The line of technical development which runs from the cast-iron-framed textile mills of the 1790s in England to the steel-framed skyscrapers of the 1890s in America seems to posterity a simple and obvious one. But, in fact, various lags and cul-de-sacs make the story long and complex. The most significant technical advances in iron construction of the first half of the century were not in the commercial field, and the account in this chapter is by no means merely a repetition and a continuation of the story of iron construction down to 1855 that has been provided earlier (see Chapter 7).
The great difference between the Benyons, Marshall & Bage mill of 1796 at Shrewsbury, which initiated metal-skeleton structure, and Sullivan’s Guaranty Building in Buffalo, N.Y., of a century later is that the English mill is purely and simply a technical feat of construction quite without architectural pretension. If not literally anonymous, the mill was certainly the work of a millwright rather than an architect; the skyscraper, on the other hand, is a prime architectural monument of the long period of a century and a half that this book covers, and the masterpiece of one of the greatest and most creatively original designers that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have produced (Plate 119). But the skyscrapers of the 1890s do represent also the culmination of developments in the field of construction that began with the English mills of the 1790s, even if those developments are far from being the whole story of nineteenth-century commercial architecture. How office buildings were gradually received into the realm of architecture and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had risen so high in that realm that few productions of the 1890s in other fields of building can compare in quality of design with the great early skyscrapers is perhaps more significant for western culture in general than the purely technical aspect of the story. The weaving together of these two strands makes the full story one of the most interesting and complex in the history of nineteenth-century architecture.
Nineteenth-century commercial building need not be very precisely defined. It includes several slightly different sorts of edifices suitable for the needs of business, all consisting of a succession of identical upper storeys subdivided into offices or storerooms, with or without shops or representational premises below. Highly specialized and very lucrative concerns such as banks and insurance companies, to whom prestige of various sorts increasingly appeared a major desideratum, were the first to seek dignity and architectural display by employing architects of established reputation. Such agencies also desired buildings that were fire-resistant quite as much as did contemporary mill-owners. Already in Soane’s earliest work at the Bank of England he emulated, as has been noted, certain French technical advances that had just been employed by Louis in the Théâtre Français in Paris before these advances were first adopted in an English textile mill (see Chapters 1 and 7). Along Regent Street, around 1820, Nash and others housed less pretentious types of business in structures of mixed character and of less completely fireproof construction. But the premises on the ground floor here generally required very wide shop-windows of the sort that the use of iron supports made possible, even though the upper storeys were still nearly identical with those of domestic terraces.
In Boston in the mid twenties Parris was designing for the streets flanking his Market Hall commercial façades of a much more novel character, using not iron but granite in monolithic posts and lintels to provide a masonry skeleton filled with wide and close-set windows in all the storeys (Plate 112B).[295] In later Boston work of the next two decades in this tradition architects such as Isaiah Rogers and various builders employed iron for internal supports and sometimes also on the exterior at ground-floor level. But the granite ‘skeleton’ front preceded the skeletonized all cast-iron front in America by precisely a quarter of a century.
In England in the forties complete internal skeletons of iron carrying jack arches of brick or tile, hitherto used chiefly in textile mills, were increasingly adopted for superior commercial work, but the characteristic exteriors of commercial buildings[296] remained entirely of bearing masonry construction. However, in one case at least, a small block at 50 Watling Street in London which was probably built before 1844, the iron came through to the outer surface in the continuous window-bands of the upper storeys, even though the corner piers and the sections of wall between the storeys were of solid brickwork.
From C. R. Cockerell, titular Architect of the Bank of England after Soane’s retirement in 1833, and other architects such as Hopper, banks and insurance companies in London and other large cities obtained in the thirties and forties distinguished buildings all of masonry. In one especially fine edifice, erected in 1849-50 purely for use as offices, Bank Chambers behind Cockerell’s monumental Branch Bank of England of 1845-8, in Cook Street in Liverpool, he closely approached the directness of trabeated masonry expression of the contemporary Boston architects and builders (Plate 112A). The fireproof construction was of vaulted masonry throughout, moreover, with iron used only for the skylights over the stair-wells.
For the general character of commercial architecture down to the late fifties, however, A. & G. Williams’s Brunswick Buildings of 1841-2, also in Liverpool, were more significant. In this very large quadrangular block of general offices they followed the palazzo model provided by Barry’s newly completed Reform Club almost as closely as George Alexander had already done in his Bath Savings Bank the year before. The palazzo mode soon became the favourite one for imposing commercial architecture in Britain and, before long, in the United States as well.[297] With its regular rows of good-sized windows and its special prestige of having housed a commercial aristocracy in Renaissance times, this had certain aspects of suitability, both real and symbolical, to the needs of business-men. It also had serious disadvantages which soon led to a gradual modulation away from the earlier formulas of design.
The wide spacing of the windows demanded by correct palazzo precedent was awkward for offices requiring that maximum of natural light which was so readily provided by Parris and others in their granite buildings in Boston and by the unknown designer of 50 Watling Street in London. Therefore windows were soon much enlarged and also set closer together. Sometimes, moreover, as in a large cotton warehouse built in Parker Street in Manchester in 1850 by J. E. Gregan (1813-55), the increasingly heavy frames were applied only to every other opening. Properly, such ‘palaces’ ought not to be more than three storeys high, but the rapidly rising value of good sites in urban business districts made it ever more desirable to carry office buildings to four and five storeys like the terrace houses of the period.
Already in the Sun Assurance Offices in Threadneedle Street in the City of London, designed in 1839 and built in 1841-2, which do not in fact conform at all closely to the standard palazzo formula, Cockerell not only opened the ground floor with an arcade of haunched-segmental arches but also linked his two topmost floors behind an engaged colonnade in order to reduce the apparent height of the façade to three storeys. Across the street in the Royal Exchange Buildings of 1844-5 Edward l’Anson (1812-88) in 1844-5 lifted his whole palace front above a tall glazed arcade and tied the top-storey windows into a sort of frieze as Barry had already done in the second storey of the Reform Club (Plate 35B). In Manchester l’Anson’s cousin Edward Walters (1808-72) in the Silas Schwabe Building of 1845 at 41 Mosley Street linked the windows of the first and second storeys by an applied arcade.
The building with an exterior entirely of cast iron that James Bogardus (1800-74) designed and built for his own use in New York in 1848-50 was well publicized at the time,[298] and is still famous although long since demolished. On the corner of Washington and Murray Streets in New York another Bogardus building, the Laing stores erected in two months in 1849, is still extant (Plate 67B). Although there was never any such general use of cast-iron fronts in Great Britain as in America in the fifties and sixties, it seems probable from contemporary evidence that some architect, probably Owen Jones, built one at 76 Oxford Street in London a year or so before 1851. However that may be, an ironfounder named McConnel provided the structural elements for an office building that still stands[299] in Jamaica Street, Glasgow, in 1855 with an exterior all of cast iron. A curious feature of the design of this structure is the delicate iron membering that forms a series of arcades between the major structural piers. This decorative device, structurally meaningless in iron except for bracing although employed by Paxton at the Crystal Palace, is probably an imitation of the masonry arcading that was, in the mid fifties, gradually modifying the earlier palazzo paradigm quite beyond recognition.
