Modernist Architecture E-Book

Keith Hasted

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 263

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Modernist architecture in Britain brought honesty to the structure of buildings and clean lines free of historical ornament to the style, establishing new ideas on how people could live and work. Where did this architecture come from? And who were the British and emigre architects creating Modernism in the UK? This book tells the story of Modernist architecture, from nineteenth-century Chicago to post-war Britain, concluding with a look at the continuing evolution of architectural style, from Post-Modern to the work of Zaha Hadid. Supported by over 150 photographs of buildings and design features from around the world, coverage includes: new methods from Chicago in the 1890s, opening up building options for Modernist architects in the new century; Frank Lloyd Wright and development of the Prairie Style; how Modernist architecture evolved in Britain; the progress of European Modernist architecture; the significance and far-reaching influence of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and finally, post-war development in Britain.

Leseprobe

Modernist Architecture

INTERNATIONAL CONCEPTS COME TO BRITAIN

Modernist Architecture

INTERNATIONAL CONCEPTS COME TO BRITAIN

KEITH HASTED

First published in 2019 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

This e-book first published in 2019

www.crowood.com

© Keith Hasted 2019

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 620 3

Frontispiece: Isokon Flats, Hampstead, London –Wells Coates, 1932–4

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

New Building Methods – the Chicago School

Chapter Two

Frank Lloyd Wright – the Prairie Style and More

Chapter Three

The Route towards Modernist Architecture in Britain – 1890 to 1914

Chapter Four

Europe between the Wars – Modernist Architecture in Holland

Chapter Five

Europe between the Wars – Modernist Architecture in Britain

Chapter Six

‘Less is More’ – Miles van der Rohe in the USA

Chapter Seven

Post-War Britain – Modernist Architecture Resumed

Conclusion

Further Reading

Index

Introduction

BRITAIN’S EXTRAORDINARILY RICH inheritance of historic architecture did not preclude joining other countries in exploring the possibilities of the modernist style.

The obvious questions that arise are firstly, what did this style look like in Britain? The focus here is on developments both between the wars and after the Second World War. Secondly, where did these ideas come from? Understanding this entails looking at influences from European countries and from the United States. Thirdly, what was the architectural background in Britain before the modernist style got under way? There, it is helpful to take a view of British building before the First World War. Lastly, where has architecture taken us after modernism? Here it is worth asking whether it is all new styles – postmodern, High-Tech or the new freedom of complex curves – or does modernism continue to have something to offer?

There are perhaps two key elements to the advent of modernist architecture. Style is one – with the general elimination of the ornament beloved in historic building. Building methods are another. If honesty to structure is a key feature of modernism, what new developments in building technology have dictated this structure? Here we may need to start by looking at the period from the 1890s, as centres like Chicago began to pioneer the new methods which modernism exploited.

Chapter One

New Building Methods – The Chicago School

MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE PLACES emphasis on honesty to the structure of buildings. Thus the development of building methods and materials is vital to the expressive aspect of modernism. Nowhere was more significant for the advancement of building methods than Chicago in the 1890s.

Much of the nineteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, had concerned itself with building in revival styles. Neo-Gothic, neo-Romanesque, neo-classical, Greek Revival – all were attempted, some even by the same architects. Building methods remained largely traditional, based on load-bearing walls of stone or brick.

Engineers were developing the use of cast and wrought iron for bridge building from the early part of the century, from Telford’s Menai Bridge linking Anglesey with the coast of Wales (1819–26) to John and Washington Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge (1869–83). Their approach was entirely functional. Toward the end of the century however, new building methods made greater use of iron and steel.

In starting to use these new materials, there was every possibility that engineering and architecture would be allowed to drift apart as new iron frame structures continued to wear revival-style clothing.

Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc wrote Entretiens sur l’architecture in 1872 to give his general theory of architecture, translated into English as Discourses on Architecture in 1875, published in the USA in 1881. In this work he had proposed a new architecture based on the structural possibilities of iron. He provided information on the construction of iron skeletons, and the way in which they permitted non load-bearing walls. This was a publication that was closely studied by architects of the Chicago School.

Fig. 1.01 Reliance Building, North State Street, Chicago – D.H. Burnham – 1895.

