Chicago School

Abstract

While contemporary scholars question the existence of a cohesive “Chicago School” of architecture, there is no doubt that by the mid-1890s Chicago came to be recognized nationally and internationally for the technological and aesthetic innovation evident in a number of commercial buildings erected in the downtown business area known as the Loop. These buildings serviced the rapid growth of a city founded earlier in the century as a major trading hub linking the East Coast and the American “West.” Principally office buildings, some were erected for particular companies while others were built as speculative ventures. These innovations were known first as the “commercial style,” then simply as “tall office buildings”; the term “skycraper” came into popular use around 1895. In order to find the correct expression for this unprecedented building type, local architects adapted historical styles including the neo-Gothic, the Romanesque, the Venetian, and the neoclassical. In their published writings, they positioned their work as the development of an indigenous American style particular to the region. By the 1920s, critics described this style as the product of an identifiable “Chicago School.” The idea of such a school played, and continues to play, a significant role in histories of modern architecture. For much of the 20th century, the term referred to a select group of commercial buildings erected between roughly 1883 and 1910. During that period, the Chicago School was positioned as precursor to the modern or International style, prefiguring the functionalism and “new objectivity” of the early-20th-century European avant-garde. Since the 1980s, scholars have dismantled the narrow and monolithic view of the subject, placing its key monuments back within the specific social and economic concerns of the late 19th century, introducing a wider range of projects and typologies for consideration, and including projects constructed up until about 1920. There is less emphasis on aesthetic commonality, and more on the diversity of built responses to the forces of industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism that shaped the American city. The texts listed here survey the Chicago School as it was defined during the 20th century as well as more recent scholarship that questions the canonical view.