I’m very happy to share that I’ll be in conversation with Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey at the Newberry Library on October 12. Registration opens on Sept. 1. More information is on the Newberry’s website.
Lee’s 2019 book, Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side, was a constant companion and guidebook as Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 was coming together; it inspired a lot of long bike rides during the pandemic that led me to important high-rises that I would have missed otherwise. So this is a particularly welcome invitation. Expect to hear about Lake Meadows, South Commons, and why Dubin, Dubin, Black, and Moutoussamy should be far better known than they are…
[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is available now on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets. This week’s post follows up on my discussion with Adam Rubin at the Chicago Architecture Center at the book’s launch event, where we talked about the roster of unsung heroes in the city’s postwar building culture–Milton Schwartz is one of the era’s most intriguing characters. His tour de force apartment tower deserves far more credit than historians have been willing to give it…]
320 Oakdale (1955), Milton Schwartz
“One man’s dream,” according to Forum’s panel, a striking tower two blocks north of Lincoln Park expanded on 1000 Lake Shore’s glass walls and concrete brise-soleils while demonstrating air conditioning’s potential for apartment design. Its architect-developer, Milton Schwartz, grew up in a Chicago family that owned a plumbing and heating business. He attended the University of Illinois’ architecture program, leaving in 1947 to work for the family and as a general contractor, earning his professional license in 1952. Living at the corner of Commonwealth and Oakdale, he bought an adjacent site from realtor Jerrold Wexler. Just 26 and inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s lecture at Illinois on heliocentric design, Schwartz drew up a circular scheme with cantilevered floor slabs reminiscent of Wright’s Johnson Wax laboratory tower in Racine (1944-1950) to form large, overhanging sunshades, surpassing Wright’s in its transparency, with “outside walls entirely of glass, with no column obstructions.” Unlike 1000 Lake Shore, Schwartz—confident in his family’s expertise—proposed that the tower be “completely air conditioned,”.[i]
The round form did not find willing lenders. Instead, Schwartz worked with structural engineer Henry Miller on a square version, seventeen stories high, with floor slabs that cantilevered 3’-4” beyond its all-glass walls. Miller supported this on 36 columns that transferred through story-tall shear walls at the third floor to just 12 columns and a central elevator core at the ground level, providing a dramatic, 20’ overhanging porte-cochere—an “outlandish underpinning,” according to Forum’s panel. Above, aluminum and plate glass storefronts made up floor-to-ceiling windows, with operable sashes at the center of each column bay.[ii] Dovenmuhle, Inc., gave Schwartz an $800,000 mortgage and Schwartz’ own contracting firm constructed it from 1953-54.[iii]
320 Oakdale’s 75’ x 75’ floors held just two or three two- and three-bedroom apartments each. Bathrooms, kitchens, and closets were planned tight to the central core, with the rest of the units opening to its continuous glass walls. Schwarz combined the units’ living and dining rooms, sensing suburban ranch homes’ open plan appeal to families and the potential for dramatic, open-cornered views.[iv] To save weight, floor slabs of lightweight concrete blocks rested on 8-1/2” deep poured-in-place concrete joists. Ceilings were plastered onto these, saving height and framing costs. Schwartz’ father and uncle installed perimeter fan coil units that supplied hot or cold water and developed a radiant slab for the ground-level parking, circulating warmed freon to heat cars from below.[v]
“Chicago’s First Completely Air-Conditioned All Glass Multiple Story Apartment Homes,” announced Schwartz’ advertising campaign in the spring of 1954. Co-sponsored by Commonwealth Edison, his ads pitched the units, available as cooperatives for between $32,000 and $38,000 ($315,000 and $374,000), to a more child-friendly clientele than Greenwald or Perlman, offering competition for the suburbs’ convenience and open space. With Lincoln Park and the lakefront so close, Schwartz’ advertising enthused, “these elegant apartment homes are the way a family wants to live!”[vi] The building’s air conditioning system was a major selling point— “Every single room in this completely air-conditioned building is Individually Controlled by you, so that you literally choose your own climate!”—as were appliances and amenities that were standard features of new suburban homes. “The work-saving electric kitchen,” his ads promised, would be “a housewife’s dream-come-true.”[vii] These amenities were matched by reasonable co-op fees. Schwartz required a 60% down payment but offered low monthly assessments of $200 ($2000), dropping to $30 ($300) after the five-year construction mortgage had been paid down. 320 Oakdale attracted the families he had targeted; demand for the project’s three-bedroom units outpaced that for one- and two-bedroom units. Schwartz was reduced to showmanship to sell the smaller apartments, installing high-intensity lights in every room of the vacant units that turned the tower into a beacon to evening commuters on Lake Shore Drive in late 1954.[viii]
That stunt “managed to sell one or two apartments, but it left more conservative architectural critics nonplussed.[ix]Forum’s panel regarded the project grudgingly, calling the long horizontals “awkward” and pointing out that the 360° sunshades “make no sense…except on the south face.” Much of 320 Oakdale’s design was prescient, though. Its cantilevered sunshades, reinterpreted as occupied balconies, would emerge in Marina City (see below), a project that realized Schwarz’ abandoned dream of a cylindrical tower. Its large units’ success showed how high-rises could compete with suburban ranch homes, and Miller’s structural accommodation of automotive traffic recognized the car’s increasing presence. Most importantly, 320 Oakdale proved the viability of glass curtain walls and air conditioning in residential high rises. Schwarz had the technical ability close enough to hand that he understood how cladding, air conditioning, and solar shading could be integrated in ways that Greenwald and Perlman had not. Forum may have considered the tower “outlandish,” but Schwartz’ ‘dream’ set new comfort standards for Chicago apartments.
