The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan's Architecture and the City

JOSEPH M. SIRY

The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan's Architecture and the City

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 568 pp.: 16 color ills., 200 b/w. $55.00; $35.00 paper

KATHERINE SOLOMONSON

The Chicago Tribune Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 383 pp.; 187 b/w ills. $27.00

It was not long ago that American architectural history consisted chiefly of biographies, thematic or typological studies, and synthetic surveys. The monographic approach, the thoroughgoing investigation of the patronage, design, construction, and iconography of a single building--like that accorded the monuments of Europe--was unknown. But in recent years detailed monographs have begun appearing, and to scholarly acclaim. Joseph Siry's study of the Chicago Auditorium Building received the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 2003. Katherine Solomonson accomplished the same feat the following year with her account of the Chicago Tribune Building. These two Chicago landmarks are very different buildings, and Siry and Solomonson have written two very different books.

The Auditorium Building (1887-89), which vaulted Louis Sullivan to national prominence, is regarded as his first mature work. It is a building of much complexity: a romanesque leviathan of granite and lime-stone occupying half a city block, into which is tucked a hotel, an office building, and an opera house with more than 4,200 seats (the largest in the world at the time of its construction). In neither style nor technology is it particularly innovative. It is an explicit paraphrase of H. H. Richardson's nearby Marshall Field Building (1885-87), from which it derives its blocklike massing, its colossal masonry, and the bold, ordered stride of its wall arcades. Its construction is likewise conventional for the period: load-bearing masonry for the exterior walls and a hybrid system of iron columns and steel girders within (pp. 161-62).

Perhaps the Auditorium's most singular feature is the way it expresses its function--or does not. For the nineteenth century, the central challenge of opera house design was to signify rhetorically its function and interior spaces. The opera houses of Charles Garnier in Paris and Gottfried Semper in Dresden are memorable precisely because their expressive physiognomy is a kind of exultant precis of the spaces and happenings within. The theater of the Auditorium Building, however, goes unrepresented on the outside; apart from three capacious arches on Congress Street and the rugged tower that rises above them, there is not a hint of the large public spaces beyond, and certainly not of spaces of stupefying luxuriance. It is the decorative and chromatic treatment of these rooms that established Sullivan's reputation, which at first was not that of the pioneering functionalist he would later become, but rather as America's most original and imaginative designer of architectural ornament.

The Chicago Auditorium Building, Siry's authoritative and well-illustrated study of this monument of the Chicago school, accomplishes precisely what a monograph should: it does full justice to the building in its specific historical and local context even as it illuminates those particular aspects that lift it above its age. Among the new material Siry presents on nearly every page, some of the most interesting concerns the Auditorium's patron, Ferdinand W. Peck (1848-1924). The scholarly literature on Sullivan has always contained more than a hint of hagiography, following the tone that he himself set. In consequence, the role of clients in his career, with a very few exceptions, has been slighted. In the case of Peck, this is especially lamentable.

Peck was that characteristic Gilded Age type, the capitalist-philanthropist, and one of phenomenal energy and executive ability. Acutely conscious that "vast numbers of people, by settling in Chicago, had given immense value to the Peck estate," he worked hard to reciprocate by promoting philanthropic and workingmen's associations (p. 35). He was the leading figure behind the Chicago Athenaeum, established after the fire of 1871 to provide adult education to working men and women. He also was the chief actor in bringing the World's Columbian Exposition to Chicago in 1893, for which his own Auditorium was an essential prerequisite. (Siry establishes that the Auditorium was one of the few buildings large enough to hold a modern presidential convention--which it did for the first time in 1888, when it hosted the nomination of Benjamin Harrison in its half-finished theater.)

