Colin Rowe - Chicago Frame

8/2/2019 Colin Rowe - Chicago Frame

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The M athem atics of theId eal V illa an d O th er Essays

C olin R ow e

T he M I T P re ssC ambr id g e, M a ss a ch u se t ts ,a nd L on do n, E ng la nd


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Contents

Preface and Acknow ledgments v iiT he M athem atics of theI de a l V i ll aM ann erism and M od ernArchitecture 29C ha ra cte r a nd C om po sit io n;o r Som e V icissitudes ofA r ch it ec tu ra l V o ca b ul ar yin the N ineteen th Century 59

Copyr ight 1976 byThe Mas sa chuse tt s Inst it ut e o f Tec h no lo gy C hic ag o F ra me 89All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, elec-tronic or mechani cal, incl uding phot ocopying, recor di ng, or by any i nf ormat ion storage and re-t ri ev al s ys tem, w ithou t p ermi ssion in wri ti ng f rom the pub li sh er .

N eo -'C la ss ic is m' a ndM odern A rch itecture I 11 9

This book was set in IBM Composer Theme by Techdat a Associates, Inc. and printed andbound by The Mur ray Pr inting Company i n the Unit ed States of Ameri ca. N eo -'C la ss ic is m' a ndMo d er n A r ch it ec tu re II 139Second pr in ti ng , 1 977Thi rd pr in ti ng , 1 978Four th p rint in g, 1979F if th pr in ti ng , 1 980L ib rary o f Congres s Cat alog in g in Publ ic at ion Data

T ra ns pa re nc y: L it er ala n d P h en ome na l(w ith R ob ert S lu tz ky ) 15 9

Rowe, Colin.The mathemat ic s o f the ide al vi ll a a nd o th er e ss ay s.

La Tou re t te 18 5

Includes bibliographical references.CONTENTS : Th e mathemat ics of the idea l v il la. -Mann er ism and mode rn a rc hi te ctur e. -Charac te r a nd compos it io n. -Chica go f rame. [ et c. ]1 . Archi tecture, Domes tic-Addres ses, e ssays, lec tu res. I.Title.

NA7110.R68 720'.8 75-33908ISBN 0-262-18077-4

The A rchitecture ofUtopia 205P ic tu re C re d it s 225


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C hic ago F ra m e

First published in the Architectural Review,1956.


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90 Chi cago Frame 91 Chicago Frame

The skeleton of the steel or concrete frame is almost certainly the most recurrentmotif in contemporary architecture, and is surely among the most ubiquitous ofwhat Siegfried Giedion would have designated its constituent elements. Perhapsthe role of the frame is most aptly summarized in the drawing by which Le Cor-busier illustrated the structural system of his experimental Domino House (Plate12), but, while its primary function is evident, apart from this practical value, theframe has obviously acquired a significance which is less recognized.

Apparently the neutral grid of space which is enclosed by the skeleton structuresupplies us with some particularly cogent and convincing symbol, and for thisreason the frame has established relationships, defined a discipline, and generatedform. The frame has been the catalyst of an architecture; but one might noticethat the frame has also become architecture, that contemporary architecture isalmost inconceivable in its absence. Thus, one recalls innumerable buildings wherethe frame puts in an appearance even when not structurally necessary; one hasseen buildings where the frame appears to be present when it is not; and, since theframe seems to have acquired a value quite beyond itself, one is often prepared toac.cept these aberrations. For, without stretching the analogy too far, it might befair to say that the frame has come to possess a value for contemporary architec-ture equivalent to that of the column for classical antiquity and the Renaissance.Like the column, the frame establishes throughout the building a common ratioto which all the parts are related; and, like the vaulting bay in the Gothic cathe-dral, it prescribes a system to which all parts are subordinate.

It is the universality of the frame and the ease with which it has apparently di-rected our plastic judgment which has led to the focusing of so much attentionupon the Chicago commercial architecture of the eighties and early nineties (Plate38). In Chicago, seemingly, our own interests were so directly anticipated thatif-as we apparently sometimes conceive it to be-the frame structure is the es-sence of modern architecture, then we can only assume a relationship betweenourselves and Chicago comparable to that of the High Renaissance architects withFlorence, or of the High Gothic architects to the Ile-de-France. For, although thesteel frame did make occasional undisguised appearances elsewhere, it was in Chi-cago that its formal results were most rapidly elucidated.

For some ten years the architects of Chicago devoted themselves to the solutionof typical problems of the frame; and, before the end of this time, they hadachieved results which are still today unsurpassed for their elegance and economy.B.ut, admiring these results and acknowledging this great achievement, one is stilldisposed to ask of these Chicago buildings whether they are indeed representatives

of a 'modern' architecture. Certainly the process of their design was as rationaland as direct as that of any modern building is supposed to be. Certainly thesebuildings are lacking in both rhetoric and sentimental excess; but, also, there isabout them a quality of rudimentary magnificence, a flavor at once more heroicand more brutal than is to be found in any building of the present day. Thesestructures make no compromise with the observer; they are neither capricious norurbane and they display an authenticity so complete that we are disposed to ac-cept them as facts of nature, as geological manifestations rather than as architec-tural achievements. "In Chicago," says Louis Sullivan, "the tall building wouldseem to have arisen spontaneously in response to favourable physical conditions... The Future looked bright. The flag was in the breeze .... "1In Chicago we areled to believe that the slate was at last wiped clean, the break with 'the styles' wasmade, and the route of future development defined.

