Chapter C: L. W. Eidlitz, Architect (1)

To begin with a paradox, the feature of Chicago is its featurelessness. There is scarcely any capital, ancient or modern, to which the site supplies so little of a visible reason of being. The prairie and the lake meet at a level, a liquid plain and a plain of mud that cannot properly be called solid, with nothing but the change of material to break the expanse. Indeed, when there is a breeze, the surface of Lake Michigan would be distinctly more diversified than that of the adjoining land, but for the handiwork of man. In point of fact, Chicago is of course explained by the confluence here of the two branches of the Chicago River. These have determined the site, the plan, and the building of the town, but one can scarcely describe as natural features the two sinuous ditches that drain the prairie into the lake, apparently in defiance of the law that water runs, and even oozes, down hill. Streams, however narrow and sluggish they may be, so they be themselves available for traffic, operate an obstruction to traffic by land; and it is the fact that for some distance from the junction the south fork of the river flows parallel with the shore of the lake, and within a half-mile of it, which establishes in this enclosure the commercial centre of Chicago. Even the slight obstacle interposed to traffic by the confluent streams, bridged and tunnelled as they are, has sufficed greatly to raise the cost of land within this area, in comparison with that outside, and to compel here the erection of the towering structures that are the most characteristic and the most impressive monuments of the town.

In character and impressiveness these by no means disappoint the stranger’s expectations, but in number and extent they do, rather. For what one expects of Chicago, before anything else, is modernness. In most things one’s expectations are fully realized. It is the most contemporaneous of capitals, and in the appearance of its people and their talk in the streets and in the clubs and in the newspapers it fairly palpitates with “actuality.” Nevertheless, the general aspect of the business quarter is distinctly old-fashioned, and this even to the effete Oriental from New York or Boston. The elevator is nearly a quarter of a century old, and the first specimens of “elevator architecture,” the Western Union and the “Tribune” buildings in New York, are very nearly coeval with the great fire in Chicago. One would have supposed that the rebuilders of Chicago would have seized upon this hint with avidity, and that its compressed commercial quarter would have made up in altitude what it lacked in area. In fact, not only are the great modern office buildings still exceptional in the most costly and most crowded district, but it is astonishing to hear that the oldest of them is scarcely more than seven years of age. “Men’s deeds are after as they have been accustomed”--and the first impulse of the burnt-out merchants of Chicago was not to seize the opportunity the clean sweep of the fire had given them to improve their warehouses and office buildings, but to provide themselves straightway with places in which they could find shelter and do business. The consequence was that the new buildings of the burnt district were planned and designed, as well as built, with the utmost possible speed, and the rebuilding was for the most part done by the same architects who had built the old Chicago, and who took even less thought the second time than they had taken the first, by reason of the greater pressure upon them. The American commercial Renaissance, commonly expressed in cast-iron, was in its full efflorescence just before the fire. The material was discredited by that calamity, but unhappily not the forms it had taken, and in Chicago we may see, what is scarcely to be seen anywhere else in the world, fronts in cast-iron, themselves imitated from lithic architecture, again imitated in masonry, with the modifications reproduced that had been made necessary by the use of the less trustworthy material. This ignoble process is facilitated by the material at hand, a limestone of which slabs can be had in sizes that simulate exactly the castings from which the treatment of them is derived. After the exposure of a few months to the bituminous fumes it is really impossible to tell one of these reproductions from the original, which very likely adjoins it. Masonry and metal alike appear to have come from a foundry, rather than from a quarry, and to have been moulded according to the stock patterns of some architectural iron-works. The lifelessness and thoughtlessness of the iron-founders’ work predominate in the streets devoted to the retail trade, and the picturesque tourist in Chicago is thus compelled to traverse many miles of street fronts quite as dismal and as monotonous as the commercial architecture of any other modern town.

There is a compensation for this in what at first sight seems to be one of its aggravations. The buildings which wear these stereotyped street fronts are much lower and less capacious than the increasing exigencies of business require, and than the introduction of the elevator makes possible, and they could not be other than cheap and flimsy in construction. Naturally the rebuilders of Chicago talked a great deal about “absolutely fire-proof” construction, but as naturally they did very little of it. The necessity for immediate accommodation, at a minimum of cost, was overwhelming, and cheap and hasty construction cannot be fire-proof construction. Accordingly, the majority of the commercial buildings now standing in Chicago are as really provisional and temporary as the tents and shanties, pitched almost on the embers of the fire, which they succeeded. The time being now ripe for replacing them by structures more capacious and durable, it is a matter for congratulation that there is nothing in the existing buildings of such practical or architectural value as to make anybody regret or obstruct the substitution.