In 1849 Wild used two ranges of Italian Gothic arcades on his St Martin’s Northern Schools in London, and the perspicacious Street remarked in an article on the obvious suitability of the theme for commercial fronts, as has already been noted. In Manchester in 1851 Starkey & Cuffley in a pair of shops employed ranges of three arches on each of the two fronts in the four storeys, binding them in with coupled columns marking the ends of the party walls.
The lifting of the window tax in 1851 encouraged great increases in window area. In jubilant recognition of this H. R. Abraham the next year made all his windows triplets in the first and second storeys of the W. H. Smith Building at 188-192 Strand in London, but without using any arches at all. Two years later, however, in a building for Heal’s furniture store in Tottenham Court Road in London, James M. Lockyer (1824-65) carried a quattrocento arcade all across the first storey.
By this time architects and public alike had become aware of a different High Renaissance formula from Barry’s (see Chapter 4). Beside the Reform Club in Pall Mall Sydney Smirke’s new front of the Carlton Club, designed in 1847, was coming to belated completion in the mid fifties. Moreover, its Sansovinesque arcades were already echoed in the first storey of Parnell & Smith’s Army and Navy Club of 1848-51 across the way. These London models were closely followed by William B. Gingell (1819-1900) in his West of England Bank in Corn Street, Bristol, of 1854 and quite outranked by the great Venetian palazzo that David Rhind (?-1883) erected in 1855 in Prince’s Street in Edinburgh for the Life Association of Scotland.
Possibly the fine warehouse at 12 Temple Street in Bristol with three groups of triplet arches in each of the upper storeys is by Gingell and of this date. There is none of the Sansovinesque lushness of his bank here, but the fine workmanship of the quarry-faced Pennant stone walls laid up in random ashlar, with smooth-cut Bath stone trim and coloured voussoirs banding the arches, bears some resemblance to the Bristol General Hospital he was building in 1853-7, notably in the very bold rustication of the ground-storey arches.
However that may be, two London buildings of 1855 advanced nearly as far towards the all-arcaded front. Hodgson’s Building by Knowles in the Strand at the corner of Chancery Lane had the general character of a palazzo, but all the windows were arched, as in buildings of the Rundbogenstil; moreover their trim sank into the wall rather than projecting from it, so that the wall sections between were reduced visually to mere piers, even though they had no imposts. The Crown Life Office, in New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, was built in 1855-7 by Ruskin’s friends Deane & Woodward, with whom he was most closely associated precisely in those years. The round-arched medieval arcading of this façade, with the piers hardly narrower than on Knowles’s building yet articulated by bases and imposts, may surely claim Ruskinian sanction. Here, at any rate, was the first important contact between advanced High Victorian Gothic and the commercial world, a contact destined to be very fruitful over the next fifteen years or so. Henceforth even architects of no aesthetic pretension were ready to exploit arcading.
The English development of arcaded masonry façades can be closely matched in America, specifically in Philadelphia.[300] There S. D. Button (1803-97), Napoleon Le Brun (1821-1901), and others in buildings of 1852-3 in Chestnut Street—that at 239-241 by Button is still extant—consistently used arched openings between slim piers; and Notman in 1855 provided for the Jackson Building at 418 Arch Street a façade even more completely articulated by arcading in all its four floors than the Crown Life Office. By this time, moreover, the trabeated design of Bogardus’s first iron fronts had likewise given way to ornate arcading in emulation of masonry fronts.[301]
Iron remained behind the scenes in most of the English arcaded buildings. In Waterhouse’s Fryer & Binyon Warehouse in Manchester of 1856, however, whose upper walls had the polychrome diapering of the Doge’s Palace so much admired by Ruskin, the first storey was opened up by an arcade carried on coupled iron columns. In the Wellington Williams Warehouse of 1858 in Little Britain in London, the obscure City firm of J. Young & Son used arcades in all the five storeys with iron columns to support the outer orders; thus the width of the piers could be considerably reduced, and the effect of over-all articulation was much enhanced as in the Philadelphia buildings.
Deane & Woodward’s very Ruskinian project of 1857 for the new Government Offices, with its endless Italian Gothic arcading, and a small warehouse in Merchant Street in Bristol of 1858 by Godwin gave some impetus to the use of pointed instead of round arches. But on the whole the best designed among the innumerable arcaded façades in England retained the rounded form, however Gothic their other detailing may be. In one of the largest and finest examples of the early sixties, moreover, Kassapian’s Warehouse in Leeds Road, Bradford, perhaps by Lockwood & Mawson, the detailing is academically Roman (Plate 114B).
Different as they are, this Bradford façade and that of Godwin’s contemporary warehouse at 104 Stokes Croft in Bristol, so much more subtly Ruskinian than anything by Deane & Woodward, are the two masterpieces of the genre at its best moment (Plate #113:pl113). Of very high quality also is 60 Mark Lane in the City of London built by George Aitchison in 1864-5. There the existence of a complete iron skeleton, presumably but not certainly present in most of the other examples, is fully documented. Moreover, on the rear the metal comes through to the outer face of the wall much as it did at 50 Watling Street, built some twenty years earlier.
In Philadelphia William Johnston had begun in 1849 the seven-storey Jayne Building in Chestnut Street,[302] introducing a new vertical formula of design for commercial façades. Above a conventional ground floor, narrow granite piers in the forms of clustered colonnettes rise the full height of the building, merging into Venetian Gothic tracery below a terminal parapet. Whether or not Samuel K. Hoxie, the contractor who provided the Quincy granite for this and other Philadelphia buildings, was familiar with the ‘granite-skeleton’ work of Parris, Rogers, and others in Boston is not clear. But in the next few years a good many façades with a similarly vertical and ‘skeletonized’ treatment were built in Philadelphia by J. C. Hoxie and his sometime partner Button. That across the street from the Jayne Building has already been mentioned, since the openings between the piers are covered with segmental arches throughout. Button’s building at 723-727 Chestnut Street of 1853 and his extant Leland Building at 37-39 South Third Street are even more ‘proto-Sullivanian’, so to put it. Louis Sullivan probably saw and admired such things as the Jayne Building and the Leland Building when he was working for Frank Furness in Philadelphia in the seventies; certainly they are very premonitory of his characteristic work of the eighties and even the nineties.