The alleged debacle which overwhelmed these Chicago architects of the eightiesis common knowledge. The World Columbian Exhibition cut short their develop-ment; public taste no longer endorsed their decisions; and, although for some fewtheir principles remained luminous, it was not until comparatively recently thattheir figures reemerged, sanctified and established in the Pantheon of architecturalprogress.

But the disaster was never quite so complete as our sense of myth requires thatit should have been; and, as we know, pockets of resistance survived which eclec-ticism could not obliterate, so that it was again in Chicago that a second andequally decisive contribution to present-day architecture was made. MontgomerySchuyler, one of the most devoted apologists of the Chicago School, writing ofthe city in the nineties, noticed that its architectural expressions were twofoldonly-"places of business and places of residence." The image of Chicago whichremained in the mind he found to be "the sum of innumerable impressions madeup exclusively of the skyscraper of the city and the dwellings of the suburbs. Nota church enters into it," he says, "Scarcely a public building enters into it ...Chicago has no more a Nouvel Opera than it has a Notre Dame."? It was a rela-tively uncomplicated situation which Schuyler recognized, a situ ation dominatedby two building types-the commercial structures of the Loop and their suburbancomplement. And, with the nineties, the spirit of experiment may be said simplyto have transferred itself from one of these types to the other, so that it becamein Oak Park that Frank Lloyd Wright was to conduct those researches into archi-tectural form whose results now seem to have been preeminently superior to anyother achievement of that day. The much publicized contributions of van de


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92 Chicago Frame 93 Chicago Frame

Velde, of Horta, Olbrich, Hoffmann, Loos, Perret, McKintosh, and Voysey canonly appear as irresolute and undirected when compared with the astonishingfinality of these early works of Wright's, which, although less implacable than theoffice buildings of the Loop, are every bit as conclusive. These houses are themonuments of an unerringly consistent development; and to informed observersof the time it was apparent that here a plastic statement of the very highest rele-vance was in process of delivery, that here a definite answer had already beengiven to those questions which many of the most advanced buildings of the dayseemed to exist merely to propose.

The international impact of this early phase of Wright's career is a matter ofhistory; and, if the exact influence which the publication of his work exerted inEurope may remain a matter of dispute, it can scarcely be denied that in such abuilding as the Gale House (Plate 39) of 1909 Wright had already defined princi-ples of form which at least very closely parallel those enunciated ten years laterby van Doesburg, or by Rietveld in De Stijl's major architectural monument, hisSchroder House (Plate 40) of 1924. In each case the vision of an architecture as acomposition of sliding planes predominates; and Wright's anticipation of this ideaseems to have been as complete as Chicago's earlier anticipation of the formal rolewhich the frame structure was destined to play.

This priority of Chicago's contribution need not imply a dependence elsewhereupon it. Obviously both van Doesburg and Rietveld could claim a legitimate de-scent from the innovations which Cubism had introduced; obviously too, Le Cor-busier's preoccupation with problems of the frame structure derives not from thesteel skeleton of Chicago but from the reinforced concrete frame of Auguste Per-ret. But neither of these observations can obscure the apparent evidence that Chi-cago did seem to experience a prevision of two of the major themes of twentiethcentury architecture-the frame structure and the composition of intersectingplanes.

This apparent insight of Chicago's is widely recognized; but its recognition hascreated certain acute critical p roblems. Wright's achievement was scarcely likelyto pass into oblivion; but the renewed consciousness of Chicago's earlier contribu-tion which has been stimulated by the later work of Mies van der Rohe is respon-sible for a conspicuous interpretative embarrassment. Thus, although we know itto be different in kind, we are apt to feel that Mies's campus of the Illinois Insti-tute of Technology is the polished culmination of a rationalism identical with thatdisplayed by Jenney in the Second Leiter Building (Plate 41); but, equally, we areobliged to believe that at least a partial explanation of the intuitive certainty

which so early distinguished Wright's work was provided by his own personal rela-tionship with the older masters of the Chicago School. We can understand that hisown audaciousness was reinforced by their daring, his own sense of order bytheirs, his own precocity by those qualities which have led so many observers tosee in the commercial buildings of Chicago the most complete adumbration ofcontemporary forms.

But it is at this point that the judgment of the present day discovers its dilem-ma. Although we may assert that the architects of the office buildings in the Loopclarified a basic disposition of twentieth century architecture, yet for the struc-tural skeleton which their achievement exposed, it can only be said that Wright(who might be considered their most illustrious pupil) seems to have shown amos t marked dis ta ste .

With the exception of the Larkin Building in Buffalo and the S. C. JohnsonCompany's Administration Building at Racine, Wright has, of course, built nolarge office buildings; and it might therefore be claimed that he had no reason toemploy the frame structure. But even in the Larkin Building the cathedrallikeinternal space suggests a certain aversion to those conclusions of the ChicagoSchool whose relevance is so enthusiastically acclaimed today; while in the John-son Administration Building an entirely different conception of structure is enter-tained. Admittedly a number of early skyscraper projects-e.g., the Luxfer PrismSkyscraper (Plate 42) and the Lincoln Center-are for steel frame buildings; and,in 1912, the Press Building for San Francisco (Plate 43) shows a concrete frame;but in all of these designs a Sullivanian influence is to be detected, and in none ofthem are we made aware of that inimitable world of Wrightian form which charac-terizes the domestic designs of the same years. We can believe that, in all theseinstances, Wright was struggling with a problem which he felt to be intractableand found to be unsympathetic, and it is not until the National Life InsuranceCompany Skyscraper project of 1924 (Plate 44) that this problem seems to be-come clarified and we find the sharp revelation of the differences in outlookwhich identify Wright's development as something apart from that of his prede-cessors in Chicago.