Even if the old-fashioned architects who rebuilt Chicago had been anxious to reconstruct it according to the best and newest lights, it would have been quite out of their power to do so unaided. The erection of a twelve-story building anywhere involves an amount of mechanical consideration and a degree of engineering skill that are quite beyond the practitioners of the American metallic Renaissance. In Chicago the problem is more complicated than elsewhere, because these towering and massive structures ultimately rest upon a quagmire that is not less but more untrustworthy the deeper one digs. The distribution of the weight by carrying the foundations down to a trustworthy bottom, and increasing the area of the supporting piers as they descend, is not practicable here, nor, for the same reason, can it be done by piling. It is managed, in the heaviest buildings, by floating them upon a raft of concrete and railroad iron, spread a few feet below the surface, so that there are no cellars in the business quarter, and the subterranean activities that are so striking in the elevator buildings of New York are quite unknown. If the architects of the old Chicago, to whom their former clients naturally applied to rear the phœnix of the new, had been seized with the ambition of building Babels, they would doubtless have made as wild work practically as they certainly would have made artistically in the confusion of architectural tongues that would have fallen upon them. It is in every point of view fortunate that the modernization of the town was reserved for the better-trained designers of a younger generation.

It might be expected that the architecture of Chicago would be severely utilitarian in purpose if not in design, and this is the case. The city may be said to consist of places of business and places of residence. There are no churches, for example, that fairly represent the skill of the architects. The best of them are scarcely worthy of illustration or discussion here, while the worst of them might suitably illustrate the work projected by a ribald wit on “The Comic Aspects of Christianity.” Among other things, it follows from this deficiency that Chicago lacks almost altogether, in any general view that can be had of it, the variety and animation that are imparted to the sky line of a town seen from the water, or from an eminence, by a “tiara of proud towers,” even when these are not specially attractive in outline or in detail, nor especially fortunate in their grouping. There is nothing, for example, in the aspect of Chicago from the lake, or from any attainable point of view, that is comparable to the sky-line of the Back Bay of Boston, as seen from the Cambridge bridge, or of lower New York from either river. The towering buildings are almost wholly flat-roofed, and their stark, rectangular outlines cannot take on picturesqueness, even under the friendly drapery of the smoke that overhangs the commercial quarter during six days of the week. The architect of the Dearborn Station was very happily inspired when he relieved the prevailing monotony with the quaint and striking clock-tower that adjoins that structure.

The secular public buildings of Chicago are much more noteworthy than the churches, but upon the whole they bear scarcely so large a relation to the mass of private building as one would expect from the wealth and the public spirit of the town, and with one or two very noteworthy exceptions, recent as many of them are, they were built too early. The most discussed of them is the city and county building, and this has been discussed for reasons quite alien to its architecture, the halves of what was originally a single design having been assigned to different architects. The original design has been followed in the main, and the result is an edifice that certainly makes a distinctive impression. A building, completely detached, 340 feet by 280 in area, and considerably over 100 feet high, can scarcely fail to make an impression by dint of mere magnitude, but there is rather more than that in the city and county building. The parts are few and large, but five stories appearing, the masonry is massive, and the projecting and pedimented porticoes are on an ample scale. These things give the building a certain effect of sumptuosity and swagger that ally it rather to the Parisian than to the Peorian Renaissance. The effect is marred by certain drawbacks of detail, and by one that is scarcely of

J. W. Egan and J. R. Mullett, Architects.]

detail, the extreme meanness and baldness of the attic, in which, for the only time in the building, the openings seem to be arranged with some reference to their uses, and in which accordingly they have a painfully pinched and huddled appearance. In the decorative detail there is apparent a divergency of views between the two architects appointed to carry out the divided halves of the united design. The municipal designer--or possibly it is the county gentleman--has been content to stand upon the ancient ways, and to introduce no detail for which he has not found Ludovican precedent, while his rival is of a more aspiring mind, and has endeavored to carry out the precepts of the late Thomas Jefferson, by classicizing things modern. His excursions are not very daring, and consist mainly in such substitutions as that of an Indian’s head for the antique mask, in a frieze of conventionalized American foliage. He has attained what must be in such an attempt the gratifying success of converting his modern material to a result as dull and lifeless and uninteresting as his prototype. It does not, however, impair the grandiosity of the general effect. This is impaired, not merely by the poverty of design already noted in the attic, but also by the niggardliness shown in dividing the polished granite column of the porticoes into several drums, though monoliths are plainly indicated by their dimensions, and by the general scale of the masonry. The small economy is the more injurious, because a noble regardlessness of expense is of the essence of the architecture, and an integral part of its effectiveness. The most monumental feature of the projected building has never been supplied--a huge arch in the centre of each of the shorter fronts, giving access to the central court, and marking the division between the property of the city and of the county. It is possible that the failure to finish this arch has proceeded from the political conflict that has left its scars upon the building elsewhere. There is an obvious practical difficulty in intrusting the two halves of an arch to rival architects and rival contractors. However that may be, the arch is unbuilt, and the entrance to the central court is a mere rift in the wall. The practical townspeople have seized the opportunity thus presented by the unoccupied space of free quarters for the all-pervading buggy. With a contempt for the constituted authorities that it must be owned the constituted authorities have gone far to justify, they tether their horses in the shadow of their chief civic monument, like so many Arabs under the pillars of Palmyra or Persepolis, and heighten the impression of being the relic of an extinct race that is given to the pile not only by its unfinished state and by the stains of smoke, undistinguishable from those of time, but by its entirely exotic architecture. As the newly-landed Irishman, making his way up Broadway from Castle Garden, is said to have exclaimed, when he came in sight of the City Hall, that “that never was built in this country,” so the stranger in Chicago is tempted to declare of its municipal building that it could not have been reared by the same race of whose building activities the other evidences surround him. This single example of Ludovican architecture recalls, as most examples of it do, Thackeray’s caricature of its Mecænas. Despoiled of its periwigs and its high heels, that is to say, of its architecture, which is easily separable from it, the building would merely lose all its character, without losing anything that belongs to it as a building.

