THE ARCHITECTS AND THE CITY:
Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880-1918
By Robert Bruegmann
University of Chicago Press, 544 pages, $65
This impressively researched and attractively produced book, the first of a two-volume series, will undoubtedly remain the definitive work on the architecture of Holabird & Roche for a long time. Robert Bruegmann, professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, makes a compelling case for the significance of the work of this major Chicago firm, founded in 1880 and still in existence as Holabird & Root.
The book is a useful and well-illustrated addition to the many volumes on Chicago’s urban development, but it is also frankly polemical in its approach. The author is out to replace classic–though now rather old-fashioned–architectural histories like Carl Condit’s “The Chicago School of Architecture,” which focused on early Chicago skyscrapers like Holabird & Roche’s Marquette Building (1893) chiefly because they seemed to be the steel-skeletoned ancestors of the later modern archi-tecture of Mies van der Rohe and his students. In contrast, Bruegmann interprets the work of the firm in the context of Chicago’s urban and social history, using the rich store of drawings and letters in the Chicago Historical Society.
“The Architects and the City” goes beyond the usual perspectives of architectural history to focus on the overall processes that produced the firm’s buildings and, to some extent, the physical look of pre-1918 Chicago itself.
Unlike most architectural historians of past generations, Bruegmann does not much want to assess the work of individual geniuses for their significance to the history of architecture. Instead, he approaches the study of this firm as a good way to try to understand a pivotal period in the history of both American architecture and of Chicago. He begins by devoting three chapters to the early organizational development of the Holabird & Roche office, one of the first large, business-oriented American architectural offices that have come to dominate the profession worldwide. Like its more famous contemporaries, Adler & Sullivan and Burnham & Root, this firm had two partners with almost opposite roles: William Holabird, the “front man” whose social connections, reputation for absolute reliability, and untiring energy for train travel got the firm its commissions; and Martin Roche, the sensitive and somewhat reclusive designer of most of the firm’s early work.
Amid the wealth of detail here, the general reader might wish for more background on the already well-studied professional context of Chicago architecture at the time. Bruegmann, however, does present what little can be learned about the partners’ lives outside of the office. In contrast to many architectural histories, this one makes it clear that the partners were assisted by a large number of employees who not only produced the construction drawings but also wrote specifications and oversaw the increasingly complex construction process for the firm, allowing the completion of unprecedentedly large and complex buildings at costs low enough for them to be quite profitable for their financial backers.
The value of Bruegmann’s approach in expanding our knowledge of architectural history is evident in his account of the development of the now-demolished Tacoma Building (1886), an early steel-frame skyscraper, one of the many Loop buildings whose development he traces. From 1882, the year of the completion of Burnham & Root’s 10-story Montauk Block, Chicago’s first tall office building, to 1892, the amount of office space in the Loop quadrupled. Like their counterparts in New York and other American cities, the Chicago skyscrapers of the 1880s deployed new technologies like metal framing, elevators, telephones and electric lighting on an unprecedented scale.
In telling the story of the development and construction of the Tacoma, Bruegmann gives us an account of a specific example of this phenomenon that interprets the architects’ intentions and actions in relation to those of the client and the contractor. He argues convincingly from the archival evidence that this edifice may have been the first built by a large-scale general contractor. Previously, owners or their architects let out the contracts for various parts of the construction work separately, doing the over-all supervision themselves. Builder George A. Fuller’s low bid on the largest elements of the Tacoma work, the masonry and the steel skeleton, led to his firm’s being awarded a construction contract for all trades except elevator installation, making his company the first general contractor in the world for a large modern building.
Bruegmann’s intensive research and awareness of the wider context of architectural design work informs the entire book, which gives detailed consideration not only of the firm’s many projects in the Loop, but also of its work elsewhere in the Chicago area. Various chapters examine the construction of Ft. Sheridan in Lake Forest, built in 1886 for federal troops thought necessary to suppress labor unrest in Chicago; the firm’s residential work in Evanston, where Holabird, like his competitor Daniel Burnham, lived; the firm’s thriving practice designing business hotels like the Congress and La Salle; the complex history of the neo-classical Cook County Courthouse; early auto showrooms on South Michigan Avenue; buildings for the Chicago Telephone Co.; the Three Arts Club; and other works, including some at a resort in northern Wisconsin.
The author generally tends to report the intentions of the large capitalists who were Holabird & Roche’s major clients dispassionately, and some readers may wish for a more aggressive critical assessment of the political context and social effects of the firm’s work; there is relatively little analysis of how the work furthered the social hierarchies of the time. Despite this criticism, the book is an impressive achievement. The author’s goal of linking the usually separate territories of architectural and urban history is realized with great skill, clearly conveying how the everyday, business-oriented architectural decisions of a firm like Holabird & Roche had a profound effect on the urban landscape of Chicago.