The classic Chicago office buildings, like the classic palaces of Renaissance Italy,were conceived as single volumes, or when situation did not permit the appear-ance of a volume, as single facades. Like Italian palazzi they overwhelm the ob-server by their economy of motif and consistency of theme; while, as architec-tural expression, they present no more than an unmodified surface exhibiting arationally integrated and well-proportioned structure. Bu t Wright's building is


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distinguished by the observance of quite contrary principles; and, rather than asingle structurally articulated block, it displays a highly developed composition oftransparent volumes, while rather than the 'static' structural solution of the frameit presents the more 'dynamic' motif of the cantilever which had already beenemployed in the Imperial Hotel. Thus, while conceptually this building is radicallydistinct from Chicago's earlier contribu tions to skyscraper design whose architectshad attempted neither such elaboration nor such openness, technically also it isdistinct, since both its construction and its curtain wall constitute an innovationin the Chicago t radit ion.

According to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, "Wright has likened the special con-struction used in the (Imperial) Hotel to the balance of a tray on a waiter's fin-gers";" and the structural members both in that building and the 1924 project doseem to have been conceived in that way-as a series of nuclei generating aroundthemselves intelligible volumes of space. This preference, already presumed byWright's old preoccupation with the central chimney stack, must explain some ofhis reluctance to use a regular skeletal frame which scarcely permits such an inter-pretation of structure; but the indivisible fusion of structure and space whichWright has designated 'organic' is scarcely realized in either the Tokyo building orthe National Life Insurance Company project, and it is not until the 51. Mark'sTower scheme of 1929 that it first becomes explicit at a major scale (Figure 7,Plate 45).

The spaces created by the St. Mark's Tower are at last of an unmistakablyWrightian order and, understandably, the tower has been the prototype for all thetall buildings by him which have followed. Aggregations of 51. Mark's Towers arethe basis for the 1930 apartment house project and again for the Crystal HeightsHotel (Plate 46) design of 1940; while the tower appears in condensed form as thelaboratory building at Racine, Wisconsin, before being finally transcribed as thePrice Off ice Bui ld ing a t Bar tl esv ill e, Oklahoma.

Conceptually all these structures present the nucleus of a gigantic mushroomcolumn supporting a series of trays which, as shown by the apartment house andhotel projects, is implied to be systematically extensible by approaching columnto column until the circumferences of their trays impinge or even overlap. Likethe central core of the chimney and the real mushroom columns of the JohnsonAdministration Building, the idea of the 51. Mark's Tower may seem to derivefrom the 'organic' demand for the integration of space and structure; and, as ful-filling this demand, the build ing becomes a single, complete, and self-explanatoryutterance.

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96 Chicago Fr ame

As an extension of the dom estic theme the St. M ark's Tower is among W right'sm ost brillian t and ingen ious ach ievem ents, and the virtuosity w ith w hich it is o r-gan ized can on ly arouse the greatest adm iration . Its v itality and coherence areun den iable, its plastic con trol little sho rt of aw e-in sp iring -adm itting the basicprem ises upon w hich its inspiration depends, the tow er is a superb ly log ical devel-opment; but for very many observers both it and its derivatives can only stand asa series of enlarg ed question m ark s. A dm irin g it as an in div id ual ach ievem ent,reco gn izin g it as a hig hly sug gestive ex ceptio n, th ese o bserv ers are still d isp osed toask whether after all it is no t a m ost elaborate evasion of a norm al and standardstructural fac t. The fram e, by so m any m odern arch itec ts, has been received al-m ost as a heaven-sent b lessing. W hy, one inqu ires, has it been so distinctly re-jec ted on the part of W righ t? D id he consider it a merely adventitious shortcu t toun im portant solutions? D id he consider it too great a restriction of a 'creative'freedom ? Just w hy did he rem ain so very unbegu iled by C hicago's first g reata rc hi te ct ur al d is co v er y?

The question is so pressing that one m ay be justified in proceeding w ith specula-tion, and a num ber of im mediate answ ers suggest them selves. B ut the answ er thatW right's career has been largely in the field of dom estic arch itectu re considers theproblem only superficially. The use of the steel o r concrete fram e in dom esticarchitecture may not be necessary , bu t many conspicuous monuments of themodern movement surv ive to prove it not abnormal. The answer that America hadalready discov ered an altern ativ e stru cture in the balloo n fram e is m ore co nv inc-ing, but no t com pletely so. Econom y in A merica recom mended the balloonframe, bu t in Europe econom y equally recommended a brick or masonry struc-tu re, and by the m ore significant innovators econom y's recom mendations w eref re qu e nt ly d is re g ar de d .

A partial answ er has already been suggested in the no tice of W righ t's h ighlydeveloped and ind ividual dem and for 'organic' space, and here one of the m ostobvious d ifferences betw een him and his predecessors in Chicago m ay be found.Louis Su llivan , for instance, w as by no m eans typical o f the C hicago School ingeneral; but a m ajor and unnoticed distinction betw een W right and Sullivan, asalso betw een W righ t and his other C hicago predecessors, m ay be found in the irfee lin g fo r th e p lan.

