Louis H. Sullivan's Chicago.

Published in: Winterthur Portfolio, Spring2013, Literary Reference Source

Through Chicago building and writing, Louis Sullivan explored the aesthetic and urban
possibilities of skyscrapers, particularly their composition on urban skylines. Sullivan
envisioned the skyscraper's eclipse of the fairly uniform street-wall urbanism constituted by
what he called "old single or 'shirt front' buildings." In its place he promoted the skyscraper
urbanism of "full four-front or all around structures." He thus pointed the way toward a
defining feature of modern architecture and modern skylines—their three-dimensional urban
character. Here, Sullivan envisioned an important balancing of the rights to the city between
private builders and the broader civic realm.

Consider the skyline. In larger American cities after World War II the skyline filled up with
Modern Movement skyscrapers that aesthetically reflected the simple geometries of their
steel frame structures. Their structural systems did not vary much from front to back or side
to side. Whether one viewed one of these buildings from north or south, east or west, the
elevations generally looked pretty much the same. This had not always been the case with
skyscrapers in the United States. This essay explores Louis H. Sullivan's formulation of the
aesthetic and urban possibilities of skyscrapers, particularly the way in which they would
compose themselves as figures on urban skylines. When Sullivan first arrived in Chicago in
1873, two years after fire had destroyed the central sections of the city, the downtown was
being rebuilt densely with three- to six-story brick and stone buildings that generally shared
party walls with adjacent structures. Very few buildings controlled an entire block front or
stood alone, visible on three or four sides in the tight confines of the downtown grid. In the
1870s most downtown buildings were designed as facades. Sullivan later called these "old
single or 'shirt front' buildings."[ 1 ] In 1892 Dankmar Adler, Sullivan's design partner, argued
that the pervasiveness of uniform cornice heights created an "uninteresting sameness of sky-
line in the street architecture of cities."[ 2 ] Though Sullivan did not have the opportunity to
design many high buildings, he envisioned ways of moving from shirt-front buildings to what
he called "full four-front or all around structures."[ 3 ] In doing that, he pointed the way
toward one of the defining features of both modern architecture and modern skylines—their
three-dimensional character uniting fairly simple design, structure, and real estate in a
singular tectonic expression. This aspect of Sullivan's work is usefully viewed in its urban
context; Chicago shaped Sullivan even as Sullivan shaped Chicago.
The relevant urban context for assessing Sullivan's skyscraper vision of "all around
structures" is the world of real estate, of street right-of-ways and bounded blocks and alleys,
lot lines, party walls, and other property adjacencies that ground skyscrapers in their place.
Sullivan and his clients exercised little control over this context. His buildings were
constructed on individual pieces of privately owned property, but he became keenly
interested in the nexus of meaning that developed between privately owned parcels and the
people gathered on the public way, in the public realm. For Sullivan, skyscrapers constituted
a politics of display. That politics necessarily negotiated between rights that flowed from the
ownership and development of private property and broader interests that defined the
shared realm of public space, perceptions, and health. To appreciate Sullivan's insight about
skyscrapers and skylines involves attending to both his design imagination and the
limitations imposed by the physical forms, financial constraints, and politics of display that
gave shape to Chicago real estate.

Historians have long recognized Louis Sullivan's architecture for its aesthetic inventiveness,
its complex philosophical and theoretical underpinnings, and its technical acumen. These
aspects of the work are so compelling that they often push interpretations of Sullivan's
architecture right out of the gritty urban world in which he worked—in fact, in which he
reveled and thrived. This essay will focus on the intersection between the gritty context of the
public realm, surrounding individual skyscrapers, and the new architectural, aesthetic, and
technological forms that made up the skyscrapers themselves. This frame for looking at
Sullivan's work contrasts with historical accounts that often treat his buildings in isolation, as
singular architectural creations, detached from their settings within the broader landscape
and culture of the city. Hugh Morrison's 1935 Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture,
one of the earliest historical chronicles of Sullivan's work, approached many of Sullivan's
buildings in isolation. For Morrison, Sullivan's significance as an architect stood in his
pioneering of a modern "Chicago School" of architecture in which the steel structural system
of the tall building inspired a new structurally expressive style that eclipsed the prevailing
canons of architectural tradition. Morrison, followed by other historians such as Sigfried
Giedion and Carl Condit, seized on Sullivan's 1896 declaration that "form ever follows
function. This is the law" to insist upon Sullivan's primacy in the creation of a functionalist,
spare, modern idiom in architecture. This perspective often prompted these historians to
ignore or dismiss the lavish fields of foliated ornament that Sullivan incorporated into many
of his designs. For these historians the less ornamented middle sections of Sullivan's tall
buildings seemed most significant and essentially modern.[ 4 ]
Subsequent historians have challenged the functionalist interpretation of Sullivan's work in
part because it failed to reconcile or explain Sullivan's obvious interest in and devotion to
lavish, often foliated, ornament, particularly in the parts of the building most readily visible to
the public encountering the lower floors along the sidewalk, glimpsing the cornice and
roofline on the skyline, and entering the richly embellished lobbies. Sullivan articulated a
nuanced theoretical and philosophical approach to ornament and architecture that drew
upon American Transcendentalism. The complexity of his designs and his voluminous
writings on architectural subjects, at times, prompted these later historians to also focus on
his buildings as formal architectural expression, the isolated creations of a creative genius.
Importantly these historians have expressed skepticism that Sullivan and his colleagues
constituted a unified "Chicago School" with a shared or defined style of architecture.[ 5 ] This
essay, in important respects, aligns with this more recent understanding of Sullivan; however,
in exploring Sullivan's effort to grapple with the broader urban landscape beyond the lots
lines of his individual buildings, this essay extends the work of historians who have focused
on Sullivan's work as expressive of central public currents of urban culture and society well
beyond Sullivan's personal philosophical musings on aesthetics, architecture, and nature.[ 6 ]

Skyscrapers introduced an architectural form into Chicago's downtown that could never have
been anticipated in the 1830s, when Chicago's first residents and developers established the
grid pattern of streets and alleys and blocks and lots. With skyscraper technology, including
steel frame structural systems, elevators, and complex plumbing and electric services,
traditional lines of three- to six-story shirt-front buildings were juxtaposed with buildings two,
three, and four times their height. Interestingly, many skyscraper architects continued
working as if they were designing traditional shirt-front buildings. They composed front
elevations using handsome pressed brick, terra cotta, stone, and ornament while leaving
massive unembellished side and rear elevations built of common brick prominently looming
over the downtown landscape. Architects and developers assumed that these secondary and
relatively unarticulated elevations would soon disappear as taller buildings filled adjacent
lots. Moreover, they were unwilling to pay the higher cost of providing elegant elevations that
might quickly disappear from view. Photographers and other recorders of Chicago's
expanding downtown tended to frame views that cropped blank or unembellished walls out
of the picture. Reviewing Burnham and Root's 1882 Montauk Block, which at ten stories was
among the earliest high buildings in the city, the Chicago Tribune reported that "because of its
uniformity of color, [it] appears as an enormous brick set on end. The color is a dark-red,
without a shade of variation in color in the whole surface. ... Blending in color with the brick
work the architectural finish is made through a judicious use of terra cotta and other
ornamentation."[ 7 ] This description completely ignored the highly visible west elevation (fig.
1). That elevation was constructed of cheap common brick with thick mortar joints and had
rows of plain unarticulated windows. It lacked the uniform color of the main elevation's
bricks, produced by the Hydraulic Pressed Brick Company. Nor did it have the main
elevation's blocks of terra cotta and ornamental details manufactured by the Northwestern
Terra Cotta Works. It had none of the balance and composition of the main elevation. The
Montauk's elevation on Monroe Street was 89 feet wide. The unadorned side elevation,
looming visibly above the lower buildings on the block, stretched back from Monroe Street
180 feet.

Graph: Fig. 1. Burnham and Root, blank party wall and common brick side elevation, Montauk
Block, Chicago, 1882, photo 1880s. (Chicago History Museum, ICHi-39491; photo, J. W. Taylor.)