Nevertheless this municipal building has its character, and in comparison with the next most famous public building of Chicago, it vindicates the wisdom of its architect in subjecting himself to the safeguard of a style of which, moreover, his work shows a real study. The style may be absolutely irrelevant both to our needs and to our ideas, as irrelevant as the political system of Louis XIV. which it recalls. Its formulas may seem quite empty, but they gather dignity, if not meaning, when contrasted with the work of an avid “swallower of formulas,” like the architect of the Board

Burnham & Root, Architects.]

of Trade. His work is of no style, a proposition that is not invalidated by the probability that he himself would call it “American eclectic Gothic.” We all know what the untutored and aboriginal architect stretches that term to cover. There is no doubt about its being characteristically modern and American; one might say characteristically Western, if he did not recall equally free and untrammelled exuberances in the Atlantic States. But it is impossible to ascribe to it any architectural merit, unless a complete disregard for precedent is to be imputed for righteousness, whether it proceed from ignorance or from contempt. And, indeed, there are not many other structures in the United States, of equal cost and pretension, which equally with this combine the dignity of a commercial traveller with the bland repose of St. Vitus. It is difficult to contemplate its bustling and uneasy façade without feeling a certain sympathy with the mob of anarchists that “demonstrated” under its windows on the night of its opening. If they were really anarchists, it was very ungrateful of them, for one would go far to find a more perfect expression of anarchy in architecture, and it is conceivable that they were instigated by an outraged architectural critic in disguise. If that ringleader had been caught and arraigned, he could have maintained, with much better reason, the plea that Gustave Courbet made for his share in the destruction of the column of the Place Vendôme, that his opposition to the monument was not political, but æsthetic.

Fortunately there is no other among the public or quasi-public buildings of Chicago of which the architecture is so hopeless and so irresponsible--no other that would so baffle the palæontological Paley who should seek in it evidences of design, and that does not exhibit, at least, an architectural purpose, carried out with more or less of consistency and success. At the very centre of the commercial water front there was wisely reserved from traffic in the rebuilding of the town the “Lake Park,” a mile in extent, and some hundreds of feet in depth, which not only serves the purpose of affording a view of the lake from the business quarter, but also secures an effective foreground for the buildings that line its landward edge. One of the oldest of these, young as all of them are, is the “Art Institute,” designed by Messrs. Burnham & Root. This is of a moderate altitude, and suffers somewhat from being dwarfed by the elevator buildings erected

since, being but of three stories and a roof; but no neighbor could make it other than a vigorous and effective work, as dignified as the Board of Trade is uneasy, and as quiet as that is noisy. It is extremely simple in composition, as will be seen, and it bears very little ornament, this being for the most part concentrated upon the ample and deeply moulded archway of the entrance. It owes its effectiveness to the clearness of its division into the three main parts of base and superstructure and roof, to the harmonious relation between them, and to the differences in the treatment of them that enhance this harmony. The Aristotelian precept that a work of art must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, is nowhere more conspicuously valid than in architecture, and nowhere does the neglect of it entail more unfortunate consequences. The severity of the basement, with its plain rectangular openings, is an effective introduction to the somewhat lighter and more open fenestration of the second and third stories, which are grouped to form the second term in the proportion, and this in turn to the range of openings in the gable of the shorter front, and to the row of peaked dormers in the longer that animate the sky-line and complete the composition. The impressiveness of the fronts is very greatly deepened by the vigorous framing of massive angle piers in which they are enclosed, the vigor of which is enhanced by the solid pinnacled turrets, corbelled out above the second story, that help to weight them, and that visibly abut the outward thrust of the arcades. It may be significant, with reference to the tendency of Western architecture, that this admirable building, admirable in the sobriety and moderation that are facilitated by its moderate size, is precisely what one would not expect to find in Chicago, so little is there evident in it of an intention to “collar the eye,” or to challenge the attention it so very well repays.

