MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
A BRIEF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY OF CHICAGO
"A cross-section of Chicago's architectural history" is the way in which architect Josef Paul Kleihues describes the setting for the Museum of Contemporary Art's new building. Offering views of both Lake Michigan and the stretch of Michigan Avenue known as the Magnificent Mile, the MCA site is located between two public parks, within an urban canyon created by the towering walls of the surrounding buildings.
Among the residential buildings north of this canyon, the most notable are Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's steel-and-glass towers at 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive (1949-51), which architectural historian G. E. Kidder Smith calls the "first buildings to excite the American scene" by this expatriate master of European modernism. Mies's influence also can be seen nearby in the 100-stary John Hancock Center (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1969), an icon that exemplifies the Chicago tradition of combining bold structural methods with distinctive architectual forms. Along the south side of the canyon are buildings for Northwestern University and Northwestern Memorial Hospital, including facilities designed by Holabird and Root more than fifty years apart, in 1928 and 1979. And to the west is one of Chicago's most cherished landmarks, the Water Tower (1869). Designed By William W. Boyington, one of the city's most prominent early architects, the Water Tower was one of the few structures to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and so stands as testimony to the division between old and new in Chicago architecture.
Chicago's Beginning, Destruction, and Rebirth
The area that is now Chicago was explored in 1673 by Jacques Marquette and Louis Joilliet and settled in 1779 by Great Lakes trader Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable. In 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase, the United States established Fort Dearborn, the nation's westernmost military post, near what is now the south end of the Michigan Avenue Bridge. At that time, the area north of the Chicago River and east of what would become Michigan Avenue still lay under the waters of Lake Michigan. In the early 1830s, a breakwater was constructed, creating sand dunes along the shoreline. Builders developing the nearby Gold Coast added fill by dumping their excavated materials in the area. By the 1880s, there was a considerable accumulation up to Chicago Avenue, and this area had taken on the name Streeterville.
Legend has it that the fire of October 8-9, 1871, was started by a cow which kicked over a lantern behind Patrick and Katherine O'Leary's De Koven Street home. Whatever the truth of that story, it is certain that Chicago at that time was a city of wood-frame buildings, which had been turned into so many tinderboxes by a three-month drought. Once the fire started, it raged for 36 hours, sweeping away a third of the city before burning itself out four miles away on the northern edge of town. More than 300 people perished, 17,450 structures were reduced to ashes, the center city was devastated. On the North Side, only a few scattered houses and the Water Tower survived. At least 90,000 people were left homeless, and the livelihoods of thousands more disappeared with their workplaces.
Within weeks, though, the city was rebuilding, resuming its role as the 19th century's fastest-growing city. Leading architects such as Boyington, Edward Burling, John M. Van Osdel, and Otis L. Wheelock had as many commissions as they could handle. Though their structures conformed to a new code, which banned non-masonary construction within the city limits, these buildings generally looked much like those put up before the fire. But another group of architects was about to change all that, as they began to write architectural history on the blank slate left by the fire.
Chicago Architecture Enters the International Spotlight
Although the tall buildings for which the Chicago School became famous took advantage of technical advances made elsewhere, particularly in New York, it was in Chicago in the last quarter of the 19th century that innovative designers and engineers exploited these new technologies most strikingly, developing the skeleton-frame skyscraper into an artistic and commercial force that would transform cities around the world.
Among the important firms in this Chicago School were Adler and Sullivan (the Auditorium, 1887-89 and Carson Pirie Scot & Co., 1899/1903); Burnham and Root (Reliance Building, 1891/95); Holabird and Roche (Monadnock Building, 1889-1891); and William Le Baron Jenney (Second Leiter Building, 1891). Classically educated at the Ecole des Beaux-Ats in Paris but working in the decidely non-classical setting of Chicago's Loop--the commercial district south of the river that is bounded by the elevated train, or El--these architects erected a number of buildings from the early 1880s to 1910 that shared significant commom elements. The gridlike organization of the building was nakedly expressed through the intersecting piers and horizontal spandrels of the walls; ornamentation was minimal (and when present, as in Adler and Sullivan's buildings, was likely to take a boldly abstracted form); windows were large and plentiful. This so-called Chicago window was a wide, fixed pane of glass, flanked by narrow movable sash windows. The dictum attributed to Sullivan, "Form follows function" encapsulates the Chicago School's aesthetic and summarizes its importance for the history of modernism.
The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 brought this fiercely pragmatic architecture into the international spotlight. Paradoxically, though, the exposition simultaneously showcased a contrary movement. After Chicago beat New York in a competition to host the Exposition--the aggressive self-promotion of the winning delegation earned for Chicago its nickname as the Windy City--an illustrious group of architects from the East Coast and Chicago, led by Daniel H. Burnham, designed an immense neoclassical White City for the fairgrounds in Jackson Park. At the same time, to help the city look its best for the Exposition, seven cultural institutions opened new buildings, including the Chicago Academy of Sciences, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Newberry Library. The vision of the City Beautiful that was promoted by the Exposition had an incalculable effect, making classicism the standard style for practically evey city's major cultural. commercial, and municipal institutions until the Depression.