Rising seven stories higher than the Montauk, the Chicago Title and Trust Company Building
on Washington Street, designed in 1892 by Henry Ives Cobb, presented an even more
dramatic contrast between front and side elevations. Its 80-foot-wide front elevation was
dwarfed by its exceedingly plain 165-foot-deep side elevations (fig. 2). Fronting on
Washington Street on a lot standing in the middle of the block between Clark and Dearborn
streets, both the unadorned common brick east and the west elevations were clearly visible
over the lower adjacent buildings. The west elevation had a modest setback to protect the
exterior windows in the event that the adjacent lot was developed for a skyscraper. D. H.
Burnham and Company's Reliance Building at the southwest corner of State and Washington
streets presented similarly stark contrasts in its front and side elevations (fig. 3). The building,
with its pale enameled terra cotta and broad expanses of glass, has long been celebrated as
a forerunner of the modern glass curtain wall skyscraper. Upon its completion, the Chicago
Tribune recognized it as a "glazed terra cotta tower" meeting the "necessity of providing
ample light" for "tenants of the best class."[ 8 ] Architectural historian Carl W. Condit
chronicled the Reliance Building's "bold transparency," its "grace and airiness," and "the
triumph of the structuralist and functionalist approach of the Chicago school."[ 9 ] But in the
Reliance Building two of the four elevations, easily visible from adjacent streets, were built of
unbroken common brick running from the foundation to the cornice (fig. 4). Indeed, those
elevations are as visible today as they were over 120 years ago when the building opened.
Despite the newspaper critics, photographers, and architectural historians who overlooked
this built reality, these buildings were more than mere aberrations.[10] They filled the
downtown landscape and skyline with their jarring contrasts.
Graph: Fig. 2. Henry Ives Cobb, common brick side elevation, Chicago Title and Trust
Company Building at left, 1892; Holabird and Roche, Chicago City Hall–Cook County
Courthouse at center, 1905–11; C. A. Eckstorm, unornamented rear and side elevations, City
Hall Square Building at right, 1912, photo 1914. (ICHi-65322, Chicago History Museum; photo,
Charles R. Clark.)

Graph: Fig. 3. Burnham and Root, Daniel H. Burnham and Company, Reliance Building, 1890
and 1894–95, with unornamented side elevation of Holabird and Roche, Boston Store, 1905,
in distance, photo ca. 1900. (ICHi-01066, Chicago History Museum.)

Graph: Fig. 4. Unornamented side elevation, Reliance Building, photo 2006. (Daniel
Bluestone.)

Chicago is a surprisingly different city when viewed from the alley or along the seams and
property lines between adjacent buildings, as opposed to the street. The scale and the
materials change dramatically. On streets that are 66 or 80 feet wide, a pedestrian can stand
back from the building, but on public ways that are 15 to 20 feet wide, the buildings close in
the space and the sky. Viewed from the alleys or along the party walls the buildings loom
larger, they look different, rougher, less finished. Alley views of Sullivan's buildings present a
different vantage point for understanding his architectural and urban vision. They certainly
provide additional evidence that challenges the view of Sullivan as narrowly focused on
structural expressionism or deeply committed to some logic that might flow from the
statement "form ever follows function."[11] The structural imperatives of the street and alley
elevations or the front and rear of Sullivan's buildings were nearly identical. But the materials
palette, the fenestration pattern, and the design were often studies in contrasts. Adler and
Sullivan's 1887 Wirt-Dexter was a great early example of this phenomenon. Even though the
building was constructed as a loft for furniture manufacture, it still showed strikingly
different aspects at the front and the rear. The front elevation's red pressed brick and stone,
cast iron columns, and its sense of composition gave way at the rear of the building to much
cheaper common brick and exposed structural supports, perforated at regular intervals so as
to provide additional light to the interior. The rear elevation has little of the sense of
composition found in the front elevation.

Yes, form ever follows function, but part of that function has to do with attracting the eye and
patronage of tenants, clients, and pedestrians with flattering images of refinement and
beauty pursued on a plane very much distinct from building structure.[12] Adler and
Sullivan's 1881 five-story Jewelers' Building on Wabash Avenue has some of the same
character as the Wirt-Dexter (fig. 5). The common brick and simple window detail found on
the side and rear alleys are entirely distinct from the form and artfulness of the front
elevation. Sullivan sought in the Jewelers' design to admit greater light to the interior and to
create a visual coherence derived from the singular composition of the central bay, which
gathered three stories under the modestly curved arch.[13] Viewed in the context of Sullivan's
trajectory toward "all around" structures, the Jewelers' Building has additional importance—it
was something of a "stuffed shirt." Sullivan took advantage of the passageway to the alley,
along the north side of the building, for maximum pragmatic and aesthetic effect. Rather
than extending the front elevation across the full width of the lot, Sullivan angled the
northwest corner away from the street, sacrificing a modest amount of interior space and
introducing a larger window in this angled corner of the facade for better illumination. He
also began to explore ways to give the two-dimensional shirt-front building a more
substantial, sculpted, three-dimensional mass that deepened the viewers' perspective.
Lower-rise commercial buildings like the Jewelers' and Wirt-Dexter show Sullivan working in
the shirt-front tradition of Chicago streetscape architecture before he began to transcend it
with his higher building projects.

Graph: Fig. 5. Adler and Sullivan, Jewelers' Building, with common brick side elevation at
extreme left, 1882, photo 1964. (Historic American Buildings Survey, reproduction no. ILL, 16-
CHIG, 51-1, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; photo, Harold Allen.)

Skyscraper Design: The "Dry-Goods Box" Problem

Sullivan's effort to conceive of an ideal form for skyscrapers played out against a backdrop of
vigorous social and aesthetic criticism of high buildings that began in the 1880s and 1890s. In
1891 architectural commentary published in the Chicago Tribune declared that rich
architectural ornament and picturesque elements with their "appeal to the eye," "sentiment,"
and aesthetics were being crowded off of the landscape by the new "remarkably plain" "'dry-
goods box' giants, which are becoming so common." In this critical view there was a "chasm
between the old four and five story office buildings, which will soon be little more than a
memory," and the twelve- to twenty-story buildings that were seen as "severely plain and
without any of the ornamentation which was a part of the old-style buildings." Architects
complained of "being circumscribed" by clients who refused to consider ornament "angles,
domes, turrets, and recessed windows. They were willing to confer with us in regard to floor
space, light shafts, steel frames or pressed brick. In building residences these same clients
are anxious to secure artistic effects and spare no expense to produce picturesque homes."
[14] In the 1890s Simeon B. Eisendrath, Chicago's former building commissioner, even
expressed some skepticism that beauty in tall buildings was possible; he declared, "From an
architectural point of view, at least from an esthetic point of view, it is next to impossible to
make anything beautiful where the proportion of the height of buildings is so much greater
than the frontage."[15] People demanded that builders "blend some sentiment with cold
business policy." Despite this effort many observers concluded at the turn of the century that
it was simply a "home truth" to declare that Chicago was "not a beautiful city." The evidence
stood on the skyline where, according to one observer in 1900, "private business structures
are simply huge, skyscraping places for buying and selling, with no more pretense to
architectural effect or adornment than a dry goods box set up on end."[16]

The frequent comparison of skyscrapers with dry-goods boxes seemed apt when people took
in the entire high-rise building form—especially the massive unadorned exterior elevations at
the sides and rear of high office buildings, plainly visible on the streets and skyline of the city.
Like the Montauk street elevation, with its hydraulic pressed brick and terra cotta, skyscraper
fronts often used terra cotta and pressed or face brick, a much harder, more evenly colored,
and regularly shaped material made by molding clay under the great pressure of hydraulic
presses. Common brick was more varied in color and form and was much softer and less
regular than pressed brick. Pressed or face brick cost between two and three times more
than common brick. Developers refused to use the more expensive face brick for secondary
elevations, assuming that they would not be visible for long. Yet, the unevenness of
downtown development and the vagaries of the real estate cycle meant that the common
brick portions of Chicago buildings often remained for generations nearly as visible as the
shirt-front elevations made of pressed brick.

In skyscrapers that still drew upon the shirt-front tradition of lower buildings, the
embellished front elevation had more depth, variation, and ornament than could easily be
associated with a dry-goods box. Indeed, Sullivan's coining of the contrast between "shirt
front" and "all around structures" registered his keen awareness of the difference between
front elevations and side and rear ones; many of the latter had so little design character that
the dry-goods boxes punched full of holes seemed an apt characterization. Such contrasts
became an important critical framework for assessing tall buildings in Chicago. In 1923 the
Chicago Tribune review of the eleven-story Lenox Club, a residential hotel, included a section
under the subhead, "Not a 'Shirt Front' Building." It quoted Ralph C. Harris, the building's
architect, as declaring that he had not designed a "'shirt front' building: that is, a structure
with fine material on two sides and cheap brick on the other two. It'll be the same on all
sides, which is the only fair way when a building looms up for miles, as this will."[17] Similarly,
in 1923 when Daniel H. Burnham and Company's sixteen-story Central Insurance Company
building was planned at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Superior Street, the architects
revised their initial plans, abandoning the shirt-front plan and adopting the same materials
on all four sides, rather than the original plan that included common brick on the south
elevation, which would have "disfigur[ed] the landscape for years to come."[18] In
announcing the plans for Walter W. Ahlschlager's eighteen-story Jackson Towers in 1924, the
Chicago Tribune informed readers that the same brick and stone would be employed on all of
the elevations, which was considered "especially imperative from the standpoint of good
taste, attractiveness and fairness to the neighborhood in general."[19] This notion of taste
and fairness underscored how the ideal of "all around structures," which Sullivan had
articulated and explored in his early work on tall buildings, had become a point of
architectural etiquette in Chicago. It was unsurprising that the "shirt front," an article of
formal attire, should become the metaphor for this ideal of proper design and urban
manners. In 1927 in describing Thielbar and Fugard's design for a fourteen-story building on
Astor Street, along the Gold Coast, which incorporated limestone cladding on all four
elevations, the Chicago Tribune quoted "a citizen" criticizing buildings that had "attractive
fronts and ugly sides. ... Buildings of that type resemble a gentleman who is dressed in
evening clothes and wears a top hat, but who has been chary of using soap back of his ears
and on the neck."[20] Sullivan's role in establishing this standard underscores the extent to
which beauty, taste, and aesthetics in his architecture trumped later modernist ideals of
expressing function and utility.