In part, as we have just intimated, this modesty may be ascribed to the modest dimensions of the building. At any rate, it was out of the question in another important quasi-public building, which is the latest, and, at this writing, the loudest of the lions of Chicago--the Auditorium. Whatever else a ten-story building, nearly 300 feet by more than 350 in area and 140 in height, with a tower rising 80 feet farther, may happen to be, it must be conspicuous, and it is no wise possible that its designer should make it appear bashful or unobtrusive. Of however retiring a disposition he may be, in such a situation he must brazen it out. It is in his

Adler & Sullivan, Architects.]

power to adopt a very simple or a very elaborate treatment, and to imperil the success of his work by making it dull on the one hand or unquiet on the other. Messrs. Adler & Sullivan, the architects of the Auditorium, have chosen the better part in treating their huge fronts with great severity, insomuch that the building can scarcely be said to exhibit any “features,” except the triple entrance on the lake front, with its overhanging balcony, and the square tower that rises over the southern front to a height of 225 feet. While they did wisely in showing that monotony had fewer terrors for them than restlessness, the monotony that undoubtedly amounts to a defect in the aspect of the completed work is by no means wholly or mainly attributable to them. A place of popular entertainment, constructed upon a scale and with a massiveness to which we can scarcely find a parallel since Roman days, would present one of the worthiest and most interesting problems a modern architect could have if he were left to solve it unhampered. It is quite difficult enough to tax the power of any designer without any complications. The problem of design in the Chicago Auditorium is much complicated with requirements entirely irrelevant to its main purpose. The lobbies, the auditorium, and the stage of a great theatre, which are its essential parts, are all susceptible of an exterior expression more truthful and more striking than has yet been attained, in spite of many earnest and interesting essays. In the interior of the Auditorium, where the architects were left free, they have devoted themselves to solving their real problem with a high degree of success, and have attained an impressive simplicity and largeness. We are not dealing with interiors, however, and they were required to envelop the outside of their theatre in a shell of many-storied commercial architecture, which forbade them even to try for a monumental expression of their great hall. In the main, their exterior appears and must be judged only as a “business block.” They have their exits and their entrances, and it is really only in these features that the exterior betrays the primary purpose of the building. The tower, even, is evidently not so much monumental as utilitarian. It is prepared for in the substructure only by a slight and inadequate projection of the piers, while it is itself obviously destined for profitable occupancy, being a small three-story business block, superimposed upon a huge ten-story business block. Such a structure cannot be converted into a monumental feature by making it more massive at the top than it is at the bottom,

Adler & Sullivan. Architects.]

even though the massiveness be as artistically accentuated as it is in the tower of the Auditorium by the powerful open colonnade and the strong machicolated cornice in which it culminates. Waiving, as the designers have been compelled to do, the main purpose of the structure, and considering it as a commercial building, the Auditorium does not leave very much to be desired. The basement, especially, which consists of three stories of granite darker than the limestone of the superstructure, and appropriately rough-faced, is a vigorous and dignified performance, in which the expression of rugged strength is enhanced by the small and deep openings, and in which the necessarily large openings of the ground-floor are prevented from enfeebling the design by the massiveness of the lintels and flat arches that enclose them, and of the piers and pillars by which these are supported. The superstructure is scarcely worthy of this basement. The triple vertical division of the wall is effectively proportioned, but a much stronger demarcation is needed between the second and third members than is furnished by the discontinuous sill-course of the eighth story, while a greater projection, a greater depth, and a more vigorous modelling of the main cornice, and an enrichment of the attic beneath, would go far to relieve the baldness and monotony that are the defects of the design, and that are scarcely to be condoned because there are architectural faults much worse and much more frequent, which the designers have avoided. It is only, as has been said, in the entrances that they have been permitted to exhibit the object of the building. Really, it is only in the entrance on the Lake front, for the triplet of stilted arches at the base of the tower is not a very felicitous or a very congruous feature. The three low arches of the Lake front are of a Roman largeness--true vomitoria--and their effectiveness is increased by the simplicity of their treatment, by the ample lateral abutment provided for them, and by the long and shallow balcony that overhangs them. With the arches themselves this makes a very impressive feature, albeit the balcony is a very questionable feature. Even to the layman there must be a latent contradiction in the intercalation of the pillar to relieve the bearing of a lintel, when the pillar is referred to an unsupported shelf, obviously lighter and weaker than the lintel itself. This contradiction is not explained away by the vigor and massiveness of the shallow corbels that really account for the alternate columns, and it suggests that the construction so exhibited is not the true construction at all, and leaves this latter to be inferred without any help from the architecture. Even if one waives his objection to architectural forms that do not agree with the structural facts, it is surely not pedantic to require that the construction asserted by the forms shall be plausible to the extent of agreeing with itself. It is a pity that there should be such a drawback from a feature so effective; but the drawback does not prevent the feature from being effective, nor do the shortcomings we have been considering in the design of the Auditorium, nor even the much more serious obstacle that was inherent in the problem and imposed upon the architects, prevent it from being a very impressive structure, and justifying the pride with which it is regarded by all patriotic Chicagoans.