But even while a Beaux-Arts inspired classicism was taking hold in Chicago and the rest of the country, one of Louis Sullivan's former apprentices, Frank Lloyd Wright, and several contemporaries were developing the first distinctly American architectural style. The residences they built, beginning in suburban Oak Park, have become known as exemplars of the Prarie School. Among the masterpieces of this style is Wright's Frederick C. Robie House (1908-10) in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood--a building composed of cantilevered, horizontal planes, with a broad, hipped roof and wide, overhanging eaves, ribbon windows, and a free-flowing, open floor plan. Wright's early Prarie School designs, and his later Usonian houses, influenced the development of American housing after World War II.
By the time of the First World War, Chicago's rich mixture of styles and building methods had attracted the attention of design professionals around the world. Kleihues offers his own perspective on the influence of Chicago's architects: "Many Americans think we Berlin architects have mainly been interested in Frank Lloyd Wright. That was never true. There were indeed those very early, marvelous publications of Wright's work done in Berlin. But I know of no Berlin architect from the 1920's who was really influenced by Wright. The influence of Chicago architecture in Berlin has been that of William Le Baron Jenney, Adler and Sullivan, Burnham and Root, and later the work of Holabird and Roche and of Purcell, Feick, and Elmslie. Taken together, it is they who are Chicago's architectural soul."
North Michigan Avenue Becomes Chicago's Second Downtown
Calling on his experience with the Columbian Exposition, Burnham began work in 1906 on a master plan for the city. When published three years later, the Plan of Chicago reserved the lakefront for public recreation, creating Grant Park as a formal "front door" for the city, with the Art Institute of Chicago (Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, 1893-1916) as its focal point. The Field Museum of Natural History (Daniel H. Burnham and Company, 1909-1912); John G. Shedd Aquarium (Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, 1929); and the Adler Planetarium (1930) comprised a museum campus anchoring Grant Park's south end.
Burnham's plan also inspired passage in 1923 for Chicago's first comprehensive zoning law, in an attempt to regulate both vertical and horizontal sprawl. The plan urged making the Chicago River another focal point for the city. The opening of Michigan Avenue Bridge in 1920 extended the development north of the river, much as Burnham had envisioned. Michigan Avenue was upgraded into a boulevard, with historicized commercial buildings intended to rival those of European capitals. Among these were the Gothic Revival Fourth Presbyterian Church (1914), the Italian Renaissance-inspired Drake Hotel (1920), the dazzling white Wrigley Building (Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, 1919-24), and the Art Deco Palmolive Building (Holabird and Root, 1929). The most notable, however, was the Tribune Tower, whose design was chosen in an international competition held in 1922. The winner was the Gothic design of New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond M. Hood, although Eliel Saarinen's forward-looking second-place entry exerted a much greater influence on the design of subsequent skyscrapers.
The worldwide depression of the 1930s and the rise of fascism encouraged the emigration of a number of talented architects from Europe, particularly from Germany. The most powerful of these was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who came to Chicago in 1938 after the closing of the Bauhaus. Taking up a new post at the Architecture School of the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), Mies thoroughly revised the curriculum and began the second, Chicago-based phase of his career, which was to influence generations of architects to come. His transformation of the earlier International Style can be seen in the powerful balance of steel, glass, and light of Crown Hall (1956) on the IIT campus.
Most of the buildings constructed in the Loop from the mid-1950's through the 1970s were at least indirectly influenced by the classically ordered style of Mies. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, one of the more prolific firms working during this period, has been credited with a number of technical and design innovations, such as columnless floors of the Inland Steel Building (1954-58) and the bold cross-bracing of the John Hancock Center. The firm's biggest achievement was undoubtedly the Sears Tower (1968-74), which at 1,454 feet is currently the world's tallest building. Mies's firm continues today under the aegis of Helmut Jahn, an internationally renowned architect whose James R. Thompson Center (1979-85) in the Loop is his most notable, and perhaps most notorious, work.
Newer Buildings Reflect Chicago's Architectural Roots
Mies's death in 1969 marked the beginning of the demise of modernism in Chicago and the start of post-modernism, with its emphasis on pluralism, contextualim, and historicism. Restoration of several important buildings, including Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio in Oak Park--as well as the Chicago Theater, the Monadnock Building, and the Rookery downtown--added to the trend toward incorporating historical references, which was a notable feature of the building boom of the 1980s. Among the major additions to the Chicago skyline that hark back to earlier architectural styles are Cesar Pelli's 181 West Madison Street (1990); the Morton Internation Building by Ralph Johnson of Perkins and Will (1990); the AT&T Corporate Center (1988) and NBC Tower (1989) by Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; and Thomas Beeby's Harold Washington Library Center (1991), the winner of a highly publicized design-build competition.
Architects of international repute continue to be drawn to Chicago by the opportunity to add to the city's remarkable treasury of architecture. "As one who has long loved Chicago, I feel the commission for the MCA fulfills one of my greatest dreams," says Kleihues, who is among a select group of architects from abroad who have built in Chicago during the last decade. Others include Spain's Ricardo Bofill (77 West Wacker Drive, 1992) and Japanese architects Kisho Kurokawa (Athletic Club Illinois Center, 1990) and Kenzo Tange (American Medical Association Building, 1990).
"The design of the MCA, for me, is a combination of European classicism, which of course was the origin of what was called rationalism in architecture since the late 1920's, and something that is typical of Chicago," Kleihues says. "I wanted the MCA's new building to manifest the pragmatism that characterizes Chicago's best architecture, its naked concentration on the task at hand, which I consider to be the real Chicago architecture."
A Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago publication
reproduced here with the permission of the museum's direction
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