Aesthetic and Legal Issues of the Party Wall

Besides making apparent the distinct material and aesthetic treatment of the four elevations
of single buildings, the uneven development of Chicago downtown blocks also disrupted
generations of established building practices. In the years when downtown office buildings
rose to only three or six stories, party-wall agreements between adjacent owners helped
facilitate the building of the downtown. Transacting legally straightforward party-wall
agreements, the first owner to build would construct a wall directly on the lot line. When an
adjacent building was subsequently constructed, the builder would compensate the adjacent
owners for the value of the party wall and the right to incorporate it into the newer building.
The system generally ran smoothly; however, the structural requirements for a party wall and
its supporting foundations were entirely different for a ten- or fifteen-story building than for
a three- to six-story building. An 1891 Chicago Tribune headline pointed to a new reality:
"Complications Over Party Walls." Numerous downtown building projects were being held up
because adjacent owners could not agree to terms for building, strengthening, or sharing
costs for party walls between "old-style buildings" and the newer skyscrapers. The disparity
between structural demands for lower and higher buildings opened the way for "selfish"
owners or neighbors with a grudge to "prevent important improvements."[21]

In the 1880s a party-wall drama played out at the southwest corner of LaSalle and Monroe
between Levi Z. Leiter and Marshall Field, two men who had been business partners in the
dry-goods business from 1865–81. In 1878 Leiter built a five-story building on Monroe Street,
immediately west of the corner lot facing LaSalle Street. The office building accommodated
the Fire Insurance Patrol and other businesses. In 1884, after purchasing the corner lot on
LaSalle and planning a new ten-story building, Marshall Field entered into a party-wall
agreement with Leiter that he assumed would permit him to strengthen the party wall
between Leiter's existing building and the proposed skyscraper. The agreement also
established Leiter's rights to subsequent use of the wall if and when he built a larger building
on his own land. After the party-wall agreement was concluded and at a time when Leiter
was out of town, Field's construction workers entered Leiter's building and used building
screws and timber to temporarily shore up the party wall. The crew then removed the wall's
foundation and replaced it with a massive new foundation of stone, railroad iron, and
cement. By extending six feet further into the basement of Leiter's building than the old
foundation, the new foundation took up valuable basement space and interfered with the
plumbing and sewerage lines serving the building. When Leiter returned to Chicago he
immediately sought an injunction to stop the work and to evict Field's construction workers
from his building. He argued that his party-wall contract did not give Field any right to work
on Leiter's side of the party wall. When the Circuit Court supported Leiter, Field appealed the
case to the Court of Appeals. In October 1885 the Court of Appeals pointed to the
"unambiguous language" of the party-wall contract and concluded that Field had no explicit
right to build new foundations outside of the limits of the original party wall and foundation.
Field then appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Illinois. At the highest court Field won
the case. The Supreme Court concluded that few men could have known better than Field
and Leiter that strengthening the party wall would require the sort of work that Field's
workers had undertaken. To work within the bounds of the old foundation, or on Field's side
of the lot line, while trying to build a higher building was "utterly impracticable" in the view of
the court, and in May 1886 the Supreme Court overturned the appeals court ruling and gave
Field permission to proceed with his plans.[22] The litigation did slow Field's development of
a ten-story building, and in the end Field leased his land for the construction of Burnham and
Root's Woman's Temple Building on the site in 1892, covered by a new party-wall agreement
between Leiter and the Woman's Temperance Building Association. When the Woman's
Temple was completed it included a massive, relatively blank party wall along the west
elevation, on both sides of the building's central section, overlooking Leiter's building (fig. 6).

Graph: Fig. 6. Burnham and Root, Woman's Temple Building, with steeply pitched roof and
line of dormer windows, 1890–92, opposite building formerly owned by Levi Z. Leiter at lower
center, photo 1914. (ICHi-65323, Chicago History Museum.)

Eclipsing Party-Wall Problems: Skyscraper Islands and Monumental

Buildings

The difficulties of negotiating party-wall agreements, the premium placed on better natural
light and ventilation for white-collar office workers, and the gradual movement of the center
of business southward within the Loop spurred skyscraper development on some of the
more idiosyncratic blocks in Chicago's grid. This was especially true of the narrow blocks
extending south of Jackson Street. These blocks permitted developers to maximize office light
because more offices would front directly on a wide street than was possible on a larger
block. These narrow blocks helped minimize the aesthetic problems arising from looming
party walls of common brick. They even reduced the scale of party walls and the number of
adjacent buildings on a single block. In improving these blocks, therefore, early skyscraper
builders were able to avoid some but not all of the most obvious challenges to development
presented by Chicago's older pattern of streets, alleys, blocks, and lots. Burnham and Root's
sixteen-story Monadnock Building, built in 1889, presents an excellent case in point. Its
narrow 66-foot-wide block, which contrasted with the larger ones located north of Jackson
that typically measured 320 feet east to west and over 400 feet north to south, made it
feasible for a single buyer, the Brooks Estate of Boston, to purchase most of the land. Thus,
the three sides of the original building under Brooks control exhibited a uniform, although
notably unornamented, treatment. The fourth side, however, terminated in a looming
common brick party wall demonstrating that, even on an ideal block for skyscraper
development, unembellished treatment of the elevation could be as economically desirable
as it was aesthetically problematic (fig. 7). The Brooks Estate later solved the problem of its
own making when it took over the rest of the block for an addition designed by Holabird and
Roche in 1893, which terminated with a finished end wall of face brick. This skyscraper was
thus visible on all four sides and uniformly enclosed in pressed brick.

Graph: Fig. 7. "Dearborn Street, North from Van Buren," Burnham and Root, Monadnock
Building, showing original common brick south elevation. From Chicago (Chicago: S. L. Stein,
1893). (Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.)
In the immediate neighborhood of the Monadnock, other builders worked with more limited
parcels but also effectively took advantage of narrow blocks in a similar fashion. These
buildings included the sixteen-story Manhattan Building that rose on a 68-foot-wide block.
Here William Le Baron Jenney treated the Dearborn and Plymouth Court elevations similarly.
Additional ornament on the Dearborn elevation established it as the primary facade. The 68-
foot-wide north and south elevations were treated more simply still, using clay fire tile rather
than face brick. Jenney also addressed the party-wall problem by using a steel cantilever
system for the final bay, so as to avoid disturbing the foundations of the older adjacent
buildings. Again the narrow block made these aspects of the building possible. Jenney also
protected the light in upper-story offices from adjacent high-rise development by setting the
building back above the tenth floor. Just north of the Manhattan Building, Holabird and
Roche's 1894 Old Colony Building and D. H. Burnham's 1896 Fisher Building rose eighteen
stories on lots that were 70 feet wide facing onto Van Buren Street.

The smaller blocks south of Jackson and other idiosyncratic blocks provided skyscraper
islands in the Chicago grid. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have
been unthinkable for a developer to assemble all of the lots on an entire standard downtown
block for the development of a single skyscraper. On these smaller blocks, like the one
occupied by the Monadnock, however, it was possible to achieve a measure of unity and
harmony in the skyscraper streetscape without the jarring contrasts between embellished
street elevations and unadorned side and rear elevations. On these blocks, buildings were
visible on all sides, and the four frontages seem to have encouraged a more consistent and
harmonious treatment of the exterior walls. Here, "all around structures" could fill the
skyscraper islands. Developers were less tempted to leave unadorned elevations under an
assumption that later adjacent buildings would block those elevations from view. Some
measure of hierarchy can be seen in the treatment of the various elevations of buildings
rising on these blocks, however. Burnham and Root's eleven-story Rookery Building went up
on one of the more idiosyncratic blocks north of Jackson, where alleys and courts provided a
lot for a freestanding building that corresponded to the scale of skyscraper building possible
in the 1880s. Here, in 1888 Burnham and Root designed four elevations that reflected the
hierarchy of the abutting right of ways. The main street elevations that faced the 100-foot-
wide LaSalle Street and the 80-foot-wide Adams Street had the building's primary entrances
and more ornamental details and more elaborate stonework than the elevations facing the
40-foot-wide Quincy Street or the 20-foot-wide Rookery Court. Another site like this stood at
the northeast corner of Randolph and State, where Burnham and Root built the 1890
Masonic Temple Building, the highest building in the world at 300 feet.
The attractiveness that building sites like the Rookery or Masonic Temple held for the age of
the high building was evidenced by the fact that some builders actually carved them out even
in places where they did not exist. Builders created skyscraper islands by opening alleys and
rights-of-way on their own land. A leading example of this came in the fascinating land deal
that created a site for the Board of Trade Building in the vacated right-of-way of LaSalle
Street, just south of Jackson. William L. Scott of Erie, Pennsylvania, who owned the two lots of
land on either side of LaSalle, conceived of the development in 1879. He offered a large site
to the Board of Trade for a nominal price. By uniting with the powerful business organization,
which felt cramped in its building on Washington Street, Scott was able to persuade the City
of Chicago to vacate LaSalle Street—creating one of the more monumental building sites in
the city; in a regular grid where streets vistas stretched to the horizon, there were very few
locations where buildings could actually close the vista along a street (fig. 8).[23] The city, in
turn, took part of Scott's land on either side of La Salle to open streets adjacent to the new
building site. In the case of the new Board of Trade, a 300-foot-high tower closed the vista
along La Salle Street. Scott's agreement with the Board of Trade created a 20-foot-wide alley
between the Board of Trade and the proposed office building constructed on the south side.
It also provided for one or more bridges between the buildings. What this exceedingly
profitable arrangement did was to provide a site for a new nine-story freestanding building—
both visible from all sides and provided with excellent exposure to light and air on all sides—
without party walls connected to the hub of commercial transactions at the Board of Trade.
Here, again, Burnham and Root got the design commission and creatively grappled with the
width of the site by creating exterior courts on the east and west sides of the building. The
name given to the building when it opened was "Rialto," a name that emphasized the all-
important bridge connection to the Board of Trade (fig. 9).[24]