Architecture in Chicago

In 1830, Chicago was just a tiny settlement. By 1870 it had become a key focal point for the whole of the USA. This explosive rate of growth was propelled by agricultural production of grain and meat from the prairies, new waterways opening up a connection to the Great Lakes, and rapid expansion of the rail network. In October 1871 a disastrous fire destroyed a large part of the city of Chicago, rendering 100,000 people homeless. After the fire, remarkable opportunities were presented to architects by the combination of growing prosperity and the vital need to rebuild. These made Chicago probably the most exciting centre for building development worldwide, with the group of architects who came to be known as the Chicago School taking up these opportunities with alacrity. In this atmosphere there was plenty of scope to try out new building methods, particularly if these could speed up construction, and to consider discarding European conventions that had favoured heavy ornamentation of public buildings. Needless to say fireproof construction was also a preoccupation, and new methods using materials such as tile to protect exposed iron elements were rapidly developed. It had been recognized that, exposed to high temperatures in fire, iron components lost their structural strength with disastrous consequences.

Some of the outstanding figures of the late 1880s and 1890s working in the city were William Le Baron Jenney, Daniel Burnham, the exceptionally talented John Wellborn Root, Louis Sullivan and a young draftsman called Frank Lloyd Wright.

Fig. 1.02 Fine Arts Building, formerly the Studebaker Building, South Michigan Avenue, Chicago – Solon Spencer Beman – 1884–5. A rich mix of rustication continued into the upper stories, detached columns and capitals and round arches of the neo-classical style.

Fig. 1.03 Fine Arts Building – striking neo-Romanesque entry portal with rusticated stone blocks and fine detailed relief carving.

Fig. 1.04 Fine Arts Building – neo-classical round arches with columns and capitals of an individualistic interpretation of the Corinthian order.

The Fine Arts Building (formerly the Studebaker Building)

The Studebaker Building gives a good sense of the form of Chicago’s commercial buildings before new structural developments such as the iron frame came into use.

The architect Solon Spencer Beman designed this eight-storey building for a prestigious site on South Michigan Avenue, facing Grant Park and the lake. Built in 1884–85, it was commissioned by the Studebaker company for carriage sales, with the upper levels devoted to manufacturing. A structure with load-bearing masonry walls, it fitted the nineteenth-century taste for revival styles. Its round arches, columns and capitals all emphasize a neo-classical form, and features such as its main entrance portal verge on the neo-Romanesque.

This is not as unlikely as it may sound – the Chicago-based Henry Hobson Richardson designed domestic houses explicitly in the neo-Romanesque style. Beman would later design Chicago’s Grand Central Station of 1891, demolished in 1971. He contributed designs for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, at which architecture was much influenced by the École des Beaux Arts in Paris where many US architects travelled to study. Beaux Arts style was firmly neo-classical and after the 1893 Expo, Beman’s own work moved in the direction of Renaissance and neo-classical styles.

Remodelling in 1898 took this to the ten-storey form in which it survives today. The Studebaker Building became in due course the Fine Arts Building, which now houses art studios, galleries, recording studios and a theatre.

Henry Hobson Richardson

Born in Louisiana, great grandson of the scientist Joseph Priestley who was linked with the discovery of oxygen, H.H. Richardson studied at Harvard College and then at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Returning to work in the USA, initially in Boston, he developed a style that came to be described as Richardsonian Romanesque, drawing on architecture of the Romanesque period in southern France. His work was to be seen in Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh and many other cities. His Richardsonian Romanesque buildings had straightforward plans, heavy massing of almost medieval form, round arches over portals, and round arches over the window groups of his large commercial buildings.

Among his important works, his Trinity Church in Boston of 1872, and the New York State Capitol in Albany of c.1880 were to be followed in Chicago by the Marshall Field Wholesale Store of 1885–7 (demolished in 1930). The store was completed to his designs by his assistants after his death at the age of forty-seven in 1886. An indicator of traditional buildings methods at this point – this seven-storey warehouse was constructed with stone load-bearing walls. Its general form was later to influence Louis Sullivan in the design of Chicago’s Auditorium Building. In addition to commercial buildings, Richardson designed many private houses. His house for John J. Glessner of 1885–7 incorporated work by Frank Lloyd Wright, then working as a draftsman in his office, and Richardson’s private house designs were to influence Wright in his later development of the Prairie Style.

With these examples of traditional construction methods, producing buildings adorned in general with classical ornament inspired by French Beaux Arts classicism, it is valuable in the context of the development of modernism to look at how new construction methods based on metal frames were introduced, and what approach to ornament was applied to these new buildings.

