New materials with images

1. Chicago School
Revision

2. Origins
• This school appeared after the fire in Chicago that created
the need of rebuilding the city
• Architects were encouraged to build higher structures
because of the escalating land prices
• Conscious of the possibilities of the new materials and
structures they developed buildings in which:
– Isolated footing supported a skeleton of iron encased in masonry
– There were:
• fireproof floors,
• numerous fast elevators and
• gas light
– The traditional masonry wall became curtains, full of glass,
supported by the metal skeleton
– The first skyscrapers were born

3. Sources of the style
• The Louisiana-born architect Henry Hobson
Richardson. Although he was trained at the École
des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Richardson rejected the
école's dictum that the Greek and Roman classical
style was the ultimate standard of design. Instead,
his ideal was the rugged Romanesque of the South
of France.
• The second source of style for the architects of the
First Chicago School derived from the very nature
of the material they so wholeheartedly adopted:
steel.

4. Sullivan
• Sullivan was the main architect of this style
• Sullivan provided his building with a firm visual
base, treated the intermediate office floors as a unit,
and crowned the whole with a bold cornice
• The decorative ornamentation devised by Sullivan
and used on some of his office buildings is based on
floral motifs but organized in a manner closely
resembling the Irish interlace of the early Middle
Ages
• Sullivan designed with the principles of reconciling
the world of nature with science and technology

5. Sullivan
• His buildings were detailed with lush, yet tastefully subdued
organic ornamentation.
• His attempt to balance ornamentation into the whole of
building design inspired a generation of American and
European architects;
• the idea that ornamentation be integral to the building
itself, rather than merely applied.
• He created a personal style that had few imitators or
followers
• Sullivan is one of the few human beings to whom Frank
Lloyd Wright publicly acknowledged a debt of influence in
his career.

6. Auditorium Chicago
Almacenes Carson

7. Characteristics
• Bold geometric facades pierced with either arched or
lintel-type openings.
• The wall surface highlighted with extensive low-relief
sculptural ornamentation in terra cotta.
• Buildings often topped with deep
projecting eaves and flat roofs.
• The multi-story office complex
highly regimented into specific zones
or ground story, intermediate floors, and
the attic or roof.
• The intermediate floors are arranged
in vertical bands. Large arched window

8. Characteristics
• Large arched window
• Decorative terra cotta panel
• Decorative band
• Vertical strips of windows
• Pilaster-like mullions
• Projecting eaves (the under part of a sloping
roof overhanging a wall)

9. Characteristics
• Highly decorated frieze
• Enriched foliated rinceau (an ornamental
motif of scrolls of foliage, usually vine)
• Porthole windows
• Decorated terra cotta spandrels
• Capital of pilaster strips

10. Characteristics
• Guilloche (a pattern of interlacing bands
forming a plait and used as an enrichment on
a moulding) enrichment
• Foliated and linear enrichments along jambs
or entry

11. Architects
• Adler
• Sullivan
• Le Baron Jenney
• Burham
• Wellborn Root

12. Buildings
• Chicago’s Auditorium

13. Buildings
• Montauk block

14. Buildings
• Chicago Stock Exchange

15. Buildings
• Home Insurance Building

16. Buildings
• Carson Store

17. Influences
• The First Chicago School was an astonishing
and a profoundly important achievement.
• Its matchless tradition of technical prowess
and aesthetic boldness would surface again in
Chicago
– in the 1930s with the arrival of the Bauhaus, and
– in the following decades in the work of Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe and his disciples.