Apartment building at 320 W. Oakdale Avenue, designed by architect Milton Schwartz & Associates, Chicago, Illinois, February 12, 1959. [Chicago History Museum].
320 Oakdale was one of several important turning points in curtain wall and air conditioning nationwide. Window air conditioners saw sales spike during the hot summer of 1952 and “are you air-conditioned?” challenged “politics, baseball, and Russia as something to talk about,” according to the New York Times.[x] Chicago hosted the American Society of Heating and Ventilating Engineers’ annual conference in January, 1953, which the organization billed as “air conditioning’s biggest year.”[xi] Used to mechanical comfort in offices, stores, and theaters, Chicagoans also began to demand it in their homes.
[i] Al Chase, “Building Using Big Glass Area Under Study.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 21, 1952. A7.
[ii] “Eight Chicago Apartments: Nineteen Glass Tiers Sitting on a Cantilever.” Architectural Forum, vol. 103, no. 5. November, 1955. 149.
[iii] “Real Estate Notes,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb. 27, 1954. A5; Al Chase, “21-Story Co-op with Walls of Glass Rising.” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 31, 1953. A9.
[iv] See floor plan published in “Eight Chicago Apartments: Nineteen Glass Tiers Sitting on a Cantilever.” Architectural Forum, vol. 103, no. 5. November, 1955. 149.
[vi] Display Ad: “Designed for Luxury Living! [320 Oakdale]” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1954. E8.
[vii] Display Ad: “Designed for Luxury Living! [320 Oakdale]” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1954. E8.
[viii] “Eight Chicago Apartments: Nineteen Glass Tiers Sitting on a Cantilever.” Architectural Forum, vol. 103, no. 5. November, 1955. 149.
[ix] “Glass Tower Doesn’t Hide its Light.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 25, 1954. G6.
[x] C. B. Palmer, “The A B C and the X of Air Conditioning: The Elements and Benefits are Simple; the Unknown Quantity is the Future. the ABC and the X of Air Conditioning.” New York Times, July 27, 1952. 2.
[xi] Russell Freeburg, “Homes Are Air Conditioning’s New ‘Frontier’: Fair of ’33 Gave Big Boost To Industry.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 23, 1953. 1-b5.
[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.This week’s entry follows up on last week’s Skyscraper Museum webinar conversation with SOM Principal Emeritus Bill Baker about that firm’s history of concrete high rises and tube structures].
“The right means to the right ends must be found; i.e., the means must be in scale with the ends, and a philosophic base must be used to judge the relationship of structure, scale, end architecture.”
–Myron Goldsmith, “The Effects of Scale,” 1953-1987.[i]
Myron Goldsmith’s 1953 IIT Master’s thesis on tall building structures argued that scale was critical to structural systems. He began with Galileo’s physiological example: if a bone is enlarged proportionally, its cross-sectional area—and thus bearing capacity—increases exponentially by a factor of two but its volume—determinant of the bone’s self-weight and thus of the loads it carries—increases by a factor of three. A structure can only be scaled up so far, Galileo realized, before it fails under its own weight—or, as Goldsmith quoted biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson: “Elephant and hippopotamus have grown clumsy as well as big.”
Goldsmith recognized this principle in building structures, particularly masonry ones, where bearing walls’ self-weight produced structurally clumsy equivalents—the massive walls of the Monadnock’s lower stories, for example. Similar limits exist for all systems and materials. In high rises, lateral resistance to wind limits simple frames to around 25 stories—lower-story columns become ungainly in buildings taller than this as shear forces build up, and shear walls or trusses are needed to maintain reasonable column sizes. Taller buildings, Goldsmith argued, require structural changes that are not simply quantitative—more cross-section or stronger materials. Instead, they require qualitative changes in the configuration of the structure itself. New systems came with architectural potential in addition to optimization. “A new structural system,” he wrote, “gives the possibility of a new aesthetic expression.”
Myron Goldsmith, “The Effects of Scale.” Master’s Thesis, IIT, 1952 and Fazlur Khan, diagram of comparative structural types for high-rises, ca. 1968. (Author, new graphic after original in SOM Archives).
