The hands down all time expert on the development of the tall commercial building was Carl Condit, my one-time colleague at Northwestern University and teacher of many, many of today's top architectural historians. His first important book, The Rise of The Skyscraper, Univ. Chicago Press, 1951, is a famous classic. I'm lucky to have a first edition of this important book.
Condit argued that the decay of architecture in the 19c was due to a separation between a literary and historical minded architectural succession of fashionable styles ...no style at all, and the overwhelming revolution in modern science and technology. Suddenly, there was a need to bridge the big gap between modern life, with its emerging mechanisms, and art. Condit defined architecture, partially, as an applied field that aims to unite the aesthetic and moral with the technological and the practical. Michael's summary is good but it is not true that Sullivan was the first to use the steel frame. Others had already done that, notably William Jenney, in 1882-83, with Chicago's Home Insurance Building. Even in the 1850s there were all cast iron buildings, where not only the facades but the interior supports were cast iron (1856, Van Odsel, Chicago). Sullivan used both cast iron and steel, and it was his early partner, Dankmar Adler, who was the engineering, practical genius in harmony with Sullivan's artistic genius. Anyone with an interest in Chicago history and its architecture (I'm a Chicago history nut) knows how important Chicago was, and is, to early modern architecture. I love to go wandering among the remaining gems of those marvelous structures. The tall office building was born in Chicago and on almost any downtown block one can still trace the history of modern architecture from its beginnings to the present. Newer buildings purposely echo older buildings as if to illustrate the inheritance of architectural genes. Every day the Chicago Architecture Foundation leads hourly tours around the city center to visitors from all over the world. While the height of older all brick-load bearing buildings generally didn't exceed 5 floors, it wasn't just the trouble of climbing the stairs but the need to thicken the base brick walls 4 inches for each floor above the first. Steam elevators came into general use during the 1860s, long after 5 and 6, 7 floors were being built. The last and tallest brick and stone building in the world is Chicago's Monadnock building at 16 floors and a base over 72 inches thick, by Burnham and Root 1889, built a few years after steel frames became the structure of choice. I take a walk through that beautiful Monadnock at least once a month. It's like visiting the great pyramid for me. One of Chicago's most popular pre-fire architects was William Boyington. He designed the famous Chicago Water Tower, a rare surviving structure of the 1871 fire, andone of the very few remaining buildings by him. His granddaughter was my first art mentor who gave me loads of art books and encouragement when I was a kid trying to draw "realistic" things. If these -- and other -- great early architects of the modern style had followed prevailing architectural theory they wouldn't have created the innovative structures they what they did but instead would've continued to build the ugly-soup-of the-soup variations of the 19c, and all of those buildings would be gone today. Read anything by Carl Condit and be enlightened, and well prepared to gain new knowledge of modern architecture, especially the tall building. Or ask me, since I have a great Chicago architecture shelf. WC ________________________________ From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, June 4, 2009 6:24:20 PM Subject: Re: Architecture and utility On Jun 4, 2009, at 6:39 PM, Frances Kelly wrote: > As an example, for a construct to look like a monetary bank, at > least say to most ordinary persons in everyday common life, the > lines of such a building would usually be deemed dark and rough > and thick and made of stone or brick and loom as a big tall > edifice. The problem is that with modern building materials and > construction techniques a bank can be made of what seems to be > very flimsy stuff, yet be safer than the older traditional > edifices. Such newer banks thus no longer really glorify the > primary utility of a financial institute. But then the true and > real needs of its transactional users in being depositors can now > be satisfied remotely and automatically over the internet. It > would seem that for the design of a bank any architectural > criteria of its function being dominant over its form and its > function being correspondent to its utility is thereby obsolete > and obscure and even thwarted. Frances, this whole problem of what modern buildings "should look like" arose well over a century ago. What you posit here--that a 'monetary' bank "at least to most ordinary persons of everyday common life ... would usually be deemed dark and rough and think and made of stone or brick and loom as a big tall edifice"--has been taken up by many writers on architecture. (Who is doing all this deeming, by the way? How about using a verb in the active voice once in a while?) Up until Otis invented a practical safety elevator in 1853. Thereafter, it became increasingly practical to erect buildings taller than four or five stories, which was the practical limit of using leg power to move furniture up and down stairs or hoist heavy items with block and tackle. Long story short, with the advent of steel cage construction techniques and the Otis Elevator, taller buildings began to be feasible. Our friend Louis Sullivan is credited with designing the first two, the Guaranty Building and the Wainwright Building. When he designed them, he confronted the conceptual problem of what they should look like and how to decorate them. Both building, for example had marked vertical pilasters that defined the columns of windows, between which he applied his extraordinary floral decorations. Both buildings had very pronounced cornices and nothing above in the way of spires or finials. As big buildings spread and the era of the skyscraper burst on us, many architects were trying to figure out what big buildings "should look like," and their only models were churches--Gothic, Roman temples, etc. In short order, two major buildings applied the Gothic style to tall structures: in 1913, the 50+ story Woolworth Building opened in New York, and in the 1920s, Chicago Tribune tower opened. Tall buildings with Gothic themes. Banks and many churches in the U.S. adopted Roman or Greek temples fronts, which were more in keeping with the earlier inclinations of Jefferson and others. Neoclassicism was widely adopted in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries: Monticello, UVa, the Virginai Capitol in Richmond, all from Jefferson, are famous examples. Let's not forget that Ruskin extolled the Gothic over the Classical style, and honesty in materials; and Viollet le Duc championed the restoration of Gothic buildings, and even proposed building faux Gothic ruins, which became a bit of a vogue thing. More than that, though, he was one of the first theorists of modern approach to architecture So, the question of what buildings "should look like" has been around for a long time, and the discussions take a turn into semiotics, i.e., what does a certain style or look convey, betoken, imply, etc. These questions are at least 100 years old in practical discussions by architects, but after almost 2/3 of a century of the influence of the International Style and PostModernism in architecture, "what a building should look like" is a wide-open topic. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected]
