As far as our search for the first all iron skeleton-framed tall building in Chicago the Second Leiter was another “near miss.” Many historians have labelled this building as being all iron-framed, but if we walk around to the back of the building we find that the rear wall was a loadbearing gridwork of brick.  

The building was only eight stories high. There was no reason for Jenney to expend the extra dollars to erect the iron frame in this location.  (The same reason for Root’s use of the west masonry wall in the Rand-McNally Building.) This type of wall was exactly what Field had Richardson design with the rear of the Wholesale store, including its shallow U-plan to form a lightcourt.  Leiter had simply followed the economical lead of Field in not wanting to pay the extra cost of using iron framing in this location and that of a multistory atrium to light the interior of his store.

With this exception, Jenney structured the building with the metal skeleton frame (cast iron columns and steel beams).  This may be somewhat misleading, however, for although there were no “walls” on the exterior, Jenney had once again, as he had detailed the Home Insurance Building, placed the cast iron columns inside the granite piers. (Maybe a better way of saying this is that he wrapped the stone slabs of the exterior piers around the iron columns.)

In fact, these iron columns had the same box cross-section but without the concrete filling of the Home Insurance Building.  The first question to ask is why use granite slabs on an iron frame?  Of course, the answer must have been because Field had demanded that Richardson use stone, and Leiter, by no means, wanted to look “cheaper” than Field.  Following Field’s lead, the Auditorium had been changed from brick to stone, that then led Sullivan to experiment with smooth-surfaced stone on the Walker Warehouse. 

This might have sparked a “fashion” but the last three buildings I have reviewed did not use stone. Root used glazed terra cotta in the Rand-McNally Building, first as an experiment, but also, I pointed out that this would have reduced the power of the bricklayer’s union to control the project. This, no doubt, Leiter would have also added into his financial calculations.

The piers at the building’s corners comprised of five and half feet widths of granite, the eight intermediate piers were slightly thinner, all supported itheir own weight to the ground. The building was only eight stories high, so the stone would easily support its own weight; no need to increase the size and cost of the cast iron columns.  The stone spandrels, however, would have to be carried by the steel spandrel beams.  The weight and inertia of the granite exterior would have assisted in resisting wind loads.    As this was only an eight-story tall building, however, relying on a stone exterior to assist in resisting wind loads was easier to do than in a 14-story skyscraper where the wind forces are a much more dominant design factor. 

Curiously, the Inter-Ocean reported on July 7, 1889, that Jenney’s iron frame was like “the system of construction first used in this extensive way by Mr. Jenney in the Home Insurance Building, and which has since become so popular for commercial and office buildings.”  This was the first published mention of the use of iron in the Home Insurance Building that I have uncovered since its completion in May 1885.  Over four years had passed without any interest or mention of Jenney’s experiment with iron columns, until LeRoy Buffington had been granted his patent for iron framing on May 22, 1888.  Why wasn’t the structure of the Home Insurance Building mentioned in any of the articles that covered the design and construction of any of the earlier constructed buildings that employed the iron frame in their exteriors, such as the Tacoma or Chamber of Commerce Buildings or the Rand-McNally Building?  All three of these were designed and constructed, using iron shelves to support their masonry exteriors, during the publication of Buffington’s patent of iron framing.  But over a year had since passed before anyone had really appreciated the threat that Buffington’s patent could pose to Chicago’s owners and builders. Could it have been the threat of royalties due to Buffington who now had a patent for iron framing that forced Chicago’s construction community to seek an example of “prior art” in order to negate his patent royalties?  The “big lie” had been born.

Jenney’s design consciously, or merely conceptually, once again recalled the Shillito’s Store in Cincinnati (v.2, sec. 6.13) that he had used as the basis for the design for his earlier 1879 building for Leiter.  (Obviously either leiter or Jenney really liked Shillito’s building…) The second Leiter Building would be an updated version of the twelve year-old Shillito Store.  In essence, Jenney would take its cubic, Renaissance palazzo form and structurally-based elevations to the next, logical evolutionary step. As was the case with Shillito’s store, there were no walls whatsoever in the interior of Leiter’s store.  This was a departure from the Field store in which Field had demanded firewalls to reduce the spread of any fire.  I also pointed out that Leiter had followed Field, and not Shillito by nixing the extra cost of an interior atrium.

In the wings of the Hercules building, Jenney’s elevational language was “structural.”  That is, the columns were expressed as continuous piers, and the beams were expressed as recessed spandrels. However, rather than just simply covering the metal frame with a repetition of the minimum of fireproof material, as Root had always done in his lightcourt elevations, and as had Holabird & Roche with the exterior of the Tacoma, Jenney preferred to compose a lyrical elevation that still employed the conventional motif of a rhythm that expressed a compositional hierarchy. By increasing the widths of some of the piers, he created a second rhythm across the face of the building. I didn’t realize the reason for this until I spliced the tower out of the perspective sketch above; the two wings were not the same length!  I had to count the number of bays in each wing to confirm this, because Jenney’s visual trick of using the widen piers to “camouflage” this asymmetry had completely fooled me. He also resorted to the Classical tripartite composition of the elevation with corner pavilions (with five vs. three windows) into a tripartite elevation of a two-story base, a four-story middle, and a two-story top, defined by making the spandrel flush with the piers at the seventh floor.

