8/7/2023 0 Comments First skyscraper chicago 1885Bangladeshi engineer Fazlur Khan made the boldest initial steps with tube structures, using them to design the city’s John Hancock and Sears (now Willis) Tower. This movement gained momentum during German modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s time at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, innovating with 3D “tube” structures, just as the first Chicago school innovated with steel beams. The 1940s saw the emergence of a “second Chicago School”, which took the pioneering work in new directions – upward, for the most part. It was a concept whose limits New York, and later other world capitals, would keep pushing over the following century.Īn artist’s impression of LaSalle Street, Chicago in 1890, five years into the Home Insurance Building’s life. Jenney’s design gave Chicago’s modestly sized central business district – now known as the Loop – a way to expand upward, rather than outward. The group included architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, whose firm would give Frank Lloyd Wright his start, and Daniel Burnham, who in 1902 would design New York City’s still-standing and still-striking early skyscraper, the Flatiron Building.īy developing and refining the concept of the skyscraper, the Chicago School’s influence not only changed the way we built cities in the 20th century, ushering in previously unthinkable densities, but remains visible in the newest additions to major skylines today. Though aesthetically unified only by what some historians term the “commercial style”, the architects of the Chicago School shared an interest in creating innovative tall buildings, an effort supported not just by steel but by the electricity needed to keep the lights on and the elevators running. Photograph: Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago/Getty Jenney got the idea to switch to an exotic new material, steel. A 1962 Life magazine retrospective on the origins of skyscraper recalls how “an aroused critic terrified his fellows at a protest meeting by impersonating the writhings of a steel beam exposed to a sudden change of temperature”.īut in the event, not only did the Home Insurance Building stand up, it came to stand for an entire architectural movement, loosely termed the Chicago School, which gave built form to the proud, square-shouldered, technologically forward American ambition that drove the country forward in the late 19th and early 20th century.Īmerican architect Andrew Nicholas Rebori and colleagues examine the structure of the Home Insurance Building on its demolition in 1931. Soon after, Jenney got the idea to switch from an iron frame to an exotic new material, steel, using a supply offered to him by the Carnegie-Phipps Steel Company of Pittsburgh. “Your building at Chicago will be the first,” Jenney replied.Īfter construction got underway, the Home Insurance Company and the City of Chicago temporarily halted the project in order to investigate further whether the building could really stand up on its own. “Where is there such a building?” the committee asked when presented with the plan. Not everybody immediately accepted the soundness of Jenney’s design. Photograph: Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago/Getty Terra cotta spandrel on the Home Insurance Building, 1931. This opened a new chapter in the history of towers, helped by the Great Chicago Fire (in which more than three square miles of the mostly wooden central city burned to the ground in 1871), and by Chicago’s surging 1880s economy. Legend has it that Jenney, an engineer by training and an École Centrale Paris classmate of Gustave Eiffel (designer of the eponymous tower), first suspected that an iron skeleton could hold up a building when he saw his wife place a heavy book atop a small birdcage, which easily supported its weight. While it didn’t take Manhattan long to claim the steel-framed high-rise as its own, the skyscraper boom began in the capital of the American Midwest in 1885 with William Le Baron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building, which rose to its then-impressive height of 10 storeys (and, after an 1890 addition, 12) by means of metal, rather than just masonry. It won’t surprise anybody to learn that the very first skyscraper went up in the United States, but it will surprise some to learn that it went up in Chicago.
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