But, as has been intimated, it is not in monumental edifices that the characteristic building of Chicago is to be looked for. The “business block,” entirely utilitarian in purpose, and monumental only in magnitude and in solidity of construction, is the true and typical embodiment in building of the Chicago idea. This might be said, of course, of any American city. Undoubtedly the most remarkable achievements of our architects and the most creditable have been in commercial architecture. But in this respect Chicago is more American than any of the Eastern cities, where there are signs, even in the commercial quarters, of division of interest and infirmity of purpose. In none of them does the building bespeak such a singleness of devotion, or indicate that life means so exclusively a living. Even the exceptions prove the rule by such tokens as the modest dimensions of the Art Institute and the concealment of the Auditorium in the heart of a business block. It does not by any means follow that the business blocks are uninteresting. There are singularly few exceptions to the rule of dismalness in the buildings that were hurriedly run up after the fire. One of these exceptions, the American Express Company, has an extrinsic interest as being the work of Mr. Richardson, and as being, so far as it need be classified, an example of Victorian Gothic, although its openings are all lintelled, instead of the Provençal Romanesque to which its author afterwards addicted himself with such success. So successful an example is it that an eminent but possibly bilious English architect, who visited Chicago at an early stage of the rebuilding, declared it to be the only thing in the town worth looking at--a judgment that does not seem so harsh to the tourist of to-day who compares it with its thus disesteemed contemporaries. It is a sober and straightforward performance in a safe monochrome of olive sandstone, and it thus lacks the note of that variety of Victorian Gothic that Mr. Ruskin’s eloquence stimulated untrained American designers to produce, in which the restlessness of unstudied forms is still further tormented by the spotty application of color. From this variety of Victorian Gothic Chicago is happily free. A gabled building in brick and sandstone opposite the Palmer House is almost a unique, and not at all an unfavorable, example. The business streets that are now merely dismal would have been much more aggressively painful if the incapable architects who built them had deviated from the comparative safety of their cast-iron Renaissance into a style that put them upon their individual want of resources. Moreover, throughout the commercial quarter any attempt at a structural use of color is sure shortly to be frustrated by coal-smoke. Upon the whole, it is a matter for congratulation that the earlier rebuilders of

H. H. Richardson, Architect.]

Chicago, being what they were, should have been so ignorant or careless of what was going on elsewhere, which, had they been aware of it, they would have been quite certain to misapply. Not only did they thus escape the frantic result that came of Victorian Gothic in untutored hands, but they escaped the pettiness and puerility that resulted of “Queen Anne,” even when it was done by designers who ought to have known better. These pages contain a disparagement of that curious mode of building in a paper written when it was dressed in its little brief authority and playing its most fantastic tricks. Now it is so well recognized that Queen Anne is dead, that it seems strange educated architects ever could have fancied they detected the promise and potency of architectural life in her cold remains. This most evanescent of fashions seems never to have prevailed in Chicago at all.

One of the earliest of the more modern and characteristic of the commercial structures of Chicago, the Field Building, is by Mr. Richardson also, a huge warehouse covering a whole square, and seven stories high. With such an opportunity, Mr. Richardson could be trusted implicitly at least to make the most of his dimensions, and large as the building is in fact, it looks interminably big. Its bigness is made apparent by the simplicity of its treatment and the absence of any lateral division whatever. Simplicity, indeed, could scarcely go further. The vast expanses of the fronts are unrelieved by any ornament except a leaf in the cornice, and a rudimentary capital in the piers and mullions of the colonnaded attic. The effect of the mass is due wholly to its magnitude, to the disposition of its openings, and to the emphatic exhibition of the masonic structure. The openings, except in the attic, and except for an ample pier reserved at each corner, are equally spaced throughout. The vertical division is limited to a sharp separation from the intermediate wall veil of the basement on one hand, and of the attic on the other. It must be owned that there is even a distinct infelicity in the arrangement of the five stories of this intermediate wall, the two superposed arcades, the upper of which, by reason of its multiplied supports, is the more solid of aspect, and between which there is no harmonious relation, but contrariwise a competition. Nevertheless, the main division is so clear, and the handling throughout so vigorous, as to carry off even a more serious defect. Nothing of its kind could be more impressive than the rugged expanse of masonry, of which the bonding is expressed throughout, and which in the granite basement becomes Cyclopean in scale, and in the doorway especially Cyclopean in rude strength. The great pile is one of the most interesting as it is one of the most individual examples of American commercial building. In it the vulgarity of the “commercial palace” is gratefully conspicuous by its absence, and it is as monumental in its massiveness and durability as it is grimly utilitarian in expression.