I reviewed the Hercules elevation so that we might better understand how Jenney arrived at the final elevation of the Second Leiter Building. His initial elevation for the six-story design was simply the Shillito’s elevation with three exceptions: first, Jenney had expressed only every other interior column with a pier (he had stretched the visual width of the bays). Second, he had placed two, rather than three double-hung windows in each bay. Last, and most importantly, instead of keeping the width of the corner piers the same as the interior piers as had McLaughlin, Jenney wanted to “compose” the building’s elevation rather than simply accept the repetition of the bays ad infinitum.  Therefore, he widened the corner piers as the prevailing architectural conventions dictated.  But when compared to his Hercules elevations, Jenney followed McLaughlin’s precedent by not creating “corner pavilions” at the corners, per the French Classical tradition. 

While this elevation still looks like a “structural” frame, in fact this façade was, as is the final elevation, a “structural” lie.  Obviously, as I pointed out in the corner detail of the ground floor above, the two side elevations were most decidedly “dishonest,” as the repeated spacing of the piers from the front elevation bore no relation to the spacing of the interior columns along these two elevations. Jenney had chosen to “express” (not literally expose) in the State Street facade only every other column of the interior frame, probably for two reasons: first, the elevation would have been just “too busy” with piers at the same spacing of the interior columns; and second, those wide piers reduced the amount of daylight when compared to the intermediate smaller mullions (that are in front of every other structural column in the interior). Here is a perfect example of a “rational” design that is not “truthful.” The two terms are not necessarily synonymous. Then Leiter added two more stories, and just like Root who had to revise the elevations of the Rookery for the same reason, Jenney had to rethink the now eight-story elevations.

His solution was to remove the cornice of six-windowed bays, and rubber stamp the middle layer of three floors of the six-story scheme on top of the original three-story layer, with one exception: he placed the six-windowed cornice in the upper floor of the new, three-story layer. He capped this new layer with an appropriately scaled cornice, creating a crisp cubic volume. But then he faced a choice: should he keep the continuous spandrel at the sixth floor that would nullify the conventional tripartite scheme of the old elevation, or eliminate this line and allow the piers to extend unbroken for their entire six-story height so as to maintain a tripartite composition?

Unfortunately, he obviously couldn’t make up his mind and had naively tried to do both, but of course, this was inherently impossible. He capped each of the ten piers with abstracted capital as if they were six-story tall elements, that broke the elevation into nine equal bays.  One of the few unfortunate design errors occurred where these piers were joined flush with the continuous spandrel that Jenney used to break the six-story body into two three-story layers.  Instead of allowing the piers to be dominant by recessing this horizontal behind the vertical thrust of the piers, as he had done in the other four spandrels, Jenney kept this horizontal in the same plane as that of the pier, implying that the elevation was not a line of piers that supported the cornice, but a smooth plane into which the windows were carved, not unlike Root’s treatment of the Rand-McNally Building.  This resulted in an awkward hermaphroditic quality when Jenney applied capitals at the top of the piers, that was only reinforced by the design of the joints in the granite that implied the frieze was dominant over the piers because the vertical joints of these blocks were consciously not aligned with the edges of the pilaster.  Was the elevation a colonnade or a wall? 

Each of the nine bays was broken into an upper three-story zone, and a lower three-story zone that were detailed with a subtle and sure-handed difference.  The large horizontal distance between each pier was not a direct result of Jenney’s use of a steel beam to span this distance. (A plate girder, 36 inches high, made up of two cover plates, forming the upper and lower flanges, two web plates, and four angles, runs around the entire wall just above the first story.  Box girders are also used as spandrels, but almost all the other beams are rolled steel I-beams.) As the floor plans clearly show, Jenney chose to place a pier in front of only every other column.  This was a conscious choice on his part to reduce the number of vertical elements in the State Street elevation in an attempt, successful in my opinion, to achieve a better balance between the horizontals and the verticals in the façade.  In essence, he had designed two almost identical horizontal layers in the elevation.

Rather than matter-of-factly just repeating the same window four times in each bay, Jenney’s lyrical intent arranged each of the two layers in a geometric hierarchy by first dividing each major bay in half with a thinner, secondary pier in front of the “every other column.” These contained two engaged colonettes that stretched for the three stories between the major central frieze.  These broke up the four double-hung windows in each bay of the lower layer into pairs of two, that were then further divided by a tertiary pier that had one engaged colonette.  In the upper layer, in the eighth floor he placed six narrower windows, three to either side of the secondary pier to help create the building’s top.

Obviously, this spacing forced him to stop the tertiary piers one floor shorter than in the lower zone, and here he made a second, minor, but still visible error.  Instead of allowing the spandrel at the eighth floor to span continuously from the primary to the secondary piers, which he implied with the location of the capitals of the tertiary colonettes, he placed a vertical extension on top of this capital that extended to the sillcourse of the window above that broke the spandrel into two halves.  He had located the capital of the tertiary pier in the correct location to support the lintels in the spandrel; it was the vertical extension block that simply confused the clarity of the otherwise exquisite structurally expressive hierarchy of the elevation. Jenney was forced into this compromise because he couldn’t repeat the detail he had used in the same location two floors below (see photo above) because while the lower detail had the spandrel in the same plane as the intermediate pier, he had recessed the spandrel in the eighth floor, but had kept the pier in the original plane, leaving the dimension of the recess to be addressed, hence, the reason for the offending stone extension.

