old chicago skyscraper of the week–Masonic Temple

The combination of steel construction, wind bracing, and elevator technology led to what Chicago claimed as the tallest building in the world, Burnham & Root’s Masonic Temple, constructed between 1890 and 1892 at the corner of Randolph and State street.

The building was designed to be both a home and an investment for the city’s Freemasons.  The lower dozen or so floors were planned to be an internal retail mall, with a central atrium that extended up through eight more floors of lettable offices.  At the top, the masonic halls took up attic spaces under its double pitched roofs, which surrounded an enclosed wintergarden.  Such a mix of uses was not unheard of–the auditorium, after all, had combined retail, office space, and a hotel with its large theatre.  But in its height and concentration of business and mercantile uses, the Temple was unique.

At this height, wind bracing became a paramount concern, and the building’s steel structure incorporated two planes of cross, or “x” bracing, concealed within the atrium walls.  These were designed to counter the sail-like effects of its broad State street facade and its relatively shallow depth along Randolph.  The elevator system was likewise advanced for its day, with two banks of elevators designed to serve only half the building apiece.

At its groundbreaking ceremony, the cornerstone was found, improbably, to be too small, and it had to be broken apart and relaid in private later.  Rumors abounded at the irony of a society dedicated to the mysteries of masonry failing to get such an important element of their headquarters right, and more suspicious attendees no doubt saw this as ominous.  Indeed, within a year both the head of the building committee, Norman Gassette, and Burnham’s partner and the building’s chief designer, John Root, were dead of sudden illnesses.

The building fared little better after its opening.  As Joanna Merwood-Salisbury notes in her new, outstanding book, Chicago 1890, the atrium proved a magnet for suicides, which the building endured at the rate of one every three months.  Its opening was rushed, leading to slipshod interior finishes and workers interrupting daily business for months after firms and retailers moved in.

Worst of all was the elevator service, which was barely adequate for the office and retail population it served.  Added to that was traffic from Masonic meetings, which added hundreds of passengers at a time to the upper floors’ bank.  Worse, the toilet rooms were concentrated on one of the upper floors, meaning that they, too, added passengers to these cabs.  A worker on one of the lower floors had to ride all the way down to the lobby, transfer to an upper zone cab, and ride all the way to the top of the building to simply answer nature’s call.  Tenants complained, too, about the attitude of the elevator operators who became used to the attentions of tourists heading to the wintergarden and developed a disdainful attitude to the building’s mere tenants.

The Masons moved out within ten years, leaving their halls to be rented out for theatrical productions.  Office tenants objected to the seedy crowd these attracted, noting that they had difficulty attracting secretaries who would have to share the elevators with morally challenged theater-goers.  The building emptied as occupants became disgusted with the long waiting times for elevator service and the declining atmosphere of the building.  In 1939, the owners chose to simply demolish it instead of paying for foundation upgrades as the new State Street subway was laid next door.  For over sixty years, the site of what had been Chicago’s tallest building was occupied by a two-story Walgreen’s drugstore, though it is now the site of the Joffrey Ballet tower by Booth Hansen, whose proportions echo those of the Masonic Temple, one of John Welborn Root’s last designs.

President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities

Word this morning that Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne has been appointed to Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. After twenty years or so of small scale but formally and materially inventive work, Mayne caught on to federal funding for new architecture and became the darling of the GSA’s design program in the last ten years. Not all of those buildings drew rapturous applause (his courthouse for Eugene, Oregon basically got him run out of town on a rail), but this is a provocative, interesting choice.  He’ll be serving with Sarah Jessica Parker, among others…