It is in this observance of the proprieties of commercial architecture, and in this self-denying rejection of an ornateness improper to it, that the best of the commercial architecture of Chicago is a welcome surprise to the tourist from the East. When the rebuilding of the business quarter of Boston was in progress, and while that city was for the most part congratulating itself upon the display of the skill of its architects for which the fire had opened a field, Mr. Richardson observed to the author of these remarks that there was more character in the plain and solid warehouses that had been destroyed than in the florid edifices by which they had been replaced. The saying was just, for the burned Boston was as unmistakably commercial as much of the rebuilt Boston is irrelevantly palatial. In the warehouse just noticed, Mr. Richardson himself resisted this besetting temptation of the architect, and his work certainly loses nothing of the simplicity which, with the uninstructed builders of old Boston, was in large part mere ignorance and unskilfulness, but emphasizes it by the superior power of distributing his masses that belonged to him as a trained and sensitive designer; for the resources of an artist are required to give an artistic and poignant expression even of rudeness. The rebuilt commercial quarter of Boston is by no means an extreme example of misplaced ornateness. Within the past three or four years Wall Street has been converted from the hum-drum respectability of an old-fashioned business thoroughfare to a street of commercial palaces, the aspect of which must contain an element of grievousness to the judicious, who see that the builders have lavished their repertory of ornament and variety on buildings to which nobody resorts for pleasure, but everybody for business alone, and that they have left themselves nothing further to do in the way of enrichment when they come to do temples and palaces, properly so called. Mr. Ruskin has fallen into deep, and largely into deserved discredit as an architectural critic, by promulgating rhapsodies as dogmas. His intellectual frivolity is even more evident and irritating by reason of the moral earnestness that attends it, recalling that perfervid pulpiteer of whom a like-minded eulogist affirmed that “he wielded his prurient imagination like a battle-axe in the service of the Lord of Hosts.” All the same, lovers of architecture owe him gratitude for his eloquent inculcation of some of the truths that he arrived at by feeling, however inconclusive is the reasoning by which he endeavors to support them, and one of these is the text, so much preached from in the “Seven Lamps,” that “where rest is forbidden, so is ornament.” Wall Street and the business quarter of Boston, and every commercial palace in every city, violate, in differing degrees, this plain dictate of good sense and good taste, even in the very rare instances in which the misplacement of the ornateness is the worst thing that can be alleged against it. In the best of the commercial buildings of Chicago there is nothing visible of the conflict of which we hear so much from architects, mostly in the way of complaint, between the claims of “art” and the claims of utility, nor any evidence of a desire to get the better of a practical client by smuggling architecture upon him, and deceiving him for his own good and the glory of his architect. It is a very good lesson to see how the strictly architectural

S. S. Beman, Architect.]

sucess of the commercial buildings is apt to be directly in proportion to the renunciation by the designers of conventional “architecturesqueness,” and to their loyal acceptance at all points of the utilitarian conditions under which they are working.

The Studebaker Building is one of the show buildings of Chicago, but it cannot be said to deserve this particular praise in so high a degree as several less celebrated structures. It partakes--shall we say?--too much of the palatial character of Devonshire Street and Wall Street to be fairly representative of the severity of commercial architecture in Chicago. It is very advantageously placed, fronting the Lake Park, and it is in several respects not unworthy of its situation. The arrangement of the first five stories is striking, and the arcade that embraces the three upper of these is a striking and well-studied feature, with detail very good in itself and very well adjusted in place and in scale. It is the profusion of this detail and the lavish introduction of carved marble and of polished granite shafts that first impress every beholder with its palatial rather than commercial character, but this character is not less given to the front, or to that part of it which has character, by the very general composition that makes the front so striking. An arcade superposed upon two colonnades, which are together of less than its own height, can scarcely fail of impressiveness; but here it loses some of its impressiveness in losing all its significance by reason of its subdivision into three equal stories, none of them differing in purpose from any other or from the colonnade below, and the larger grouping that simulates a lofty hall above two minor stories is thus seen to be merely capricious. Of course pretty much the same criticism may be passed upon most American works of commercial architecture, and upon the best not less than upon the worst, but that it cannot be passed upon the best commercial buildings of Chicago is their peculiar praise. Moreover, the Studebaker building has some marked defects peculiar to its design. The flanking piers of the building, in spite of the effort made to increase their apparent massiveness by a solid treatment of the terminal arches at the base, are painfully thin and inadequate, and their tenuity is emphasized by the modelling into nook shafts of their inner angles in the second story. These are serious blemishes upon the design of the first five stories, and these stories exhaust the architectural interest of the building. There is something even ludicrous in the sudden and complete collapse of the architecture above the large arcade, as if the ideas of the designer had all at once given out, or rather as if an untrained builder had been called upon to add three stories to the unfinished work of a scholarly architect. In truth, this superstructure does not show a single felicity either of disposition or detail, but is wholly mean and commonplace. It suffices to vulgarize the building below it, and it is itself quite superfluously vulgarized by the unmeaning and irrelevant conical roofs with which the sky-line is tormented. If the substructure be amenable to the criticism that it is not commercial architecture, the superstructure is amenable to the more radical criticism that it is not architecture at all.