A third, minor design error in the elevation was located in the second floor, where Jenney changed the intermediate pier from two to three engaged colonettes.  The visual weight of the three columns was simply not sufficiently visually supported by the granite lintel that it sat on, and if Jenney was actually trying to impart a rhythmic progression in this vertical line, keeping the three in the lower level, and two in the middle, should not have the uppermost layer contained only one colonette, instead of two? It would have been better if he had maintained the two colonettes in this floor.

These minor flaws notwithstanding, Jenney’s final design was a well-balanced weaving of horizontals and verticals in search of Owen Jones’ “repose,” with the nostalgic stone voussoir arch finally relegated to the dustbin of history.  This was a truly rational, modern elevational expression based upon (but not identical to) the underlying rectangular grid of the structural metal framework.  It is my favorite of Jenney’s many designs.

FURTHER READING:

Turak, Theodore. William Le Baron Jenney. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

If Root’s Rand-McNally Building can be viewed as his attempt to “one up” Richardson’s Field Wholesale Store, a more vengeful response to Marshall Field’s new building was announced soon after it opened by his former partner, Levi Leiter.  We left off with the spite battle between the two former partners in March 1885, when Field had ordered S.S.Beman to complete the details of his planned 13-story skyscraper at the southwest corner of La Salle and Monroe and to renew excavation from its winter lull.  Field had approved the breaking into of Leiter’s adjacent basement in order to shore up the existing wall and to place the new foundation for his building.  Leiter countered by obtaining a permanent injunction in May 1885 against Field from doing any more construction on Leiter’s side of the wall.  Field had been vindicated the following year (in May 1886) when the Illinois’ Supreme Court ruled that the original agreement was a party wall contract, implying that the easement of support was given to both parties, and that one party could not have the benefits without submitting his property to the requirements of support for either party.  However, while Field had won the battle, he had lost the war, for the time lost during the postponement in construction had killed the project as the building boom had oversaturated the rental market and the Haymarket Square bombing and trials had all but halted construction. (see v.3, sec. 8.19).  So the partially excavated hole at one the busier corners of S. La Salle Street had sat quietly for the next three years, until Field, following the opening of his new Wholesale Store, in a rare show generosity, offered the site to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in July 1888 (v.4, sec. 5.4).

Three months later it was announced the Leiter had obtained the entire half block on the east side of State Street between Van Buren and Congress.  In April 1889, the local press announced Leiter’s intention to build a huge new department store covering the entire site.  Leiter was quoted as saying that in planning the building, he anticipated that the almost-completed Auditorium would draw business farther south from the existing core.  Not only was Leiter’s new building (now commonly referred to as the Second Leiter Building to distinguish it from his earlier building, now known as the First Leiter Building, designed by William Le Baron Jenney in 1879) going to be 20% larger than Field’s (and three feet taller!), but it was also being designed as the most modern building in Chicago, said “to be as complete and perfect in all its appointments as the resources of modern art and science can make it.”  

• 

• 

Leiter’s intent was quite transparent, he was attempting to steal all of the publicity surrounding his former partner’s new Wholesale Store, while implying that it was already a dinosaur.  The contrast between the two buildings couldn’t have been starker, yet there were less than four years separating the two designs.  The Field Store was a rough-hewn medieval fortress while the Leiter Store was an open, light-filled cage of smooth-faced, light gray Maine granite, due to its modern skeleton frame construction.  The Leiter Store still stands today as a testament to the owner’s faith in new technology; the Field Store had to be demolished in 1930 primarily because its architect had still not learned the lessons of modern foundations.  Truly, Leiter would take great pleasure in his new building, for more than one reason.

Leiter turned once more to William Le Baron Jenney to design the store.  In addition to having designed Leiter’s building at the northwest corner of Wells and Monroe in 1879, Leiter had also commissioned Jenney in 1884 to remodel his six-story Tobey Building, located at State and Jackson.  Jenney would benefit greatly from his professional relationship with Leiter, for this new commission would reinvigorate not only his firm’s business, but also his historical reputation.  Between the bookends of the ten-year period from the First Leiter Building of 1879 to the Second Leiter Building of 1889, Jenney had designed only two rather significant buildings, the Union League Club (of which he was a member) and the Home Insurance Building.  The Home Insurance commission, as I have already documented, was due not his preeminence within Chicago’s architectural community at the time, but because of a personal favor given by the company’s Chicago agent, Arthur Ducat, a Civil War acquaintance of Jenney’s. 

Following the completion of the Home Insurance Building, Jenney had no more commissions for skyscrapers or other large buildings that were erected.  If the Home Insurance Building was such a pioneering achievement in construction or architecture, as it has been made out to be by many historians, why didn’t building owners and contractors flock to Jenney’s door in 1885 or 1886, before the Haymarket Square bombing, or in mid-1888 with the upturn in construction?  We only have to list Chicago’s major architects and their completed skyscrapers during this period prior to Jenney’s commission for the Second Leiter Building to ascertain Jenney’s meager output during this important era.  One can only imagine what would have Jenney’s future reputation had been if Leiter had favored a different architect or had died prior to 1889.

