Early Modern Architecture: Chicago 1870-1910

Exhibition with photo of Glessner House at far right

On January 18, 1933 – exactly 90 years ago – the Museum of Modern Art in New York City opened its second architectural exhibition. Entitled Early Modern Architecture: Chicago, 1870-1910, the exhibition was curated by architect Philip Johnson, who noted in the official press release that, “Chicago, and not New York, is the birthplace of the skyscraper.” Thirty-one Chicago buildings were featured, including three of H. H. Richardson’s four Chicago commissions – the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, and the Glessner and MacVeagh houses. In this article, we will explore how Johnson came to curate the exhibit, how the buildings included demonstrated the development of “modern architecture,” and how the exhibition helped to restore Richardson’s legacy.

The Museum of Modern Art and Philip Johnson

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had its beginnings in 1929, when a group of seven collectors and patrons decided to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in particular. Founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., had a vision that it would soon become “the greatest museum of modern art in the world.”

MoMA started out in six rooms in the Heckscher Building at Fifth Avenue and 57^th Street. Within months, 1,500 people a day were visiting the galleries, so in May of 1932, the museum moved into a six-story house at 11 West 53^rd Street owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (his wife Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was one of MoMA’s founders). Five years later, the site was cleared for construction of the present building.

Museum of Modern Art in 1933

Architect Philip Johnson (1906-2005) attended Harvard University after which he traveled extensively in Europe, becoming exposed to the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In 1930, utilizing a considerable fortune from his father, Johnson financed the architecture department at MoMA. Two years later, he was named curator, and soon arranged for Gropius and Le Corbusier to visit the United States. He also negotiated the first American commission for Mies van der Rohe.

This photograph of Philip Johnson was taken on January 18, 1933, the day the exhibition opened.

In February 1932, working with architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., Johnson organized the first exhibition of modern architecture at MoMA, entitled Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. They simultaneously published the book International Style: Modern Architecture Since 1922, which introduced modern architecture to the American public.

Early Modern Architecture: Chicago 1870-1910

Johnson’s second exhibition for MoMA was announced in early January 1933. The press release quoted Johnson:

“Chicago, and not New York, is the birthplace of the skyscraper. Few people realize that on the ashes of the Chicago fire of 1871 there was built the only architecture that can truly be called American. The great names in the building of the frontier city were three architects, H. H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, who, with their followers, made the end of the nineteenth century the greatest epoch in the architectural development of our country. They created a native product not indebted to English or continental precedent.

“To these men goes the credit of bridging the gap between the Crystal Palace of steel and glass in London in 1851 and the skyscraper of today. They were the first to take advantage of the shift from masonry to cast iron and from cast iron to steel. This independent American architecture finally succumbed to the wave of classical revivalism which the World’s Fair first brought to Chicago in 1893.”

The press release went on to note that Johnson and Hitchcock had spent the summer of 1932 in Chicago collecting information and photographing important buildings. It also noted that the exhibition would be “the first record of a great architecture which is vanishing rapidly under the sledgehammer of the housewrecker.” This was a poignant statement given that five of the buildings included in the exhibit had already been demolished.

Johnson felt that there were two main reasons why Chicago became the center of architectural development in the late 19^th century. The first was its inland location which “removed it from the influence of traditional architecture active on the Atlantic seaboard.” The second was the fire of 1871 which brought countless architects to the city to assist in the rebuilding and finding ways to construct taller structures.  

The exhibition consisted of photographs of 31 Chicago buildings, and one from New York, included to show how backward thinking the latter city was at the turn of the century. Each photograph was accompanied by an explanatory wall label prepared by Johnson and Hitchcock:

“We don’t want people merely to look at this show, we want them to study it and carry away with them a conception of what went into the making of the greatest epoch in our American architecture.”

Glessner House was the only building included for which the plan was displayed, clearly demonstrating how its innovative floor plan was central to the significance of its design. The Auditorium building was the only one for which an interior view was included, which revealed “Sullivan’s power of original design.”