Various other ways of reducing the wall to little more than a masonry cladding of the iron structural members were also in use in England as well as in America by this time. A notable small edifice in the City of London, of uncertain date and authorship but probably by Thomas Hague and of 1855, is at 22 Finch Lane, with another front to the court at the side. On both these façades the two lower storeys are joined together visually by setting back the horizontal spandrel between them, and the moulded stonework of the very narrow piers is of almost metallic scale and crispness.
Still more striking is Oriel Chambers[303] in Water Street in Liverpool, built in 1864-5 by Peter Ellis (fl. 1835-84), and another smaller building by him at 16 Cook Street of a year or two later. On the front façades of these the masonry is scaled down quite as much as at 22 Finch Lane but given a more decorative treatment, in both cases of rather metallic character. At Oriel Chambers, oriels of plate glass held in delicate metal frames are cantilevered out in every bay of all the upper storeys, producing a regular rhythm broken only by the clumsy cresting on the top (Plate 114A). At 16 Cook Street all the stone spandrels are set back, thus emphasizing even more strongly than at Oriel Chambers the continuous vertical lines of the mullions. The over-all pattern is once more somewhat confused, however, by the arches across the top that link the mullions together. The rear walls of both of Ellis’s buildings are even more open in design and directly expressive of the metal skeleton. Towards the narrow court at the side of Oriel Chambers only every third iron pier is clad with masonry; those between rise free behind the glass of the horizontally sashed windows whose upper planes are slanted inward. This is, in effect, an early example of the ‘curtain-wall’ (see Chapter 22).
If in some technical respects the Chicago skyscraper of the nineties seems almost to have come to premature birth in Liverpool in the sixties, as in some other respects it had done in the Philadelphia commercial buildings of the fifties, the immediate influence of these buildings by Ellis seems to have been almost nil. Eventually Owen Jones, in a façade at Derby of 1872, and Thomas Ambler, in a corner building at 46-47 Boar Lane in Leeds of 1873, did come to use only iron and glass, omitting all masonry; but more characteristic commercial work of these years is to be seen in such warehouses by unknown hands as the one at 1-2 York Place in Leeds, with an arcade crisply detailed in moulded brick rising through all the upper storeys, somewhat as on the Philadelphia buildings of the fifties, or a larger example in Strait Street in Bristol, with a much heavier arcade subsuming several upper storeys, handsomely executed in stones of different colours and textures and very boldly and simply detailed. Such things, however, very soon seemed to the English not advanced but retardataire as contemporary attention focused on the Queen Anne of Shaw’s New Zealand Chambers of 1872-3.
Richardson’s very un-Shavian American Express Building[304] in Chicago of 1872-3 first brings that Mid-Western metropolis into this story. That had no arcading, but the windows were very closely set, sometimes (it would appear) with only light metal colonnettes as mullions between them. There was also a directness and a ‘realism’ of treatment throughout comparable to that of Richardson’s more monumental work of this date, notably the Hampden County Courthouse and the Buffalo State Hospital, both designed the previous year and at this time still in construction. But Richardson’s dependence on English commercial work of the preceding fifteen years became closer still in his first really fine business building, the Cheney Block (now the Brown-Thompson Department Store) built in Hartford, Conn., in 1875-6 (Plate 116A). Here the wide ground-storey arcade, including a mezzanine, and the narrower arcade above, subsuming several storeys—as on the very proto-Richardsonian warehouse in Strait Street in Bristol—are carried out with typically Richardsonian stoniness in quarry-faced brownstone. But the banded arches introduce a bold note of High Victorian Gothic polychromy, and the carved detail is in the harsh but richly naturalistic vein—also High Victorian Gothic in spirit—of the ornament on the earliest executed portions of Trinity Church in Boston, probably of a year or two before.
Already, in New York, the skyscraper[305] had been born by this date, and leadership in commercial architecture had crossed the Atlantic for good and all. None of the structures dealt with so far in this chapter except the Jayne Building were more than five or six storeys high, since it could not be expected that business clients would climb more than four or five flights of stairs. But the average height of buildings in the financial districts of cities had, even so, almost doubled since the eighteenth century, partly because of the general rise in the number of storeys, partly because of much increased storey heights. Vertical transportation of human beings, which would allow the erection of office buildings considerably more than five storeys high—industrial buildings were often much taller already—became increasingly feasible during the forties and fifties. Hoists for goods were a commonplace of English warehouse design after 1840, and in 1844 the Bunker Hill Monument had a passenger-hoist operated by a steam engine. In New York the Haughwout Store on Broadway had in 1857 the first practical passenger lift or elevator to be installed in an ordinary urban structure. This was of the type developed by Elisha G. Otis. A lift of another sort was introduced in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York later that year. Those of 1860 in the Westminster Palace Hotel in London apparently did not function, at least for some years. The Equitable Building, for which Arthur Gilman and Edward Kimball, with George B. Post (1837-1913) as the associated engineer, won the competition in 1868, was the first office building in New York to have a lift from the time of its completion in 1871. Immediately after this lifts were introduced in several other comparable structures, and one- or two-storey mansards were often added to the tops of existing buildings. A great change was thus at hand in New York in the early seventies.
Despite the Panic of 1873, the mid seventies saw the construction of what may properly be considered the first skyscrapers, the nine-storey (260-foot) Tribune Building and the ten-storey (230-foot) Western Union Building. Both were therefore about double the height even of the tallest office structures, such as the five-storey (130-foot) Equitable Building erected during the preceding boom period. These first skyscrapers rose to altitudes reached hitherto in America only by church spires, as general views of the New York skyline around 1875 make evident. Neither Hunt’s New York Tribune Building, extant but since carried many storeys higher, nor Post’s Western Union Telegraph Building, long since demolished, incorporated any other technical innovations;[306] nor was their design at all closely related, like that of Richardson’s Cheney Block in Hartford, to the advanced English commercial work of the previous decade. Paradoxically, the French-trained Hunt’s building is somewhat the more English of the two in character; but, for all the direct expressiveness of the window grouping in triplets in each bay, the detail throughout is coarse and gawky, and the silhouette of the very tall mansard and the asymmetrically placed tower was from the first overbearing. The later addition of many more storeys has made the building even more top-heavy in appearance. The Tribune Building was of interest chiefly for its relatively great height, now unnoticeable among the much taller skyscrapers built around it later. Its almost complete avoidance of any sort of archaeological styling, however, such as the Romanesquoid of Richardson’s Cheney Block or the violently polychromatic and spiky Gothic of Hunt’s own Divinity School at Yale, on which construction was still at this date proceeding, is certainly worth remark also.
The Western Union Building of Post was only nominally French, for its rather heavy-handed Second Empire treatment owed more to earlier English and American designs in this mode than to anything Parisian (Plate 115A). But the exterior was more orderly, if less expressive, than that of Hunt’s skyscraper and the mansards on top piled up as grandly to the centrally placed tower as on the big contemporary Post Office near by. Yet stylistically both Post’s and Hunt’s buildings were out of date almost as soon as they were finished; and after the hiatus caused by the depression of the seventies the locus of the skyscraper story moved westward to Chicago.