The context for Peck's philanthropy was the constant looming specter of labor strife. Late-nineteenth-century Chicago had an enormous population of German immigrants, who brought both a taste for opera and the activism of the German trade-union movement. Peck tried to address both in 1884 by organizing a "Grand Opera Festival," which he envisioned as an annual affair. Such an institution, he hoped, "would have a tendency to diminish crime and Socialism in our city by educating the masses to higher things" (p. 114). Toward this end, he hired Dankmar Adler, an architect of considerable experience in acoustics, to design a provisional opera house, a temporary stage and auditorium that would be inserted into the cavernous space of the city's exhibition hall. Adler had just promoted his draftsman Louis Sullivan to full partner, and their design was a kind of dress rehearsal for the Auditorium. Utterly free from any structural considerations and concerned only with the shaping of space and sound within the shell of the hall, they enjoyed an unusual degree of experimental freedom. (Having once enjoyed this freedom, they were evidently reluctant to relinquish it, which is perhaps why the Auditorium was similarly treated as a free exercise in shape making, with no thought for how that space would be expressed externally.)

Siry details how the Auditorium Building directly followed from one of the most notorious episodes in American labor history, the Haymarket Riots of May 1886. Far from dashing Peck's utopian hopes, the bombing and riots spurred him to action. Three weeks later he unveiled his vision of "a large public auditorium where conventions of all kinds, political and otherwise, mass-meetings, reunions of army organizations, and, of course, great musical occasions in the nature of festivals, operatic and otherwise, as well as other large gatherings, could be held" (p. 125). Peck was too astute a businessman to believe such a hall could be financially self-supporting. He insisted that it be wrapped in a mantle of rent-producing spaces that might generate an income and attract the investors needed for the grand undertaking.

In order to maximize its rentable volume, as Peck insisted, the walls of the Auditorium were thrust to the property line, giving it its characteristically Chicagoan boxlike form. There was no scope whatsoever for picturesque massing or sculptural effects, making the design of the exterior essentially an exercise in cladding. Sullivan essayed various schemes in brick and terra-cotta before arriving at his Richardsonian romanesque solution. The final round of revisions occurred after William Ware, architect and head of Columbia University's School of Architecture, critiqued the designs in January 1887, and to great effect. The difference between the penultimate and the ultimate plans is staggering; the one is discursive and disperses its energies while the other organizes them into a taut and compact unity. Siry relates how Sullivan, though still somewhat uncertain as a designer at the age of thirty, was nonetheless able to respond to intelligent criticism with breathtaking decisiveness and insight (pp. 139, 143).

In short, for the Auditorium Building, the program produced the image; for the Chicago Tribune Building, however, the program was the image. As Katherine Solomonson demonstrates in The Chicago Tribune Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s, her brisk and thorough analysis of the world's most famous architectural competition, the building belongs as much to the world of graphic design as to that of architecture. Organized as an exercise in corporate image making, the competition was laughably indifferent to matters architectural. In fact, the original program did not even demand floor plans, only elevations and a perspective--the first building in history, perhaps, for which the plan was an afterthought. Conceived as eye-catching graphic imagery, the entries were likewise disseminated through graphic means, in the portfolio published in 1923 after the competition, The International Competition for a New Administration Building for the Chicago Tribune MMXXII. All this has given the competition an independent life, in which unrealized projects such as Adolf Loos's wry Doric column have been far more influential than the Gothic tower that was built.

As a case study of the turbulent dynamics of architectural patronage in Chicago, The Chicago Tribune Competition forms a pendant to Siry's book, with which it shares several actors. (One is Sullivan himself, who shortly before his death wrote a review of blistering intensity of the competition.) Solomonson has much to say about the building's curious patrons, Joseph Patterson and Robert R. McCormick. First cousins, they inherited the Chicago Tribune from their grandfather, Joseph Medill, who was the newspaper's guiding spirit from 1855 to 1899 (and, as Siry notes, an occasional associate of Peck). Patterson and McCormick saw service in World War I, after which they expanded their operations, launching the New York Daily News in 1919, which within a few years had the largest circulation of any American newspaper. This expansion soon brought them to the attention of the imperious publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, who owned Chicago's other daily, the Herald and Examiner. In 1921 Hearst launched an advertising campaign to steal readers from the Tribune, offering $100,000 in cash prizes to his readers. In retaliation, the Tribune offered double the amount. "We are bound to have circulation supremacy," McCormick wrote, "if we only meet the Examiner stunts" (p. 39). Thus, the Tribune Building, unlike Peck's high-minded effort to "educate the masses to higher things," began life as a stunt.