Philip Johnson with the building models; Glessner House is partially visible at far left

The only three-dimensional items included in the exhibition were three models showing the progression from masonry to steel:
-The All Masonry Building
-The Masonry Building with Metal Skeleton
-The Steel Skeleton Building
The models were built by Alfred Clauss (1906-1998) a German architect who, in collaboration with his wife, architect Jane West Clauss, is credited with designing one of the earliest examples of the International Style in the United States. (The development of distinctive split-level homes was known as “Little Switzerland” and was located outside of Knoxville, Tennessee.)

The exhibition catalog included chronologies of both the technical and aesthetic development of the skyscraper, along with selected architect biographies. Johnson’s comments are brief but telling. Of William LeBaron Jenney, he credits him with the first use of steel skeleton construction, but notes he was “a technician rather than a designer.”

Henry Hobson Richardson

He praised H. H. Richardson:
“In his later work the importance of reminiscent elements of design grew less and less, but his originality as an architect was based on the integrity of his use of traditional construction rather than on technical innovations. To the new national architecture, he contributed not methods of building but a formative spirit.”

Louis Sullivan was clearly a favorite:
“Applying the basic stylistic discipline of Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store to the new skeleton construction, Sullivan first found a dignified clothing for the skyscraper. In his work of the late eighties and early nineties, his designs emphasized the vertical. Soon, however, he found a more logical expression of the underlying construction with a scheme of wide windowed horizontality. Sullivan led for two decades a considerable group of architects known as the Chicago School, but he alone made of the early skyscraper an aesthetic invention.”

Burnham & Root received mixed reviews, Root being noted as “one of the more original Chicago Richardsonians.” But after his death in 1891, “the prolific work of the firm, beginning with the general supervision of the World’s Fair, was rarely original or distinguished in design.”

Johnson made several comments in the catalog noting the negative impact the World’s Fair of 1893 had on the development of modern architecture.

Buildings included in the exhibition

The exhibition included 31 buildings in Chicago, ranging from the 1872 Field Building (architect not identified) to Carl Schurz High School, a design of Dwight Perkins completed in 1910. Most were tall buildings located in downtown, but the range included a synagogue, an armory, a park pavilion, a school, and five houses.

Louis Sullivan was represented with eight buildings, designed in partnership with Dankmar Adler, or from his independent practice. Four buildings represented the work of Burnham & Root and D. H. Burnham and Co. Richardson, Jenney, and Richard E. Schmidt each had three buildings, while Holabird & Roche had two.

A short paragraph described each building. Among the more interesting entries are the following:

Leiter Building I
William LeBaron Jenney, 1879
“An important step toward the skyscraper: the use of cast iron posts between the masonry piers introduces more light. The design is crude, but the general horizontal ordering foreshadows the more finished designs of the later steel skyscrapers.”

Home Insurance Building
William LeBaron Jenney, 1884-85 (demolished 1931)
“The crucial step in the creation of the skyscraper. The metal skeleton supports all the weight of the building except the exterior walls which are partially self supporting. . . In principle, the building has ceased to be a crustacean (chief support by masonry shell) and is already implicitly a vertebrate (chief support by skeleton). Jenney did not yet realize the revolutionary quality of the device he had employed above the second floor.” 

Marshall Field Wholesale Store
H. H. Richardson, 1885-86 (demolished 1930)
“The masterpiece of commercial architecture in masonry, and the strongest single influence on the design of Chicago commercial architecture of the next generation. Even when this influence was no longer direct, the aesthetic discipline of regular and simple design continued.”

Glessner House
H. H. Richardson, 1885-1886
“Here, as in the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Richardson generalized and recreated the traditional elements of design which he had earlier borrowed directly from the Romanesque. The disposition of the plan with the main rooms opening toward the court rather than toward the street is unusual in America.”

MacVeagh House
H. H. Richardson, 1885 (demolished 1922)
“Less original than the Glessner House this house by Richardson is nevertheless superior to most work of the Richardsonians of the eighties.” 

First Infantry Armory
Burnham & Root, 1890
(Note: located just four blocks from Glessner House)
“The contrast of tiny windows and colossal portal, the avoidance of fussy detail, and the fortress-like scale of the whole, illustrate the possibilities of the free traditional design which existed in Chicago before the World’s Fair. The medievalism is hardly Richardsonian but rather that of the projects of the early nineteenth century in France.” 