“Engineering for efficiency is not the last and only determinant; it is possible to make a choice from several efficient schemes because of architectural, aesthetic, and environmental reasons. The human needs must give the directions.”[ii]
Goldsmith expanded “The Effects of Scale” in his 1987 monograph, Buildings and Concepts, to include urban and environmental impacts. The efficient scaling up of oil tankers in the 1970s, for instance, made more optimal vessels but brought greater risk of catastrophe, and denser and larger cities required more complex systems—circulatory, infrastructural, and economic, among others. Goldsmith’s thesis, done with Mies as advisor, formed the prototype for IIT’s M.S. program during the 1960s, much of which he and Fazlur Khan supervised along with David Sharpe, a graduate of Tuskegee’s undergraduate program who joined SOM and the IIT faculty. IIT’s Master’s program became a fertile think-tank for SOM, producing case studies of structural and architectural integration that often found their way to drawing boards downtown and vice versa.[iii]
Chestnut-DeWitt (SOM, 1962-65)
Goldsmith’s thesis saw striking application in the 43-story Chestnut-DeWitt Apartments, designed in parallel with the 37-story Brunswick. Brunswick’s wind-resisting synthesis of closely spaced perimeter columns, stiff spandrel beams, core shear walls, and linking floor slabs spurred Graham, Goldsmith and Khan’s growing interest in the ‘rebirth of the bearing wall.’ But Chestnut-DeWitt’s unique site circumstances, coupled with differences between commercial and residential programs, made for a subtle reconsideration of the Brunswick’s principle into a new structural type—the tube.
Chestnut-DeWitt’s site was an L-shaped Streeterville lot adjacent to Mies’ 860-880 Lake Shore Drive. Metropolitan Structures, re-organized after Herbert Greenwald’s death in 1959, owned the site and asked SOM to design a third pair of towers in their Lake Shore Drive cluster. Graham recalled being concerned about views to and from the iconic 860-880 and realizing that another pair of towers would crowd them.[iv] He suggested stacking Metropolitan’s program into one taller tower, leaving half the site for a low garage pavilion. This would leave breathing space around Mies’ towers, but Graham’s massing brought structural issues. Commercial floor plates like the Brunswick’s could accommodate deep shear walls or trusses in their large cores to resist wind. Alternatively, they could rely on stiff joints throughout deep, repetitive rigid frames. In apartments, however, the desire—and, in Chicago, code requirement—for natural light and ventilation in living areas produced longer, shallower building masses that were weak across their short axes. Shear walls deployed between units or at building ends could contribute lateral resistance, but apartment buildings lacked the multiple elevator shafts and condensed plumbing cores convenient for effective shear walls or wind trusses in commercial towers. Worse, residential buildings did not have the interstitial mechanical requirements that made deep, moment-resisting girders viable. Instead, concrete slab construction, thinned by the economic advantages of reducing floor-to-floor height, left little sectional area for the deep moment connections that could brace commercial towers.
Graham planned apartment layouts around short, hammer-headed corridors, wrapping bedrooms and living rooms around tightly planned bathrooms, closets, and entries into floor plates of 122’ x 78’. Multiplying this to fill Metropolitan’s program required a tower more than 40 stories tall, slender enough to require significant bracing in both directions. Exterior shear walls were out of the question given the lake and city views in all directions. Hal Iyengar and Khan instead tried to develop a central core out of fire stairs and elevator shafts, at one point suggesting twin shear walls containing these elements parallel to the building’s longer axis. Stair and elevator openings, however, frustrated these attempts.
Chestnut-Dewitt Apartments (SOM, 1962-1965). Digital model of typical floors by Jack Strait
The structural design for Brunswick, meanwhile, was developing a few months ahead of Dewitt-Chestnut’s. Its rigid but porous external bearing walls showed that a shear wall’s rigidity could be distilled into a network of moment joints around large window apertures. Brunswick’s large central core made it only partly reliant on this external frame–the tall, open lobby and large transfer girder made its core shear walls critical to the building’s stability. Khan wondered whether, with more robust connections, skyscrapers’ exterior walls themselves could provide such a slender structure’s lateral stability. Doing so required a compromise between exterior member sizes and desirable views. But the Brunswick’s upturned perimeter beams held a clue. The one place in an apartment where structural elements could intrude into the expected 8’ floor-to-ceiling height was at the exterior, where sills and air conditioner cabinets reduced window apertures anyway. Upstand beams here could provide the deep column connections necessary to create stiff moment joints in the exterior wall. Khan also realized that exterior columns could be spaced more closely together in a residential program, performing double duty as structural mullions, and forming more, narrower windows. Doubling or tripling perimeter columns meant more connections and, thus, greater overall stiffness. At some point, the distinction between a skeleton of columns and beams blurred into structurally solid walls pierced with window openings that could work as a giant, tubular cantilever beam sticking out of the ground. The resulting shape was an imperfect beam (with two webs instead of the I-beam’s one), an imperfect shear wall (perforated with dozens of window openings), and an imperfect architectural solution (window walls interrupted by columns larger than mullions)—but taken together these individual elements formed an efficient overall structure.
