Thomas Leslie likes to warn his Iowa State University architecture students that when he brings them to Chicago for a show-and-tell history of pioneering skyscrapers, they’ll be facing the “legendary five-hour death march.” And he does indeed cover a lot of territory. But the city’s early high-rises are astonishingly varied, and Leslie enlivens his account of their construction with great details—about problems that stumped builders on one block and got solved over on the next, about oversized personalities and underhanded politics, about a building he once lived in that leans more than 12 inches toward Lake Michigan. You may come away from a tour with him sunburned, but you’ll have a new understanding of how cities grow, especially if they’re growing vertically.
Leslie, an architecture professor who is also an architect, starts out talking about the structural limitations of brick as he leads me north to one of the oldest surviving downtown blocks, on North Franklin between Randolph and Lake. Traditional brick, which we see here, isn’t strong enough for buildings taller than four or five stories; hydraulically pressed brick—which became available in the early 1880s—rises to 16 in the Monadnock Building, down on South Dearborn, which he says may be the world’s tallest brick structure. He describes advances in fireproofing and in calculating wind loads as we head south to the 1896 Fisher Building, one of the first skyscrapers to dispense with masonry entirely and rely instead on a steel frame. He is, he confesses, “a steel-detailing nerd—when I find a 10-page article on riveting, I cancel my appointments for the day.”
But as we walk east, he talks just as happily about foundations and the challenges of Chicago’s soggy lakefront geology. We reach the 1889 Auditorium Building, now home to Roosevelt University, where a late decision to add two stories to the tower caused it to settle 20 inches lower than the rest of the building. As we turn north onto Michigan Avenue, Leslie tells me it’s “the greatest architecture museum on the planet for this era.”
The era he’s referring to is the one he writes about in Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934, a handsomely illustrated volume published this summer by the University of Illinois Press. He’s the first to say that the book is a late entry in a crowded field: Chicago’s high-rises are among the most famous commercial buildings in the world, and much has been written about them—notably by Carl W. Condit, a Northwestern University history-of-science professor who in 1964 published The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875-1925. Leslie says the book by Condit, who died in 1997, “seemed like a category killer” for a long time.
But Leslie saw an opportunity for a different approach. Where Condit and others organized their studies around architects—Louis Sullivan, John Root, Daniel Burnham—Leslie looks instead at the technologies that made the skyscraper’s rise possible. “I realized you could tell the story from the drawing table, looking at six or seven developments that you could read directly in the buildings,” he says. Foundations, framing, and fireproofing are among the technologies whose advances he describes, but perhaps the most surprising is plate glass.
“Lighting and ventilation determined far more here than they’re given credit for,” he says. Until about 1910, electric light was so expensive that it was reserved for special uses, and the alternative, gas light, was dirty, highly flammable, and toxic. “So you want every office to have daylight.” But as buildings got larger and their floor plates expanded, that became more of a challenge, because masonry walls had to be fairly thick, and glass wasn’t available in large sizes.
Many Chicago buildings, like the Rookery and the Railway Exchange Building, were organized around inner light courts with glazed white-brick walls that helped reflect daylight into offices and manufacturing spaces, in addition to encouraging cross-ventilation in hot weather. And demand for more and bigger windows led glass manufacturers to respond.
Scholarly interest in plate glass had been slight, Leslie found. “Thomas Misa is the go-to steel guy, up at the University of Minnesota. But there’s not that guy for plate glass.” So Leslie got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to look through what archives were available.
That, he found, meant visiting Indiana. The plate-glass industry was long centered in Pittsburgh. But for a period of about 10 years, Leslie learned, demand from Chicago for glass was so strong that glass factories sprang up in Elkhart and Kokomo, which were on the western edge of a natural-gas field that could provide the energy needed for glass manufacturing. As the industry expanded and the machinery for making ever-larger pieces of glass improved, the cost of glass for Chicago’s skyscrapers fell significantly.
