Inventions in Architecture by Toler Pamela;

Author:Toler, Pamela; [Toler, Pamela D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing LLC

The exhibition drew over six million visitors between May 1 and October 15—visitors who were as amazed by the nearly transparent building as by the exhibits it housed. But the Crystal Palace’s popularity wasn’t universal. The building was ridiculed in popular magazines like Punch and reviled by critics like John Ruskin, who derided it as “a cucumber frame.”

It would be almost one hundred years before building with steel and glass was an accepted architectural practice.

CHICAGO REACHES for the SKY

The technology of building with cast-iron frames found a new use in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century.

The city was growing rapidly thanks to its critical location as a transportation hub between eastern industry and western agriculture. There was little room for Chicago’s business district to expand. The city’s downtown was hemmed in by Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, and a tangle of railroads—the same factors that contributed to its growth. The only direction in which to build was up.

Chicago’s earliest tall buildings still depended in part on load-bearing masonry walls, which required thickened bases to support the weight of additional floors. A new solution came about almost by accident in 1884, when a bricklayer’s strike brought construction of the ten-story Home Insurance Building to a halt. Architect William LeBaron Jenney responded by designing a structural frame of steel and iron girders, the same technology Paxton used to build the Crystal Palace. When the strike ended, Jenney installed a curtain wall on the steel frame: a masonry wall with no load-bearing function. The result was a building that weighed two-thirds less than a similarly sized building made of solid masonry. People were so worried the building would collapse that the city halted its construction until they could investigate whether it was structurally sound.

“FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION”

Chicago architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) was the first to grasp the aesthetic possibilities of the new technology, which he laid out in an article called “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” in 1896. Declaring that “form follows function,” he designed buildings that emphasized their height and the lightness of their frames. His buildings expressed the “loftiness” of the skyscraper, which he felt should be “a proud and soaring thing.” He treated each building as if it were a classical column, with a base, shaft, and capital. Unlike the modernists of the mid-twentieth century, who adopted “form follows function” as a prescription for minimalism, Sullivan did not reject ornamentation. Instead, he believed American architects should invent their own kind of ornament rather than relying on European models. His lush, often romantic ornamentation focused around entrances, the panels between windows, and cornices. It seemed to grow organically from the simple form of his buildings.

Sullivan demonstrated his design principles in the Wainwright Building (1890). Commissioned by St. Louis brewer Ellis Wainwright, the exterior of the ten-story structure reflects its interior organization, even though the steel structure itself is not visible. Sullivan treated the facade as a grid of horizontal and vertical lines. Horizontal bays of windows stretch across the building, separated by fluted vertical members that connect the building’s base and cornice.

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