World’s tallest skyscraper(s)–CTBUH Chicago

I spent the last part of the week in Chicago attending the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s annual conference–500 skyscraper nerds in one room gets pretty amazing. The speaker list was a who’s who of tower engineers, architects, and developers, and some interesting trends emerged.
CTBUH is, to say the least, a cheerleading group. Higher, larger, faster are the operative words, though there was some critical input by Carol Willis of New York’s Skyscraper Museum. And, this year, it’s a very, very nervous bunch. Several large projects were described in terms of contingency–”when the recession ends” prefaced any number of presentations.
Most interesting was an update on the Nakheel Tower, whose foundations have been under construction in Dubai for a little over a year. Woods Bagot, the architects, described the challenges in building a one-kilometer (that’s about 3,300 feet) tower. If the gravity load of that scale isn’t difficult enough, the main issue at that height seems to be vortex shedding, or disrupting eddies of wind that can lead to harmonic vibrations.
Nakheel is just one of several towers competing to beat out Burj Dubai, which is scheduled to open later this year. Its developer described the final bits of construction–about 12,000 workers are still employed on the site daily–and the 12-month process of bringing the structure on line when it’s complete.
The supertowers, though, will be tough to lease in this economy, and the implosion of Dubai as a financial powerhouse raises real questions about why towers like these really get built. There’s no shortage of land, of course, and there does seem to be an alarming shortage of tenants. One reporter I spoke with over lunch chuckled when I asked him whether Nakheel would get finished in this climate.  There had been rumors that Woods Bagot were going to announce a second kilome-tower for Jeddah, but the first one seems pretty far off.
In all of this Willis’ presentation, along with a brief talk by Mayor Daley and an economist from the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, raised some good points about skyscrapers as engines of economic, social, and cultural development. The supertalls have always been more about ego, and they are incredibly interesting as challenges and as stories. But the mere fact of urban density that much smaller towers enable–ten to thirty stories, say–seemed to be enough in these presenters’ analyses to kick-start and to support the sort of urban life that energizes the best cities. It remains to be seen what the effect of a Burj Dubai will be. Will it generate more activity? Or will its tenants, work, live, and shop all within the tower itself? Or–more troubling–will the inconveniences of supertall make this nothing more than a technical experiment? Several presenters brought up problems like motion sickness, multiple elevator changes, and pressurization problems, that seem endemic to the whole idea of a kilometer-high tower.  But critics of skyscrapers in the 19th century thought issues like light-headedness and the velocity of elevators were going to doom the skyscraper ‘craze’ then, so who knows?
One highlight for me was the chance to get a behind-the-scenes tour of the John Hancock tower, the building that first convinced me to think about becoming an architect. It was a pioneer of mixed-use, with offices, condominiums, retail, and entertainment all contained within. In among all the talk about elevator sequencing, wind bracing, and massive chillers, the building engineer showed us the lighting system that makes up the Hancock’s “crown.”  Eight-foot fluorescent tubes, like you can buy at Lowe’s, wrapped with colored plastic.  Pretty high-tech…

old chicago skyscraper of the week–the Rookery

The “Rookery” was the result of a complex web of backroom deals and land exchanges.  The City of Chicago had owned the site, which was partly occupied by an abandoned water tank that had been turned into the city’s Library, and an aging, decrepit structure that had served as a temporary city hall since shortly after the great fire.  While many have thought that this old structure was called the “rookery” because it housed as many pigeons as people, the term was also used to describe a den of thieves or con-men, which more than adequately described city hall in the 1880s.

Whatever its origins, the name was stuck on to the new project, funded by a number of local businessmen including Daniel Burnham.  His partner, John Root, took the opportunity to advance a rigorous Romanesque style that combined the heavy masonry arches of H. H. Richardson with a budget-driven sense of order.  Root’s design wrapped a reinforced masonry mass–somewhere between a skeleton and a bearing wall–around a central light court.  While this was a common configuration in Burnham and Root’s work by this time, the court itself featured a stripped-down, skeletal structure that enabled interior offices to access more daylight.  This, and a similar skeletal approach on the lower stories of two rear facades, are often seen as precursors to the larger skeletal frames that the office came to design in the 1890s.

Perhaps as importantly, however, were narrow iron columns inserted into the masonry piers that formed the Rookery’s exterior.  These differed little from the reinforcing installed by Jenney in the Home Insurance Building, a block away and a year earlier, and they enabled Root to widen the building’s exterior windows by reducing the amount of masonry needed to hold the loads of the floors above.  While Sullivan had been experimenting with narrow brick piers by this point, the resulting frame of brick and iron, while nowhere near the narrow proportions that would arrive with steel frames in a few years, nevertheless allowed Root to experiment with the exterior wall as a system of verticals and horizontals, not as a solid mass or plane.  While he had made similar experiments with the Insurance Exchange, the Western Union Building, and the Rialto, all in the same neighborhood (though none of them still extant), the Rookery was his most eloquent statement of this possibility.

If the Rookery represented a tenuous step toward the skyscraper frame and away from the bearing wall, it also fostered a new mode of practice.  Burnham and Root occupied offices on the eleventh floor, and Burnham himself convinced many of the offices’ most trusted collaborators to lease space in the building as well–Illinois Steel, for example, located there.  This gave Burnham and Root a decided advantage when it came to communicating with other members of the design and construction teams they helped assemble, and helped consolidate their near-dominance of the Chicago market.  Burnham and his associates laid out most of the 1893 Fair from this office, and, tragically, well-known Chicago engineer Abraham Gottlieb died on the building’s steps after being fired as the Fair’s chief of construction.  He may well have been on his way to protest his dismissal.

The Rookery has been renovated several times, most notably by Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1900s.  Wright removed much of Root’s original ornament in the atrium skylight–today we would undoubtedly say he marred the building, but since it was Wright, subsequent renovations have restored his vision, not Root’s.