Chicago, already the metropolis of the Middle West, had almost no architectural traditions at this time. First developed as a city in the thirties, the need for rapid building in timber had led to the invention or development of what is called ‘balloon-frame’ construction, in which relatively light studs or scantlings, rising wall high, form a cage or crate whose members are fastened together by a liberal use of machine-made nails. Balloon-frame construction, thus, is a typical offshoot of the industrial revolution, becoming feasible only with the mechanization of the saw-mill and of the manufacture of nails. Theoretically, there might be thought to be some analogy between this New World method of carpentry, so different from the heavy framing of the Old World, hitherto always used in America as well, and metal construction. There is no evidence, however, that Chicago took to iron with any greater enthusiasm in the fifties and sixties than did New York or various other cities; indeed, St Louis seems to have had more and finer examples of cast-iron fronts, particularly in the early seventies. As late as that, moreover, the new cities of the American Northwest were obtaining cast-iron fronts prefabricated from Britain, just as San Francisco had obtained many of her warehouses and immigrant dwellings in 1849-50.
At the opening of the seventies a terrific conflagration[307] all but wiped out Chicago. The need for rapid rebuilding drew thither ambitious architects and engineers from all over the East, but the immediate results of their activities were anything but edifying. Architectural leadership was still centred in Boston and New York; in any case, that leadership had rarely been more confused than in the early seventies when even Richardson was only just maturing his personal style. Richardson’s own Chicago building for the American Express Company was doubtless too indeterminate in character to attract a local following; nor did he build again in Chicago until the mid eighties, by which time various versions of the Richardsonian were already reaching Chicago at second or third hand.
If the Chicago architectural scene had any virtues around 1880 they were largely negative ones: no established traditions, no real professional leaders, and ignorance of all architectural styles past or present. Among the architects who had settled in Chicago in the seventies was a Dane, Dankmar Adler (1844-1900). Into his office in 1879, first as chief draughtsman but soon as partner, came the young Bostonian Louis Sullivan. As has been noted before, Sullivan had been trained first in Ware’s school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later, until he revolted against its rigid doctrines, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Having worked for Frank Furness, wildest of American High Victorians, Sullivan picked Chicago not alone for its evident professional opportunities but also because he liked the idea of working where there were no hampering traditions. (Moreover, his parents had moved there from Boston.)
The earliest building of any real originality designed by Sullivan, the Rothschild Store in Chicago of 1880-1, seems at first a turgid compilation of barbarisms. Examined more closely, however, and compared with the Leiter Building on its right, which was built two years earlier by the engineer-architect William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907), the two sorts of innovation that Sullivan essayed here can be readily recognized. On the one hand there is the ornament,[308] undefinable in historic terms yet with a kind of similarity—almost certainly accidental—to the Anglo-Japanese detail of Nesfield and Godwin. At this stage in Sullivan’s career the originality of his ornament must be remarked but can hardly be admired. Below his elaborate ornamental cresting, on the other hand, Sullivan handled the main architectonic elements of his façade with considerable novelty and most admirable logic. Although the building is not tall—no skyscraper, that is, even by the modest standards of 1880—Sullivan did not hesitate to follow the lead of the Philadelphia commercial architects of the fifties in emphasizing the vertical. This he accomplished by continuing the mullions that subdivide his bays across the spandrels, somewhat as Ellis had done fifteen years before in his buildings in Liverpool, rather than by using a multiplicity of masonry piers.
Sullivan’s next Chicago building, the Revell Store erected for Martin Ryerson in 1881-3, continued the theme of the Rothschild Store, but extended it over a much larger corner block with considerable chastening of the ornamental treatment at the top. The Troescher Building of 1884, which came next in sequence, is very much finer. Widely-spaced piers of plain brickwork rise the full height of the façade above a slightly Richardsonian ground-storey arcade of rock-faced stone; between them there are no oriels, as on Ellis’s Oriel Chambers or his Ryerson Building[309] of the previous year, but broad horizontal windows separated by recessed spandrels. These spandrels are rather like Ellis’s on his other building at 16 Cook Street, but their actual prototypes are to be found, more probably, in Philadelphia buildings by Button such as the one at 723-727 Chestnut Street. The ornament here, now still further chastened, is largely confined to these spandrels. The curved cresting across the top, however, recalls a little the turgid crown of the Rothschild façade.
Sullivan’s early buildings were not very tall, and they did not advance the technical development of the skyscraper. In these same years, however, other Chicago architects were doing so to notable effect. For the ten-storey Montauk Block of 1882-3, tall, but no taller than the first New York skyscrapers of ten years before, Burnham & Root introduced spread foundations to carry its great weight on the muddy Chicago soil, out of which earlier buildings had, literally, to be hoisted every few years. In design they were content, however, with a range of ten almost identical storeys of plain brick pierced by regularly spaced segmental-arched windows. Obvious as this treatment may seem, it took courage to use it at a time when most architects were still trying to disguise the embarrassing height of buildings only half as tall by grouping their storeys together in twos and threes.
The Home Life Insurance Building begun in 1883 was also only ten storeys tall.[310] But in building it Jenney invented, or at least introduced in Chicago, what is specifically called ‘skyscraper construction’, that is a method of carrying the external masonry cladding on metal shelves bolted to the internal skeleton. Jenney, however, probably thought he was merely tying together his metal skeleton and his brickwork, not carrying the latter entirely, though this was found to be the case when the structure of the building was carefully examined during its demolition. The Home Insurance Building, in any case, looked far more as if its external walls were bearing than do any of Sullivan’s early works. Jenney, moreover, fought shy of the frankness of Burnham & Root’s treatment of the Montauk Block; instead he phrased his storeys in groups, almost as if several buildings of normal three- or four-storey height had been casually piled one on top of the other.
Before the Home Insurance was finished in 1885 two more major commercial monuments were rising in Chicago, Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store (Plate 116B), last but one of the large buildings erected in Chicago with walls entirely of bearing masonry, and Burnham & Root’s Rookery Building (see Chapter 13). Both were begun in 1885, Richardson’s being finished in 1887 and Burnham & Root’s a year earlier in 1886. The exterior of the eleven-storey Rookery Building is not an example of the stripped ‘functionalism’ that these architects had introduced in their Montauk Block but rather a provincial imitation of the Richardsonian. In the court walls, however, the architects used—and with complete awareness of its implications—the new structural method of Jenney’s Home Insurance Building, carrying the brickwork above the sides of the central glass-roofed lobby entirely on the internal metal[311] skeleton.