At the same time, advances in producing and riveting structural steel let architects abandon thick, load-bearing piers of pressed brick in favor of thinner steel columns clad in terra-cotta tiles (which provided fireproofing). This meant that the proportion of a building’s skin that was glass could be increased significantly. An 1883 building like the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Station, designed by Burnham and Root, had heavy brick walls pierced by tall, narrow windows; just a dozen years later, Burnham’s firm produced the sparkling Reliance Building, in which the walls are almost 90-percent glass—the largest plates measure six feet by eight—and the balance is enameled terra cotta. The curtain wall had arrived, and it did so right when plate glass was cheapest, Leslie says.
“This is a great corner—four different takes on the same theme,” he says, standing across from the Reliance Building. “Three department stores and a bank.” One of the department-store buildings, now home to a Target, was for decades the Carson, Pirie, Scott & Company flagship store, a tour de force of plate glass, cast iron, and terra cotta that is one of the architect Louis Sullivan’s masterpieces.
Leslie spends several minutes on the corner, describing various Chicago architects’ answers to a challenge that builders had rarely faced before the late 19th century: What should a wall look like if it’s taller than a classical temple, a medieval church, or a Renaissance chateau, the models from which generations of architects had drawn their inspiration?
Honesty was Chicago’s response, for the most part: If a wall consisted of piers, spandrels, and glass, it should look like piers, spandrels, and glass—like the Reliance Building, in fact. And while the relative plainness of such structures took some getting used to—especially after the neo-Classical fantasia of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition—Chicagoans came to admire their skyscrapers’ devotion to functionality instead of frills, and their architects’ skill at arranging plain elements pleasingly. “Compositionally,” he says, “this was as good as American commercial architecture got.”
Leslie, the son of an education professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, remembers becoming interested in architecture as a teenager when the family went to Chicago for sporting events and museum visits. “I was always fascinated by skyscrapers,” he says. “You can look at them and see their engineering. You can never see the actual steel, but there are ways as an architect where you can pick the stories that you tell. You can get across the gist of a building.”
Eventually he became an architect himself, working for Norman Foster’s firm in London and then at Stanford University, where he oversaw construction of a building the firm had designed. It was a “nuts-and-bolts assignment,” he says, in which he had to think through every detail of the plans, go on site, and get something built. “It gave the lie to the cocktail-napkin-sketch-gets-built myth.”
But he found himself increasingly interested in teaching. Thirteen years ago, “Iowa State said I could help teach students about getting buildings built,” and the idea of a land-grant college that mixed research and practice appealed to him. “I had no teaching experience—they took a huge risk,” he says. For his first research project, he focused on the Modernist architect Louis Kahn, whose works had been favorites around the Foster & Partners office. Louis I. Kahn: Building Art, Building Science was published in 2005 by George Braziller.
And there’s a link between Kahn’s work—at the Kimbell Museum, in Fort Worth, at the Salk Institute, in San Diego, at Yale University—and that of the architects who designed Chicago’s skyscrapers: Their designs are largely true to their materials and structures. Just as Kahn is famous for letting concrete in his buildings show the impression of the wood used to form it, “there’s a Chicago tradition of showing, Here’s how we solved a problem.”
“Here every cent counted, more than in New York,” Leslie says. In Manhattan, developers were willing to pay for extras, and many office towers there were as lavish as high-end apartment buildings. But Chicago’s commercial buildings look like commercial buildings. “In Chicago, you can watch people get used to the commercial style. It says something about who we are as a city that Chicagoans started to take pride in buildings that New York critics called ‘dry-goods boxes.’
“Architects are never not worried about what the building looks like,” he adds. “But we never get hired because of that. We get hired to solve problems, to maximize the amount of money that can be made off a site. You start with getting the problem solved, then maybe you have time to sculpt things a little bit.”
Lawrence Biemiller is a senior writer at The Chronicle.