For W right, as for L e C orbusier, the plan has alw ays been a genera to r of fo rm ;and, if the plans of his earliest bu ild ings are in no w ay rem arkable, already in theB lossom H ou se of 1 89 2 (F igu re 8) it is qu ite clear th at a disciplin ed o rchestrationof spaces had becom e one of his prim ary in terests, w hile alm ost any of h is houses

97 Ch i cago Frame

R .. lc .t pT lO Io I R .M .

Figure 8 Bl ossom House, Chicago. Plan.F ran k L loyd Wrigh t, 1 892.


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of the next thirty years will reveal how intensively this interest was sustained.Wright's partis develop without apparent effort. There are few lapses in his plans,few volumes where his basic rhythms are not experienced; and, in all this he isvery definitely to be distinguished from Sullivan, whose most ardent admirershave never claimed for him any highly developed interest in the formal possibil-ities of the plan. Sullivan's buildings may often be superb assertions of the pri-macy of structure, but one finds it hard to believe that for him the significance oftheir plans was other than a negative one. The plans of the Wainwright and Schil-ler Buildings, for instance, are hardly those of a master, while such a plan as thatof the National Farmer's Bank at Owatonna, Minnesota, will scarcely bear analy-sis.

Sullivan was not primarily a planner. Indeed there was little in his practicewhich could prompt him to any sophisticated evaluation of the plan. Sullivan wasprimarily an architect of commercial buildings; and, of all buildings, the officeblock is obviously that without the need of any but the minimum of planning. Itrequires elementary circulations and a well lit floor area; but apart from these, itn either can nor should present any spatial elaboration. Thus, the unobstructedevenly lit floor and the indefinite number of floors which it permitted, recom-mended the steel frame to the architects of Chicago as the answer to a practicaldilemma; but also, by the nature of the context in which they explored it, theywere necessarily inhibited in the exploration of its spatial possibilities.

With a lack of stylistic prejudice and with a discretion which seem remarkableto us today, the Chicago architects projected on to their facades the neutralstructure which they felt to be the reality of the frame behind; and if, as was thecase with Sullivan's Wainwright Building in S1. Louis and his Guaranty Building inBuffalo, it was considered aesthetically desirable that the frame should be modi-fied, this process was rationalized in terms of the need for psychological expres-siveness in the facade rather than in any need for internal spatial excitement.

With little occasion to use the frame for any other program than that of theoffice building, it is not surprising that the Chicago architects remained unawareof certain of its attributes, so that some explanation of Wright's unwillingness toemploy it may possibly be found here. To repeat: unlike Sullivan, who had ap-proached architecture primarily with the object of realizing an expressive struc-ture, Wright was from the first abnormally sensitive to the demands of an expres-sive space. These demands (one might surmise) he was compelled to satisfy, and itwas only later (one might believe) that his Sullivanian training reasserted itself todemand a rationalization of this spatial achievement in terms of a generating

structure. The monumental construction of the Hillside Home School suggeststhat a rationalization of this kind was already under way around 1902; and, by1904, in the Martin House (Figure 9), this process had taken on unmistakabledefinition. But by then, and supposing Wright to have wished a predominantlystructural rationale, his space compositions were already of a richness whichwould scarcely permit their accommodation within any system so austere as thatprovided by the Chicago frame.

However, an answer along these lines, suggesting that a cause for Wright's rejec-tion of the frame may be discovered exclusively in the nature of his formal will,can at best provide only a partial explanation of the problem, and a further reasonmust be offered which may, perhaps, be found to lie in the varieties of signifi-cance with which the frame has been endowed.

At the present day, Chicago's failure to arrive at any statement of the frame as avehicle of spatial expression-when we think about it-seems to be curious. We arenow completely accustomed to regard the skeleton structure as a spatial instru-ment of some power, since it is-after all-some considerable time ago that a for-mula was evolved permitting the simultaneous appearance of both structural gridand considerable spatial complexity; and most of modern architecture, the so-called International Style, may be said to have been dependent on this formula.

But, in order to arrive at an equation of the demands of space and structure, LeCorbusier and Mies van der Rohe had been led to postulate their functional inde-pendence, i.e., the independence of partitions from columns, so that unlikeWright's development-which may be said to proceed from. a conviction as to the'organic' unity of space and structure-the International Style may be seen toissue from an assumption of the separate existence of both according to distinctlaws. Wright's structure creates space or is created by it; but in the InternationalStyle an autonomous structure perforates a freely abstracted space, acting as itspunctuation rather than its defining form. There is thus in the International Styleno fusion of space and structure, but each in the end remains an identifiable com-ponent, and architecture is conceived, not as their confluence, but rather as theirdialectical opposition, as a species of debate between them.

That a solution in these terms was possible for European innovators of thetwenties derives, among other reasons, from a particular concept of the framewhich they entertained; that such a concept was neither possible, nor to be en-visaged, in Chicago of the nineties must be partly explained by a different signifi-cance which was there attributed to the skeleton structure. In Chicago it might besaid that the frame was convincing as fact rather than as idea, whereas in consider-


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1 01 C hicag o F ram e

F ig ure 9 M artin H ou se , B uffa lo . P la n.F ra nk L lo yd W rig ht, 1 90 4.

ing the European innovators of the twent ies one cannot suppress the supposit ionthat the frame to them was much more often an essential idea before it was analtogether reasonable fact.