With the advent of Richardson in 1885, the main lines of development in commercial architecture, both as regards design and as regards construction, might seem to have been concentrated in Chicago. It is well therefore to note again that McKim, Mead & White in their Goelet Building on Broadway in New York of 1885-6 provided almost as frank an expression of the skyscraper, or tall office building of many identical storeys, at least above their Renaissance ground-floor arcade, as did Burnham & Root in the Montauk Block. Their windows, however, were phrased in triplets like Hunt’s on the Tribune Building and also grouped vertically within tall bay-width panels of moulded brick rising with only one break to the cornice. This was a quite frank solution of the problem, and is hardly to be castigated as ‘traditional’ or even as ‘un-functional’. Moreover, another New York building, Babb, Cook & Willard’s De Vinne Press of 1885 in Lafayette Street, is not altogether unworthy of comparison with the Field store. It lacks the regularity and the grandeur of scale of Richardson’s masterpiece, but George F. Babb used his fine red brick in a belated Rundbogenstil way, and not without some conscious reminiscence, one may presume, of Durand’s exemplars of the beginning of the century.
Richardson’s last commercial work, the Ames Building in Harrison Avenue in Boston of 1886-7, on which the arcade was carried the full height of the building and the reveals much reduced, had no immediate influence in Chicago (see Chapter 13). Sullivan’s first really great work, the Auditorium Building (now Roosevelt College) in Chicago, derived for the most part straight from the Field store, at least as regards the exterior. Designed in 1886 and built in 1887-9, this is a vast and complex edifice, or group of edifices, with a hotel on the Michigan Avenue front, an opera-house entered in the middle of the Congress Street side, and offices along Wabash Avenue at the rear. The walls are all of bearing masonry still. In order to incorporate more storeys than Richardson had ever done, Sullivan carried up his heavy rock-faced granite base through two mezzanine levels and increased the number of floors subsumed by the main arcade which rises from the first storey (Plate 117A). He also used light stone throughout, instead of the red granite and the brownstone of the Field store, with its surfaces all smooth-cut above the mezzanines.
This flattening of the wall-plane was carried even further on the tower which rises above the portal of the opera-house in Congress Street. On that wide arched panels of very slight projection are filled with articulated screens of stone in which the windows are arranged in a continuous grid with no evident storey lines. The eaves gallery at the top of the tower, a stubby colonnade set in a long horizontal panel with a continuous ribbon-window behind—the window in fact of the Adler & Sullivan office—is so like Thomson’s on the front of his Queen’s Park church of the sixties in Glasgow that it is hard to believe Sullivan did not know it. Yet other evidence indicates that he continued to abjure all European influence at this point in his career.
In the interiors, particularly the bar and the banquet hall at the top of the hotel, Sullivan’s ornament changed even more markedly than his exterior design. Here also there is possibly Richardsonian influence, but coming from the Byzantinizing detail worked out by John Galen Howard of the Richardson office for the MacVeagh house of 1885-7 in Chicago rather than from the Field store.
However, one cannot entirely discount the possibility of a contribution in the field of ornament by a brilliant young man of twenty, Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Sullivan and Adler had just taken on as a draughtsman in 1887 and who was soon given charge of the innumerable detail drawings that this vast project required. Nurtured on Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament,[312] which the Paris-trained Sullivan claimed not to have known, as well as on the writings of Ruskin, Morris, and Viollet-le-Duc, Wright may perhaps have encouraged Sullivan to move away from the bold coarseness of his earlier ornament towards the lush elaboration of intricately plastic surface decoration henceforth characteristic of his work. It is tempting, even, to believe that Jones’s page of Celtic ornament particularly attracted the Irish Sullivan’s fancy.[313]
Together with the Auditorium, though commissioned a year later, there was also rising in Chicago in 1887-9 the Tacoma Building of William Holabird (1854-1923) and Martin Roche (1855-1927), two young architects trained in Jenney’s office. Here the exterior walls on the two fronts were entirely carried by the metal skeleton within, only the rear walls and some of the interior partitions being of bearing masonry like the walls of the Auditorium. Moreover, this fact was made evident in the frank if not particularly distinguished treatment of the two fronts. Vertical ranges of oriels were carried the full height of the building, and there was only a minimal brick and terracotta sheathing of the structural verticals and horizontals. A more or less Richardsonian cornice capped the whole, but the general effect was closer to Ellis’s Oriel Chambers of the sixties in Liverpool or to some of Sullivan’s earlier buildings than to the Field store.
Despite the general swing of Eastern architects towards the Neo-Academic in these years, some who were doing commercial work were not out of step with what was happening in Chicago. For example, there are office buildings and warehouses in Boston and New York of relatively modest height built in the late eighties and early nineties that emulate in brick the arcading of the Field store with almost as much success as Sullivan. Similar things can be seen in many Middle and Far Western cities, but these derive more probably from Sullivan or Burnham & Root than directly from Richardson.
In the Middle West, moreover, McKim, Mead & White were building in 1888-90 two very large business buildings, still with bearing masonry walls, for the New York Life Insurance Company, one in Omaha, Nebraska, and one in Kansas City, Missouri, of effectively identical design. Unlike the already characteristic Chicago ‘slabs’—the quadrangular plan of the Rookery Building is exceptional—these are U-shaped, and each has a tower rising above the main mass at the rear of the court. The treatment of the walls with tall arcading follows as evidently from the Field store as does Sullivan’s at the Auditorium; like that of the contemporary Boston Public Library, however, the fairly simple detailing is of High Renaissance rather than Richardsonian Romanesque character.
Before these towering blocks were finished in the West the new ‘skyscraper construction’ had been introduced in New York by Bradford Lee Gilbert (1853-1911). His Tower Building of 1888-9, as its name implies, was a tower, not a slab, with more or less Richardsonian detailing. It is worth noting that the Tower Building—ten storeys, 119 feet—was not as tall as the first New York skyscrapers built in the early seventies with bearing walls. Indeed, Post’s World or Pulitzer Building of 1889-90 in New York with twenty-six storeys, the tallest built up to then—309 feet—still had bearing walls. Of course, the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, exceeded in height by a great deal all the skyscrapers of its day whatever their construction; indeed, it was not overtopped until the Empire State Building in New York rose from the designs of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon in the early 1930s at the end of the second wave of skyscraper building following the First World War.
Post’s Western Union Building of the early seventies was in the Second Empire mode; his World Building was still French, but what can better be called ‘Beaux-Arts’. It is designed like a series of three- or four-storey Renaissance palaces, one on top of the other, and crowned with a large and ornate dome. The next New York skyscrapers all followed the new structural method introduced by Gilbert in the Tower Building; but Post, Price, and the other architects who designed them used an ornate paraphernalia of Renaissance ornamentation with none of the discretion of McKim, Mead & White on their Kansas City and Omaha insurance buildings. Characteristic of the period are Price’s American Surety Building at Broadway and Wall Street, begun in 1894, and his St James Building of 1897-8 at 1133 Broadway, both in New York, and Post’s Park Building in Pittsburgh, completed in 1896. The latter’s Havemeyer Building in New York, completed earlier, in 1892, was still somewhat Richardsonian however.