The competition "to erect the most beautiful and the most distinguished office building in the world" ultimately drew 263 proposals, each rendered in perspective--for ease of comparison--from precisely the same viewing angle. (Regrettably, Solomonson does not provide an itemized list of the competitors, and the dedicated reader will want to turn to the comprehensive 1923 portfolio as an appendix.)

Solomonson illuminates the delightfully irregular judging process. The five jurors included only one architect, while the rest were drawn from the Tribune staff. The rest-less McCormick dominated the proceedings and subsequent course of construction, although it was actually Patterson who had conceived the competition. From the beginning there were improprieties. Although the international entries officially had a deadline of December 1, 1922, judging began well before then. Many were still in transit when John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood's Gothic design was declared the winner. Among the latecomers was a shipment of thirty-one projects from Germany, which McCormick never saw: he sailed to Europe immediately after announcing the winners on December 2. Here was the crystalline cage proposed by Bruno Taut, a stark rectilinear abstraction by Max Taut, and the collaborative design of Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, a bold study in dynamic reciprocity strongly suggestive of Mondrian. These were easily the most progressive and adventurous of the entire competition.

One entry came just in the nick of time, that of Eliel Saarinen, which arrived from Finland as the final vote was being taken. Saarinen's design was based on New York's new zoning regulations that imposed setbacks and height limits on skyscrapers. Although these rules were not yet in force in Chicago, he sensed their potential for a new kind of vigorously modeled tower, at once tapered and chiseled. The drawings created a sensation, and Saarinen was immediately moved to second place. Had his project been more timely, it might have fared even better.

Or perhaps not. Solomonson hints that the competition may have been a fix from the start. John Mead Howells, it turns out, was no stranger to the Tribune: his wife was a shareholder of the tightly controlled newspaper company and her father had been the managing editor in the late nineteenth century. Solomonson is reluctant to speculate about these tantalizing strands, however, and she relegates them to a footnote. In general, it is her approach to subordinate the discussion of the individual actors to the larger thematic discussion of urbanism, advertising, and popular imagery.

This produces an unfortunate omission. Reading Solomonson's account, one gets the impression that McCormick was an incorrigible reactionary who, given the chance to choose between Gropius and Saarinen, chose instead to reprise yet again New York's Woolworth Building. In many respects, especially in his politics, McCormick was indeed reactionary--but not in all. He was a passionate believer in the progressive cause of spelling reform, which he pushed aggressively through in his newspaper during the 1920s and 1930s. The idea dates to 1867, when Medill, his grandfather, first launched his crusade against irregular spelling and the silent e. McCormick took it up with great glee and managed to make a number of neologisms standard ("catalog" and "thru"), although most seem as ridiculous now as they did then ("fantom," "doctrin," or "jaz"). Solomonson has much to say about the Tribune's interest in promoting high culture to the masses and how it affected an elite image even as it catered to a mass market; she might have said more about the relation between McCormick's architectural preferences and his progressive populism.

Siry's and Solomonson's books are model monographs, daunting in their research and free of tendentiousness, but they share a blind spot. Both the Auditorium and the Tribune Building are the result of collaboration, in which two designers worked in tandem to create a scheme that neither might have produced on his own. Neither has much to say about this. Solomonson skims over the authorship question in a single paragraph (p. 253), while Siry tacitly assumes the Auditorium to have been designed by Sullivan without discussing the evidence. Although both authors probe deeply into the social and financial forces that impinge on the design, the lobe of the process that concerns personal expression goes largely unexamined.

