Old Chicago Skyscraper of the Week–City/County Building

 

“A practical building that will be an ornament to the city as well,” according to Inland Architect, the Cook County Courthouse (shown left) and its later conjoined twin, Chicago City Hall, were commissioned and built in the wake of the Post Office debacle.  Determined not to repeat the cost and schedule overruns of that building, and to avoid the functional problems that plagued it, Cook County held a nationwide competition in 1905 to replace its crumbling courthouse, built in 1885 to designs by James Egan.  That building, along with the twinned City Hall by John Van Osdel, had been constructed on experimental mat and pile foundations, which had failed in the intervening decades.

Perhaps understandably reluctant to hire designers from out of town, the County awarded the grand prize to a St. Louis firm, but gave the commission to Holabird & Roche, whose scheme had come in a distant third.  Their plans, however, cleverly split up the half-block mass with a single, C-shaped corridor on each floor, thus avoiding problems of daylighting that had plagued other entries.  The scheme also contemplated that the City would eventually build a mirror image structure on the western half of the block, and allowed for corridor connections and continuity in elevations as and when this took place.  Extensive structural problems were alleviated by complex steel trusswork that allowed large, column-free courtrooms to slide in underneath upper stories of office space.

Work was finished on the County building in 1908, but due to a later start and labor problems during construction, City Hall itself was not complete until 1912.  For a very brief time, the County Building stood alone against the older City Hall structure, as shown above, showing the evolution of the City in its scale, and of changing tastes and technology.

In particular, the gargantuan Corinthian colonnades were heavily critiqued at the time, both for being insufficiently rigorous in their use of the Classic language, and in their pretentiousness.  Holabird & Roche had scaled and spaced these columns to permit daylight in to the offices behind–both buildings were finished well before electric light became cost-effective for daytime illumination–but the result did not, in critic Montgomery Schuyler’s view, adequately express the nature of the spaces behind.  Likewise, the choice of classical language was not universally popular, though it reflected general tastes for civic buildings throughout the country.  Harriet Monroe, sister-in-law to the late John Root and still his champion more than twenty years after his death, decried the complex as “a pretentious building of a heavy squareness,” which it undoubtedly was.  Elsewhere, the technical achievement of its 21,000,000 pounds of structural steel found a warmer reception.

Perhaps the building’s greatest achievement was to have been built with no evidence of corruption, graft, or nepotism–no small achievement in Chicago at the time.  Holabird & Roche cemented their reputation for honest dealings with this project.  It stands as an example of the fairly successful wedding, in their work, of classically derived language and functional requirements, and with the completion of the Daley Plaza across the street, it is the visible symbol of the City and County governments–pretentious, but at 200 feet no longer dwarfing its neighbors.

New World’s Tallest Building (criteria)!

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats just formally released its revised criteria for “Tallest Buildings.”  As you can see from their press release, it’s a bit of a mess, but takes into account the shenanigans that architects, owners, and engineers have gone through to be “#1.”  Most interesting is that they’ve given up on the idea of measuring to the “roof,” which makes sense given the shapey cones, towers, etc., that are sprouting up on top of skyscrapers in a bid for extra height.  And, thanks to Chicago’s Trump Tower, they’ve redefined the point from which height is measured.  No longer is it street level, it’s from the “lowest significant, open-air pedestrian entrance.”  Expect something in Dubai to bring people in from an underground parking garage through a deep open pit pretty soon.

sci-tech: pneumatic classroom

Our graduate structures sequence involves weekly laboratories that give students (and their instructor) a chance to experiment with basic statics and element design in a hands-on environment.  While we usually do something like break cardboard beams, or build trusses out of spaghetti (raw, not cooked), our final structures lab has always been a ‘pneumatic classroom.’  Students are given a box containing mylar painter’s dropcloths, duct tape, and a fan, and their assignment is to build an inflatable classroom big enough to contain the entire class.

This year, that class had 22 students, our largest yet.  We staged the classroom in the College’s new studio pavilion, which has a conveniently sized double-height review space.  It took the class just 41 minutes to lay out, fabricate, and inflate the classroom, and it stayed up with the power of just a small desk fan.

Pneumatics had their heyday in the late 1960s, when they were seen as a tectonic representation of the radical social and cultural statements being made across campuses and throughout society.  One architecture school in Paris completely dropped their classes so that students could spend their semester building temporary pneumatic ’social condensors’ that would serve as gathering places for protesters and party-goers.

Today, pneumatic structures are used almost entirely for stadiums–the Metrodome in Minneapolis being a good example.  But they’re handy as temporary classrooms, too.

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.