William le Baron Jenney

A leading architect in the introduction of new materials and construction methods was William Le Baron Jenney (1832–1907). He grew up in Massachusetts and went on to study engineering in Paris at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. Graduating in 1856, one year after Gustave Eiffel, he returned to the USA and tackled bridge building as a Union army officer in the Civil War. He emerged with a grasp of the possibilities of construction in metal. In 1867 he settled in Chicago and set up his own practice. Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird and Martin Roche were all to serve as apprentices in his office. His development of the cast iron frame, which could be faced with a non-weight-bearing curtain wall of masonry, would radically shorten construction timescales. One way of viewing this metal frame is to see it as a logical development of the ‘balloon frame’ in timber adopted for much of Chicago’s house building before the fire. The ‘balloon frame’, also known as ‘Chicago construction’ was introduced in the early nineteenth century where softwoods were in plentiful supply. Standard ‘2 × 4’ timber was nailed together to rapidly produce a surprisingly light framework. The ‘balloon’ name was applied by those who felt it could all blow away, while in practice the method was stable and viable for quite large structures – its Achilles heel of course being its vulnerability to fire.

The use of an iron frame also permitted the development of much larger windows, since these did not have to compromise the structural strength of a load-bearing wall. This was to be exploited in the widespread use of the ‘Chicago window’ comprising a large, fixed centre pane, with smaller sash windows to either side to provide scope for ventilation. Hitherto, typical city building had adhered to traditional masonry or brick construction, in which the walls bore the primary structural task of supporting the overall building. Such buildings in Chicago were typically of only five or six storeys in height.

The Home Insurance Building

William Le Baron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building of 1884–5, at the intersection of LaSalle and Adams Streets (sadly demolished in 1931), was commissioned by the insurance company as their Chicago office. Jenney’s design brought together iron structure with increased height and incorporated elevators (first seen in a New York department store in 1857). Originally of nine storeys, it was to see two further floors added in 1890. While not the first with an iron frame, this was perhaps the first office building where the iron frame enabled ‘curtain walls’ with no load-bearing function.

Despite the opportunities of this new structural system, which was ultimately to enable curtain walls to replace facing masonry entirely with glass, Jenney felt the need to add distracting decorative detail. For the Home Insurance Building he included rustication at the base, classical columns standing forward of the entrance portico, round-arched windows at the upper level, and balconies on corbels.

The materials for this external treatment were granite at the base, and brick with sandstone detailing above. His column and beam system used cast iron for the verticals, and wrought iron for the horizontal beams. Above the sixth floor he introduced Bessemer steel for the horizontal beams – previously used only in bridge construction. The river bridge at St Louis constructed in 1868–74 to a design by James B. Eads had been particularly influential amongst Chicago’s architects. The great merits of Jenney’s metal frame system were a weight approximately one-third of that of load-bearing masonry for a building of this height (eleven storeys), scope for larger windows bringing more light and much greater speed of construction. Jenney placed the footings of the Home Insurance Building on a reinforced concrete raft over clay. His Leiter Building of 1889–91 was to use the same system of construction. Jenney went on to design the Horticulture Building for the 1893 World Columbia Exposition in Chicago.

The Burnham and Root Practice

One of the outstanding architectural practices of this period in Chicago was that of Burnham and Root. Born in Georgia and growing up in Atlanta, John Wellborn Root (1850–91) had at the onset of the Civil War been sent to Liverpool where he attended school before going on to study at Oxford. Returning to take a degree in engineering from the University of New York in 1869, he went on to become an apprentice at James Renwick’s New York practice. Moving to work for John Butler Snook he gained valuable early experience on the construction of the iron train shed for the Grand Central Depot in New York. In 1871 he moved to Chicago to join P.B. Wight’s practice. Wight was a contemporary of William le Baron Jenney, and it was in his office that Root worked alongside another draftsman, Daniel Burnham (1846–1912).

In 1873 they linked up to form their own highly successful practice. Burnham’s management of their business affairs, alongside Root’s brilliance at design and engineering were a formidable combination, only to be interrupted by Root’s death in 1891 at the age of only forty-one. Root particularly favoured building design that made evident the structure within – a key principle of the modernism to come. Much influenced by the architecture of H.H. Richardson, he went on to develop the floating concrete raft, reinforced with interlaced steel beams, which was to be crucial for high-rise building on the soft ground conditions of Chicago. He had studied Viollet-le-Duc’s Discourses on Architecture with its description of the use of iron frames, eliminating the need for load-bearing walls, and was to be greatly influenced by its possibilities. As Chicago moved to create high-rise buildings, traditional masonry load-bearing walls would have had to become ever thicker at the base, ultimately becoming untenable, and he saw that Viollet-le-Duc’s ideas offered a way forward.

Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) was born in New York State, moving to Chicago at the age of eight. Like Root he worked in the offices of William Le Baron Jenney and P.B. Wight before forming the Burnham and Root partnership. After Root’s death in 1891 he continued as D.H. Burnham and Company, becoming the world’s largest architectural practice by the time of his death in 1912. Burnham served as Director of Works for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (celebrating the 400th anniversary of the voyage of Columbus). In this he took the chosen architectural style of its buildings firmly in the direction of the neo-classical forms favoured by the École des Beaux Arts – he was to be roundly criticized by Louis Sullivan for this dependence on classicism. He later prepared city masterplans for Chicago (1906–9), Manila (1905) and downtown Washington DC (1901). The Chicago plan, for which the theme was ‘Paris on the Prairie’, was intended to shape the rapid growth of the city with wide boulevards. In Washington his work on the McMillan Plan involved extension of the National Mall and creation of the Union rail station. He became chairman of the US Commission of Fine Arts and served as president of the American Institute of Architects.

Fig. 1.05 The Rookery, South Lasalle Street, Chicago – Burnham and Root – completed in 1888. Set around a central court acting as a light well, the ground level part is a glazed atrium area with delicate metalwork used on stairways and lighting. One of the first retail arcades in the USA, this internal court continues to serve its original purpose.

An early Burnham and Root building in central Chicago, the Montauk Block of 1882–83, used brick load-bearing walls, but its ten storeys rose to over 100 feet and used iron beams for internal reinforcement. Its height was remarkable given the site’s marshy ground. Root solved this problem by developing the concrete raft foundation, another key innovation in this period of building. Surprisingly for a building of this period, the Montauk displayed a minimum of decoration.

The Rookery

Designed by Burnham and Root and completed in Chicago in 1888, the Rookery was at a structural halfway point, combining traditional masonry load-bearing walls with internal supports for the floor structures in cast iron. The Rookery Building was designed and built for Peter and Shepherd Brooks of Boston. The affectionate Rookery nickname had been given by the people of Chicago to the pre-existing buildings on the site, including the old temporary city hall, which had been a focal point for roosting birds. It was to be formally retained for the new building, and laughing crows feature in carved relief on the street entrance arch.

His entrance portal, formed of rusticated granite blocks, reflects the neo-Romanesque style favoured by H.H. Richardson, and was combined with neo-classical columns and capitals of the form used on Beman’s Studebaker Building. As with building work in the Renaissance period, these huge rough-faced blocks required very accurate cutting, and the workmanship on the Rookery was of an exceptionally high standard.

The building is set around a central light well with a glazed courtyard at the base – one of America’s early retail arcades. This covered interior space is a glorious creation by Root. A dramatic stairway, picked out in delicate decorative ironwork, leads into a semi-circular stair tower rising up inside the light well. Root had in his collection a number of drawings by Piranesi, and he may well have drawn on these in this courtyard design. Frank Lloyd Wright was responsible for the subsequent elaboration, in gold and ivory, of the decorative scheme of the courtyard in 1907.

Fig. 1.06 The Rookery. Root’s inventive decorative work at the seventh-storey level, directly above one of the main entrances to the building, shows a delicacy in contrast to the massive form of its stone construction. This rich relief decoration is suggestive of Byzantine and Islamic influences.

Fig. 1.07 The Rookery. An immense semi-circular entrance arch within a rusticated frame combines with smooth marble columns to produce an extraordinarily powerful decorative effect. The rough-faced blocks that form the entrance arch are exceptionally accurately cut. The Rookery is symbolized by birds carved in the stone at the springing point of the arch on either side of the entry.

The Monadnock Building

While Burnham and Root’s Rookery had included lavish decoration, some of it exquisite, their Monadnock Building on West Jackson Boulevard, coming three years later in 1891, took a very different direction. The developers, Peter Brooks and Owen Aldis, with a taste for simplicity, had essentially specified a brick box. Ornament is almost entirely avoided. On this sixteen-storey block, flat walls have no projections or indentations. Only its projecting continuous bays break up these flat walls, with the fundamentally practical aim of maximizing light in the office spaces. The walls are presented in brick without stone cladding. Only two bays deep, the layout provided outside windows for all the offices.