Chestnut-Dewitt Apartments (SOM, 1962-1965). Digital model of exterior wall by Jack Strait
Thinking about the entire building as a cantilever was a paradigm shift. Hand calculations were limited to tracing loads through a structure, looking at individual elements’ capacities to resist loads and deflection. Such an elemental approach, engineers knew, provided conservative results—studies on the 55-story 1000 Lake Shore Plaza showed that its shear wall and column structure deflected only 37% as far its designers had calculated due to wind.[v] This may have been reassuring, but it was a waste of materials. Khan’s sense of the building structure as a holistic—almost organic—system marked a new approach. Understanding the flow of forces through a monolithic network required more computing power than hand calculation could provide. But the redundancies that made such structures difficult to calculate also made them efficient— ‘hyperstatic,’ dispersing forces throughout building frames in multiple, simultaneous load paths, in this case through a “shear shell” or “tube.”[vi]
Concentrating the tower’s structure on its exterior allowed more efficient unit layouts, too. Seventeen interior columns, taking gravity loads only and located based on apartment layouts rather than a structural grid, reduced spans, taking advantage of flat plate systems’ adaptability to irregular column placement. One important problem developed as Khan and Iyengar began using SOM’s new mainframe computer to analyze the structure. As the tube walls collected wind loads on their faces they would flex, lacking the backup of the Brunswick’s shear walls. As they did so, they would transfer loads to the side walls—the ‘webs’ of the cantilevered beam—only gradually, meaning that the wind-facing wall’s center would deflect farther than its ends, a phenomenon Khan called “shear lag.” The end walls would, essentially, be dragged along, causing unanticipated stresses in the corner columns. In conventional frame construction, corner columns were the least loaded since they carried only ¼ of the floor area of an interior column. But for tube structures, the team now recognized, corner columns became highly stressed elements, demanding larger sections—validating, at least in this case, the classical rules championed by Mies that doubled columns up when turning a corner.
DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments (SOM, 1962-1965). Street level arcade showing transfer girder. Architectural Record, January, 1966.
Graham adapted DeWitt-Chestnut’s exteriors to Khan’s structural scheme. Its perimeter columns are collected by a transfer girder at the second floor, as at Brunswick, but here only at every other column, leaving 11’-0” openings at ground level for a colonnade. Like Brunswick, Graham selected travertine to clad the raw structural frame, although here it was actually installed along with a layer of rigid foam, to forestall thermal expansion and contraction. At the corners, a re-entrant detail allowed greater column depth in both directions, accommodating the shear lag stresses while providing visual emphasis. In a subtle expression of its wind bracing theory, the tower’s structural elements all become thinner as the building rises; lateral shear and bending increase toward the base, allowing the structure to be far more flexible toward the top. As the columns and edge beams thin, from 1’-11” at the base to 1’-2” at the roof, DeWitt Chestnut’s windows grow, from 3’-7” to 4’-4”.
Metropolitan Structures secured an $8 million mortgage for this innovative structure from Aetna Life through Draper and Kramer. The project received FHA support even though it was aimed at the upper middle-class market. Federal funding meant that DeWitt-Chestnut was, along with Marina City, Sandburg Village, and Outer Drive East, open to any qualified applicant regardless of race,—still unusual enough that these projects were lauded by the Chicago Commission on Human Relations.[vii] Metropolitan’s construction subsidiary began work on site in August, 1963 and the building opened to tenants in February, 1965, with rents ranging from $140 for studios up to $410 for three-bedroom units ($1200 to $3475), 30% higher than Marina City but comparable to Outer Drive East, in keeping with Metropolitan’s professional, rather than executive, market.[viii]
DeWitt-Chestnut proved a deferential contrasting backdrop to the Mies buildings, but for engineers and critics who understood this elegant, quiet block’s structural innovation and nuanced expression, it was a qualitative leap in performance, based on principles first explored by Komendant and Pei and furthered by SOM at Brunswick, but honed into a distinct, new species of skyscraper structure. Komendant, Khan and New York’s Leslie Robertson all made steps toward the pure tube structure, but credit for SOM’s team in developing the first pure tube skyscraper here—one that relied entirely on its exterior for its lateral stability—was justified. Khan’s systemic approach turned engineers from calculators to designers. His work with Graham over the next decade fused static, programmatic, and architectural form, setting height records along with high standards for integrated engineering and structural aesthetics. DeWitt-Chestnut, on that point, was more than a technical success. Architectural Record called it “one of the most sophisticated and disciplined of SOM’s sophisticated and disciplined designs.”[ix] And, if it was a deliberate visual contrast to Mies’ incomparable towers to the east it was also, according to Iyengar, a link between Khan’s structural philosophy and 860-880’s principles:
“Mies’ buildings were still framed buildings. He was still mostly concerned with expressing the frame. He didn’t get beyond that. But, his principle though, his notion of the structure having a prominence in architecture could be seen all the way through…. As long as the structures play a dominant role, creates the essence of architecture, then it becomes Miesian.”[x]
[i] Myron Goldsmith, “The Effects of Scale” in Myron Goldsmith-Buildings and Concepts. (New York: Rizzoli, 1987). 8-23.