While Jenney was in the initial design phase of the Leiter Store, he also was working on what one can only describe as a monster project, the appropriately named Hercules Building.  Apparently commissioned by the site’s owners, the Young and Farrell Stone Company, Jenney had designed a mammoth building, reported to cost over $3 million, for a site on the west bank of the river, on the south side of Polk Street.  Its dimensions were 497’ by 372’ with eight floors at a height of 120.’  In the center of the building, Jenney positioned a 14-story tower that rose to a final height of 212,’ that divided the mass of the building into two equal wings.  The building’s primary intent was to provide manufacturing space in close proximity to the business district and the railroad terminals.  Jenney took advantage of the site’s slope to the river in designing the building’s section to provide for a very efficient system of movement of materials and goods throughout the building.  Wharves would line the river’s edge, while the sectional grade was such that railroad tracks passed through the basement.  These moves permitted him to design the ground floor with an unencumbered openness that would have allowed horse-drawn wagons complete freedom of movement under the upper floors.  The building was scheduled to have an unprecedented 28 elevators for people and freight.

Its construction was reported to have been steel skeleton framing with stone walls.  The openness in the elevations, especially the end bays in which Jenney placed five windows, obviously reveals that the stone walls (the building’s owner was a stone company) were merely a veneer, for only a steel frame in the exterior could have achieved such spans.  The design of the building’s elevation was quite functionally-based, especially those of the two flanking wings.  No nostalgic arches are used; the entire elevation was an unornamented field of a rectangular grid.  Jenney articulated the eight floors of the wings into a two-story, rough-hewn stone base, a four-story middle, and a two-story top.  A balance between the wings’ primary horizontal proportions was achieved with the six-story, unbroken vertical pilasters that Jenney used to frame the corners and the entrance of each wing.

• 

• 

While the overall profile of the tower owes its allegiance to Sullivan’s tower in the Auditorium, it is quite evident that Jenney had thought that Sullivan had designed the intersection of his tower and the lower body of the Auditorium rather poorly. Instead of just placing the extra floors of the vertically-articulated tower on the top of the lower horizontal body, and trying to resolve the inherent conflict in this solution by blurring the merging of these two forces with the slight projection of the edges of the tower as Sullivan had done, Jenney simply let the 84’ x 112’ deep plan of the tower extend all the way to the ground by recessing the first two bays of the wings on either side of the tower (which was actually the way that Adler had detailed the construction of the Auditorium’s tower).  This perfectly articulated the tower as separate from the body of the wings.  He reinforced this effect by also raising the tower’s stone base one more story than that of the wings (as had Sullivan).  While Jenney did resort to the arch in the design of the tower, it is his design of a seven-story arcade, continued another three stories into the stone base, with its unbroken, continuous 10-story vertical piers that is prophetic.  (He had superseded the eight-story run of the continuous piers that George Edbrooke had detailed in the Hiram Sibley Warehouse of 1883.)  While the Hercules, obviously, must have been far more costly than even its projectors had anticipated, and, therefore, went unbuilt, Jenney would succeed in building both the straightforward body of the wings, as well as the sheer verticality of its tower in his next two projects.  

FURTHER READING:

Turak, Theodore. William Le Baron Jenney. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

The third building of 1888 in which the iron frame was introduced into the exterior was the Rand-McNally Building.  In the fall of 1888, Burnham & Root were contracted by the local printing/publishing house Rand-McNally to design a new office building to be constructed adjacent to Root’s Insurance Exchange on a site that was in the interior of the block that ran between Adams and Quincy, to replace their existing building at 125 W. Monroe. While Root would push construction technology to the next level in this building, it was the site that controlled the overall design of this building.

The size of the lot was about the same size as that of the Rookery. The difference was that this site was not a corner site, but an interior site, very much like that of the Royal Insurance Building (v.3, sec. 7.11) that sat across the street facing the Quincy elevation.  

As in the Rookery, Burnham, who typically was responsible for figuring out the most efficient floor plan for a given project, had lined both street fronts with a double-loaded corridor while placing single-loaded offices against the two masonry party walls. 

This left a 60’ x 68’ lightcourt lined, once again lined in white-glazed brick, in the center with the skylight brought down to the second floor so that the interior ring of offices had access to daylight and fresh air, again echoing the Rookery.  As the building’s use was primarily for the company, the accounting department was located on the ground floor in the space directly under the skylight. Therefore, the building did not need, nor did it enjoy the exhilarating spatial sequence of the Rookery.  One could consider the Rand-McNally to have been the Rookery’s poor cousin…

The site in the interior of this block, in combination with the company’s program, dictated a very efficient ground floor plan: entries were located at each of the building’s four corners to minimize employee travel distance to an elevator bank at each end of the building. Employees simply passed through one of the corner entries and went directly to an elevator bank and up to their respective floor, except the accountants, who were able to enjoy the one inspiring space in the entire building.  Between the entrances at either end the street fronts on both elevations were to be rented out as stores.