The maturing of an original sort of skyscraper design around 1890 is a Middle Western, and almost specifically a Chicago, story to which New York architects made no contribution. Boston’s architectural leadership had ended with the death of Richardson; despite the prominence of McKim, Mead & White and their large Eastern following, leadership in this field passed almost at once to Chicago. It was most appropriate that Richardson’s masterpiece, the Field store, should have been built there; the inspiration it provided, as we have already seen in the case of the Auditorium Building, played an important part in the succeeding Middle Western development.
In 1889-90 Jenney built for Levi Z. Leiter a large building on South Clark Street in Chicago now occupied by Sears, Roebuck & Company. In this he not only used the new ‘skyscraper construction’ for the exterior walls but also—with the presumptive aid of his assistant and later partner William Bryce Mundie (1863-1939)—arrived at an expression of its structural character almost as logical as that of the Tacoma Building yet much more monumental. Like most other Chicago designers in these years, Jenney and Mundie were influenced here by the Field store. The uncompromisingly block-like shape of this tremendous building, with its heavy plain entablature and pilaster-like corner piers, is Richardsonian both in its scale and in its simplicity (Plate 117B). The various groupings of stone mullions that clad the main piers and subdivide the bays, lithe and light though they are, were clearly envisaged as Romanesque colonnettes and even carry modest foliate capitals. Despite the dichotomy of the solidly Richardsonian silhouette and the open screen-like treatment of the walls, the effect is coherent and dignified. In this respect the Sears, Roebuck Building is superior to Sullivan’s very Richardsonian[314] Opera House Building in Pueblo, Colorado, of 1890 which was burned in the 1920s. The Walker Warehouse in Chicago of 1888-9 better displayed his great talent.
Three buildings of the early nineties, two in Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham’s firm and one in St Louis by Sullivan, illustrate the wide range of creative possibilities in skyscraper design at this point. The most advanced is surely the Reliance Building, at least in terms of direct structural expression. This was carried up only four storeys in 1890, though extended to its present thirteen storeys by D. H. Burnham & Company in 1894. As completed, this is a refined and perfected version of Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building (Plate 115B). The light-coloured terracotta cladding of the vertical members, particularly on the flat oriels, is reduced to a minimum; the terminal member is a thin slab, not a cornice or an entablature; and the only stylistic reminiscence is in the cusped panelling—neither Romanesque nor Renaissance, but slightly Late Gothic in character—of the spandrels. What we see was presumably designed as well as built in 1894.[315]
Burnham & Root’s other significant skyscraper of this particular moment, the sixteen-storey Monadnock Building begun in 1891, the last tall Chicago building with bearing walls of brick, was and still remains more famous than the Reliance; doubtless it is also finer, although much mid-twentieth-century critical opinion has favoured the Sears, Roebuck Building of Jenney & Mundie and the Reliance because they are more advanced technically. The smooth shank of the Monadnock, varied only by the slight projection of the recurrent oriels, has a most subtle and elegant taper or reverse entasis. The final bending outward of the brickwork to provide a cove cornice unifies the whole formal concept with extraordinary effectiveness. Few large buildings have ever achieved such monumental force with such simple means. There is almost literally no detail of any sort, whether derivative or original.
Sullivan’s Wainwright Building of 1890-1 in St Louis, Missouri, in which he and Adler used ‘skyscraper construction’ for the first time, no longer dominates two- and three-storey neighbours as it did when newly built; thus the prominence that the relatively great height gave it in the city picture of the nineties can hardly be realized today. But Sullivan undoubtedly sought to emphasize what seemed to contemporaries, as they do not to posterity, its very tall proportions (Plate 118). Continuous pilaster-like piers of brick, quite like those on his Troescher Building of 1884, clad the vertical elements of the steel skeleton, yet identical brick piers with no major structural members behind them also serve as intervening mullions. But at the base the wide windows of the ground storey and the mezzanine reveal the true width of the actual bays of the steel skeleton as the treatment of the shank of the building does not. The piers are considerably broader than most of those on the Sears, Roebuck Building; but they are also topped, like Mundie’s, with ornament that forms a sort of capital. Moreover, the attic storey above is quite hidden behind a deep band of the richest Sullivanian ornament elsewhere restricted, as on the Troescher Building, to the recessed spandrels. The ‘cornice’ above this frieze-like attic is merely a slab, but a much thicker one than that which caps the Reliance Building. Nothing of Richardson’s direct influence is left; but by now Sullivan had learned from the Field store the basic lessons of scale and order, applying them here in a visually sure but not particularly frank way to the new type of metal-skeleton construction. The plan is U-shaped, like those of the McKim, Mead & White buildings in Kansas City and Omaha, but the court is to the rear, so that the block appears unified from the surrounding streets.
In Sullivan’s next important work, the Schiller Building in Chicago of 1891-2, he adopted—exceptionally for him—a truly tower-like shape. Here the masonry piers that clad the structural steel stanchions are not doubled by identical mullions between; instead these piers are linked by arches below a sort of frieze. The ‘frieze’ is really a very ornately arcaded eaves-gallery, not a flat band as on the Wainwright Building, occupying a whole storey below the thick slab cornice.
Interchange of ideas was continuous in these years between the various Chicago architects’ offices, while the influence of the Academic Revival in the East, dominant in almost all the buildings at the World’s Fair of 1893 save Sullivan’s own Transportation Building, was still negligible in the commercial field. Thus Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building of 1893-4 in Chicago borrowed its rather clumsy ground storey and mezzanine, with a cavernously Richardsonian arched entrance, from Burnham’s Ashland Block of 1892 and its oriels from the Tacoma or possibly the Reliance Building. These oriels alternate with horizontal openings of the type known as ‘Chicago windows’ sharply cut through the smooth light-coloured terracotta of the wall plane. ‘Chicago windows’, with a wide fixed pane in the centre and narrower sashes that open on either side, were used by most Chicago architects in this decade and the next. A heavy moulded cornice, not just a thick slab, crowns the whole above a colonnaded eaves-gallery somewhat like the one at the top of the Auditorium tower.
What should probably be considered Sullivan’s masterpiece, the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, N.Y., followed in 1894-5 (Plate 119). One of the most significant new themes in the design of this skyscraper, whose premonitory character can only be fully appreciated in relation to the use of pilotis in later modern architecture (see Chapter 22), is already to be found in a project of Sullivan’s of the previous year for the St Louis Trust & Savings Bank. This is the treatment of the ground storey, where the terracotta sheathed piers were isolated from the wall plane by bending back the tops of the shop-windows. The piers are thus nearly free-standing and seem to lift the shaft of the building above them right off the ground. This allows circumambient space to penetrate under the main volume of the building. Thus the fact that the edifice is a hollow cage is very strongly suggested, and the wide shop-windows do not appear to undermine the walls above them as in so much commercial work of the nineteenth century.
