Rorotoko

In a nutshell

This book is about the first skyscrapers in the world, those built in Chicago in the 1880s and 90s. The unprecedented sixteen-story buildings lining La Salle and Dearborn Streets gave the world a spectacular image of the future of the modern city: dense, crowded and vertical. Amongst architects, these buildings are famous for the way in which they incorporated and expressed new building technologies (steel-framing, elevators), and rejected traditional ornament in favor of startling simplicity.

My goal in writing this book, however, was to examine these buildings not as icons of architectural history, but in cultural and social context. What did they mean to the people who designed and built them, worked inside their walls, and gazed up at their façades?

Researching the book I uncovered a fierce debate about the meaning of the first skyscrapers in the popular press and in professional journals. While architects and property owners saw these pioneering structures as manifestations of a robust American identity being formed in the Midwest, labor activists viewed them as symbols of capitalism’s inequity, and social reformers worried about their potentially negative effects on public health.

The wide angle

Although I was trained as a professional architect, I am principally an architectural historian, drawn especially to the social and political context of architecture and urbanism in nineteenth and early twentieth century America. My aim is always to investigate buildings not as autonomous aesthetic objects, but as the physical manifestations of culture and society. In this way my research ranges far from the traditional approach that focuses on individual architects and aesthetic analysis towards a more inclusive understanding of the meaning of buildings, not only for architects and critics, but also for the people who build and occupy them.

Chicago 1890 reflects this approach. The book is firstly a reinterpretation of some well-known architectural masterpieces by Chicago architects Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, notably the Monadnock (1885-92) and the Reliance Building (1889-95). I examine these buildings not only as important artifacts in architectural history, but also as sites for a contentious debate about the future of the industrial city.

Chicago’s defining events, including the violent building trade strikes of the 1880s, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and Burnham and Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago— feature large in the book as the context in which the skyscraper, at the turn of the twentieth century, was imagined, built, and finally repudiated. This approach to architectural history provides a new way to look at the work of important American architects, understanding their designs as specific responses to modern urban phenomena.

As much as architects justified the skyscraper as the finest product of the city, socialists and anarchists denounced it as a symbol of class oppression and economic inequality.