Although the size of the site was equivalent to that of the Rookery, because it was located in the interior of the block, Root was faced with the design of only an elevation, as opposed to the three-dimensional mass of the Rookery and his other corner buildings, including the neighboring Insurance Exchange and Burlington Building.  In concept, the problem of designing a building with two independent elevations was similar to what Boyington had faced with the Royal Insurance Building. While Boyington had designed two completely different elevations, economics dictated Root’s repetition. There were two considerations for Root to address in the design of the building’s elevations: one technical expression, and second, the building’s architectural/urban context.

It was the context that was the more challenging of the two, and so, I’ll start there. Adams Street, as I’ve already alluded to, was quickly emerging as Chicago’s architectural showcase.  To the east of the site sat Root’s Insurance Exchange and the Rookery, as well as the Home Insurance Building; to the west sat his Burlington Building. But the real challenge was Richardson’s recently completed Marshall Field’s Wholesale Store. As this was on the same side of the street as the Rand-McNally lot, his design would be seen “inline” with the Field’s sophisticated use of stone arcades.

Given such an opportunity to have “the last laugh” with Richardson’s (who had died two years earlier) masterpiece next door, Root had to have been extremely frustrated with the company’s representatives who could not make up their mind on how many floors to build.  During the design phase, Root was asked to design elevations that contained 9, 10, 12, 14, and 16 floors.  This indecisiveness would have tried the patience of Job, so one can just imagine the utter frustration that Root went through trying to one-up Richardson with this particular project.  Eventually the company decided on ten stories.

• 

• 

As Root had been the first in Chicago to use the iron frame and curtain wall in the lightcourt of the Rookery, it was logical that he would also be one of the first to try the new system on the exterior of a tall building.  First, he restated the elevation of the Rookery’s lightcourt to enclose the Rand-McNally’s court. To this new type of exterior construction he added the extra challenge of using only enameled terra cotta to clad the iron frame.  In addition to the reducing the weight of the brick exterior and the corresponding increase in rentable area gained from using the thinner terra cotta, the work done on a building controlled by the members of the bricklayers’ union would be significantly reduced, lessening the chance of a slowdown in the building’s construction.

I am quite certain that in his mind, Root believed he had already solved in the Rookery’s lightcourt the problem of designing an elevation that rationally expressed the gridlike nature of the iron skeleton frame.  I think he took the opportunity afforded with the Rand-McNally design to explore the plastic potential of terra cotta as an exterior material.  

The year before the firm received the commission, Root had published in the Inland Architect a paper, “Style,” in which he clearly stated:

“The value of plain surfaces in every building is not to be overestimated.  Strive for them, and when the fates place at your disposal a good, generous sweep of masonry, accept it frankly and thank God.  If this goodly surface comes at the corners of your building, so much the better; for there can be no better guaranty that the house will “stay where it was put” than the presence of simple masonry at its angles.”

Think of the Rand-McNally’s facade as one 158′ long by ten-story high sheet (or curtain) of smooth clay hung on the building’s skeletal structure. Now you get to carve the windows for each floor in it. You could simply make the windows all the same, but for Root an elevation was still meant to be a composed piece of architecture. While one can easily read the steel frame behind the terra cotta skin, Root’s design was not a dry repetition of the same floor detailing, one on top of the next, as was his design of the Rookery lightcourt or Holabird & Roche’s design of the Tacoma Building’s elevations.  Root was Root, and the design of a building was but one more opportunity to experiment with a “full-scale model.”  

First off, he treated the facade of the Rand-McNally as one continuous, ten-story high surface of plastic terra cotta. In this aspect it continued his earlier experiments with such a surface in the two apartment buildings he had designed in 1886 following the precedent set by Richardson in the middle layer of the Field Wholesale Store’s elevations (in which he had eliminated the continuous sillcourse between the primary and secondary arcades). Sullivan had also experimented with the smooth, unbroken multi-storied surface in the elevations of the Walker Warehouse, that sat only three blocks to the west along Adams Street. The difference between the Sullivan’s building and Root’s was that Sullivan had used a smooth stone wall that also provided the building’s structure; Root was going to explore the same language of the smooth-surfaced exterior, except with a different material. Where Sullivan’s detailing was rightfully lithic and designed with Sullivan’s propensity to see a building as a series of intersecting, two-dimensional planes (i.e., sharp corners), Root explored the plastic possibilities with terra cotta designed with his propensity to see a building as a three-dimensional volume (i.e., rounded corners) to be sculpted. (Once again, no judgment, both approaches are valid, but very different in design.) This was not the only detail from Sullivan that Root appropriated in his design of the Rand-McNally Building.

At first glance, surviving photographs of the Rand-McNally Building’s exterior tend to make the viewer think that the elevation consisted of corner pavilions that acted as bookends within which Root placed a number of horizontal layers. These images contain the exterior fire escapes that were located in front of each of the corner pavilions, that obscured how each of the floors intersected with the corner pavilions.

