THE CHICAGO SCHOOL AND ITAIAN FUTURISM.

BACKGROUND.

• Between the late 1870's and the First World War one of the most significant architectural movements since the
Renaissance flourished in Chicago. The "Chicago School," as it came to be called, produced an original architectural
expression based on the application of industrial technology responsive to new economic demands and social concerns.
Mirroring and shaping life styles, this architecture anticipated and influenced today's patterns of urban and suburban life
in the United States and Europe.
• Following the fire of 1871, Chicago created distinctive urban forms that permitted new highdensity use in the city core.
Development of the skyscraper made possible vertical growth. Innovations in mass transit moved people out from the city
core and accelerated the city's horizontal expansion. New towns and new housing styles were developed. These new
forms were the physical response to the stimulus of Chicago's booming activity in manufacturing, railroading, and
commerce.
• Chicago architects adapted the design flexibility and speed of erection used by iron bridge builders to a basic system of
construction for commercial buildings. The resulting metal skeleton frame, first in cast and wrought iron and finally in
steel, permitted new physical height and openness. Since the wall no longer supported the building, it became a mere
skin, a transparent envelope permitting maximum light and ventilation. The synthesis of the skyscraper form led to
revolutionary theories of design expressing the structure and function of the building.
• Designers of this period rejected historic styles in architecture and sought to apply newly formulated architectural
theories to all types of buildings.
• These theories were particularly manifest in the continuity of exterior form and fluid interior spaces of a new kind of
private residence—the Prairie house.
BACKGROUND.

• Search for a design universality to reflect man's physical needs and social well being touched all aspects of architecture,
the applied arts, landscape design, and town planning. The nature of building materials, the function of form, and the
relationship of man's structures to nature became articulated in a philosophy that is still fresh and relevant.
• The Chicago School movement prompted an architectural revolution, wholly American in origin, that anticipated by
several decades a similar development in Europe.
• The refinement of building techniques and the expression of the function of the buildings in fully integrated architectural
style provided inspiration for the designers of Europe's new architectural movement that followed World War I. For the
first time an artistic development in America influenced architectural designers in Europe.
• The work of the Chicago School was international in its consequences and prefigured the form of commercial and
residential buildings now universally adapted as twentieth century architecture.
• The evolution of modern architecture may be traced through its formative phases in Chicago and environs. Here survive
not only individual buildings but whole communities that graphically portray this significant aspect of America's culture.

The Development of a Modern Architecture .

• Radical shifts in architectural form constitute one of the most significant elements of architectural history.
• The development of a totally new architecture indicates social and economic changes which cause the basic forms and
objectives of building to differ substantially from those of the preceding period.
• New structural systems as well as new decorative schemes appear. A new sense of space emerges and with it a new
variety of symbolism more suitable to the requirements of a clientele representative of the new society.
• The forces that nurtured the Chicago architecture are well documented in the political, economic, and social histories of
the Midwest. Problems in Chicago were an intensification of problems that faced the nation in the 1870's — readaptation
from cultural patterns formed in an agrarian society to a vigorous newly industrialized society.
The Development of a Modern Architecture .
• New structural devices and construction methods increased the speed and efficiency of the building process. New
systems, now standard, were conceived. With the achievement of the iron and later steel skeleton frame, great open floor
areas became available for the first time. Raft footings better distributed the building weight over the medium bearing
soils. Concrete caissons carried the loads of massive structures down more than a hundred feet to bedrock. Chemicals
were added to concrete and mortar, permitting construction in freezing temperatures. Shelters were built to protect men
and materials so that work could continue in any weather.
• the architects of the Chicago School strove to identify a set of architectural principles having a common outlook on
modern life. They reacted against romantic historicism and the melange of ethical, literary, naturalistic, and sentimental
values that were attached to various adaptations of classical and medieval "styles.”

The Evolution of a New Form .

• The tall commercial building originated in New York City, where the invention of the elevator made the multi-story
building feasible. However, the designers of these early skyscrapers did not recognize the possibilities that this building
type offered in the organization of the plan and elevations into a new architectural form.
• The form of the skyscraper that evolved from the Chicago School was based on the adaptation of the new technology to
the art of building and expressing these techniques in architectural design.
• The technological advances of the Chicago School were the culmination of a structural evolution that extended over a
century.
• the street facades are of wall bearing masonry, these elevations have an extraordinary openness of the wall with vigorous
articulation of the elements in precise scale and proportion. In spite of the elaborate decorative elements on the street
elevations, the design is a powerful revelation of the building's pier-and lintel and pier-and-arch construction. The real
significance of the Rookery is its interior court.
Characteristics of Chicago school.
• Use of steel-frame buildings with masonry cladding (usually terra cotta), allowing large plate-glass window areas and
limiting the amount of exterior ornamentation.
• Sometimes elements of neoclassical architecture are used in Chicago School skyscrapers.
• Many Chicago School skyscrapers contain the three parts of a classical column. The lowest floors functions as the base,
the middle stories, usually with little ornamental detail, act as the shaft of the column, and the last floor or two, often
capped with a cornice and often with more ornamental detail, represent the capital.
• The "Chicago window" originated in this school. It is a three-part window consisting of a large fixed center panel flanked
by two smaller double-hung sash windows. The arrangement of windows on the facade typically creates a grid pattern,
with some projecting out from the facade forming bay windows. The Chicago window combined the functions of light-
gathering and natural ventilation; a single central pane was usually fixed, while the two surrounding panes were operable.
These windows were often deployed in bays, known as oriel windows, that projected out over the street.
 Architects whose names are associated with the Chicago School include
• Henry Hobson Richardson,
• Dankmar Adler,
• Daniel Burnham,
• William Holabird,
• William LeBaron Jenney,
• Martin Roche,
• John Root,
• Solon S. Beman,
• and Louis Sullivan.
• Frank Lloyd Wright started in the firm of Adler and Sullivan but created his own Prairie Style of architecture.
• The Home Insurance Building, which some regarded as the first skyscraper in the world, was built in Chicago
in 1885 and was demolished in 1931.
Louis Sullivan.
Known as Chicago's "Father of Skyscrapers," Louis Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) foreshadowed
modernism with his famous phrase "form follows function." Sullivan was an architectural prodigy even as a young man,
graduating high school and beginning his studies at MIT when he was just 16. After just a year of study he dropped out of
MIT, and by the time he was just 24 he had joined forces with Dankmar Adler as a full partner of Adler and Sullivan.

