Chicago school (architecture)

A "Second Chicago School" with a modernist esthetic emerged in the 1940s through 1970s, which pioneered new building technologies and structural systems, such as the tube-frame structure.

First Chicago School

While the term "Chicago School" is widely used to describe buildings constructed in the city during the 1880s and 1890s, this term has been disputed by scholars, in particular in reaction to Carl Condit's 1952 book The Chicago School of Architecture. Historians such as H. Allen Brooks, Winston Weisman and Daniel Bluestone have pointed out that the phrase suggests a unified set of esthetic or conceptual precepts, when, in fact, Chicago buildings of the era displayed a wide variety of styles and techniques. Erroneously, critics of the Chicago School iterated that publications before 1900 used the phrase "Commercial Style" to describe the innovative tall buildings of the era, rather than proposing any sort of unified "school". However, research completed in 2016 demonstrates that the term “Chicago school” was used in the public media and known by the general public since the 1880s. In 1900, the term was used in the first American-published textbook of architecture and it referred to skyscrapers, as pointed out by Dan C. Baciu in an article in the Journal of Architecture. The critique against the “Chicago School” by 20th and 21st-century scholars appears to be an example of poorly informed mock attack.

Some of the distinguishing features of the Chicago School are the use of steel-frame buildings with masonry cladding (usually terracotta), allowing large plate-glass window areas and limiting the amount of exterior ornamentation. Sometimes elements of neoclassical architecture are used in Chicago School skyscrapers. Many Chicago School skyscrapers contain the three parts of a classical column. The lowest floors functions as the base, the middle stories, usually with little ornamental detail, act as the shaft of the column, and the last floor or two, often capped with a cornice and often with more ornamental detail, represent the capital.

The "Chicago window" originated in this school. It is a three-part window consisting of a large fixed center panel flanked by two smaller double-hung sash windows. The arrangement of windows on the facade typically creates a grid pattern, with some projecting out from the facade forming bay windows. The Chicago window combined the functions of light-gathering and natural ventilation; a single central pane was usually fixed, while the two surrounding panes were operable. These windows were often deployed in bays, known as oriel windows, that projected out over the street.

Architects whose names are associated with the Chicago School include Henry Hobson Richardson, Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, William LeBaron Jenney, Martin Roche, John Root, Solon S. Beman, and Louis Sullivan. Frank Lloyd Wright started in the firm of Adler and Sullivan but created his own Prairie Style of architecture.

The Home Insurance Building, which some regarded as the first skyscraper in the world, was built in Chicago in 1885 and was demolished in 1931.

Buildings in Chicago

Buildings outside Chicago