He had detailed slightly wider pilasters within the elevation’s surface to articulate the two end bays of the façade. These contained the entries on the ground floor and the elevator corridors above. The corner pavilions made a frame but were still contiguous with the smooth, taut terra cotta ten-story surface.  It is when one zooms in for a closer inspection that we see that Root had detailed the entire 10-storied surface as one continuous plane, within which he then carved out the windows, experimenting with a number of different details.  Hence, the reason I call this building a “Whitman Smapler” of how terra cotta could be detailed in any number of different ways to frame a window opening. No matter if you move up or across the building’s face, you will find that the exterior is one continuous surface within which Root then proceeds to show a number of different corner conditions achievable with the plasticity of terra cotta. In fact, in the total ten floors, eight of these each had different details. Only floors 5 and 6 and 8 and 9 were duplicates. Within this building, Root took the opportunity to experiment with each of the four types of constructional articulation that I have listed as being an appropriate rational solution for the iron skeleton frame: the structural grid (the lightcourt), the column/vertical (floors 5-7), the horizontal repetition of stacked identical floors (floors 8-10), and the uniform surface enclosing the building’s volume (all ten floors).

Root used continuous projected sillcourses (that he stopped short at the corner pavilions) to break the elevation into four zones, each displaying a different window technique:

Zone 1. The first two floors were one continuous two-story surface of terra cotta. In this close-up photo of the building’s base, I have highlighted where the building’s original surface continues past the joint between the corner pavilion and each floor (arrow #1).  At first glance, the two stories look like separate layers, defined by a continuous sillcourse. Yet, when we get closer, it is apparent that the sillcourse was broken for a few inches at the centerline of each column (arrow #2), just enough to allow the surface of the Ground Floor to ooze up, into the second floor.  The first floor storefronts were carved into the surface plane with his characteristics curved edges and with a curved corner between the pier and the beam.  The second floor was detailed as a line of single-story columns that Root had formed by taking the terra cotta surface of the lower floor and bending it to form a column that sat above the flat-fronted pier below.  These were capped with an ornamental capital that supported the sharp-cornered spandrel of the third floor. A pair of double-hung windows set the secondary vertical spacing between the primary spacing of the terra cotta clad steel columns.

Zone 2.  He detailed this zone as a two-story colonnade by recessing the spandrels between floors three and four. While the columns had rounded corners, the lintel of the colonnade once again had a sharp corner. The mullions in floor 3 were detailed to be flush with the recessed spandrel above, while those in floor 4 were slightly different as they sat recessed from the original surface of the elevation.

Zone 3.  This zone contained his old friend, the arcade, that obviously Root was having a hard time saying good-bye to. The piers in this zone were triple-stepped in section that supported crisply-detailed voussoir arches. He continued the same window spacing from below, with the exception, rightly so, under the arches in which he appropriately divided into three windows with smaller mullions than those used with the paired windows.  One detail I truly appreciate that I want to bring to your attention is how he detailed the connection of the arches to the wider piers of each corner pavilion: the sharp edge of the arch dissipates into a line as the pier’s corner curves away from it.

Zone 4. Here he articulated each floor into its own layer with a continuous sillcourse. He continued to use the triple-stepped piers and the paired window language in these three floors, but with a final twist. He recessed the spandrel in front of the roof to be flush with the recessed secondary window mullions that allowed the primary piers to read as if they were helping to support the building’s cornice. While zones 2 and 3 had a vertical accent, with these sillcourses he gave zone 4 a distinct horizontal grain, probably to provide an appropriate cap for the elevation.  As the elevation was nearly as wide as it was tall, such a balance between these two forces would have imparted a sense of “repose” to the design.  A feat of master design, that is to synthesize four related, but different elevational languages into one “reposeful” elevation.

The enigma of the final design was his continued use of his old friend, the multistoried arcade.  Similar to his awkward placement of the arcade in the Phoenix elevation, he located the three-story arcade in the ambiguous midheight region, with the arches capping the windows in the seventh floor.  One wonders at first viewing why didn’t he put these at the top, in the compositionally more logical location, or was Root trying to tie his elevation back to the arcade in the Insurance Exchange, or had it something to do with Richardson’s arcades in the adjacent Field Store?  There is a reference that states that the company wanted its printing presses located on the seventh floor, but this flies in the face of everything we have learned about buildings with printing presses.  First, the presses are heavy, and second, they are susceptible to the slightest vibrations (that the building’s lightweight steel frame most certainly would not have retarded).  Nevertheless, if this was the case, then no one can question the logic of Root’s placement of the only arches in the entire field of the building’s elevation to mark the presence of this special activity. (If this was the case, then Root gave us five examples of a “rational” elevation for a skyscraper, i.e., an expression of the building’s internal function.) But again, Root told us that arches actually retard the amount of daylight making it to the interior,  This may have been somewhat offset because the openings under the arches were appropriately divided into three windows with smaller mullions than those used with the paired windows, arguably compensating for the lost daylight caused by the arches.  My instinct tells me that Root placed these arches here to tie the Rand-McNally to the Rookery in order to create an urban setpiece with the three Root designs lining these two blocks of Adams.

The only other arches used by Root demarked the two entries at either end bay.  These were ornamented with terra cotta panels that bore Root’s personal organic-motifed designs. 

