Preface: Chicago Schools

doi:10.5622/illinois/9780252044953.002.0005

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Preface: Chicago Schools

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https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252044953.002.0005

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vii–xiv

Published:

June 2023

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This book’s predecessor, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871–1934, traced the city’s high-rise development between the Great Fire and the Great Depression, arguing that, rather than following the strict principles laid down by any “school,” the city’s architects, developers, engineers, and builders responded to changing palettes of materials and techniques to achieve greater efficiency, safety, and height in commercial construction. They did so in the service of a building type that remained largely unchanged programmatically (in the words of Cass Gilbert, skyscrapers were always essentially “machines for making the land pay”) and in a relaxed regulatory context that was responsive (often passively) to landowners’ desire for greater scale and profit.

Any account of the later burst of skyscraper construction in Chicago, between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, must grapple with that earlier era’s legacy. To what extent was the postwar era an extension of whatever principles guided the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century landmarks? By the time Carl Condit (1914–1997) attempted to weave the two periods together in the expanded 1964 reissue of his 1952 Rise of the Skyscraper—titled, provocatively, The Chicago School of Architecture—H. Allen Brooks and others were challenging the very idea of a unified approach. “Chicago School,” Brooks wrote in 1966, “[is] one of the best known, yet most abused, of all terms in current usage by historians of modern architecture.”¹ Winston Weisman, in his critique of Condit’s reissued book, noted that the sheer variety of ornament and articulation encrusting the city’s nineteenth-century towers obviated any notion of “an academy with a sound conceptual base and strict set of regulations…. There is little evidence to prove that such a body of thought and practice actually existed,” Weisman concluded.²

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