is famed for its steakhouses, and this is one of the better ones.

The dining room has an equestrian theme, with a huge race board on the wall.

The meal was very good, but also pretty pricy.

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Photos

Cloud Gate and Chicago skyline
The Cloud Gate by Anish Kapor, against the Chicago skyline

Chicago River from Michigan Avenue
Looking up river at one of the grandest urban views in the world.

Chicago Trump Tower
The Chicago Trump Tower. The building is too tall to fit in a single picture

Carbide and Carbon Building
Shot of the lower portion of the building to show the gold leaf art deco detail.

Chicago downtown model
The Chigago Architecture Foundation's incredible model of downtown Chicago. The view is north northeast.

Federal Prison
Compare the triangular building in the background with the office tower in front of it. The triangular building is a prison!

Sears Tower, Chicago
The Willis Tower, still widely known by its original owner, Sears.

Rookery, Chicago
The incredible carved facade of the Rookery in Chicago. Note the small birds on the lower left and right.

Monadnock Building
The Monadnock Building, the last tall building built without using a steel skeleton. Note the incredibly thick walls on the bottom floors.

Marquette Building Lobby
A portion of the incredible lobby of the Marquette Building

Auditorirum Building Lobby
The outer lobby of the Auditorirum Building, designed by Louis Sullivan.

Marshall Field's
The original store of Marshall Fields (officially Macy's on State Street), the third largest department store in the world.

Water Tower Place
The world's first urban mall, with the John Hancock Tower behind it.

Loew's Hotel
The facade of the old McGraw Hill Building, attached to its modern replacement