The Owings Building is another conspicuous commercial structure that invites the same criticism of not being strictly commercial, but in a very different way. There is here no prodigality of ornament, and no irrelevant preciousness of material. A superstructure of grayish brick surmounts a basement of gray-stone, and the only decoration is reserved for the main entrance, which it is appropriate to signalize and render conspicuous

Cobb & Frost, Architects.]

even in works of the barest utility. This is attained here by the lofty gable, crocketed and covered with carving, that rises above the plain archway which forms the entrance itself. The lintelled openings of the basement elsewhere are of a Puritanical severity, and so are the arched openings of the brick superstructure. Neither is there the least attempt to suggest the thing that is not in the interior arrangement by way of giving variety and interest to the exterior. In the treatment of the wall space, the only one of the “unnecessary features,” in which Mr. Ruskin declares architecture to consist, is the corniced frieze above the fourth story of the superstructure, with its suggested support of tall and slim pilasters; and this is quite justifiable as giving the building a triple division, and distinguishing the main wall from the gable. For this purpose, however, obviously enough, the dividing feature should be placed between the two parts it is meant to differentiate; and in the present instance this line is two stories higher than the point actually selected, and is now marked only by a light string course. If the emphatic horizontal belt had been raised these two stories, the division it creates would not only have corresponded to the organic division of the building, but another requisite of architectural composition would have been fulfilled, inasmuch as one of the three members would visibly have predominated over the others; whereas now the three are too nearly equal. It is quite true that the prolongation of the pilasters through two more stories would have made them spindle quite intolerably, but in any case they are rather superfluous and impertinent, and it would have decorated the fronts to omit them. The accentuation of vertical lines by extraneous features is not precisely what is needed in a twelve-story building of these dimensions. In these points, however, there is no departure from the spirit of commercial architecture. That occurs here, not in detail, but in the general scheme that gives the building its picturesqueness of outline. The corbelled turret at the angle makes more eligible the rooms its openings light, but the steep gabled roofs which this turret unites and dominates plainly enough fail to utilize to the utmost the spaces they enclose, and so far violate the conditions of commercial architecture. It seems ungracious to find fault with them on that account, they are so successfully studied in mass and in detail, and the group they make with the turret is so spirited and effective; but nevertheless they evidently do not belong to an office building, and, to borrow the expression of a Federal judge upon a famous occasion, their very picturesqueness is aliunde.

We have been speaking, of course, of the better commercial edifices, and it is by no means to be inferred that Chicago does not contain “elevator buildings” as disunited and absurd and restless as those of any other

Burnham & Root, Architects.]

American town. About these select few, also, there is nothing especially characteristic. They might be in New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia, for any local color that they exhibit. It is otherwise with the commercial buildings designed by Messrs. Burnham & Root. With the striking exception of Mr. Richardson’s Field Building, the names of these designers connote what there is of characteristically Chicagoan in the architecture of the business streets, so that, after all, the individuality is not local, but personal. The untimely and deplorable death of John Wellborn Root makes it proper to say that the individuality was mainly his. It consists largely in a clearer perception than one finds elsewhere of the limitations and conditions of commercial architecture, or in a more austere and self-denying acting upon that perception. This is the quality that such towering structures as the Insurance Exchange, the Phœnix Building, and “The Rookery” have in common, and that clearly distinguishes them from the mass of commercial palaces in Chicago or elsewhere. There is no sacrifice to picturesqueness of the utilitarian purpose in their general form, as in the composition of the Owings Building, and no denial of it in detail, as in the irrelevant arcade of the Studebaker Building. Their flat roofs are not tormented into protuberances in order to animate their sky-lines, and those of them that are built around an interior court are frankly hypæthral. Nor is there in any of them any incongruous preciousness of material. They are of brick, brown or red, upon stone basements, and the ornament is such, and only such, as is needed to express and to emphasize the structural divisions and dispositions. These are negative merits, it is true, but as our commercial architecture goes, they are not less meritorious on that account, and one is inclined to wish that the architects of all the commercial palaces might attend to the preachments upon the fitness of things that these edifices deliver, for they have very positive merits also. They are all architectural compositions, and not mere walls promiscuously pierced with openings, or, what is much commoner, mere ranges of openings scantily framed in strips of wall. They are sharply and unmistakably divided into the parts that every building needs to be a work of architecture, the members that mark the division are carefully and successfully adjusted with reference to their place and their scale, and the treatment of the different parts is so varied as to avoid both monotony and miscellany. The angle piers, upon the visible sufficiency of which the effectiveness, especially of a lofty building, so largely depends, never fail in this sufficiency, and the superior solidity that the basement of any building needs as a building, when it cannot be attained in fact by reason of commercial exigencies, is suggested in a more rugged and more massive treatment not less than in the employment of a visibly stronger material. These dispositions are aided by the devices at the command of the architect. The angle piers are weighted to the eye by the solid corbelled pinnacles at the top, as in the Insurance Exchange and the Rookery, or stiffened by a slight withdrawal that gives an additional vertical line on each side of the arris, as in the Phœnix, while the same purpose is partly subserved in the Rookery by the projection from the angle of the tall metallic lantern standards that repeat and enforce this line. The lateral division of the principal fronts is similar in all three structures. A narrow central compartment is distinguished in treatment, by an actual projection or by the thickening of the pier, from the longer wings, while the coincidence of this central division with the