Graph: Fig. 8. Map highlighting prominent "skyscraper islands" in downtown Chicago. Detail
from Map of the Business Center of the City of Chicago in 1905 (Chicago: Chicago Directory
Company, 1905). (Map Collection, University of Chicago Library; adapted Jessica Lankston and
Bradley Allen.)

Graph: Fig. 9. Detail of Poole Brothers, Bird's Eye View of the Business District of Chicago,
1898, showing bridge connecting Burnham and Root, Rialto Building at left, 1884–86, to
William W. Boyington, Board of Trade Building at right, 1881–88. From Poole Brothers, Bird's
Eye View of the Business District of Chicago (Chicago: Poole Brothers, 1898). (Geography and
Map Division, Library of Congress.)
On some of the larger blocks of the downtown grid a few Chicago builders did achieve the
architectural and urban harmony that characterized the smaller, more idiosyncratic blocks.
They did this through simple monumental acts of land purchase followed by monumental
acts of building. Uncharacteristically for the time, they gained control of at least half a block
of downtown land and then filled it from corner to corner with single buildings. W. W.
Boyington's 1873 Grand Pacific Hotel was one such building—filling the block from Clark to
LaSalle along Jackson. Nevertheless, even here after a modest return at the northwest and
northeast corners the building went from stone to brick and from ornamented to
unornamented for the least visible elevation, the elevation facing the relatively narrow
Quincy Street. Nevertheless, the building block, so clearly visible from three sides, was
remarkable for its uniform monumentality.

A similar building and one that influenced Sullivan's design thinking in significant ways was
Henry Hobson Richardson's 1886 Marshall Field Wholesale Store. Here Field assembled a
building site 325 by 191 feet that had initially been subdivided into 29 separate lots. This
huge building lot had streets on three sides and an alley along the fourth side. Even before
the design or the program for Field's building was completed observers celebrated the
possibilities it had for all-around design. The Chicago Tribune reported, "the site will be an
admirable one for an office-building, and as it has four street fronts the opportunities for the
display of architectural skill and artistic taste will be unexcelled."[25] Richardson designed a
monumental building with a quiet massiveness that gathered its seven-story height into
simple arched openings (fig. 10). The load-bearing walls on the three primary street
elevations were built of brick faced with Missouri red granite on the lower two floors and East
Longmeadow red sandstone above.[26] The fourth elevation on the smaller court or alley
south of the building opens new vistas on Chicago architecture. The critique of Richardson
and his adaptation of Romanesque form was that he was a great nineteenth-century
architect who did little to pave the way toward modern architecture. This argument is
undercut by the alley elevation with its simple window wall alternating structural piers and
windows (fig. 11). The spandrels of cast iron and brick contained an innovative system of roll-
down shutters that would protect the building from fire. The piers projected in front of the
recessed spandrels and gave the wall its vertical emphasis. In the next twenty years this
simple compositional device seen in the alley wall appeared in many street elevations of
Chicago commercial buildings. Sullivan attended to both the quiet massiveness of
Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store street elevations and the simplicity of the alley
elevation in composing his Chicago buildings, both large and small.
Graph: Fig. 10. Henry Hobson Richardson, Marshall Field Wholesale Store, 1886. (ICHi-23209,
Chicago History Museum.)

Graph: Fig. 11. Marshall Field Wholesale Store, showing contrast between alley court and
street elevations. (ICHi-65324, Chicago History Museum.)

Like Marshall Field, Ferdinand Peck assembled a huge piece of land, 362 by 187 feet, as a
monumental building site. Fronting Congress, Michigan, and Wabash, Peck used the site to
construct the eighteen-story Auditorium Building, a combined theater, hotel, and office
building.[27] With the 1886 Auditorium commission Adler and Sullivan got a chance to begin
exploring "all around" buildings on a massive scale in a design that drew inspiration from the
form of the Field Wholesale Store. In the context of the emergence of "all around" buildings,
the Auditorium's tower was key. The tower played a number of important roles in the
building: it marked the entrance to the Auditorium, it housed the tanks that operated the
hydraulic system that raised and lowered and changed the form of the stage, and it provided
lofty office space, initially occupied by the Adler and Sullivan firm. It is important to recognize
that from a somewhat elevated position the eight-story Auditorium tower, rising above a
uniform ten-story base, replicated the urban form of many downtown blocks where
skyscrapers had broken the relative uniformity of the traditional shirt-front streetscape (fig.
12). But the crucial difference with the Auditorium design was that the tower and the base
harmonized, something rarely seen in the skyscrapers rising from other downtown blocks.
The four elevations of the 270-foot-high tower were all faced in the same Indiana limestone
and designed with shared architectural motifs and window fenestration. Sullivan also
gracefully integrated the tower with the building below by echoing the arched openings of
the base with those in the tower, terminating the tower with small rectangular openings
similar to those at the top floor of the base, and extending the limestone of the upper seven
stories of the base up into the elevations of the tower. The project economized only on the
interior light courts—invisible from the street—using brick in place of stone. An observatory
deck on top of the tower added yet another stage to the "all around" aspects of design (fig.
13). Here, Sullivan's response to the three-dimensional challenges of designing the modern
skyline coincided with the construction of a platform that facilitated the taking in of that
skyline. This provided a model that proved important in Sullivan's subsequent work. In his
autobiography, Sullivan pointed out that the load-bearing walls were "old-time now," but he
obviously admired what he had set out to achieve; he wrote, "its tower holds its head in the
air, as a tower should."[28] In 1892 critics recognized this when they argued that the
Auditorium was actually among the real exceptions to the "general monotony" of "the latest
office buildings" that were often as "unpicturesque as a dry-goods box with holes for
windows."[29] The Auditorium's "greatest glory," its lavishly ornamented interior, was
balanced by an exterior that carried its architectural embellishment consistently from one
elevation to the next, from the base to the tower, clearly visible as one turned corners and
moved around the building.

Graph: Fig. 12. Adler and Sullivan, Auditorium Building, 1886–89, photo 1897. (ICHi-18768,
Chicago History Museum.)

Graph: Fig. 13. S. B. Frank, publisher, "270 Feet in the Air, Top of Auditorium Tower," photo ca.
1894. (ICHi-50782, Chicago History Museum; photo, J. W. Taylor.)

Street Front and Alley

The blank-side elevation of buildings, which Sullivan sought to overcome in his designs, had
of course preceded the advent of high-building technology. Blank party walls and
unornamented rear elevations appeared repeatedly in the pre-skyscraper cityscape. These
vertical surfaces were often pressed into the service of advertising. Some high-rise buildings
similarly used their enormous side elevations for advertising messages. D. H. Burnham and
Company's 1897 Silversmith Building on Wabash Avenue had a Wilson's Whiskey
advertisement that boasted of being the "largest picture in the world." A photograph of the
construction of D. H. Burnham and Company's 1905 Heyworth Building captures the last days
of the advertisement, destined to be enclosed between the walls of the Silversmith and
Heyworth buildings (fig. 14). This photograph also provides one of the best available views of
the alley elevation of Sullivan's Schlesinger and Mayer department store, later occupied by
the Carson Pirie Scott department store. What is notable about this building project is the
way in which Sullivan and his department store client literally pushed the envelope of the
rigid boundaries set up by the existing block and lot lines to increase the power and success
of the design and the department store business it accommodated. First, they succeeded in
changing what many people viewed as a fixed and stable element of Chicago's real estate
pattern—stretching the canvas upon which Sullivan could design and Schlesinger and Mayer
could sell their goods. In July 1898 "Bathhouse" Johnny Coughlin, alderman of Chicago's first
ward, got the council to approve a land swap whereby the north-south alley that stood 73
feet east of State Street could be moved further east, uniting two separate parcels controlled
by Schlesinger and Mayer and doubling their frontage on Madison Street from 73 to 144 feet.
[30] In the land trade between Schlesinger and Mayer and the City of Chicago, the block's
public alley was maintained by having it extend over formerly private land, but a straitjacket
of the established alley structure was altered in favor of the department store.
Graph: Fig. 14. D. H. Burnham and Company, north elevation, Silversmith Building, 1897,
showing Wilson Distilling Company, Wilson High Ball whiskey advertisement, and Schlesinger
and Mayer department store alley elevation, photo ca. 1904. (ICHi-65359, Chicago History
Museum.)