[ii] Goldsmith, “The Effects of Scale,” op. cit. 22.
[iii] On David Sharpe’s career, see Dahna M Chandler, “Scaling the Heights of Architectural Academe.” Black Issues in Higher Education, vol. 16, no. 23, Jan. 6, 2000. 24 and Robert Lau, “The Legacy of David C. Sharpe.” CTBUH Journal, 3. 2010. 40-43. See, too, Lizondo-Sevilla, L., S.-F. José, G.-R. Zaida. “Mies and His Teaching Venues: The Triumph of Architecture over Function”. ACE: Architecture, City and Environment, Vol. 15, no. 45, Feb., 2021.
[iv] The following relies heavily on the excellent descriptions of the building’s design process in Yasmin Sabina Khan, Engineering Architecture: The Vision of Fazlur R. Khan (New York: Norton, 2004). 84-103 and Mir M. Ali, Art of the Skyscraper: The Genius of Fazlur Khan. (New York: Rizzoli, 2001). 43-44, 86.
[v] “Winds Post Challenge for Skyscraper Builders.” Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1968. D1.
[vi] An authoritative overview of tube principles is Fazlur R. Khan, Ph.D., “Tubular Structures for Tall Buildings” in Mark Fintel, ed., Handbook of Concrete Engineering (New York; Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1974). 345-354. See, too, the excellent overview of the tube concept in Robert E. Fischer, “Optimizing the Structure of the Skyscraper.” Architectural Record, Vol. 152, no. 4. October 1972. 97-104.
[vii] “Open Housing Increasing on Near North Side.” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 29, 1963. N2.
[viii] Display Ad, The Dewitt Apartments. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 14, 1965. C9.
In Situ is an ongoing project with Carol Willis of New York’s outstanding Skyscraper Museum and Bill Baker, Emeritus Partner at SOM Chicago, to look at the history of the concrete skyscraper. Most historians have focused on steel as the key material development in tall building construction, and while that was the case at the end of the nineteenth century, Carol makes the argument that concrete has been the more important, even the defining innovation that has allowed many of the 20th and (especially) 21st century’s greatest achievements.
We’re working toward an exhibition sometime in the late Fall, but as part of the conversation, Carol has commissioned a series of conversations with historians, architects, and engineers that will look at some key moments in concrete skyscraper development. We’ve just had the first two of these. Earlier this month, Chicago architect Geoffry Goldberg talked about Marina City, designed by (and, in large part, inspired by) his father, architect Bertrand Goldberg:
Earlier this week, Bill Baker and I talked about two other Chicago skyscrapers–almost exactly contemporary with Marina City–that have been largely left out of the standard histories. Chestnut-DeWitt Apartments and the Brunswick Building in Chicago were important moments in the development of the tube structure. Architects Myron Goldsmith and Bruce Graham worked with engineers Hal Iyengar and Fazlur Khan to distill these buildings’ structures onto their exterior skins–clearing space for programmatic flexibility while discovering new synergies that came with thinking of the towers’ structures as structural ‘organisms’ instead of collected structural elements:
We have more of these planned–the next two will take place at the end of July and August, respectively, and will cover high rises farther afield–watch this space (and the Skyscraper Museum’s page) for further details…
Pleased to report that the eighth meeting of the Construction History Society of America is in the books. My UIUC colleague, Marci S. Uihlein, and I volunteered last year to co-chair and host it–somewhat selfishly, as this is always a favorite moment on the calendar and a good chance to catch up with a few dozen close friends and collaborators. We had twelve paper sessions, with topics ranging from thin-shell concrete construction to the evolution of masonry ties in historic facades, and settings throughout the Americas–Oaxaca, Chicago, Guatemala, and Seattle were just a few of the locations covered by presenters.
We also had four outstanding keynote lectures. Prof. Uihlein introduced the discipline to N. Clifford Ricker, the first architectural graduate in the U.S. who went on to teach at his alma mater (Illinois since you asked!) and to write an early (but unpublished) textbook on construction and structures that is among the best examples of the state of the art ca. 1890 that I’ve seen. Marci has been leading the effort to publish Ricker’s text, along with a handful of framing essays, and this was the perfect venue to publicize the project. Deborah Slaton, from WJE, gave an overview of Chicago’s history of concrete construction, and UIUC landscape architecture professor Stephen Sears talked about Illinois as a site–both poetically and as a region transformed by industrial agriculture. Finally, our closing keynote by Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey was an insightful look into four major preservation projects that Chicago’s new mayor could–should–take on as the city transforms itself once again.
Actual Adler and Sullivan cast/wrought iron elements. It would be happier to see these in situ, but still fascinating to see in the job site yard at Pilgrim Baptist.