This is suggestive about the state of architectural history, which has never been terribly good at dealing with the issue of creative collaboration. It is a fact that many of the most important American architects have worked in partnerships: besides Adler and Sullivan, McKim, Mead and White, Cram and Goodhue, Burnham and Root, Gambrill and Richardson, and many others. Too frequently, however, even in the scholarly literature, the partner is relegated to a straw figure, demoted to an engineer (Adler), a bookkeeper (Mead), a bon vivant (Burnham), or a nonentity (Gambrill). This comes about not merely through literary metonymy. Here the legacy of romanticism lumbers on, still treating creativity as the sudden and spontaneous product of individual genius and still shaping, however unconsciously, our ideas about creativity. It may also be because the formal apparatus of architectural history has been taken largely from the study of painting and sculpture, which, other than the master and studio prototype, offers few models for understanding the different kinds of creative collaboration.

Of course, the categories of collaboration are endless, an infinitely graded continuum from a simple division of labor to genuine joint design, conducted eyeball-to-eyeball at the drafting table. In firms that are true design partnerships, the general rule seems to be one of parallel problem solving and subsequent synthesis, advancing in stages. It is true that such a dynamic process, in which a shared understanding of the design objective is created and maintained by constant mutual criticism, leaves little documentary evidence. But one might still learn much from drawings, anecdote, and indirect evidence. Hood, for example, is invariably treated as the author of the Tribune Building although, as Solomonson reveals, this is not the case. She reproduces Howells's crucial sketch in which all the distinctive elements of the building are present in embryonic form: the Gothic lantern at the summit, the play of flying buttresses, and the strong articulation of the wall piers (p. 227). Hood's role was to develop and detail this generating motif and to refine its sculptural expression. He contributed the finely proportioned silhouette of the building and its supple plasticity--a quality utterly lacking in Howells's brittle sketch. One wishes she had made more of this.

In much the same way, Sullivan routinely receives credit for the Auditorium Building, except for the unglamorous matter of acoustics, which are assigned to Adler. Yet Siry points out that Adler was a designer of theaters well before he knew Sullivan. One of the most remarkable sections of his book is a discussion of Central Music Hall (1879). Adler's first building, in many ways a forerunner of the Auditorium (pp. 46-61). It, too, was an acoustic triumph, and it, too, concealed its theater within the volume of a well-planned office building. Only at the end of the project did Sullivan come on board, where he attended to its interior decoration.

The same division of labor evidently prevailed at the Auditorium Building, Adler shaping the plan and interior spaces while Sullivan supervised the vast ornamental program. At a time when most American opera houses presented decorous pastiches of La Scala, with its tiered boxes, the Auditorium theater proper was an essay of considerable originality and spatial freedom. Demonstrating Adler's flair for thinking simultaneously in structural, spatial, and acoustic terms, it is an urgent, fluid space, free of historical reminiscence, presided over by its three concentric rings of arches.

Sullivan's role was to articulate this brilliant shell, both within and without, and to produce the sumptuous ornament and chromatic treatment that is the building's chief glory. In this function he performed brilliantly. Here we are reminded that Sullivan's architectural education was fragmentary. He spent an unhappy year at M.I.T. and another at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Otherwise his training consisted entirely of work in various architectural offices, where he swiftly won fame as a decorative draftsman of inexhaustible precocity, who could pour out a torrent of extravagant ornament at will. It was on this basis that Adler first hired him, relying on him to compose a building's facades and decoration and the comprehensive treatment of its surfaces--in short, to provide the building's epidermis.

Such a role is not unknown in history. A. W. N. Pugin, another architect with an ungovernable talent for inventing ornament, designed virtually every visible inch of the Houses of Parliament in London, which were otherwise conceived by Sir Charles Barry. Looking at the building, each man could say that he designed it, and both would be right. And to judge by the implicit evidence of Siry's book, something like this looks to be the case at the Auditorium Building.

To bring up this gap is not to criticize these two worthy and essential books--they have set a standard that will be difficult to match--but to say that they accurately depict the state of architectural history today. It has never been so scrupulous in its methods, so inclusive in the questions it asks--and so incurious about what might be called the aesthetic life of a building.

MICHAEL J. LEWIS is professor of American art at Williams College [Department of Art, Lawrence Hall, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. 01267].

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