Fire Day

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 started on October 8, 1871 and burned until midnight on October 10. The coincidence of a long dry spell, an exhausted and embittered fire department, and stiff winds allowed a small barn fire to spread to its west side neighborhood, and then to jump the Chicago River and begin burning the Loop. Speculative development in timber, cast iron and stone left the city vulnerable, and by the end there was virtually nothing left of downtown or the north side–although timber buildings less than a block upwind of the fire’s origin were left unscathed. Of the two downtown buildings that survived, one of them offered lessons for future construction. The Nixon, still under construction but nearing completion, was built with a new system of heavy plastering around its iron beams and columns and this, along with the fact that the building was empty and thus free of potentially flammable contents, meant that it survived where other structures perished.
Standard histories suggest that the city learned its lesson and immediately began building other fireproof structures. But the reality was that re-construction was so quick that the city did not have time to study or implement any new codes. It would take another fire, in 1874, for Chicago to begin legislating fire-resistant construction.
The rapid re-building did, however, lead to the importation and invention of new fireproofing techniques. New York architect P. B. Wight gave up his practice to come to Chicago, where he began a second career as a fireproofing consultant and entrepreneur, while Chicago builder E. V. Johnson began selling patented terra cotta protection for metal construction.
The site of the O’Leary barn, where the fire began, is now the site of the Chicago Fire Academy on Canal Street just southwest of the Loop–a nice twist.

boston field trip–saarinen

In addition to site and precedent visits, it’s inevitable that we take students to MIT and Harvard when we go to Boston.  The collection of buildings on the two campuses is museum-like, and the architects who’ve worked at MIT in particular have generally risen to the occasion–I.M. Pei, Alvar Aalto, and in particular Eero Saarinen did some of their best work within a few minutes’ walk of one another.

The two Saarinen buildings–a chapel and a lecture hall–are always a good stop.  Both buildings are simple, quiet, immaculately detailed, and fearless in their expression of a basic idea.  The chapel is a simple brick cylinder, with a small skylight above the altar and a carefully orchestrated entry sequence involving an intentionally under-sized corridor and a changingperspective that gradually reveals the interior and altar.  The group never fails to wander in total silence, which I think Saarinen would have liked.  The lecture hall echoes some of the chapel’s geometry; it’s a segmental spheroid shell that rests on three nimble supports, and it has an early steel curtain wall that’s suspended between the shell and the ground.  The detailing isn’t as precise as aluminum later allowed, but it shows how the wall was made, and how it stands up against wind in particular.

After these two, we take our group to Frank Gehry’s Stata Center, leaking and falling to bits after being open for three years.  After seeing the subtle competence of the two Saarinen buildings, we don’t have to say a word.

old chicago skyscraper of the week–home insurance building

CAD Model by Ryan Risse

Happy Birthday to William Le Baron Jenney, whose career included a stint as an engineer on Sherman’s March.  When he returned to Chicago after the Civil War, he quickly gained a reputation as an innovative structural designer and a questionable stylist.

The Home Insurance Company hired Jenney in 1883 after a competition to design new headquarters and speculative office space downtown.  The Company had earned a reputation in the west after its prompt settlement of claims arising from the 1871 and 1874 Chicago fires, and it sought to capitalize on this with a new, prominent outpost.  In discussions with Jenney, they specifically asked that he give thought to maximizing daylight in the offices, and Jenney responded by developing a hybrid structural system in brick and iron.

His earlier buildings, in particular the Leiter Store of 1879, had used iron columns to reinforce masonry piers. This allowed the piers to be smaller, and thus allowed windows to be larger.  He adopted a similar strategy in the Home Insurance, but with one additional detail–cast iron lintels connected directly to the columns and spanning the windows–that carried a small but significant portion of the exterior walls’ weight.  To later generations, this detail suggested the beginnings of the “curtain wall,” that is, an exterior wall that was carried by an interior metal structure, rather than one that carried the weight of the interior floors.

Just how important this distinction was has been debated ever since.  Jenney, writing about the Home Insurance for the Sanitary Engineer in 1888, barely mentioned the building’s superstructure, concentrating instead on its spread foundations, which were also relatively new for the time.  It was not until the 1890s that the debate began in earnest over who could claim the title of “inventor of the skyscraper,” and that the Home Insurance was seen as such a key innovation.  On its demolition in 1932, two committee’s examined the frame as it was being dismantled and disagreed on the building’s status as a ‘first.’  One group claimed that the iron frame had carried nearly all the weight of the masonry, but an independent group of engineers noted that the iron and brick must have worked in concert, and that the provision of heavy masonry shear walls on the building’s rear elevations negated many advantages of the more skeletal fronts.