There are several reasons, not intrinsic to Sullivan’s design, that explain why the Guaranty remains the most effective of all the early skyscrapers. Since downtown Buffalo has not filled up with buildings of equal or greater height in the way of downtown St Louis and the Chicago Loop, the Guaranty still rises high above most of its modest neighbours, in effect a tower as well as a slab, although actually of U-shaped plan like the Wainwright. In this city, moreover, which has in the last sixty years remained considerably cleaner than Chicago, the colour of the tawny terracotta sheathing has not been so much obscured by grime as on the Stock Exchange Building. These were happy local conditions that Sullivan could not foresee.
The plastic handling of the crown of the Guaranty was perhaps suggested to Sullivan by the effectiveness of the cove at the top of Burnham & Root’s Monadnock Building. Here the crowns of the arched façade bays—two to each structural bay, as the wide spacing of the piers at ground-storey level so clearly reveals—are related to the outward curve of the top of the wall below the terminal slab. The profuse and melodious curvilinear ornament, subsuming the round attic windows, echoes and complements the plastic theme. This is an example, rare even in Sullivan’s most mature work of the mid and late nineties, of the successful integration of architectonic and decorative effects. The treatment of the terracotta cladding throughout the exterior of the Guaranty, moreover, covered all over as it is with lacy geometrical ornament in very low relief, seems to lighten the whole. The cladding is read as a mere protective shell carried by the underlying steel structural members and not as solid brickwork like the piers of the Wainwright Building.
Just as the Wainwright Building may be contrasted on the one hand with the still greater solidity of the Monadnock Building—in that case justified by the bearing-wall construction—and on the other with the openness of the Reliance, so it is of interest to compare the Guaranty with two other big business buildings of 1895 by other Chicago architects. In the Ellicott Square Building, also in Buffalo, Burnham was strongly influenced by his close association with McKim at the World’s Fair. With the assistance of his designer Atwood, whose short life ended this same year, he adopted the elaborate Renaissance membering and the heavy masonry vocabulary of the New York skyscraper architects, although he retained the quadrangular plan and the glass-roofed central court of the Rookery. On the other hand, in Chicago Solon S. Beman (1853-1914) in the Studebaker (now Brunswick) Building came very close to providing an all-glass front, despite the profusion of Late Gothic frippery with which he detailed his very restricted terracotta cladding.
Adler had parted from Sullivan in 1895, but Sullivan’s career as a skyscraper builder continued for a few more years at a very high level. In his next skyscraper, the Condict Building in New York of 1897-9, he reduced very considerably the width of the mullions between the piers so that they became mere colonnettes, and even these are omitted in the first storey. But this highly logical differentiation between pier and mullion, related to the treatment of his Rothschild Store of 1880-1, still gets lost at the top in a flurry of ornamentation almost as turgid in its very different and almost quattrocento[316] way as the top of that very early façade. The treatment of the ground storey was originally like that of the Guaranty, but has been modified by later shop-fronts.
The next year Holabird & Roche built three contiguous buildings on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for Harold McCormick (Plate 120). The two southerly ones are excellent examples of the work of the Chicago School; they are a little less extensively glazed than Beman’s Studebaker Building or Holabird & Roche’s own McClurg Building of 1899 but with crisp and simple, if quite conventional, moulded brick detail on the piers and rather plain cornices of wholly academic character. Standard Chicago windows are used throughout. The third façade on the north, that of the Gage Building at 18 South Michigan Avenue, while fronting a structure also by Holabird & Roche, is itself by Sullivan. A different arrangement of the windows, a bolder moulding of the terracotta cladding of the piers—there were no intervening mullions now, any more than on his Troescher Building of 1884—and a strategic spotting of the chicory-like ornament—as well as, originally, a rich picture-frame-like band around the ground-storey shop-window—produce an entirely different effect. This effect is no less expressive of the underlying structure, but it represents a fuller and subtler deployment of architectural resources than Holabird & Roche provided on the façades next door.
The Gage Building was Sullivan’s penultimate major work. With the Carson, Pirie & Scott Department Store his career as an architect of big commercial buildings came to an end. This was designed in 1899 and the original three-bay and nine-storey section on Madison Street built in 1899-1901 for Schlesinger & Mayer; it was completed in 1903-4 for the present owners with the erection of the twelve-storey section that runs along State Street.[317] This building, which was Sullivan’s swan song, has also seemed to many critics his masterpiece (Plate 121). It lacks, however, the unity of the earlier Guaranty Building, having been built in two—indeed actually in three—successive campaigns. Despite the prominence of its site in the Chicago Loop, the store is inevitably overshadowed today by later and taller neighbours; nevertheless, it occupies a very high place in the Sullivanian canon.
There is no vertical emphasis except on the rounded pavilion at the corner, where continuous colonnettes rise the full height between the rather narrow bays; this feature was intended from the first but not built until 1903-4. The wide Chicago windows are crisply cut through the white terracotta sheathing just like the windows between the oriels on the Stock Exchange Building. The underlying grid of the structural steel frame—always more horizontal than vertical in effect, as the Reliance Building so clearly reveals—completely controls the surface pattern of the fenestration. On the Guaranty Building Sullivan emphasized the structural piers at their base by bending back the shop-windows of the ground storey; here it was the topmost storey that he set back, revealing the tops of the piers like little free-standing columns beneath the terminal slab in the spirit of his earlier eaves galleries. This treatment—most unfortunately replaced in 1948 by a flush parapet—increased very notably the effect of volume in much the same way as the parallel treatment at the base of the Guaranty.
At the base here, however, the shop-windows are carried up two storeys and given picture-frame-like surrounds, somewhat as on the Gage Building. In the cast-iron ornamentation of these frames, now much simplified, as also in that of the canopy on the north side and around the entrances in the rounded corner pavilion, Sullivan reached a peak of virtuosity in the lush decoration that has seemed to later critics quite at odds with the severe rectangularity of the façades above. There can be no question, however, that Sullivan considered ornament of the greatest importance in architecture and gave to its invention and elaboration his best thought and energy. It is certainly an interesting coincidence, moreover, rather than a matter of influence either way, that in these very years in Europe the newest architectural mode, the Art Nouveau, also put heavy emphasis on a somewhat similar sort of curvilinear decoration, often in association with exposed metal construction, and most notably on department stores (see Chapters 16, 17).