In order to c lari fy these too general observa tions a c lassic Chicago bui ld ing,Holabird and Roche 's McGlurg Bui ld ing of 1899-1900 (Pla te 47), migh t be para l-leled with an almost con temporary European bui ld ing of 1897, Horta's Maison duPeuple in Brussels (Plate 48)-both of them, though different in function, com-parable as advanced buildings of the ir day . Both of them show preoccupat ionwith problems of the frame; but it is the contrast between the rather quiet ele-gance of the fi rs t and the f renet ic rest lessness of the second which is immediatelyapparent . The McGlurg Bui ld ing isa sub tle and uncomplica ted sta tement . TheMaison du Peuple isan obl ique and a highly involved reference. In the McGlurgBui ld ing i t i s possible to suppose tha t cer ta in pract ical requ irements have beenaccommodated; in the Maison du Peuple it is impossible not to deduce that cer-tain theoretical desiderata have been stated. In the f ir st , the steel f rame presen tsi tsel f as the solut ion of a specific prob lem; whi le , in the second, a cast iron pre-vision of the steel frame i s exposed apparent ly as the manifesto of an archi tec tu ra lp rogram. Holabird and Roche's s truc tu re isprimar ily a bui ld ing; Hor ta 's is pre-dominantly a polemic.

There is little doubt that Horta's building cost the greater aesthetic effort; butthere isa lmost complete cer ta inty tha t Holabird and Roche 's ismore general lyp leasing to the taste of the present day. Of Holab ird and Roche's sel f-consc ious-ness, however, the McGlurg Bui lding of fers no assurance; whi le of Hor ta 's sophis-tication the Maison du Peuple is indisputable evidence. In Hor ta 's case one canguess a t a hyperawareness of the response h is bui lding was l ike ly to evoke . Onecan sense the an ticipa tion of extended controversy , cri tica l explanations, avant-garde deligh t, conserva tive horro r. The Maison du Peuple isa bu ilding of fered to asocie ty; and, whether society wil l accept or rejec t i t, Horta sti ll assumes i ts part ici -pat ion as an aud ience. That is, Hor ta invi tes reac tion ; and, accordingly, the Mai-son du Peuple exhibi ts a humani ty which the McGlurg Bui lding does no t d isplay .For there, rather than any subject for the discussion of a coterie, Holabird andRoche have att empted to provide no more than the rational envelope for theactivities of their clients' tenants.

Indeed, if the methods followed by Holabird and Roche at this time were in anyway typical of the Chicago School in general, it might safely be assumed that theywere definit ely not anxious that their building should involve them in any of theexcitements of artistic notoriety. In the word of the French novelist, Paul Bour-


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get, whose appreciat ions of the Chicago School have been constan tly quoted , theChicago arch itec ts had "frank ly accep ted the condit ions imposed by the specu-.lator '" -they had limited themselves to producing buildings which should be nomore than the logical instruments of investment. In other words , being in no posi-t ion to make manifestos in the cause of ra tional ism, they were simply obliged-and within the strictest terms-to be as rational as they might.

This distinction between two styles of argument (it is really a question of theidea of mechanizat ion versus the fac t) , would seem to crysta ll ize the basic differ-ences of approach sign ified by the two bui ld ings; and i t i sa dist inc tion whichmigh t be ex tended fur ther. "I asked one of the successful archi tects of Chicagowhat would happen if the designer of a commercia l bui lding sacr if iced the pract i-ca l avai lableness of one of i ts f loors to the assumed ex igencies of archi tecture ashas often been done in New York," wri tes Schuyler . "His answer ," he con tinues,"was sugges tive. 'Why the word would be passed around and he would never getanother one to do. No, we never try tricks on our businessmen, they are too wideawake.' "5 The businessmen of Chicago , then, were not prepared to make sacri -f ices for the idea, did no t requ ire the overt a rch itectura l symbolism which wasapparent ly necessary in New York, d id not even require those fantasies uponmechanist ic themes which cou ld be obtruded upon the cit izens of Brussels; bu tthe Chicago arch itec ts (or some of them) were sti ll qu ite aware tha t symbolicmeaning has ever been among the necessary a tt ributes of arch itec tu re ; and if, asSchuyler infers , they were compelled to be ut il itar ian , they were no t a lways un-conscious of the socia l s ignificance of the ir ut il itarian ism. John Root , for in-stance, requ ired tha t the modern of fice bu ilding should by i ts "mass and propor-t ion convey in some elemental sense an idea of the grea t, s tab le, conserving forcesof modern civilization."6

But , even in this demand, one might con tinue to not ice a d ifference betweenChicago and Brussels. In Belgium, Siegfried Giedion tells us, it had been discoveredthat architectural forms were impure, that the atmosphere was "infected," andthat , in consequence, archi tectural "progress" was there conceived as a k ind of"moral revo lt ."? But the Chicago archi tects had been scarcely a llowed to subjec tforms to so detached a scrutiny; and, had they enjoyed the leisure to do so, ifthei r conclusions had conf licted with the requ irements of the speculator , i t i s tobe doubted whether they would have been enabled to put them into practice."The great, stable, conserving forces of modern civilization" (The great, expand-ing forces of a laissez-faire economic system?) represented for Root a powerwhich it was desirable to express . But for Horta? One mus t doubt if Horta recog-

n ized any such imperat ive. He, one suspects, had arrived at certain cri tica l conclu -sions as to the nature of contemporary society and had come then to envisage hiswork as the architectural manifestation of these judgments.