Notable works of architect Louis Sullivan

• The Guaranty Building.
• Wainwright Building.
• Auditorium Building, Chicago.

• Wainwright Building.
Wainwright Building.
• The Wainwright Building (also known as the Wainwright State Office Building) is a 10-story, 41 m (135 ft)
red brick office building at 709 Chestnut Street in downtown St. Louis, Missouri.The Wainwright Building is considered
to be among the first early skyscrapers in the world. It was designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan in the Palazzo
style and built between 1890 and 1891. It was named for local brewer, building contractor, and financier Ellis
Wainwright.
• The building, listed as a landmark both locally and nationally, is described as "a highly influential prototype of the
modern office building" by the National Register of Historic Places.
• Architect Frank Lloyd Wright called the Wainwright Building "the very first human expression of a tall steel office-
building as Architecture.
• As designed, the first floor of the Wainwright Building was intended for street-accessible shops, with the second floor
filled with easily accessible public offices. The higher floors were for "honeycomb" offices, while the top floor was for
water tanks and building machinery.
• Aesthetically, the Wainwright Building exemplifies Sullivan's theories about the tall building, which included a tripartite
(three-part) composition (base-shaft-attic) based on the structure of the classical column.
• his desire to emphasize the height of the building. He wrote: "[The skyscraper] must be tall, every inch of it tall.
• The force and power of altitude must be in it the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud
and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.
• The base contained retail stores that required wide glazed openings; Sullivan's ornament made the supporting piers read
as pillars.
• Above it the semi-public nature of offices up a single flight of stairs are expressed as broad windows in the curtain wall.
• A cornice separates the second floor from the grid of identical windows of the screen wall, where each window is "a cell
in a honeycomb, nothing more“.
Wainwright Building.
• The building's windows and horizontals were inset slightly
behind columns and piers, as part of a “vertical aesthetic” to
create what Sullivan called “a proud and soaring thing.
• The ornamentation for the building includes a
wide frieze below the deep cornice, which expresses the
formalized yet naturalistic celery-leaf foliage typical of The piers read as pillars
Sullivan.
• decorated spandrels between the windows on the different
floors and an elaborate door surround at the main entrance.
• "Apart from the slender brick piers, the only solids of the
wall surface are the spandrel panels between the windows.....
They have rich decorative patterns in low relief, varying in
design and scale with each story.“
• The frieze is pierced by unobtrusive bull's-eye windows that The intricate frieze
along the top of
light the top-story floor, originally containing water tanks
the building along
and elevator machinery. with the bull's-eye
• The building includes embellishments of terra cotta,a windows
building material that was gaining popularity at the time of
construction.
• One of Sullivan's primary concerns was the development of
an architectural symbolism consisting of simple geometric,
structural forms and organic ornamentation.
“Form follows function”
• Louis Sullivan, exact word describing form follows function in his article. Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight,
or the open apple-blossom, the toiling workhorse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base,
the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.
• “It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human
and things superhuman… that form ever follows function, This is the law …”
• He defined the style in architecture which expresses the ‘verticality’ of high rise buildings.
• His architecture was defined my beautiful modular ornamentation on simplistic building forms, striking a perfect balance
in art nouveau and modernism.
• The underlying idea behind this philosophy is “efficiency”. Efficiency in materials, space planning and ornamentation
provides a way to minimize the cost of construction and increase the profit margin.
• The idea of efficiency suddenly became central to the high rise architecture because of modular construction that
greatly supports repetition.
• What’s so special about form follows function?.
• Sullivan’s speciality was not cutting costs with efficiency, rather his abilities shined in “optimization”.
• It is the idea of striking a balance to optimize aesthetics, economics, experience and usability of any architecture.
• He used ornamentation only where needed, namely in pediments, cornice and common areas in the interior of the
buildings.
• He always used custom ironwork railings and elevator doors since these are high traffic areas.
• He expressed verticality with exterior columns and believed that every inch of a tall building should reflect its ‘tallness’.
This can be seen in his choice of ornamentation, facade and spatial organization.
• Their buildings were not only functional examples of metal frame technology, but successful artistically in unifying a
skyscraper’s repetitious components.
• He delineated three major visible sections in his works:
• A strong base with broad windows for shops,
• A middle section for offices with vertical elements to dramatize height, and
• A capping cornice housing mechanical equipment.
• The tripartite division corresponds to practical requirements.