Escuela de chicago

Architecture: The First Chicago School | |
|It is no mere accident that in the 1880s Chicago produced a group of architects, now known as the “First Chicago School,” whose work would have a profound effect |
|upon architecture. |
|Within a decade afterthe fire of 1871, Chicago was a boomtown. By 1890 it had a population of more than a million people and had surpassed Philadelphia to become|
|the second-largest metropolis in the United States. The value of land in the Loop soared. Quickly, the low buildings constructed just after the fire were seen as |
|an inefficient use of valuable space.|
|Chicago was ready to experiment with daring solutions. The city that had stood at the center of innovations like the Pullman sleeping car, the McCormick reaper, |
|and mail-order retailing would now be the place where the tall office building would be perfected. One of the keys to this development was the invention ofthe |
|elevator. Chicago had a special problem, however: it stood upon a swamp. |
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|Montauk Block, c.1880 |
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|As early as 1873, Frederick Baumann had proposed that each vertical element of a building should have a separate foundation ending in a broad pad that would |
|distribute its weight over the marshy ground. It was this type of foundation that Burnham & Root used for the Montauk Block (1882) on West Monroe Street. But |
|Baumann's foundation occupiedvaluable basement space and could support only 10 stories. |
|Adler & Sullivan developed a far better solution. Dankmar Adler's experience as an engineer with the Union army during the Civil War helped him devise a vast raft|
|of timbers, steel beams, and iron I-beams to float the Auditorium Building (1889). In 1894 Adler& Sullivan developed a type of caisson construction for the |
|Chicago Stock Exchange which quickly became routine for tall buildings across the United States. |
|The early structures of the First Chicago School, such as the Montauk and the Auditorium, had traditional load-bearing walls of brick and stone, but it was the ||metal skeleton frame that allowed the architects of the First Chicago School to perfect their signature edifice, the skyscraper. William Le Baron Jenney |
|constructed the world's first completely iron-and-steel-framed building in the 1880s. Jenney had in 1853 enrolled in Paris's prestigious École Centrale des Arts |
|et Manufactures. (Among his classmates was Gustave Eiffel.) Duringthe Civil War Jenney had been assigned the task of demolishing buildings and bridges. In the |
|process he had mastered the nuances of metal construction. |
|In 1868 Jenney established an office in Chicago which became the training ground for a number of leading architects of the First...