In Belgium, i t i sevident , the art nouveau was one of those revolut ionary move-ments essen tial ly dependent on a h igh ly developed program; bu t in Chicago, i tshould be clear tha t the struc tural revo lut ion was large ly withou t any such the-oretical support.

"The Chicago act ivi ty in erect ing high bui ld ings (of sol id masonry) f ina lly a t-t racted the a tten tion of the loca l sales managers of Eastern rol ling mills," Sul livantells us, and it was they, he says, who conceived of the idea of a skeleton whichwould carry the entire weight of the building. From then on, he continues, theevolution of the steel frame "was a matter of vision in salesmanship based uponengineering imagination and technique"; and, in this manner, asaproduct forsale, "the idea of the steel f rame was tentat ive ly presen ted to Chicago archi tects. "

"The passion to sel l, " Sul livan asser ts , " is the impel ling power of American l ife.Manufactur ing issubsidiary and adven ti tious. But sel ling must be based on asemblance of serv ice- the sat isfact ion of a need. The need was there , the capaci tyto satisfy was there, but contact was not there. Then there came the flash of imag-ination which saw the single thing. The trick was turned and there swiftly cameinto being something new under the sun.!"

The Chicago struc tural revo lut ion therefo re was the resul t of a certain combina-tion: of ruthless open-mindedness and imaginative salesmanship. On Sullivan'sadmission, the archi tects o f Chicago d id not demand the f rame; i t was ra ther pre-sented to them; and this simple fac t may explain both the rapid and dispassionatemanner in which they contrived to rationalize the frame structure and also theway in which so many of them were able to abandon their method for anotherand differen t one. "The arch itec ts of Chicago," Sul livan adds, "welcomed thesteel frame and did something with it. The architects of the East were appalled byit and could make no contribution to it." But from Schuyler we learn the oppo-site- tha t the archi tects o f Chicago were no t very d ifferent f rom archi tects e lse-where. "They are," he wri tes, "di fferent on compulsion." They have "franklyaccepted the condi tions imposed by the specu lator, because they real ly are im-posed, and there is no getting away from them if one would win and keep thereputation of a 'practical' architect."?

Taken together, these two statements are confus ing; but they are not perhaps ascontrad ic tory as a t f ir st they may appear. They describe a situa tion . They suggesta lack of theore tica l awareness . They indica te a responsiveness to the new. They


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i llustra te a will ingness to defer to the c lient . And the cl ients, Schuyler cont inues,"the men who project and finance the utilitarian buildings" are not "the mostprivate spirited (but) they are the most public spirited body of businessmen ofany commercial city in the world." They are, he says, "the same men who areready to incur expendi tu res for publ ic purposes with a generosi ty and a publicspiri t tha t are e lsewhere unparal leled ." "They are will ing to make the most gener-ous sacrifices for their city to provide it with ornaments and trophies which shallmake it more than a centre of pig sticking and grain handling. They are willing toplay the part of Maecenas to the fine arts, only they ins ist that they will not playit during business hours."

The candor of these contemporary observations goes a long way to dispose of acr it ical scheme to which nowadays we pay our respects. It d isposes of the dichot-omy between the virtuous Chicago of the Loop and the depraved Chicago of theFair. Magnificently undisguised, the office buildings of the Loop owe somethingof their authenticity to their being no more than the rationalization of businessrequ irements; bu t, a lthough they are socia l documents of the h ighest impor tance,in spi te of Root 's endeavors they are scarcely, in any deliberate and overt sense ,cul tu ra l symbols. They were conceived as the means to achievement ; and , fo rwhat was thought to be tha t achievement i tsel f, i t i s necessary to look elsewhere ,presumably both to the suburban resident ia l development, and to "the ornamentsand trophies ," the unparal le led expendi tu res, and "the generous sacri fices, " ofwhich those lav ished upon the World Columbian exhibi tion can only appear themost outstanding.

Thus, seen in terms of the admirable pragmatism which actual ly reared thebui ldings of the Loop, which was responsib le for thei r di rectness and lack of ges-ture, both these and the structures of the Fair, like opposite sides of a coin, cometo appear as complementary phenomena. Because business and cul tu re were con-ceived of as d is tinc t act iv it ies, because the commercia l magnates of Chicago werenot willing "to play the part of Maecenas to the fine arts during business hours,"i t was possible fo r the archi tects o f Chicago to proceed with the most audaciousinnovat ions; and, because in doing so they offended no expressed socia l or art is ticpreference, no check was offered to thei r remorse less evolut ion of a basic struc-tural log ic. As Schuyler tel ls us , this rat iona liza tion could not have been effectedin New York. It could not, as we know, have been effected in Europe. It was pos-sible in Chicago because there business was without inh ibi tion ; but unhappily, asthe World Columbian Exhibition proves, business was not for this reason irrespon-sible.

Thus, what to us appears to have been Chicago 's success and Chicago's fa ilurewere impl ic it in the same condit ions. A pr imary archi tec tu ra l ach ievement wasdetermined by the urgency of a phys ical need; and, by the lack of a specificallyarch itectura l p rogram, an apparent ly complete archi tec tu ra l revolut ion was madepossible.

But just this lack of program in the end made it not possible for this revolutionto become decisive . The off ice bu ildings of the Loop were undoubted ly admiredby contemporaries; bu t, however rat iona l the ir s tructure and however immaculatetheir form, it is hard to represent them as the response to any very adequatelyaccep table not ion of society. They invoked no completely receivable publ ic stand-ards; they s tipulated only private gain; and for the taste of the time, which hadnot yet sufficiently expanded-or contracted-to be able to envisage the machinewith a poetic bias, they were not so much architecture as they were equipment.Stimulating facts they might be; but they were scarcely to be received as facts ofculture.