• 

• 

Curiously, while these were semicircular in profile, the arcade arches had an elliptical profile, the first use by Root of this shape.  While I can make an argument that this shape allows more daylight to enter than the semicircle, I am intrigued by another idea: Root took this shape from Sullivan’s interior of the Auditorium’s House, whose interior had only recently been opened to the public for the Republican Convention (opening night was still over a year in the future).  If this was the only quote from a recent Sullivan building, I would not have mentioned it.  But I have already mentioned Sullivan’s smooth-surfaced Walker Warehouse, in which he had employed projected ledges for their articulation and their shadow, in a similar manner to how Root then used them in the Rand-McNally Building.  In fact, I had pointed out how Root had interrupted these at the second floor to allow the building’s surface to continue through this opening. Sullivan had done this exact detail at the third and seventh floors in the Walker Warehouse.

As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, the Rand-McNally Building was the third of this series of Chicago buildings designed 1888 to replace exterior masonry walls with iron skeleton framing in the evolutionary process of birthing the all iron-framed skyscraper that Buffington had prophesized in May 1888.  In addition to being the first exterior made from only enameled terra cotta, it also deserves credit for having been the first all-steel structure. This, however, does not mean that it was an independent steel-framed building without any bearing walls, for the west party wall was still a masonry bearing wall.  In other words, all of the building’s structure, except this one wall comprised of iron skeleton framing.  The family tree of its construction consisted of:

1. The Rookery: its lightcourt iron framing and curtain wall.

2. Cleveland’s Society for Savings Building: Charles Strobel’s riveted steel z-bar columns.

3. The Tacoma Building: its engineers, Wade & Purdy and its contractor, George Fuller, were responsible for its erection.

As was done in the Society for Savings Building, steel z-bar columns were used, hot-riveted to steel beams to achieve sufficient rigidity to resist the wind loads. The frame was braced in the horizontal plane with diagonal ties rods in the floors to resist wracking of the frame due to wind and to incorporate the rigidity of 44” thick west wall to assist against the wind. I am sure that it was less expensive to use load-bearing masonry in this wall rather than the skeletal construction used to erect the east wall.

While the building code also required a masonry party wall between the Insurance Exchange and the Rand-McNally Building, the Insurance Exchange’s party wall had not been designed with the idea of eventually having to support an adjacent building, meaning that the Rand-McNally Building would have to be built with its own party wall in this location.  This posed a vexing problem for Root and his consulting engineers, Wade & Purdy, in that he could not locate the new party wall immediately up to the Insurance Exchange if he employed a conventional foundation, for he would have to place the new load of the Rand-McNally’s east wall on the Insurance Exchange’s existing pyramidal footing.  This would significantly increase the stress under the footing, which would expose the existing building to the subsequent additional settlement and would certainly result in cracking within the Insurance Exchange. 

Root evolved a revolutionary solution by cantilevering iron box beams in the basement from the first interior line of columns, over a fulcrum located a safe distance from the existing foundations of the Insurance Exchange, to the edge of the lot line.  Here the cantilevers could support the loads of the steel columns of the skeleton frame that Root placed in the party wall (to also lighten the weight of the wall that would have to be transferred by the cantilevers).  Thus, the cantilevers carried the load of the east party wall back to the fulcrum and down to the ground, without impacting the existing foundation. The rotation of the cantilever was counterbalanced by making the cantilever continuous over the fulcrum to the first line of columns whose loads offset that of the cantilevers..   He had achieved his second innovation in foundation engineering (the first being the use of iron rails to reinforce concrete in the construction of pad foundations, that replaced stone pyramidal foundations). However, the Rand-McNally Building still had one load-bearing masonry wall. We have yet found Chicago’s first all-skeleton framed skyscraper…

FURTHER READING:

Condit, Carl W. The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875-1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Hoffmann, Donald. The Architecture of John Wellborn Root. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

Hoffmann, Donald. The Meanings of Architecture: Buildings and Writings by John Wellborn Root. New York: Horizon, 1967.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)

The Tacoma Building was the first, but only the first in a number of experiments that builders erected during the period 1888-89, in the process of carefully divorcing the iron frame from the lateral support imparted by the masonry wall.  The second experiment in Chicago occurred in the Chamber of Commerce building, one of the least documented and appreciated Chicago School buildings, but one of my favorite designs.

An eight-story addition was placed on top of the post-fire Chamber of Commerce building at the southeast corner of La Salle and Washington, just north of the Tacoma.  In fact, both buildings were on their respective drafting boards at the same time, so one can consider the Chamber of Commerce to simply be a bigger experiment of the Tacoma concept.  Once again, we can point to Cincinnati for the impetus for this project. 

The new Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, for which H.H. Richardson had won the competition in 1885 had opened its doors on January 30, 1888. (Doesn’t it already look dated?)  During the period of its construction, the owners of Chicago’s outmoded Chamber of Commerce, following the jump of the Board of Trade to the south end of La Salle Street had simply continued to wallow in self-pity.  Construction of the Cincinnati building was garnering national recognition that simply forced the Chamber’s directors to take action.  The new construction was also influenced by the completion and occupation of the post-fire City Hall, that sat directly across on the northside of Washington Street. A group of Chicago investors bought the old building and hired Edward Baumann and Harris W. Huehl to remodel the existing building to accept an eight-story addition.

