The final detailing of the brick and terra cotta exterior was again, a tour de force in clay. Root consciously modeled the building as a three-dimensional form in masonry. He expressed the mass of the masonry by pushing the windows as far back as he could so one could actually see the wall’s thickness (in contrast to the Midland Hotel) and emphasized its mass by curving every corner. There were no sharp 90° corners that resulted in planes in this building; it was mass, true plastic mass, through and through.
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The Architecture Professor 