Distinctions such as these which go some way to clarify the other than technical and formal differences between a McGlurg Bui ld ing and a Maison du Peuple neces-sar ily el ic it questions of at ti tudes and mythologies; and such quest ions might pos-s ibly be brought into sharper focus by the brief analysis of a further pair of build-ings which , in Space, Time and Architecture, Siegf ried Gied ion was led to com-pare : Daniel Burnham's Rel iance Bui ld ing (Plate 49) of 1894 and Mies van derRohe's Glass Tower pro jec t (Pla te 50) of 1921.

It i s t he similarity of these buildings with which Giedion is concerned; and, interms of a Wolflinian background such as his which tends to ignore problems ofcontent (implying that roughly identical forms suppose roughly approximatemean ing), i t i s the common l ikeness of the Amer ican bui lding and the Germanpro ject which wil l command attent ion . But , i f we have here , very obviously, twoextensive ly g lazed of fice towers, i t i sfundamental ly no t the ir s imi lari ty bu t the irunl ikeness which shou ld most ser iously involve us-and part icu larly so since toemphasize the ir unl ikeness need not involve any grea t exercise of cri tica l acui ty.

Thus, we have a building and a would-be building; the concrete result of a par-ticular problem and the abs tract solution of a general one;a building which ser-v ices an exist ing requ irement and a proposa l which relates to a possible futureneed . We have something which answers and something which ant ic ipa tes. TheRel iance Bui ld ing rises above the streets o f a commercia l capi ta l; the Glass Towersoars against a background of wooded hi lls and above an agglomera tion of Gothicroofs ; and, if we can scarcely believe the Glass Tower to be a necessity in this toy


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city of an older Germany, then also we may know it to be not only the projectfor an office building but also the advertisement for a cause. For, if the RelianceBuilding, very largely, iswhat it is, the glass tower, like the Maison du Peuple,very patently, issomething which it does not profess to be-a highly cha rged sym-bolic statement. While the Reliance Building is almost devoid of ideological over-tones, the Glass Tower is not only a presumptive building but also an implicitsocial criticism.

From these differences of innuendo both building and project derive their weak-ness and their strength; if the one lacks poetry, the other lacks prose. Burnham,one might guess, is someone, optimistic about the present, who accepts the pre-vailing ethos and who envisages the future as its continuance; while Mies, onecould suppose, is someone, not able to collaborate with the existing, who is con-strained to reject the established and who insists only on the justifications oftime. Which is, of course, grossly to simplify. But, if Burnham's complicity andMies's protestation may be equally respectable, they do impose upon their respec-tive products a quite different significance; and, while the Reliance Building re-mains a direct answer to a technical and functional problem, the Glass Tower, byinferring an altruistic order of society, continues to be both much less and muchmore than this. For, unlike the Reliance Building, the Glass Tower engages boththe moral and the aesthetic interests of our Utopian sentiment.

In Europe in the 1920s it might be said that the tall building such as Mies hadhere projected presented itself primarily as a symbol rather than as any object foruse. It was a symbol of a technologically oriented future society and, to a lesserdegree, a symbol of an America which seemed to anticipate that future develop-ment; and thus, by circumstances, the idea of the tall building in Europe becameimbued with an ultimate persuasiveness which in America it could not possess. InEurope the idea of the tall building was apt to be the substance of a dream; but,in America, the idea become fact was prone to be little more than an aspect of atoo emphatic reality. "The American engineers," writes Le Corbusier, "over-whelm with their calculations our expiring architecture." They are not, he asserts,"in pursuit of an architectural idea"; rather they are "simply guided by the resultsof calculation't!? and, although this may have been as true of the Chicago archi-tects of the eighties as Le Corbusier felt it to be of the engineers of a later date, itis only too obvious that the skyscrapers of the ville radieuse are not the results ofany comparable calculation. Rather they betray a mind preoccupied with theideal order of things. They exude what Dr. Johnson described as "the grandeur ofgenerality." They are rational abstractions upon the theme of the American sky-

scraper rather th an what the American skyscraper itself was-a rational calculation(with trimmings if necessary) as to the-worthwhile investment in a given specula-tion.

We are here at the place where different conceptions as to what is real, rational,and logical exist side by side; and to stigmatize any as being radical or conserva-tive, irrelevant or relevant is not to be very useful. Simply, it is best to say that,while in Chicago certain things (the culmination of an unbridled emp iricism?)were done, there was an incapacity and/or refusal to conceive of them in otherthan specific terms; that they were, therefore, construed without any regard fortheir proper enormity; that, thus, one has to look to those European skyscraperswhich existed only in the imagination to discover any even slightly plausible, pub-lic rationale for what Chicago had produced; and that, just as the European inno-vators of the twenties related the skyscraper not simply to commerce but to anotion of society as a whole-even implying that the skyscraper might be an agentof social salvation-so these same innovators also ascribed an ideal, a general, andan abstract function to the structural frame. In America, the skeleton structure,conceiv ed to be of utilitarian value, had been rationalized by the predominantlyutilitarian tone of a Chicago business community; but, in Europe, where simpleissues of utility could not assume such prominence, it was given a logical formonly by the sustained volition of an architectural intelligentsia. And, for theseavowed protagonists of revolution, the frame became something other than whatit had been for Chicago. It became an answer not to the specific problem, officebu ilding, but to th e universal problem, architecture.

