The Structural System of Adler and Sullivan's Garrick Theater Building

Abstract

THE GARRICK THEATER BUILDING has long been recognized as a unique masterpiece of the Chicago school and as a particularly imaginative achievement among the long series of brilliant and original designs produced by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. Chicago created the contemporary multi-story office building and apartment house in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Among all the skyscrapers the city erected in that prolific period, the Garrick stands out as the most complex because the peculiar combination of problems which it posed required that its architectural and engineering designers draw on all the structural resources available at the time. While none of the structural features of the building was original with it, they were brought together here in an unprecedented way. Thus the Garrick may be regarded simultaneously as the culmination of a century's development in iron-frame construction, and as a formal and technical creation which stands at the beginning of a new age in the building arts. Although the recent demolition of the building constitutes an irreparable loss to American architecture, at least the destruction offered us an opportunity to see at first-hand exactly how this work was put together.' The idea of the Garrick Theater Building was originally conceived in the late 1880's by A. C. Hesing, owner of the Illinois Staatszeitung,