On Saturday we caught an early bus to Chicago to tour four preservation projects in the city, focusing on the South Side, sponsored and led by Wiss, Janney, Elstner and Central Building and Preservation. Pullman, the site of the Spencer Solon Beman-designed factory and company town, was an introduction to the city’s labor and industrial history–a remarkable site of both preservation and transformation. The ruins of Louis Sullivan’s Kehilath Anshe Ma’arav Synagogue–later Pilgrim Baptist Church, the “birthplace of Gospel Music”–was both haunting and promising, as there are hopes that the surviving walls can be incorporated into a new Gospel museum. Michelangelo Sabatino gave us an overview of IIT’s iconic Crown Hall, restored and re-glazed in 2007. Finally, WJE and Central got us up on the sidewalk canopy at the Old Republic Building on N. Michigan Avenue to see their work to restore that building’s terra cotta facade up close and personal.
This year’s conference was an argument and a challenge to the discipline. CHSA has always met in alternate years, but we felt that there was enough good work and enough enthusiasm to meet that we could pull off an annual event. Next year will be the Eighth International Congress on Construction History, to be held in Zurich, so we’ll defer to that. But we’re hoping that CHSA can fill in the intervening years between the ICCHs. This year’s event is convincing evidence that Construction HIstory as a field of study continues to grow and to attract scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts from a range of backgrounds–preservation, engineering, architecture, history, etc. Selfishly, I’m looking forward to gathering with folks from across this spectrum every year. The number of submissions to CHSA8–and the high quality of work throughout–suggests that we’ll be able to.
Photograph courtesy Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla/CHSA
Thanks to all who made the event happen–especially the staff and administration of the College of FIne and Applied Arts and the Illinois School of Architecture, our sponsors, WJE, Central, and Vertical Access, the half-dozen student volunteers who made sure the meeting went smoothly, and everyone who made the trip to Central Illinois to join in.
Happily amid the Construction History Society of America’s Eighth annual meeting, which I’m co-hosting with Illinois School of Architecture colleague Marci Uihlein. In addition to spotlighting her research on N. Clifford Ricker–U of Illinois’ patron saint of all things architectural and construction–the conference has its usual outstanding range of papers, from concrete pontoon bridges to straw bale houses and almost everything in between. Tonight at 5:00, we’ll have our closing keynote lecture from Chicago Sun-Times columnist and architecture critic Lee Bey, who will be speaking about how architecture and historic preservation can play a role in Mayor Johnson’s agenda for the city. Lee’s lecture is open to the public, in 120 Architecture, if you’re in town.
Brunswick Building, Chicago. SOM, 1961-65. Digital model by Jack Strait, from Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986.
This coming Tuesday the Skyscraper Museum will host the second of its In Situ webinars, which look at the history of concrete high-rises in anticipation of this Fall’s exhibition. Bill Baker, Emeritus Partner at SOM, and I will talk about the evolution of the concrete tube structure, in particular looking at two Chicago examples by SOM from the early 1960s–the Brunswick Building and the Chestnut-DeWitt apartments. Free admission, but registration is required. More details and registration here.
Very glad to have Ted Fishman’s review of Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 appear in the June issue of Chicago’s NewCity magazine. It’s a thorough, thoughtful overview of the book and its predecessor–any review that cites work by William Cronon, Carl Condit, and Lee Bey as comparisons is a welcome one…
[Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986, published by University of Illinois Press, is out now–available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, among other outlets.
Standard Oil (Edward Durrell Stone/Perkins & Will, 1968-1973).
Standard Oil of Indiana began as an offshoot of John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust after it was broken up in 1911. From its inception, it had occupied a 13-story Marshall and Fox-designed building at 910 South Michigan, but postwar growth had forced it, like Sears, to lease offices throughout the city. Standard revealed plans in September 1968 to build over the Illinois Central rail yards east of the Prudential Building. Negotiations took place throughout 1969 to develop the railroads’ air rights into what would become Illinois Center, but Standard proceeded independently, ignoring that project’s zoning and size recommendations.[i] In March 1969, the company announced that it would build 2 million square feet of office space on its site, to be designed by two architectural firms: Chicago-based Perkins & Will, and New York-based Edward Durrell Stone.[ii]
This pairing was notable for being well outside the city’s Miesian architectural culture. Perkins & Will’s partnership with C.F. Murphy on First National Bank had been a stylistic anomaly—its commercial reputation still rested with the diamond-planned U.S. Gypsum Building, and it was working on 230 Monroe Street at the time, a 28-story steel-framed building rendered in black aluminum and bronze glazing with angled column covers that recalled Saarinen’s CBS Building in New York.[iii] Stone, meanwhile, was enjoying the high point of his long, varied career. An Arkansas native, he had been an early proponent of the International Style, associating with Phillip Goodwin on the Museum of Modern Art and designing modernist houses in New York and suburban Boston. His postwar work, however, had been eclectic. After worldwide acclaim for the ornate screens and gold-tinged columns of his temple-like American Embassy in New Delhi, Stone’s designs combined formal planning with material opulence. His greatest cultural commission, the Kennedy Center in Washington, and his first skyscraper, the marble-shafted General Motors Building at the southwest corner of Central Park in Manhattan, were popular with the public—and lambasted by critics—for their ersatz formalism and decorative elements. Ada Louise Huxtable, writing about General Motors’ acres of marble cladding and finishes, assailed its “pretentiously ordinary…Throwback Classicism” as “Furniture Store Posh.” Its sturdy-looking marble columns were, she pointed out, a “seven-eighths inch…veneer” concealing the actual structure to “disguise and diminish one of the great art forms of our day,” with “overlays of low-level corn and pseudo-grandeur.”[iv] Stone relished his iconoclastic reputation, though, telling the press that Standard Oil would not defer to Chicago’s traditions. “The glass box design for office buildings has run its course,” he prophesied, promising a “permanent look” for Standard Oil.[v]
Al Picardi’s structural scheme for Standard Oil in model form. From E. Alfred Picardi, “Structural System—Standard Oil of Indiana Building.” Journal of the Structural Division, ASCE. Vol. 99, no. ST4. Apr., 1973. 42-51.