Le Corbusier's drawing for the Domino House represents precisely such an eval-uation; and is perhaps the perfect illustration of the meaning of the frame for theInternational Style. What we have here is not so much a structure as an icon, anobject of faith which is to act as a guarantee of authenticity, an outward sign of anew order, an assurance against lapse into private license, a discipline by means ofwhich an invertebrate expressionism can be reduced to the appearance of reason.Disposed to accept the frame as much for reasons of dogma as utility, the Inter-national Style was therefore led to envisage it as enforcing a system with whichthe architect was obliged to come to terms; and, for this reason, the exponents ofthe International Style felt themselves under the necessity of evolving an equationbetween the demands of space and the demands of the skeleton structure. In Chi-cago, a comparable obligation could not exist and, therefore, no comparable equa-tion could be reached. There, where the frame served as no more than empiricalconvenience, it was scarcely to be invested with ideal significance. It could predi-


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cate no city of tomorrow. Indeed, by the nineties, it predicated a city of yester-day. Its overtones were not so much prophetic as they were historical; and, sincei t soon became increasing ly possible to see the frame structure as the naked lyi rresponsible agent of a too ruthless commercia lism, so i t became, not around theoff ice bui ld ing conceived as paradigmatic and normative , but around the a lterna-t ive program of the residence tha t ideal is t and progressivist sent iment was able toeffect a coherent expression.It i s by such inferences tha t Wright 's con tinuous unwil lingness to use the f rame

may possibly be explained. He was too close to it to be able to invest it with theiconographic content which it later came to possess ; too close to the Loop to feelo ther than i ts abrasiveness and constr ic tion; and too undetached from Chicago tosee the city as the idea which it so nearly is and which the reforming mind of the1920s might have wished i t to become.To attribute an iconographical content to the frame was, for better or worse

(and unknowing ly) the prerogative of the Internat ional Style; and if one can un-derstand how for Mies , preoccupied with anonymity-again with the idea and notthe fac t-his own self-wi lled and classica l anonymity could be equated with theempirical anonymousness of the Chicago School, one may also perceive how forother exponents and apo logists of the Internat ional Sty le, unacquain ted with thesociopol it ical de ta il of the Loop, i ts techn ica l and formal effects must of ten havebeen seen as der ived f rom the same deta ils as had comparable ef fec ts in Europe.That is, because struc tural renovat ion was unconsciously associated with the wil lto complete socia l reform, the Loop could be seen as some sur rept it ious adumbra-tion of a ville radieuse and that therefore an intention could be ascribed to itsarchi tects which they d id not possess.

But in the Loop, unlike the ville radieuse, the world was accepted as found; and,whi le i t remains i ronica l that , in terms of forms, this mid-Western accep tanceshould be so comparable to the discoveries of European protest, it should not becur ious tha t fo r Wright the forms conceivable as represen ting protest should haveto be sought elsewhere.

Notes1 Louis H. Sullivan, Autobiography of anIdea, New York, 1924, p . 314.2 Montgomery Schuyler, "A Critique of theWorks of Adler and Sullivan," ArchitecturalRecord, 1895. Reprinted, William Jordy andRalph Coe, eds ., in Schuyler, AmericanArchitecture and Other Writings, Cambridge,Mass., 1961, pp. 377-79.3 Henry Russell Hitchcock, In the Nature ofMaterials, New York, 1942, p . 68.4 Quoted in Schuyler, p. 381.5 Schuyler, p. 381.6 Harriet Monroe, John Root, New York,1968, p. 107.7 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Archi-tecture, Cambridge, Mass.,ed. 1941, p. 215.8 Sullivan, pp. 312-13.9 Schuyler, p. 382.10 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Archi-tecture, London, 1927, p. 33.


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Plate 40 Schroeder House, Ut recht. Ger ritRietveld, 1924.

P lat e 41 Se cond Lei te r Bui ld in g, Chica go .Wil liam Le Baron Jenney, 1889-90 .

Plate 38 Fair St or e, Chicago. Will iam LeBaron Jenney, 1889-90 .Plate 39 Gal e House, Chicago. Fr ank Ll oydWright, 1909.


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112 C hicago Fram e

P la te 4 2 P ro je ct , L ux fe r P ri sm S ky sc ra pe r.F ra nk L lo yd W rig ht, 1 89 5.P la te 4 3 P ro je ct, P re ss B uild in g. F ra nkL lo yd W rig ht , 1 91 2.P la te 4 4 P ro je ct, N atio na l L ife In su ra nc eS ky sc ra pe r. F ra nk L lo yd W ri gh t, 1 92 4.

11 3 C hica go F ra me


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Plate 45 Project, St. Mark's Tower. FrankLloyd Wright, 1929.

P lat e 46 Proje ct, Crysta l Hei gh ts Ho te l.Fr ank Lloyd Wr ight, 1940 .


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117 Chi cago Frame116 Chicago Frame

P lat e 4 7 McGlurg Bu ilding, Ch icago. Hola-b ird and Roche , 1899-1900 .

Plat e 49 Rel iance Building, Chicago. D. H.Bu rnh am and Company, 1895.

Pl at e 48 Mai son du Peuple, Brussel s. VictorHorta, 1897.

Plate 50 Project, Glass Tower. Ludwi g Miesvan der Roh e, 1921.

Documents

Colin Rowe - Chicago Frame