Schlesinger and Mayer were less successful in freeing up another fixed element that
confronted them—they originally had Sullivan design a twelve-story building, which would
have exceeded the existing 130-foot height limit. They apparently were unable to obtain a
variance, so the first section of the building went to only nine stories and 130 feet. The next
section of the building, built soon after the City Council removed the 130-foot height limit in
1902, rose to twelve stories (fig. 15).

Graph: Fig. 15. Louis H. Sullivan, Schlesinger and Mayer department store [here Carson Pirie
Scott], 1899–1904, showing differing heights and alley opening at left. (Historic American
Buildings Survey, reproduction no. ILL, 16-CHIG, 65-1, Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress.)

Joseph Siry has argued that the rounded corner of the Bowen Building that previously
occupied the site, as well as the fashionable rounded corners on several other notable
buildings ranging from the Palmer House to various Paris department stores, influenced the
distinctive rounded corner on the Schlesinger and Mayer store. The form also constituted
something of a local vernacular, as many Chicago saloons used a projecting rounded corner
tower above the first floor to prominently mark these entrances and attract the eyes of
people approaching the corner of the block from different directions. Chicago's building code
permitted corner towers to project 3 feet into the public way, starting at a height of 12 feet
above the ground.[31] While the corner towers provided additional space in the apartments
and offices above the saloon, their primary role was to add prominence, grandeur, and
visibility to the entrance. What Schlesinger and Mayer succeeded in doing, again with the
approval of the Chicago City Council, was to break the rules for corner towers by extending
this one all the way to the ground, projecting directly into the public way. The company paid a
modest rental for the privilege but got a windfall in visibility on one of the busiest corners in
Chicago.[32] The adjacent display windows with their heavily foliated ornamented frames
extended the advertising appeal of the building. The lavishly ornamented foliated surfaces
extended to the rounded corner, making it one of the most alluring building entrances in
downtown Chicago (see fig. 15).[33]

The alley elevation shows where Sullivan grappled with the Schlesinger and Mayer building's
design visibility and the urban context (see fig. 14). The first bay in from the front corner
carries ornamental elements of the street elevation into the alley, but then the gleam of
white enameled terra cotta disappears. The subtle horizontal lines disappear. The ornament
disappears. The all-around architecture is suspended. The alley windows have today all been
closed in with brick, but there is no mistaking that Sullivan deployed here a fundamentally
different approach from that used for the street elevations. Structurally, however, the
building was supported on a neutral and balanced steel frame that is essentially identical on
all four sides (fig. 16). Form ever following function had something to do with functions and
laws of the building very much outside of structural expression—otherwise the street and
alley elevations would have been identical.

Graph: Fig. 16. Schlesinger and Mayer department store during construction, photo 1903.
(Collection of Tim Samuelson.)

Louis Sullivan's Tank Beautiful Movement

The rooftop of the Schlesinger and Mayer store provides further evidence of Sullivan's effort
to foster an all-around urban visual order for the city. Here he took the unusual step of
completely enclosing the building's water tanks in terra cotta and brick (fig. 17). His effort did
not go unnoticed and was later cited as a key precedent in Chicago's "tank beautiful"
movement and by extension the "factory beautiful movement." In both cases, architects
followed Sullivan's lead in taking on a rather utilitarian aspect of building construction and
rendering it as an embellished addition to the urban landscape and skyline. Even as
examples of the architectural treatment of water tanks proliferated, critics raised strenuous
objections to the continued addition of unadorned water towers to rooftops (see fig. 6).
Richard E. Schmidt's and Hugh M. G. Garden's 1902 design for Chicago's Schoenhofen
Brewery placed its water tanks in a tower that stood with Sullivan's Schlesinger and Mayer
store as an early effort to treat the water tank architecturally. For his part, Schmidt later
credited Louis Sullivan's design as the precedent he followed in enclosing the Schoenhofen
water tank.[34] From time to time the Chicago Tribune vigorously editorialized against the
visual blight of water tanks. In 1929 the Tribune explained, "We are respectfully submitting
herewith a group of likely candidates for membership in the Chicago Association of Atrocities
—a notorious element in our town which has brought forth a number of broadsides from this
paper's staff of editorial writers. The group for which membership is requested comprises
roof water tanks—the Adam and Eve variety—that is, tanks exposed to the public view
without the slightest attempt at concealment or adornment."[35] In an attempt to focus the
attention of architects on this problem, Leon E. Stanhope, president of the Illinois Society of
Architects, proposed a new annual award for the best skyline and roof view of buildings
erected during the year. He hoped that such a prize would have a ripple effect on other
design awards, making it unthinkable to recognize a design just for the elevation while
ignoring "a roof cluttered up with penthouses, tanks, and stacks."[36] In 1930 another
observer hoped that a new competition would start for a "tank beautiful" to "take the place of
the thousands of sky searing atrocities perched on commercial and office buildings in
Chicago."[37] Despite the fact that architects like Sullivan and Schmidt had shown the way,
obviously not all builders had followed.

Graph: Fig. 17. Schlesinger and Mayer department store, showing rooftop with Sullivan-
designed enclosed water tank at left foreground, photo 1914. (ICHi-65325, Chicago History
Museum; photo, Charles R. Clark.)

Sullivan's water tank enclosure on the Schlesinger and Mayer store and his vision of all-
around structures rippled outward from the downtown, providing a precedent for the
architecturally distinguished water tanks that soon characterized a striking series of Chicago
factory designs. In advocating for and designing all-around structures, Sullivan demonstrated
that functional elements, like the common brick party walls, punched window holes of side
and rear elevations, and water tanks, needed to be reconsidered in relation to the broader
urban landscape in which they stood. With the water tank enclosure on the Schlesinger and
Mayer store, Sullivan brought the utilitarian form of the water tank under the auspices of the
architect so as to contribute to the beauty of the skyline and the cityscape. The influence of
these ideas could be seen in the construction of embellished factories and water tanks in
suburban industrial plants that aimed to limit the blighting influence of factories on
established residential areas. In 1915 the Architectural Record, reviewing the buildings of
George C. Nimmons, one of those most directly associated with the aesthetic reform of
Chicago industrial architecture, argued that "a number of interesting attempts have been
made in the last few years to construct buildings which although their purposes required a
high degree of economy, might, nevertheless, present a dignified and pleasing appearance.
The Chicago architects particularly distinguished themselves in this field. The great
warehouses and factories of which they have been the authors include some of the more
notable contributions to architectural design in America."[38] In numerous designs over the
previous decade Nimmons had explored the use of varied colors in brick and terra cotta and
historically derived ornament to enliven and refine Chicago's industrial architecture.

In surveying Nimmons's work, Architectural Record pointed out the way in which Nimmons
and other Chicago architects had followed Sullivan in seizing upon the necessity of a rooftop
water tank as a point of departure for architectural embellishment. Nimmons's work
highlights the fact that Sullivan's idea for all-around structures extended beyond downtown
commercial buildings, appearing in urban territories well outside of the downtown. On
Nimmons's industrial buildings a tower "forms the dominating feature of the façade. The
tower, in each case, has a good reason for its existence, as it encloses the water tank of the
sprinkler system usually required now by the fire insurance underwriters for a low insurance
rate. The old method of erecting these tanks exposed on the roof was unsightly and
unattractive. ... The insurance requirements for water supply of an industrial plant, taking
into account the size of the tank and its height above the roof, are nearly always such as to
make it possible to design a well-proportioned tower. Inasmuch as the expense involved in
enclosing the sprinkler tank is not materially greater than the cost of supports and
foundations for an exposed tank, it has often been possible to secure the owner's consent to
make a water tower the principal feature of the main façade and utilize the base of such a
tower for the main entrance. The result is that the sky-line of the buildings is much improved,
and an interesting feature added to a design which might otherwise be box-like and devoid
of any particular attraction."[39] As if to further underscore the relationship between urban
beauty and citizen welfare, the Architectural Record pointed out that Nimmons's 1912 design
for the C. P. Kimball Company automobile factory building at 3906–3936 South Michigan
Avenue added a clock and set of chimes in the place of the standard steam whistle to inform
employees of the opening and closing hours at the plant. The form and function of the
Gothic tower on the Kimball hovered ambiguously between that of a factory and a cathedral.