In fact there is some external ornamentation in the form of relief carvings of papyrus in panels high on the building and hard to see from street level. Internally the stairways feature delicate metalwork foliage forms, blending practicality with decoration. This might suggest that the largely unadorned facades, looking somewhat like a precursor of the modernist style, were driven by the client’s wish for economy and rapid construction, rather than stylistic aim by the architects. They seem not to have been able to resist putting in this decorative papyrus element, almost as if the clients might not spot it.

Fig. 1.08 Monadnock Building, West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago – Burnham and Root – first phase completed in 1891. Phase one, designed by Burnham and Root, is in the foreground. Its essential freedom from the decorative detail typical for this date reflected the wishes of the developers Peter Brooks and Owen Aldis.

Fig. 1.09 Monadnock Building. Bay formation on the otherwise exceptionally plain surface of Burnham and Root’s phase one improved the lighting of the offices and enhanced rentable space.

The bays were included for functional reasons – to maximize light in the office spaces and increase rentable floor area. Brooks and Aldis had reservations about using steel frame construction, so the Monadnock has load-bearing brick walls. As a result the windows are a relatively small proportion of the wall surfaces. Cast iron columns and wrought iron beams are used to support the inner floors and the roof structure.

At their lowest point the bays have the corbelled form of an oriel window. At the street level the walls slope backwards, an inward inclination that on a medieval castle wall would be referred to as a ‘batter’. This pyramid-like form has been associated with Root’s interest in Egyptian architecture (which we know of from references in the correspondence between his clients Aldis and Brooks). Its purpose may however have been much more practical. Root was concerned to spread the building’s load on relatively soft subsoil. As with the Montauk Block an extensive concrete raft forms the footings for the structure. At the roof line, in place of the more usual elaborate cornice, Root instead used just a slight flare of the wall profile, again indicating his response to his client’s wish for plain form.

Fig. 1.10 Monadnock Building. Root’s wall sloping backwards from street level – while there is evidence to show that he was interested in Egyptian forms, he may also have been preoccupied with spreading the building’s load at the base.

Fig. 1.11 Monadnock Building. The contrast of phase one in the foreground, with its uniformly square-headed windows and no formal roof cornice, with the more traditional round-headed windows and prominent cornice added for phase two. Burnham and Root’s phase one of 1891 is on the right. Holabird and Roche’s addition of phase two in 1893 is on the left and has both an imposing cornice and the introduction of traditional round arches in the top storey – an apparent retreat from the futuristic form of Burnham and Root’s building.

It is notable that when William Holabird and Martin Roche constructed a later extension to the south in 1893, it used steel-frame construction. Their addition adopted Root’s exceptionally plain design from the earlier 1891 block, but introduced a cornice in place of Root’s roof-level flare of the wall. The instinctive feeling for ornament is also expressed in Holabird and Roche’s injection of round-arched windows, divided by columns and capitals, in the top storey of their addition.

Fig. 1.12 Reliance Building, State and Washington Streets, Chicago – Daniel H. Burnham and Company – 1895. This is one of the most advanced buildings by the Chicago School. With a complete metal frame, the curtain walls did not need to carry loads and large windows could be used.

It is particularly intriguing that Burnham and Root, responding to their patron’s wish, produced a design almost completely free of ornament, whose form expresses its function in exactly the manner promoted by the architect and writer Louis Sullivan. Yet this is much more evident in Burnham and Root’s Monadnock than it is in Sullivan’s own buildings of this period.

The Reliance Building

Despite the early death of John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham made a striking success of his continuation of the practice. Burnham relied on the design skills of his team, in particular those of Charles Atwood, who had joined the practice after Root’s death. The Reliance Building on North State Street was a project that D.H. Burnham and Company took forward from 1894 for the developer William Ellery Hale. Charles Atwood completed the design work in 1894 with the support of the structural engineer Edward Shankland. Its fourteen-storey structure was based on a full steel frame. Demonstrating the enormous advantages of such a construction method for a city in a hurry, the top ten storeys of the steel frame were completed in just fifteen days!

Fig. 1.13 Reliance Building. The restored entry facade on Washington Street indicates how relatively free of historical forms, including the traditional semicircular entrance arch, this building was.

Fig. 1.14 Reliance Building. With a ground plan too small to accommodate a light court, Atwood was able to provide exceptionally large windows within the curtain wall. Enhanced by the bay format, this maximized light within offices all lit from the street. The ‘Chicago window’ form was retained, and decorative panels were subtly applied in bands between the window lines.