Burnham & Root, Architects.]

main entrance relieves the arrangement from the unpleasant look of an arrangement obviously forced or arbitrary. In the Insurance Exchange the centre is signalized by a balconied projection over the entrance, extending through the architectural basement--the dado, so to speak, which is here the principal division; by a widening of the pier and a concentration of the central openings in the second division, and above by an interruption of the otherwise unbroken arcade that traverses the attic. In the Rookery it is marked by a slight projection, which above is still further projected into tall corbelled pinnacles, and the wall thus bounded is slightly bowed, and its openings diminished and multiplied. In the Phœnix Building this bowing is carried so much further as to result in a corbelled oriel, extending through four stories, and repeated on a smaller scale at each end of the principal front and in the centre of each shorter front. This feature may perhaps be excepted from the general praise the buildings deserve of a strict adherence to their utilitarian purpose. Not that even in Chicago a business man may not have occasion to look out of the window, nor that, if he does, he may not be pardoned for desiring to extend his view beyond the walls and windows of over the way. An oriel-window is not necessarily an incongruity in a “business block,” but the treatment of these oriels is a little fantastic and a little ornate for their destination, and belongs rather to domestic than to commercial architecture, and it is not in any case fortunate. This is the sole exception, however, to be made on this score. The entrances, to be sure, are enriched with a decoration beyond the mere expression of the structure which has elsewhere been the rule, but they do not appear incongruous. The entrance to a building that houses the population of a considerable village must be wide, and if its height were regulated by that of the human figure it would resemble the burrow by which the Esquimau gains access to his snow-hut, and become a manifest absurdity as the portal of a ten-story building. It must be large and conspicuous, and it should be stately, and it were a “very cynical asperity” to deny to the designer the privilege of enhancing by ornament the necessary stateliness of the one feature of his building which must arrest, for a moment at least, the attention of the most

Burnham & Root, Architects.]

preoccupied visitor. It cannot be said that such a feature as the entrance of the Phœnix Building is intensely characteristic of a modern business block, but it can be said that in its place it does not in the least disturb the impression the structure makes of a modern business block. If beauty be its own excuse for being, this entrance needs no other, for assuredly it is one of the most beautiful and artistic works that American architecture has to show, so admirably proportioned it is, and so admirably detailed, so clear and emphatic without exaggeration is the expression of the structure, and so rich and refined the ornament. Upon the whole these buildings, by far the most successful and impressive of the business buildings of Chicago, not merely attest the skill of their architects, but reward their self-denial in making the design for a commercial building out of its own elements, however unpromising these may seem; in permitting the building, in a word, to impose its design upon them and in following its indications, rather than in imposing upon the building a design derived from anything but a consideration of its own requirements. Hence it is that, without showing anywhere any strain after originality, these structures are more original than structures in which such a strain is evident. “The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.” The designer did not permit himself to be diverted from the problem in hand by a consideration of the irrelevant beauties of Roman theatres, or Florentine palaces, or Flemish town-halls, and accordingly the work is not reminiscent of these nor of any previous architectural types, of which so many contemporary buildings have the air of being adaptations under extreme difficulties. It is to the same directness and sincerity in the attempt to solve a novel problem that these buildings owe what is not their least attraction, in the sense they convey of a reserved power. The architect of a commercial palace seems often to be discharging his architectural vocabulary and wreaking his entire faculty of expression upon that contradiction in terms. Some of the buildings of which we have been speaking exhibit this prodigality. There is something especially grateful and welcome in turning from one of them to a building like one of those now in question, which suggests by comparison that, after he had completed the design of it, the architect might still have had something left--in his portfolios and in his intellect.