Nimmons later featured the Kimball design in his September 1916 article in the Brickbuilder
magazine, "Does It Pay to Improve Manufacturing and Industrial Buildings Architecturally?"
For the article Nimmons provided a "utilitarian" version of the Kimball design in which he
stripped away all of the terra cotta details and architectural ornament and removed the
tower, leaving a massive water tank supported by a steel framework (fig. 18). The builder's
estimate for the utilitarian design lowered the cost of the $326,000 Kimball factory by only
$14,957. When considering the benefits to employees and the public, as well as the
advertising value of handsome industrial buildings, Nimmons answered the rhetorical
question presented in his Brickbuilder title with a resounding "yes"—it paid to improve
industrial design and to participate in the broader City Beautiful Movement.[40] Following the
lead of Nimmons's work in industrial design, the owners and designers of the Central
Manufacturing District, located south of Thirty-Fifth Street and east of Ashland Avenue,
adopted a policy that banned unadorned rooftop tanks from their development. S. Scott Joy
served as primary architect for the district in its early years, completing such buildings as the
Pullman Couch Company at 3739–3723 South Ashland Avenue in 1915 and the National
Carbon Building at 3711–3725 South Ashland Avenue in 1916. An impressive freestanding
water tower resembling an Italian campanile dominated the Pershing Road frontage of a
major expansion of the Central Manufacturing District completed in 1917. Designs for the
Victor Manufacturing Company and the ILG Electric Ventilating Company featured in the
pages of the Chicago Tribune under the headline, "Towers Add Dignity and Beauty to Chicago
Plants."[41] In 1926 the Tribune claimed that F. E. Davidson, former president of the Illinois
Society of Architects, was a "pioneer in hiding tanks in towers" for his 1910 design for
Progress Company at the corner of Berteau and Ravenswood. This brought a quick correction
as Richard Schmidt pointed back to Sullivan's design for the Schlesinger and Mayer
department store as the fountainhead for all such designs.[42]

Graph: Fig. 18. George C. Nimmons, two designs for C. P. Kimball Company, 1912. From
George C. Nimmons, "Modern Industrial Plants, Part IV," Architectural Record 45 (February
1919): 167; images first appeared in the Brickbuilder 25 (September 1916): 221.

Schiller: Leasehold Restrictions and All-Around Towers

At the time he took on the commission for Schlesinger and Mayer, Sullivan had already
moved beyond the Auditorium design in his approach to the all-around structure. His design
for the German Opera House Company's Schiller Theatre Building on Randolph Street
exemplifies this strategy. The site, immediately adjacent to Adler and Sullivan's 1880 six-story
Borden Block, presented a much greater challenge in terms of taking on the shirt front and
the dry-goods box than either the earlier Auditorium design or the later Carson Pirie Scott
design. The site was wedged between and shared party walls with the Borden Building on the
east and the five-story 1872 Music Hall building on the west designed by Burling and Adler. A
leasehold agreement of May 1890 between the German Opera House Company and the
Bartlett estate of Boston, owner of the land, required the construction within two years of a
"first class, thoroughly fire proof structure not less than ten stories high with steel beams,
columns, and girders. All ceilings shall be fire proofed from brick walls to brick walls with
hollow tile and ... all the fire proofing therein to be at least as good as that of the [Holabird
and Roche's 1890] Caxton Building on Dearborn Street."[43] The 80-foot-wide site was thus
not only hemmed in by adjacent party walls but also by leasehold requirements that would
necessitate nearly doubling the height of adjacent buildings. The building would have not
one but two sizable side elevations. The final program carried the building even higher than
required by the lease—to seventeen stories and nearly 240 feet. This left expansive side
elevations clearly visible above the lower buildings in the block. Appropriating the idea of a
setback from Jenney's Manhattan Building, which he admired, Sullivan built a single central
tower that rose with dominant vertical lines from the building's base and flanked on either
side by lower wings, nine stories high. These lower sections of the building carried foliated
panels between the eighth and ninth floors, a motif that visually linked the Schiller to the
adjacent Borden Block. The Schiller Building's complex program was expressed both in plan
and in section. The darkest part of the building, the lower floors in the center of the lot,
housed the building's impressive auditorium, which did not require natural illumination.
Above the six-story auditorium space stood an office wing that rose to the thirteenth floor
with exterior light courts and space left between the windows and the adjacent buildings (fig.
19).

Graph: Fig. 19. Adler and Sullivan, Schiller Theatre Building, 1891–92, photo 1900. (ICHi-
24256, Chicago History Museum; photo, J. W. Taylor.)

On an urban level, one of the impressive things about the Schiller was the rigor and
consistency with which Sullivan sought an all-around tower. The same terra cotta cladding
and the same foliated terra cotta cornice not only extended to all sides of the front tower but
continued through the mid-lot sections of the building (fig. 20). The rear section of the
building was clad in face brick, and the lower section of the mid-lot office building was clad in
less expensive fire clay tile—it was this section of the building that was not visible from the
street level (see fig. 19). The blank elevation of the rear section of the Schiller still had a
prominent cornice and had blank walls only because it housed the hydraulic tanks for moving
the theater stage, rather than additional offices. Burnham and Root's sixteen-story Ashland
Block constructed at the same time as the Schiller Building and on the same block (just 80
feet to the west, at the northeast corner of Randolph and State), provided a strong contrast
to the building Sullivan designed. In the Ashland the heavy cornice turned the corner and
then just stopped—an unadorned common brick wall with simple rectangular windows faced
the handsome and embellished side elevation of the Schiller Building (fig. 21). Sullivan had
substantially pushed the cause of modern all-around building far beyond a point that most of
his contemporaries seemed able to go within the confines of Chicago's typical city blocks and
prevailing real estate practice.

Graph: Fig. 20. "Looking East from Roof of Ashland Block," with tower and cupola of Schiller
Theatre Building showing all-around embellishment and Burnham and Root, Masonic Temple
Building at left, 1891–92. From Chicago (Chicago: S. L. Stein, 1893). (Special Collections
Research Center, University of Chicago Library.)

Graph: Fig. 21. Burnham and Root, Ashland Block at center right, 1891–92, showing
unadorned party wall and exterior light court facing the Schiller Theatre Building, photo
1914. (ICHi-65357, Chicago History Museum.)

Debating Skyscraper Limits

In the first years of the 1890s, as Sullivan designed and built the Schiller, a furious debate
unfolded in Chicago about limiting the heights of skyscrapers. The most popular proposals
sought a height limit of between 130 and 160 feet. Both of these limits were far lower than
the towers of the Schiller and the Auditorium. The advocates of limitations presented a range
of reasons—they worried that existing fire-fighting equipment would not be able to contain a
fire in a skyscraper; they disliked the tendency of skyscrapers to plunge lower buildings and
the public streets into shadows; they objected to the dry-goods box aesthetic taking over the
skyline with forms that were too high and too ugly; they sought to diffuse building more
broadly as a way of reducing street traffic and congestion; some hoped height limits would
make real estate on the other side of the Chicago River more valuable.[44]

In 1891 as the City Council took up the question of limitations, it asked the city's corporation
counsel to give his opinion concerning the legality of such a limitation. He pointed out that
"the owner of private property has a right to a reasonable use" but the city had a police
power to protect and promote the public good. Height restrictions could survive court review
if they were reasonable. He doubted that the court would uphold a limit in height to, say, two
stories, but he felt that a limit of eight, ten, or twelve stories would survive a court challenge.
In an argument that was later echoed in Louis Sullivan's own view of the issue, the
corporation counsel concluded: "The City Council may take into consideration all of the
circumstances bearing upon the question of the public good. The public upon the streets are
entitled to light and pure air and to travel the streets in safety. It is a matter of public concern
that buildings should be safe to the occupants. ... The question of congestion of travel upon
the streets produced by the prevalence of high buildings may be considered. ... And I think
that in connection with all the other facts bearing upon the question of the public good, the
question of the sightly or unsightly appearance of the city may be taken into consideration."
[45] Many real estate developers, including Marshall Field and Ferdinand Peck, objected that
the limit should not be any lower than 175 feet. In 1893 the City Council passed an ordinance
limiting the height of buildings to 130 feet. The limitation struck at the heart of Sullivan's
skyscraper city filled with what he called "proud and soaring things."[46]

Exercising the Brain about Skyscrapers

As the debate unfolded about limiting skyscrapers, Sullivan honed his own ideas on the issue,
hoping to influence the future of the building type that had helped define his career. In April
1890 in the Chicago Tribune, he declared that "the main problem now presented to Chicago
architects are solidity of structure, economization of space, perfect interior arrangement,
combined with beauty of exterior outline and finish, and minimum possible expenditure." In
fact, he obviously had been working out "beauty of exterior outline and finish" in projecting
the transition from "shirt front" to "all around structures." He wondered, "what will occur
when entire business streets are covered with a double row of these lofty edifices? When
these thoroughfares resemble a mountain canyon will not the lower stories be almost
valueless for lack of sufficient light? These problems are exercising the brains of reflective
architects and some new methods of construction are of imperative necessity if the reign of
the 'sky-scraper' is assured. Among others I have given much thought to this question, and
although I am not prepared at present to give the result of my researches I may state that
the problem is probably capable of a satisfactory solution."[47]

