The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan's Architecture and the City

JOSEPH M SIRY

The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan's Architecture and the City

Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 2002 568 pp: 16 color ills., 200 b/w $5500; $3500 paper

KATHERINE SOLOMONSON

The Chicago Tribune Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s

Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 2003 383 pp; 187 b/w ills. $2700

It was not drawn out ago that American architectural history consisted chiefly of biographies, thematic or typological studies, and synthetic scans The monographic approach, the thoroughgoing investigation of the patronage, design, construction, and iconography of a single building--like that accorded the records of Europe--was unknown. But in novel years detailed monographs have begun appearing, and to scholarly acclaim. Joseph Siry's research of the Chicago Auditorium Building received the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 2003 Katherine Solomonson accomplished the same feat the following year with her account of the Chicago Tribune Building. These sum of two units Chicago landmarks are very different buildings, and Siry and Solomonson have written sum of two units very different books.

The Auditorium Building (1887-89) which vaulted Louis Sullivan to national prominence, is regarded as his first mature work. It is a building of a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of complexity: a romanesque leviathan of granite and lime-stone occupying half a city block up into which is tucked a public-house an office building, and an opera house with more than 4200 seats (the largest in the world at the time of its construction). In neither phraseology nor technology is it particularly innovative. It is an explicit paraphrase of H H Richardson's nearby Marshall Field Building (1885-87) from which it derives its blocklike massing, its colossal masonry, and the adventurous ordered stride of its wall arcades. Its construction is likewise conventional for the period: load-bearing masonry for the exterior walls and a hybrid combination of parts to form a whole of iron columns and carbonized iron girders within (pp. 161-62).

Perhaps the Auditorium's greatest in quantity singular feature is the way it expresse its function--or does not. For the nineteenth hundred the central challenge of opera house design was to signify rhetorically its function and interior spaces. The opera houses of Charles Garnier in Paris and Gottfried Semper in Dresden are memorable precisely because their expressive physiognomy is a kind of exultant precis of the spaces and happenings within. The theater of the Auditorium Building, however, goe unrepresent upon the outside; apart from three capacious arches upon Congress Street and the rugg tower that rises above them, there is not a hint of the large public spaces beyond, and certainly not of spaces of stupefying luxuriance. It is the decorative and chromatic treatment of these plays that established Sullivan's reputation, which at first was not that of the pioneering functionalist he would later become, on the other hand rather as America's most original and imaginative designer of architectural ornament.

The Chicago Auditorium Building, Siry's authoritative and well-illustrated investigation of this monument of the Chicago seminary accomplishes precisely what a monograph should: it does filled justice to the building in its specific historical and local connection even as it illuminates those particular aspects that lift it above its age. Among the of recent origin material Siry presents on nearly each page, some of the greatest in quantity interesting concerns the Auditorium's patron, Ferdinand W Peck (1848-1924) The scholarly literature upon Sullivan has always contained more than a hint of hagiography, following the tone that he himself station In consequence, the role of clients in his career, with a actual few exceptions, has been slighted. In the case of Peck this is especially lamentable.

Peck was that characteristic Gilded Age emblem the capitalist-philanthropist, and one of phenomenal potency and executive ability. Acutely conscious that "vast numbers of tribe by settling in Chicago, had given immense value to the Peck estate," he worked hard to reciprocate by the agency of promoting philanthropic and workingmen's associations (p 35) He was the leading figure behind the Chicago Athenaeum, established after the fire of 1871 to provide adult education to working men and women He also was the chief actor in bringing the World's Columbian Exposition to Chicago in 1893 for which his hold Auditorium was an essential prerequisite. (Siry establishes that the Auditorium was single of the few buildings large enough to clinch a modern presidential convention--which it did for the first time in 1888 when it entertainered the nomination of Benjamin Harrison in its half-finished theater.)

The words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following for Peck's philanthropy was the constant looming specter of labor strife. Late-nineteenth-century Chicago had an enormous population of German immigrants, who brought one as well as the other a taste for opera and the activism of the German trade-union move Peck tried to address one as well as the other in 1884 by organizing a "Grand Opera Festival," which he envisioned as an annual affair. like an institution, he hoped, "would have a bent to diminish crime and Socialism in our city through educating the masses to higher things" (p 114) Toward this extreme point he hired Dankmar Adler, an architect of considerable experience in acoustics, to design a provisional opera house, a temporary stage and auditorium that would be inserted into the cavernous space of the city's exhibition hall. Adler had just promot his draftsman Louis Sullivan to filled partner, and their design was a kind of dres rehearsal for the Auditorium. Utterly independent from any structural considerations and relate toed only with the shaping of space and unimpaired within the shell of the hall, they be delighted withed an unusual degree of experimental freedom. (Having one time enjoyed this freedom, they were evidently reluctant to relinquish it, which is perhaps on what account the Auditorium was similarly treated as a unrestrained exercise in shape making, with no musing for how that space would be press outed externally.)