I’ll save my own opinion for the book (now tentatively titled A Great Architectural Problem: The Technical Evolution of the Chicago Skyscraper and out, I hope, sometime in 2012) but the above diagram by Ryan Risse, a recently graduated Iowa State student, gives a fairly clear idea of how the frame and brick may have worked together.  This model and others will allow readers to see more clearly the importance of details like this, and to appreciate how building skins and structures were gradually separated for reasons both functional and material.

BPL and ICA

Just back from the Boston field trip, highlighted by a day’s tour of two relevant precedents–the Institute of Contemporary Art on Fan Pier, and the Boston Public Library on Copley Square.  Between these two, we think the idea of a digital media library gets pretty well covered, and these tours are both good chances to see approaches to public space, civic design, and the mechanics of information storage, retrieval, and viewing.

Last year, this group went to Seattle, and many said they had been disappointed by OMA’s Public Library there–poor detailing and difficulty navigating the admittedly provocative organization scheme trumped, for many, the spatial and visual thrills of the place.  ICA presents a different set of problems.  It’s well detailed, for the most part, and it has a great relationship to the waterfront; the main gallery has an auxiliary space that offers views through a double-story glass wall, and there’s an outdoor amphitheater under this cantilevered space that is structurally and spatially amazing.  But students were slightly appalled by the approach (see above).  The building literally turns its back on the city and the approach to get this relationship to the water.  Likewise, the circulation isn’t always intuitive, and it relies heavily on a giant elevator to do the work of moving up and down.

Boston Public is all about civic presence, on the other hand, and it solves a vertical circulation problem with a really elegant main staircase.  The piano nobile approach, derived from Italian palazzi that raised their public rooms above the din and threat of the street, relies on stairs like this that often turn back on themselves to deposit you precisely above the entrance.  It’s entirely intuitive and fantastically well-crafted.  And, of course, impossible to replicate in materials that are affordable today.

So, is it possible to create something as relevant as ICA and as urban as BPL?  Watch this space…

Field Trip–Boston

Boston dining at its finest

Off to Boston for four days.  My day job involves teaching Comprehensive Design studio–a studio that is supposed to wrap up three years of technology, history, and design coursework in a single project.  For the past six years, we’ve asked students to design a “Mediatheque,” or a library with a dedicated digital component.  We make the program intentionally complex, asking them to integrate cinemas, shelving, public areas, and offices into a single, coherent building.

We try to make the point that just solving the problem isn’t enough, so we have always looked for sites that are also challenging and, we hope, inspiring.  Boston has made a good place for this.  It’s a completely different context from the midwestern cities our students are used to, and it has enough urban variety to provide plenty of interesting sites.

This year, our students have been working with three sites, all along or near the Big Dig.  We head out this morning for a site visit.  Seventy-five students changing planes at O’Hare usually goes better than you would think.  We have tours of the Boston Public Library and Diller + Scofidio’s ICA scheduled, along with walking tours of Harvard, MIT, and Back Bay.  We’ll come back with one site and, hopefully, a lobster or two.

old chicago skyscraper of the week–the Auditorium

Happy birthday, Louis Sullivan!  Chicago’s patron saint of architecture, and the author of, perhaps, the most widely quoted modernist axiom of all time, turns 154 today.

The Auditorium was the greatest of his works with his longtime business partner, Dankmar Adler.  Conceived as a cultural center to replace a temporary Exposition in Grant Park, it combined the largest theater in the West at the time with commercial office space and a hotel. It was often said that Chicagoans never combined business and culture, but here is a good refutation of that myth.

The tower was the tallest structure in Chicago at the time.  It was designed to house water tanks that powered the theater’s hydraulic lifts, but Adler and Sullivan wisely included office space that offered stunning views of the lake and the city.

For all its advances, though, the Auditorium employed a decidedly conservative structure; the entire building was supported by bearing walls that wrapped around the central auditorium.  On the exterior, Sullivan settled on an ornamental scheme that clearly owed a lot to H. H. Richardson’s work of the 1880s.  While the theater used wrought iron trusses extensively, its commercial ‘wrapper’ was, along with the Monadnock and the Woman’s Temple, among the last of the great bearing wall buildings.

The differing weights of the tower and the surrounding building led to a quite noticeable foundation failure.  Adler was unable to spread the load of the tower out adequately over the soft clay of Chicago’s soil, and as a result the tower has sunk further than the surrounding structure.  Patrons entering the theater lobby, directly under the tower, walk down several steps from the street as a result.

Adler and Sullivan wisely took offices on one of the tower’s top floors, the one behind the colonnade.  Sullivan’s office was in the southeast corner, looking out over the lake, and it was in this office that he fired a precocious draftsman for persistent moonlighting.  In addition to hosting political conventions, full opera, and thousands of classical, jazz, and rock concerts, the Auditorium thus also saw the beginning of Frank Lloyd Wright’s solo career.