In December 1891, as the debate over limiting high buildings continued, Sullivan presented
the results of his research in his essay "The High Building Question," published in the Graphic
. Echoing the arguments of the corporation counsel, Sullivan declared that both individual
property owners and the public had at times competing and conflicting claims that needed to
be reconciled. He wrote, "It must seem a hardship to the individual owner of land that he
should be debarred from erecting upon it such building as he deems fit. It will seem,
however, to the remaining stubborn majority of the community—non-owners of land—a
distinct impudence that the individual should build otherwise than as they themselves see fit.
It is between these extremes that my suggestion lies, for I believe it is possible to preserve in
a building of high altitude the equities both of the individual and of the public."[48]

Sullivan proposed tying skyscraper form and height to the width of the fronting street and
stepping the building mass back in a series of setbacks. He tentatively suggested that the
initial height limit would be twice the width of the street—thus, for Chicago standard streets
that would come to be 132 or 160 feet. Once this height was reached, he argued that the
building should not cover more than half the area of its lot nor half the street front, up to the
next height limit of say 132 feet above the first limit, at which point the building would have
to taper to cover only one-quarter of the lot size and the mass could no longer stand on the
street front but would have to be built in the middle of the lot. In this way Sullivan hoped to
teach "manners" to owners, but he also wanted to leave the "brainy men" who had been at
the forefront of skyscraper development room to continue to build. He concluded his idea by
insisting that "these men may be selfish enough to need regulation, but it is monstrous to
suppose that they must be suppressed, for they have in themselves qualities as noble,
daring, and inspired as ever quickened knights of old."[49]
It was clear that Sullivan was not simply envisioning manners and aesthetics as the
prerogative of quasi-civic buildings like Ferdinand Peck's Auditorium Theater or the German
Opera Company's Schiller, or even Schlesinger and Mayer's department store. Those
institutions seemingly appropriated an architecture of civic expression, which often had city
halls, courts, churches, and other public buildings standing alone, visible and embellished on
all sides, and decidedly detached from dominant pattern of the shirt-front party-wall
urbanism. Sullivan now clearly aimed to extend those patterns to the monuments of
commerce, to the skyscraper buildings of the private commercial city.

In these ideas, Sullivan stood very much in the vanguard of city builders who during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the eclipse of the monumental civic and
religious landscape of the city by skyscrapers and a new commercial monumentality. The
skyline of the city dominated by church steeples and civic domes gave way to the skyline
dominated by skyscrapers. For this transition to occur gracefully, commercial skyscrapers
needed to become beautiful, monumental, all-around structures, rather than simply built
forms dominating the skyline with utilitarian expressions of common brick and
unembellished elevations. In short, skyscraper designers had to solve the problem imposed
on tall buildings by the tradition of shirt-front commercial design and party-wall urbanism;
they needed to embellish tall commercial buildings in the manner of earlier religious and
civic buildings—as all-around structures. In 1890, as he was working out the details of his
solution to skyscraper design, Sullivan noted the passing of the steeple and spire in the
landscape and in the image of Chicago. In his view utilitarian considerations defined the
problem, not the solution. Evoking the figure of the Chicago residents looking out from "the
top of the Auditorium," Sullivan declared, "It is a pity in some respects that the church spire
idea is going out. It was a pretty one, but in this utilitarian age the tendency is to the
practical. A church committee says: 'What's the use of a spire? We can't put the organ in it; we
can't seat strangers there; it can't be utilized for a lecture or a Sunday-school, or supper
room. Better put the money in the building proper, where it can be of practical service. ... Our
bells are harsh, our spires are ugly; and we have enough noise during the week without
having a bell clang upon our ears Sunday. As I said, the spire must go from Chicago. ... The
church spire in the city is a thing of the past. ... Architecturally, I do not hesitate to say that
there isn't a church spire in Chicago."[50] Earlier in Chicago history, churches and civic
building rarely rose from the party-wall conditions that characterized commercial buildings;
they stood alone, often detached from their immediate neighbors. This detachment was
generally neither possible nor desirable for commercial buildings. On the skyline, however,
skyscrapers, designed as all-around structures could appear detached, monumental, and
beautiful.

Setbacks and the Right to Beauty

Historians who have read Sullivan's "The High Building Question " carefully have seen in it a
stunningly prescient delineation of modern zoning that started when New York City's 1916
zoning code encouraged setback skyscraper development.[51] I would argue that there is
something equally if not more important about his vision—in arguing that Chicago architects
needed to attend to the "beauty of exterior outline and finish" in their buildings, I think that
Sullivan also envisioned an important balancing of equities and rights between individual
builders and the broader public. The balancing here surely demanded a conscientious effort
to creatively mingle sentiment and business concerns. All-around designs would not only put
an end to dry-goods box architecture but would contribute to a pervasive sense of
refinement. In the same issue of the Graphic in which he took on the high-building question,
Sullivan also published his most ambitious skyscraper design—the plan for the world's
highest skyscraper—a thirty-four story, 556-foot building that embodied the design principles
laid out in Sullivan's answer to the high-building question. Designed for the Odd Fellows, the
project represented a clear effort to trump Chicago's Masonic Temple Building, the world's
highest building (see fig. 20, left). The leading sites considered for the building stood on
either side of LaSalle Street just north of Monroe.[52] Four- to six-story buildings constructed
in the 1870s covered the two parcels. Sullivan's plan called for a building that would cover the
site up to the level of ten stories—except for four exterior light courts. Above this level, the
building would rise another ten stories, covering much less than 50 percent of the lot and
less than one-third of the street frontage. A fourteen-story tower setback to the center of the
lot rose on about 10 percent of the lot (fig. 22). The building would primarily contain offices
and shops, with accommodations for the Odd Fellows hall. On a much more open site the
design followed precisely the direction established in the all-around towers of the Auditorium
and Schiller buildings. With piers projecting and spandrels recessed, the main sections of the
building had emphatically vertical lines, like the alley elevation of Richardson's Marshall Field
Wholesale Store. The heavy cornices with foliated ornament that terminated the first and
second stages of the building echoed the cornice of the recently completed ten-story
Wainwright Building in St. Louis.

Graph: Fig. 22. Louis H. Sullivan, "Proposed Odd Fellows' Temple," Goodspeed Publishing,
1891. From Louis H. Sullivan, "The High Building Question," Graphic 5 (December 19, 1891):
405. (ICHi-31472, Chicago History Museum.)
The four highly visible elevations of the Odd Fellows Building would be harmoniously
designed. There would be no common bricks, no unadorned elevations, no contrast between
one side and another. At the ground level, the main entrances opened onto La Salle and
Monroe streets, with an alley between the side elevations and older adjacent buildings.
However, the height of the building and the evenness in the architecture in the upper
sections of the elevation dwarfed the distinctions at ground level. Well beyond its anticipation
of the setback skyscraper form, popularized in New York's 1916 zoning ordinance, the design
represented a clear revelation of the all-around structure.[53] Viewed from east or west,
north or south, the building looked the same. The simple treatment of the window openings
and the handling of the piers and spandrels united design, structure, and real estate in a
unified expression. Sullivan's design seemed engaged in a balancing act between the rights
of property and the rights of the public. With this design Sullivan attempted to parry the
movement for restricting the height of skyscrapers. Part of that effort involved skyscraper
design that would let more light reach the street. It also insisted on aesthetic standards for
building design that limited the use of cheap common brick and unadorned publicly visible
surfaces.

Despite Sullivan's best efforts to fend off absolute limitations on the height of skyscrapers,
the city restricted heights to 130 feet in 1893. These restrictions combined with the economic
depression of the 1890s scuttled the plans for the Odd Fellows Building. An important feature
of the new building code was a provision for towers to rise above the height limit, covering
up to one-quarter of the street frontage and with a base of up to 1,600 square feet.[54] This
aspect of the new law seemed entirely consistent with Sullivan's tower form placed in the
middle of the Odd Fellows design. The tower provision anticipated a more equitable form of
development that balanced an unmistakably modern form with a public right of beauty in the
commercial city.

Sullivan's refinement of the all-around structure did not mean that he never returned to shirt-
front design. In 1899 he designed an eight-story facade for the Gage Brothers Building, a
millinery loft on Michigan Avenue (fig. 23). Working under height restrictions and hemmed in
by buildings of similar height, Sullivan designed a distinctive curtain wall of buff terra cotta,
with projecting piers that supported elaborate foliated cartouches at the cornice. In 1902,
when the building received four additional stories, these ornamental cartouches were simply
raised to the top of the expanded elevation. Interestingly this exercise in shirt-front design
replaced the earlier Cyclorama Building on the site (fig. 24). This building housed an all-
encompassing circular painting that captured the horror and spectacle of the 1871 Chicago
fire. Close by, two other panorama buildings had been built in the 1880s—one with a
religious theme related to Jerusalem and the other portraying the third and decisive day in
the battle of Gettysburg. Hundreds of thousands of people went into these buildings to be
enveloped by historic scenes that captured the range of human passion, spirit, and emotion.
Ironically, the Cyclorama Building's site occupied by one of Sullivan's important shirt-front
designs usefully reminds us of Sullivan's ability to envision and help develop the city itself as
a panorama, as a place where we can see all around, a place where human passion and
emotion can be channeled and framed by art and beauty. This is an important legacy of
Sullivan grappling with the politics and ethics of display in the modern city.