The two firms worked through 1969 to adapt Stone’s formula to Standard Oil’s program as it grew to 3,200,000 gross square feet of corporate and tenant space. Stone proposed spreading this over 80 floor plates of 40,000 square feet each. The project benefitted from SOM’s former head of structural design, Al Picardi, who joined Perkins + Will in 1967. Picardi had overseen Khan’s tube structures and he applied that experience here. As impressive a structural system as the Hancock was, he wondered whether “it would be possible to develop a structural system with efficient tube action, yet simplify the fabrication and erection problems?” A “natural concept to consider,” he concluded, would treat the exterior frame as “steel plate walls with openings only large enough to accommodate architecturally acceptable vision panels.” The result would distribute material evenly around the building’s perimeter, instead of concentrating it in discrete, heavy columns– a scheme more like the perimeter structures being designed in concrete by Dubin, Dubin, Black, and Moutoussamy or Leslie Robertson’s tightly spaced steel columns at the World Trade Center. Picardi designed a tube of 64 broad, triangular folded plates, 10 feet on center, each wrapping a vertical shaft accommodating ducts or pipes, with 5’-0” windows and induction units between them. These plates were shop-welded in three-story lengths and field-bolted to 5’-6” deep spandrel beams, forming a planar wall of deeply corrugated steel on each of the building’s four sides. Within, a grid of sixteen columns formed a 95’ square core and 45’-0” bays, spanned with 38-inch open web steel joists large enough to accommodate ductwork services. The building’s corners consisted of rigid steel plates forming nine-foot-deep re-entrant angles, making the tower into a stiff-edged box.[vi] Picardi claimed nearly the same material efficiency as the Hancock but with significant fabricational savings due to its simpler geometry. Standard Oil has just one basic floor shape, multiplied over the building’s full height, with none of the Hancock’s sloping walls, making it “simpler in design, less expensive to fabricate, and easier to erect than conventional or previous tube systems.”[vii] Stone and Perkins & Will planned a simple cladding scheme for the building, replicating the white marble columns and dark spandrels and glass that had wrapped U.S. Gypsum and General Motors.[viii]
Standard Oil Building. Typical Floor Plan.
Turner Construction won the contract to build this simple but massive structure, breaking ground on April 1970 as a helicopter hovered at the tower’s planned 1,136 foot height.[ix] Ten caissons on each face and 16 under the core were tied together with an eggcrate of girders similar to the Hancock’s, while a slurry wall similar to Sears’ formed the building’s basements.[x] Steelwork began fabrication while foundations were being completed. Once steel assembly began, in May 1971, Turner had a continuous feed of pre-welded column panels, spandrel girders, and trusses. One piece arrived every seven minutes, ready to be hoisted into place by one of four climbing derricks. As the building’s 53,000 tons of steelwork rose, cladding followed. Stone selected Italian Carrara marble to cover the building’s columns—more than 18 acres of it, in 1-1/4” thick slabs.[xi] While the job suffered through the same strikes that delayed Sears, Standard Oil also had to contend with Italian labor unrest that delayed marble deliveries. As Standard moved into the tower’s lower floors in March and April 1973, the upper seven stories remained uncovered until July. Tenants began moving into those floors in October, and the plaza’s “dazzling” pattern of marble and granite was completed soon afterwards, though it only received its signature acoustic sculpture by Harry Bertoia in 1975.[xii] The building’s final days of construction were marked by a dramatic, ominous accident. In December 1973, scaffolding on the 82nd floor broke loose in high winds, tearing a 350-pound piece of marble from the building and sending it plunging through the Prudential’s roof. No one was injured, but emergency inspections delayed the project’s completion.[xiii]
Standard Oil with One and Two Prudential Plaza. (Author).
