Review: Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago: Architecture, Institutions, and the Making of a Modern Metropolis, by Edward W. Wolner

Abstract

Edward W. Wolner Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago: Architecture, Institutions, and the Making of a Modern Metropolis Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, x + 384 pp., 139 b/w illus. $45, ISBN 9780226905617 Henry Ives Cobb (1859–1931) was well-born and well-educated in Boston. Following European travel and his employment at the well-regarded Boston architecture firm of Peabody and Stearns, Cobb seemed set for a promising career in his hometown. Yet, instead Cobb moved to Chicago, where he developed an extensive practice and a large office. This period was followed by a move to Washington, D.C., and a diminished practice, and a final move to New York, with even less work. This reversal of the usual pattern of career development from modest beginnings to final successes plays a role in Cobb’s diminished place in the history of American architecture. However, Cobb suffers from two additional disadvantages. First, in 1896, when Montgomery Schuyler published the monograph A Critique of the Work of Adler & Sullivan, D. H. Burnham & Co., Henry Ives Cobb , drawn from his Great American Architects series in Architectural Record , Cobb suffered from Schuyler’s assessment that Cobb’s work, while fine, was not characteristic of the distinctive commercial and suburban work of Chicago. This drift into critical irrelevance was reinforced by the emergence of a canonical Chicago School. Second, compounding our ignorance of the architect whose career began in prominence and distinction but ended in obscurity, Cobb’s archive is lost. Cobb’s reputation only began to be reversed after 1976, when the exhibition and publication Chicago Architects , edited by Stuart Cohen, appeared as an explicit rejoinder to Chicago’s official bicentennial publication, 100 Years of Architecture in Chicago , edited by Oswald Grube and others. More importantly for Cobb’s status is the recent book Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago, in which the author, Edward W. Wolner, …