Graph: Fig. 23. Louis H. Sullivan, Gage Building at left center, 1899, with Richard E. Schmidt,
Montgomery Ward Building and tower at right, 1899, photo 1914. (ICHi-65358, Chicago
History Museum; photo, Charles R. Clark.)

Graph: Fig. 24. Detail of Poole Brothers, Bird's Eye View of the Business District of Chicago,
1898, showing Cyclorama Building, 1891, demolished for the Gage Building. From Poole
Brothers, Bird's Eye View of the Business District of Chicago (Chicago: Poole Brothers, 1898).
(Maps Division, Library of Congress.)

Footnotes

1 Louis H. Sullivan, "Foreword," Suggestions in Artistic Brick (St. Louis: Hydraulic-Press Brick Co.,
[1910]), 5.

2 Dankmar Adler, "Light in Tall Office Buildings," Engineering Magazine 4 (November 1892): 174.

3 Sullivan, "Foreword," Suggestions in Artistic Brick, 5.

4 Louis H. Sullivan, "The Tall Building Artistically Considered," Lippincott's Magazine 57 (March
1896): 408–9; Hugh Morrison, Louis Sullivan, Prophet of Modern Architecture (New York: Museum
of Modern Art and W. W. Norton, 1935), 270; Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The
Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941); Carl Condit, The Rise
of the Skyscraper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), and The Chicago School of
Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Buildings in the City Area, 1875–1925 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1964). See also Reyner Banham, "A Walk in the Loop," Chicago 2
(Spring 1965): 24–28; Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1991), 104–51.

5 Wim de Wit, Louis H. Sullivan: The Function of Ornament (New York: Norton, 1986); Lauren S.
Weingarden, Louis H. Sullivan and a Nineteenth-Century Poetics of Naturalized Architecture
(London: Ashgate, 2009); Narciso G. Menocal, Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist Idea of
Louis Sullivan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981); Bluestone, Constructing Chicago,
104–51, and Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation (New York:
Norton, 2011), 165–68; Robert Bruegmann, "The Marquette Building and the Myth of the Chicago
School," Threshold 5/6 (Fall 1991): 7–18, and "Myth of the Chicago School," in Chicago Architecture:
Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, ed. Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ray (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005): 15–29.

6 See, e.g., Joseph Siry, The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan's Architecture and the
City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), and Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the
Chicago Department Store (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); David Van Zanten,
Sullivan's City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan (New York: Norton, 2000); Robert
Twombly, Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work (New York: Viking, 1986); Bluestone, Constructing
Chicago, 104–51; Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Richard Longstreth, ed., The Charnley House: Louis
Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Making of Chicago's Gold Coast (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).

7 "Ten Stories, Montauk Block and Its Model Offices," Chicago Tribune, October 15, 1882, 6.

8 "Informal Opening of 'The Reliance': A Triumph of the Builder's Art," Chicago Tribune, March 16,
1895, 8.

9 Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture, 110–11.

A recent history does mention these brick elevations in the Reliance Building, noting that they were
built "with the expectation that adjacent buildings would soon be hiding them"; see thoughtful
discussion of the Reliance Building design in Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890, 95–115.

Sullivan, "The Tall Building Artistically Considered," 408.

Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 104–51.

Van Zanten, Sullivan's City, 19–21.

"Two Types of Office Buildings," Chicago Tribune, November 29, 1891, 28.

"Chicago Real Estate," Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1898, 38.

"Mr. Ashbee's Criticisms," Chicago Tribune, December 9, 1900, 40.

"Real Estate News: Edgewater to Have Niftiest Bachelors' Home," Chicago Tribune, January 28,
1923, G24.

"Abandon 'Shirt Front' Plan for Central Life," Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1923, A12.

Al Chase, "Real Estate: Fine Arts Bond Issue Hurries $2,500,000 Co-op," Chicago Tribune, June 15,
1924, A13.

Philip Hampson, "14 Story Co-op Will Rise on Astor Street," Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1927, B1.

"Complications Over Party Walls: New Requirements Growing Out of the Construction of Lofty
Buildings," Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1891, 10.

Marshall Field v. Levi Z. Leiter, Court of Appeals of Illinois, First District, 18 Ill. App. 155; 1885 Ill.
App. Decided October, 1885; Marshall Field v. Levi Z. Leiter, Supreme Court of Illinois, 118 Ill. 17; 6
N.W. 877; 1886 Ill.; "All About a Wall: The Field and Leiter Difficulty," Chicago Tribune, April 21,
1885, 8.

"The Board of Trade: Vacating La Salle Street," Chicago Tribune, December 28, 1880, 8. The map is
part of the online University of Chicago Digital Preservation Collection, Chicago, 1900–1914,
http://proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/maps/chi1900/G4104-C6A15-
1905-C5 .

"As Explained by Mr. Randolph," Chicago Tribune, February 3, 1886, 7; "Rialto," Chicago Tribune,
January 30, 1887, 1.

"Real Estate: Promise of a Profitable Year," Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1884, 11.

James F. O'Gorman, "The Marshall Field Wholesale Store: Materials toward a Monograph," Journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians 37 (October 1978): 175–94.

Siry, The Chicago Auditorium Building .

Louis H. Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Dover, 1956), 303.

"Heart of Chicago: Restricted Area within Which Business Is Concentrated," Chicago Tribune, July 3,
1892, 6.

Journal of the Proceedings of the City Council of Chicago, Illinois (July 13, 1898): 570–71; "Big
Ground Lease Made," Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1898, 10.
Henry Binmore, compiler, Laws and Ordinances Governing the City of Chicago, from April 2, 1890,
to July 10, 1894, with Notes and Cross References to All Amended and Repealed Sections of Prior
Ordinances (Chicago: E. B. Myers, 1894), 62.

Journal of the Proceedings of the City Council of Chicago, Illinois (December 5, 1898): 1067.

Siry, Carson Pirie Scott, 119–201.

"Richard E. Schmidt Calls Louis Sullivan Roof Tank Pioneer," Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1926, B5.

Philip Hampson, "Cite Ugly Roof Tank for City's Atrocity List," Chicago Tribune, February 17, 1929,
B1.

"Urges Prize for Best Roof Seen from Air," Chicago Tribune, September 4, 1927, C1.

"$4,000 Contest Is Planned for a 'Tank Beautiful,'" Chicago Tribune, October 19, 1930, 27.

"Some Industrial Building by George C. Nimmons," Architectural Record 38 (August 1915): 229.

Ibid., 229–30.

George C. Nimmons, "Does It Pay to Improve Manufacturing and Industrial Buildings

Architecturally?" Brickbuilder 25 (September 1916): 217–47.

"Towers Add Dignity and Beauty to Chicago Plants," Chicago Tribune, December 28, 1919, A8.

"F. E. Davidson Is Pioneer in Hiding Tanks in Towers," Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1926, B5; "Richard E.
Schmidt Calls Louis Sullivan Roof Tank Pioneer," Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1926, B5.

Quoted from the contract between Francis Barlett of Boston trustee of Caroline Barlett under the
will of John F. Slater and Franz Amberg of Chicago and the German Opera House Company, May 1,
1890, Deed Book 3425, 534–51, Cook County Recorder of Deeds, Chicago.

Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 150; Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890, 117–19.

"In the Council's Power: Mr. Aldricuh's Opinion," Chicago Tribune, October 23, 1891, 7.

Sullivan, "The Tall Building Artistically Considered," 403–9.

L. H. Sullivan, "Architecture and Building," Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1890, 36.

Louis H. Sullivan, "The High Building Question," Graphic 5 (December 19, 1891): 404.

Ibid., 405.
"Church Spires Must Go," Chicago Tribune, November 30, 1890, 36. On the skyscraper eclipse of
civic and religious monumentality, see Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 104–204.

Donald Hoffmann, "The Setback Skyscraper City of 1891: An Unknown Essay by Louis H. Sullivan,"
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 29 (May 1970): 181–87.

"Higher Than Others: Chicago Odd-Fellows to Erect Thirty-Four Story Building," Chicago Tribune,
September 5, 1891, 1.

Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).

Binmore, Laws and Ordinances Governing the City of Chicago, 180.

The author would like to thank Robert Bruegmann, Tim Samuelson, Howard Singerman, David Van
Zanten, and the anonymous readers for their insightful engagements of the argument. Presented
at the "Politics of Display" symposium honoring him upon his retirement from the University of
Chicago, this essay is dedicated to Neil Harris, an artist in American society, history, and culture.

~~~~~~~~

By Daniel Bluestone

Daniel Bluestone is professor of architectural history and director of the Historic Preservation
Program at the University of Virginia.

Copyright of Winterthur Portfolio is the property of The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum and its

content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's

express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

This document was generated by a user of EBSCO. Neither EBSCO nor the user who have generated this content is
responsible for the content of this printout.
© 2024 EBSCO Industries, Inc. All rights reserved.
EBSCO | 10 Estes Street | Ipswich, MA 01938