Standard Oil’s opening occurred amidst the same uncertainty about the Loop’s commercial market that had worried Sears’ backers. Unlike Sears, though, less than a third of Standard Oil’s upper floors were under contract at its opening.[xiv] Its leasing agent, Frank Whiston, kept rents high, hoping that the building would attract tenants based on prestige, but the 1973 energy crisis put Standard’s future in doubt, too. The AIA honored the tower for its engineering, but architectural critics were scathing. A local AIA committee auditing the Illinois Center project critiqued it for nearly doubling the city’s floor area ratio development guidelines for Illinois Center of 14:1.[xv] Stone himself gave the building a luke-warm reaction, remarking only that “it’s good looking” on seeing the project firsthand. The Tribune’s Paul Gapp, on the other hand,was furious. “The Standard Oil Building,” he wrote, “is perhaps the worst thing that has happened to Chicago’s skyline in the last 30 years.” The Prudential’s “headstone by the Lake” was now matched, in Gapp’s view, by Stone’s scale-less, “unbroken verticality.” Its blazing contrast between brilliant white marble and the narrow, dark recesses hid any sense of floor-to-floor rhythm or Picardi’s ingenious structural fabric behind facile elevational stripes. “If you stare at the building from a short distance for more than 15 seconds,” Gapp complained, “it is almost disorienting.”[xvi]
Standard Oil’s thin veneer of Carrara marble became infamous. After the 1973 accident, maintenance engineers noticed that winter freeze-thaw cycles were already causing panels to warp and buckle. In 1988, the company (renamed Amoco) installed stainless steel straps to prevent cracked panels from falling off. The next year they announced that all 43,000 panels would be replaced with hardier, Carolina granite at a cost of $80 million. Forensic engineers blamed bolt details that hadn’t allowed adequate expansion and contraction, but the fragility of the marble—the very delicacy that Stone and Perkins & Will had championed—was cited as a contributing factor.[xvii]
[i] “Indiana Standard Picks Chicago Site.” The New York Times, Sept. 8, 1968. F17.
[ii] “Standard Oil (Ind.) Selects 2 Architects.” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 14, 1969. 1-c11.
[iii] See “Anticipating Inflation Results in High Quality at Reasonable Costs.” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 13, 1970. 1-e1 and “City Keeps Growing.” Chicago Tribune, Aug 10, 1969. 1-d1for coverage of 230 W. Monroe.
[iv] Ada Louise Huxtable, “The Newest Skyscraper in Manhattan: G.M. Building Draws Crowds, But Gets Mixed Reviews.” New York Times, Oct. 1, 1968. 57.
[v] Edward D. Stone and Alvin Nagelberg. “Architect Throws Verbal Barbs At New Buildings Made Of Glass.” Chicago Tribune, Jan 11, 1970. 1-e9.
[vi] E. Alfred Picardi, “Structural System—Standard Oil of Indiana Building.” Journal of the Structural Division, ASCE. Vol. 99, no. ST4. Apr., 1973. 42-51.
[vii] Alvin Nagelberg, “Simplicity is Key to Standard Tower: Design is a Big Step Forward.” Chicago Tribune, Feb 08, 1970. 1-e1.
[viii] “Double-Deck Elevators Set for Building.” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1970. E9.
[ix] “Standard Oil Turns Ground Here Monday.” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 4, 1970. A9.
[x] “Ready Steel Work for 80-Story Tower.” Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1971. D1.
[xi] Genevieve Flavin, “80 Stories of Mighty Stan.” Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1972. H28.
[xii] “Marble-less Big Stan Can Now Finish Coat.” Chicago Tribune, July 13, 1973. C9 and Alan G. Artner, “Sounding Out the World of Sculpture’s Bertoia.” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 16, 1975. E17.
[xiii] “Huge Slab Falls Off Big Stan.” Chicago Tribune, Dec 26, 1973. 1.
[xiv] Alvin Nagelberg, “Downtown ‘Giants’ Vying for Office Space Tenants.” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 8, 1973. W_A1.
[xv] Stan Ziemba, “Cite Poor Plan: Experts Rap I.C. Project.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 4, 1972. A3.
[xvi] Paul Gapp, “Ambiguous Statement Snarls Center Debate.” Chicago Tribune, June 30, 1974. 1-e3.
[xvii] Michael Arndt, “Amoco Chucks all the Marble on its Tower.” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 7, 1989. 2.
Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 is officially hitting the streets on June 20, but there have been sightings in the wild already. We’ll formally launch it next month–the Chicago Architecture Center is hosting an event on July 11 at 6:00pm that will involve a short lecture, a conversation with CAC Senior Director of Content and Interpretation Adam Rubin, and a book sale/signing. Tickets are $15 for the general public and just $7 for CAC members (which I’m sure most architecturefarm readers are!)
I couldn’t be happier to have this finally out there. It has been a fascinating, richly rewarding adventure, and the research has uncovered plenty of new history to go along with the well-known stories of the city’s postwar architecture. I’ve had a great team of graduate students working on new digital reconstructions that show how these buildings were put together. I’m grateful to archivists, librarians, and company PR departments (including a Kentucky bourbon distillery–I’ll just leave that hanging there) who have helped uncover new photographs and ephemera that help to flesh out their broader contexts. And editors and designers at the University of Illinois Press have done a spectacular job with the raw material we gave them.
Lots more people to thank for making this happen–I’m hoping to have the chance to do that in person with many of you at CAC next month…
architecturefarm 