Above the first entrance level, the bay form used on the Monadnock Building is applied, but here the windows are dramatically larger than the Monadnock. This was achieved by taking full advantage of the non-load-bearing walls, in a building in which the steel frame was now supporting the structure. As a result, glass occupied a much larger proportion of the wall area than seen on the Monadnock Building. The ‘Chicago window’ combination of large fixed pane with sashes to either side maximized light and provided ventilation.

Here, this early example of the modern curtain wall takes full advantage of steel-frame construction. To make this point evident there are no columns on the facade to imply a load-bearing function of the wall itself. Neo-classical orders and other ornament in the Beaux Arts tradition are entirely absent. Yet decoration is by no means entirely eliminated. Bands of glazed terracotta separate the window levels carrying a relief pattern of quatrefoils and foliage, with perhaps more reference to the Gothic than the classical style.

With its large proportion of glazing versus solid wall (the largest in Chicago so far) and absence of the formal orders, the Reliance can look distinctly modernist in style. It could even be seen as a forerunner of Mies van der Rohe’s International Style – visibly developing the possibilities of the curtain wall to act as a thin form minimizing wall surface between windows. Yet it is expensively ornamented – internally decorative detailing covered everything from elevator portals to door knobs. Externally the terracotta relief work is exquisite and shows Charles Atwood’s mastery of Gothic as well as classical forms. The use of delicate terracotta in these bands between window levels makes explicit the absence of a load-bearing role. A magnificent restoration project was completed in 1999, reflecting the importance of this building in the development of Chicago’s architecture.

Louis Sullivan

Born in 1856 and living through until 1924, Louis Sullivan was one of the central figures of the Chicago School, and arguably one of the key figures in the journey to modernism. He is credited with the dictum ‘form ever follows function’, though he had ascribed this to the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollo, whose ten books of architecture are the only complete text on building to have survived from the time of Augustus in the first century BC.

Fig. 1.15 Charnley House, North Astor Street, Chicago – Louis Sullivan – 1891–2. It seems likely that Louis Sullivan was largely responsible for the exterior and Frank Lloyd Wright for its interior design, where he made magnificent use of timber – appropriate for their client James Charnley, whose fortune was made in the lumber trade.

Fig. 1.16 Charnley House. This classical loggia hints at the possibility that Sullivan was influenced in his design by the plan of a small classical palace that was published in the USA at this time.

Born in Boston, he studied briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before going on to work in Philadelphia. Moving in 1873 to work for William Le Baron Jenney in Chicago, he then spent one year at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and stayed on for a further year working in the city. Returning to Chicago, he joined Dankmar Adler’s practice in 1879, becoming a partner in Adler and Sullivan in 1881. Their first major commission together was Chicago’s Auditorium Building, and further work on theatres was to follow. After 1889 they turned to office buildings, with the Wainwright Building in St Louis, the Chicago Stock Exchange and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, all built in the early 1890s. In particular the Wainwright Building of ten storeys had a riveted steel frame, fireproof tile covering of the structural elements and moveable interior partitions exploiting the possibilities of the steel frame.

With a fall in new work, the partnership was dissolved in 1894. Sullivan went on to design the remarkable Carson Pirie and Scott Store of 1899–1904. An example of his domestic house design can be seen in the Charnley House in Chicago of 1891–2, now preserved as the office of the Society of Architectural Historians. Frank Lloyd Wright worked on this project as a draftsman in Sullivan’s office, and viewed Sullivan very much as his mentor.

Sullivan designed the Transportation Building for the 1893 Expo, pushing against the Beaux Arts classicism applied under Daniel Burnham’s directorship of the event. While this building, as with others produced for the Expo, does not survive, Sullivan’s dominant semi-circular entrance arch has now been re-erected at the Art Institute of Chicago.

With an architectural career which peaked in the 1890s, his building designs were however surprisingly ornate, with highly elaborate interiors. He justified this in the following terms: ‘I believe just as firmly that a decorated structure, harmoniously conceived, well considered, cannot be stripped of its system of ornament without destroying its individuality.’

It could be argued that just such a view was to emerge again in the 1970s and 80s as architects and patrons began to react against the ‘less is more’ approach to design adopted by Mies van der Rohe and which had guided the International Style.

The Auditorium Building

Chicago’s Auditorium Building was a major construction project carried out by Adler and Sullivan for the developer Ferdinand W. Peck. This ten-storey building contained a theatre with over 4,000 seats plus offices at its west end and a hotel at the east. At the centre of its south elevation a tower rises to seventeen storeys, accommodating both hydraulic machinery for the theatre stage and prestige office space. Adler and Sullivan’s own practice occupied part of this space for many years.