Auditorium Building
Adler & Sullivan, 1887-89
“The treatment here of the masonry bearing walls shows strongly the direct influence of the Marshall Field Wholesale Store. The lower portions have been influenced by the Marquis de Vogüé’s publications on early Syrian architecture. Only in the tower appears the beginning of Sullivan’s more personal style.” 

Walker Warehouse
Adler & Sullivan, 1888-89
“Here the flatter surfaces and the more vertical grouping indicate the direction Sullivan’s manner was to take as it freed itself from the influence of Richardson.” 

Carl Schurz High School
Dwight H. Perkins, 1910
“This building owes little specifically to Sullivan. But it indicates the ability of the members of the Chicago School to find a new type of design for new problems. Especially in such a school is the superiority of their inventions over the archaeology of the stylistic revivalists clear.” 

Johnson included one New York building in the exhibition – George B. Post’s Pulitzer Building (also known as the World Building), completed in 1890. He was clear in his disdain for the design:
“Although at its completion the tallest building in the world (349 feet), this New York tower is progressive neither in structure nor design. It has masonry bearing walls on the exterior, 12 feet thick at the base, and only the interior is supported on wrought iron columns. Yet the Home Insurance and Tacoma Buildings had been completed several years earlier. 

“The conventional scheme of academic Renaissance design (the dome of the Invalides has been placed on top of the Louvre) is characteristic of the Eastern architecture of this period and is inappropriate and devoid of scale.”

Chicago’s awareness of the exhibition

Despite Johnson’s praise of Chicago’s architecture, it appears that the exhibition, which ran for five weeks, received little attention in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune carried a brief article entitled “Chicago Architecture in Gotham” two weeks after the exhibit opened.

However, Chicagoans were given the opportunity to see the exhibit for themselves, when it traveled to Chicago that summer. In a move that would be considered unusual today, the exhibition was installed not in a museum, but in the interior decoration galleries at Marshall Field & Co. This was a smart move, and probably resulted in many more Chicagoans being exposed to it than if it had been installed in a traditional setting. Additionally, that was the first summer of the Century of Progress World’s Fair and, for many visitors to Chicago, a trip to Marshall Field’s was an absolute must.

It was an ironic twist of fate that the exhibition ended up at Field’s. Clearly one of Johnson’s favorite Chicago buildings was the Marshall Field Wholesale Store by H. H. Richardson – a structure Field’s had razed just three years earlier.

Conclusion

The 1933 exhibition is the earliest to have brought attention to the innovative design and plan of Glessner House. Richardson had slipped into obscurity by this time, and with Prairie Avenue in significant decline, few would have an opportunity to see the house in person. If they had, they would have seen it blackened with soot and surrounded by empty lots, shuttered houses, and factories.

Three years later, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr. curated The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times at MoMA, to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of Richardson’s death. (Johnson had abruptly resigned as curator in late 1934). The exhibition opened on January 14, 1936, just six days before John Glessner’s death at the age of 92. Hitchcock’s accompanying book was instrumental in restoring Richardson’s legacy, and even made the case that the distant roots of European Modernism were actually found in the United States.

Of the 31 Chicago buildings featured in the exhibition, five had been demolished by 1933. An additional 13 have since been razed, leaving 13 survivors (listed in chronological order):
-Glessner House
-Auditorium Building
-Leiter Building II
-Monadnock Building
-Anshe Maariv Synagogue (Pilgrim Baptist Church, some exterior walls remain)
-Charnley House
-Winslow House
-Reliance Building
-Schlesinger-Mayer Building (Carson, Pirie, Scott)
-Gage Building
-Nepeenauk Building (Chapin & Gore Building)
-Humboldt Park Pavilion
-Carl Schurz High School 

Philip Johnson at Glessner House, 1995

When Glessner House went up for sale in 1965 and was threatened with demolition, Philip Johnson became one of the most outspoken advocates for its preservation. In an interview with the Chicago Daily News, Johnson referred to it as “the most important house in the country to me.” He stood behind his words and provided $10,000 toward the $35,000 purchase price. His appreciation for Glessner House extended back more than three decades to his 1933 exhibition, a time when he probably would have never imagined the critical role he would one day play in its preservation.