Edgar Lee Masters once traipsed from his downstate village to the Masonic Temple at State and Randolph, then the tallest building in the world, because he had heard it said that a man could see all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa, from its 21st floor. Traveling more than 200 miles to see Iowa from the top of a building, when the same trip in another direction would have let you see it close up, suggests something of the mystique that Chicago’s tall buildings have always had for the rest of the world.
The Sky’s the Limit offers a chronological listing of 130 major skyscrapers from the 1885 Studebaker building (now the Fine Arts on Michigan) to several projects as yet unbuilt. Seeing them all together allows you to consider them in ways not easy to do when you encounter them by chance.
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As the Loop has been built up, the tall building has become the context as well as the text of architectural discussion. The Sky’s the Limit points out in detail the ways architects relate new buildings to nearby older ones through stylistic references. Such guidance is welcome; often these references register feebly on passersby, who can be forgiven for assuming they exist only in the imagination of the architect. Take the multicolored stone piers that ring Helmut Jahn’s State of Illinois Center, which John Zukowsky reveals “refer indirectly” to the polychromed masonry of the Sherman Hotel. Very indirectly; the hotel was razed to make way for Jahn’s building.
The rise of the “Chicago School” of tall-building design is so familiar by now that even an alderman can recite it: how the Great Fire in 1871 led to innovations in fireproof iron and steel framing that was “expressed” or revealed through the windows, piers, etc of the facade; how these structural innovations (along with mechanical innovations like the elevator) liberated architects to design honest American buildings shorn of decadent Europeanized ornament.
In a now-famous 1894 letter, the financier who bankrolled the Monadnock instructed architect John Root to design a building that would not become a home to roosting pigeons, which colonized every doodad of classically ornamented buildings. The uncluttered facade Root came up with–window bays instead of pediments to vary the facade, a subtle swelling to give shape to the base and cornice–did more than just pigeon-proof the Monadnock. Historian and critic Donald Hoffman is quoted here calling the building “without peer” in the history of the tall office building.
It is hard to form an opinion about postmodernism in Chicago without forming an opinion of its most notorious local practitioner, Helmut Jahn. The most challenging building to go up in Chicago in 30 years was his State of Illinois Center. Jahn also was the perpetrator of such major Loop buildings as the 1980 addition to the Board of Trade and the Northwestern Atrium Center. The Board of Trade project deserves the praise that Pauline Saliga gives it in The Sky’s the Limit, but the Northwestern project revealed some of Jahn’s less ingratiating habits. He borrowed from the Board of Trade addition in designing the Northwestern building, specifically from the scallop motif used in the sconces and lobby of that art-deco beauty; but Jahn’s reworking produced a building that looks like a giant Wurlitzer jukebox. And Jahn quoting Louis Sullivan in the arched entrance on Madison is a bit like George Bush quoting Lincoln in this year’s state of the union address.