Sullivan’s ornament never had much influence either at home or abroad. Although Sullivanian skyscrapers of varying size and quality exist in many Middle Western and Far Western cities, most of them built in the first two decades of the new century, only the Rockefeller Building in Cleveland, built in 1903-6 by Knox & Elliot and extended laterally in 1910, really employs ornament, although of a drier and more geometrical order deriving from Owen Jones’s Grammar, in anything like Sullivan’s way. On Sullivan’s own late buildings, mostly tiny banks in small Middle Western towns, and in comparable work by his former assistant George G. Elmslie (1871-1952)[318] and William G. Purcell (b. 1880) the ornament tends to get more out of hand than on any of his skyscrapers of the nineties except perhaps the Condict Building. The best of Sullivan’s is the National Farmers’ Bank at Owatonna, Minn., of 1908; but Purcell & Elmslie’s Merchants’ National Bank in Winona, Minn., completed in 1911, might easily be mistaken for Sullivan’s work, for it is of comparable quality.
In the skyscrapers of the late nineties and the first two decades of the twentieth century designed in other Chicago architectural offices, such as D. H. Burnham & Co., Jenney & Mundie, and Holabird & Roche, there was rarely any attempt to vie with Sullivan as an ornamentalist but rather a continuance of the straightforward sort of design of the last-named firm’s Michigan Avenue buildings of 1898-9. A particularly fine and very large example is their Cable Building in Chicago of 1899. In the Fisher Building of 1897, also in Chicago, the Burnham firm more or less repeated the formula of the Reliance Building, but with a profusion of rather archaeological Late Gothic detail, eschewing the New York influence apparent in the Ellicott Square Building of 1895. Jenney & Mundie, rather more than the others, tended to follow the leadership of the New York architects of the day in using academic detail.
On the whole, the Chicago School continued to be vigorous, if not especially creative, down to the First World War, all the way through a period during which New York skyscrapers, still usually conceived as shaped towers rather than as plain slabs, received a succession of different stylistic disguises as they rose higher and higher. The forty-seven-storey (612-foot) Singer Building[319] of 1907 by Ernest Flagg (1857-1947) with its curious bulbous mansard—’Beaux-Arts’ of a quite aberrant sort—was followed by the campanile-like 700-foot Metropolitan Tower in Madison Square of 1909 by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons;[320] and that in turn by the cathedral-like Late Gothic elaboration of the Woolworth Building[321] of 1913 by Cass Gilbert (1859-1934), fifty-two storeys and 792 feet tall, which is still one of the major landmarks of downtown New York (Plate 178). A new flurry of skyscraper building followed in the twenties (see Chapter 24). The story with which this chapter is concerned, however, had reached its climax with the Chicago skyscrapers of the nineties, even though they were soon overshadowed in height and in contemporary esteem by the taller and more spectacular towers of Manhattan. Moreover, most of the big cities of the country, including Chicago, eventually sought to imitate the New York mode. But size is not, even in this period, a measure of quality, and the tallest skyscrapers are not the best, any more than the longest bridges are the most beautiful. So far the results of the revival of skyscraper building in the last fifteen years have rather confirmed this judgement (see Chapter 25).
A difficult question remains to be asked, even if it cannot be very satisfactorily answered: Why was the nineteenth-century development of commercial architecture, from Nash’s Regent Street to Sullivan’s skyscrapers, so completely an Anglo-American achievement? A few reasons may at least be suggested. On the Continent business activity was less concentrated in special urban districts in the nineteenth century, and was hence less likely to develop its own architectural programme. The big new nineteenth-century blocks in cities like Paris and Vienna and Rome generally serve a variety of purposes and almost always consist of residential flats in the upper storeys. In England and in America, on the other hand, most dwellings were still not flats but houses before 1900, and these fled farther and farther from the commercial areas as the nineteenth century progressed. The high property values in the central urban districts of the big Anglo-American cities, rising very rapidly in the second half of the century, encouraged the exploitation of their sites with taller and taller buildings. These values also helped to drive out the earlier inhabitants, leaving such areas as the London City and the Chicago Loop all but deserted after office hours.
Neither the office blocks of London and the big provincial English cities of the fifties and sixties nor, a fortiori, the skyscrapers of New York of the seventies and those of Chicago of the nineties can readily be matched elsewhere—except, of course, to some extent in the British Dominions and Colonies. Yet European cities do offer certain nineteenth-century commercial structures that are of real interest. The covered passages and galeries, from the modest ones of the early decades of the century in Paris to Mengoni’s great Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan (Plate 75B) of the sixties, offered an urbanistic device of real significance. This is barely to be appreciated in the various extant English and American examples, such as the still flourishing Burlington Arcade in London or the Arcade in Providence, R.I., which is maintained as a historic monument though all but deserted by commerce.
Related to these structures serving multiple business purposes was the gradual development of the department store, a grouping together of various separate shops under one management and one roof, of which the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie in Paris of 1838 were a relatively early example (Plate 62A). Exploiting like the galeries the possibilities of iron-and-glass roofing, the early Continental examples of the department store had their more modest English and American counterparts such as Owen Jones’s Crystal Palace Bazar of 1858 in London or the Z.C.M.I. in Salt Lake City, founded by the Mormon leader Brigham Young himself and housed in cast iron in 1868.
The most notable later nineteenth-century department stores were in Paris and Berlin. In Paris the still extant Bon Marché of 1876 in the Rue de Sèvres by L. C. Boileau (1837-?), son of the builder of several Second Empire churches of iron, and the engineer Eiffel and the Printemps at the corner of the Rue de Rome and the Boulevard Haussmann of 1881-9 by Paul Sédille (1836-1900) were remarkable in conception if without much distinction of design. However, the Bon Marché is now completely masked externally by a masonry façade of the 1920s, and little of interest remains visible inside the Printemps. Of the portion of the Wertheim Department Store in Berlin built by Alfred Messel (1853-1909) in 1896-9 nothing survives.
Just after 1900, when the metal-and-glass construction of the interiors of department stores came to be generally exposed externally, this line of development came to its climax (Plates 131B and 133). This climax is so closely associated with the decorative and architectural development called Art Nouveau that the later Continental department stores may better be discussed in connexion with that (see Chapters 16, 17). Being of exposed metal, however, not of masonry-sheathed ‘skyscraper construction’ and relatively low, these stores are closer in character to the cast-iron commercial buildings of the third quarter of the century in America and Britain than to the tall Chicago structures of 1890-1910.
Steel construction of the American type, with the internal skeleton carrying a protective cladding of masonry, has gradually spread since the opening of the century to all parts of the world that produce or can afford to buy structural steel. It was, for example, introduced into London by the Anglo-French architects Mewès & Davis in building the Ritz Hotel there in 1905. Yet it remains typically American. In most other countries reinforced concrete rivals or completely takes its place as the characteristic material for building large structures of all sorts. The story of reinforced concrete had its technical beginnings in the mid nineteenth century; but it was not before the nineties that it first began to be exploited on a large scale and for conscious architectural effect. The first important reinforced concrete buildings, French like most of the best department stores of around 1900, will be mentioned later (see Chapter 18).