Edward Baumann (1838-1889) was born Marienwerder, near Danzig, Prussia, in 1838, completed his polytechnic training in 1856, and immediately immigrated to the US, being hired by his cousin Frederick in 1857.  (Frederick Baumann is often mistakenly credited with the design of this building.) Harris Huehl (1862-1919) was a native Chicagoan who had experienced all of his professional training in the office of Edward Baumann, who made him his partner in July 1888, as the project became a reality.  It was a prudent decision on the part of Baumann, who died before the building was completed, in Berlin, Germany, on January 25, 1889.  Huehl was left to see the building through to completion. The reason some authors connect Frederick Baumann with the design of this building is that the addition was erected with an iron skeleton frame and Frederick had been one of the earlier architects to actually publish an article discussing the possibility of such construction in the March 15, 1884, issue of Sanitary News, “Improved Construction of High Buildings.” (see v.3, sec. 8.15)

The existing building was one of the first post-fire buildings to be erected so as to encourage investors to rebuild the city and to quickly replace the home of the Board of Trade to get its operation “back to normal.”  It had been designed by Cochrane & Miller.  There were two floors of offices that were topped by the three-story high Exchange Hall. While the new owners decided to keep much of the stone exterior of the old building whose existing structural rhythm would determine the elevation of the new addition, because the Board of Trade had abandoned the building in 1885, its outdated Exchange Hall was no longer needed so the building’s interior was gutted and replaced with the insertion of the iron frame within the existing stone walls.

Baumann & Huehl lined the perimeter of the site with a single-loaded corridor plan that left a narrow 24’ wide (if we ignore the cantilevered walkways, it was 32′ wide) atrium that ran through much of the rear two-thirds of the plan and extended for the building’s entire height of thirteen stories.  This was covered by a 35’ x 108’ iron and plate glass skylight. (I’ll remind you that the skylight in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel (1871) was 84’ x 144.’)

After having demolished the interior of the existing building, new foundations were placed upon which were set the wrought iron columns of the skeleton frame, including those in the three public faces.  As Holabird & Roche had done in the Tacoma Building, Baumann & Huehl designed a hybrid structure that combined the rigidity of the iron frame’s connections with the stiffness of masonry lateral walls. The floor plan shows the location of two lateral masonry walls, that were interrupted at the atrium. The rear or alley wall appears from the plan and elevation to also have been a masonry wall.  Finding the centerline of the plan, these three walls were decidedly offset towards the southern portion of the building.  (This is obvious because the two walls do not align with the two “wider” central piers.) This leads me to speculate that the architects/engineers relied on the thick masonry piers to either side of the central pavilion (with the five windows) and, most likely, the elevator/stair cores (there were eight elevators) at the northern portion of the building to provide lateral support.

They kept the entrance portico with its four columns (and reprised the alternating drums of different diameters in the upper pediments). While they also kept the main piers of the deep-jointed stone two-story base, they eliminated the secondary piers and the arcade these supported in order to create larger windows. This forced them to keep the wider piers that framed the old elevation’s center pavilion, that they used in the same manner in the La Salle façade.  They also kept the arched entry along La Salle Street, which explains its asymmetrical location in the new building.  It appears that of the original upper portion, they kept only the four major pilasters on each front and the entablature these supported.

The presence of the iron frame in the exterior of the addition is easily seen in the large openings between the piers in both elevations.  In the ten bays the architects inherited along La Salle Street, they placed triple windows. In the shorter Washington facade, they celebrated the strength of the steel beams by detailing an unprecedented line of five windows in the center pavilion that was framed with corner pavilions that had four windows each.

In order to merge the older, horizontally layered original base, Baumann & Huehl broke the elevation of the eleven new floors into a layered composition with a rhythm of 3:3:4:1, the top floor terminating the elevation with an arcade that continued the spacing of the windows of the lower floors.  Although this rhythm inverted the conventional reduction of floors within a layer as one reached the top of the building, I think in this case putting the four floors in the top layer actually reinforced perspective to make the building look taller than it was. By recessing the spandrels (which they did not have to do!) they created a vertical accent that counterbalanced the horizontal layers, imparting what I find to be a true sense of repose in the building’s facades.

As opposed to the neighboring Tacoma Building where the bay windows gave the facade a three-dimensional quality while blurring the reading of the structural frame, Baumann & Huehl have rendered the elevation as flat as possible by detailing the windows almost flush to the masonry. The result was a frank expression of the gridline nature of the iron skeleton frame that supported the building. The centers of both facades were marked by a yoke-shaped pediment (similar to Root’s in the Phoenix) that was framed with the reprise of the alternating drums of the original portico that  successfully tied the old with the new design. 

The architects chose a new color in Chicago for the exterior masonry, a bluish gray, in order to harmonize with the color of the existing stone in the base.  When completed, the building rose to a finished height of 182.’  So successful was Baumann & Heuhl’s design that, as I mentioned earlier, many historians simply assumed that the building had been designed fresh from the start.  Unfortunately, Baumann died while on a trip to Germany and never saw his completed building.

(If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to eMail me at: thearchitectureprofessor@gmail.com)