As always, happy to weigh in on the latest political news.
Yesterday saw extensive coverage of the remodeling of the “Lincoln bathroom” in a central Washington, D.C., residence, along with historians (amateur and professional) weighing in on the fact that its adjacent bedroom had actually been Lincoln’s office and that the conversion to a guest bedroom happened in the 1940s.
I’ll leave the interior design critique to the professionals. Still, having just given the “Electricity and Sanitation” lecture in my History of Construction class (better known by at least one student as the “Light Bulbs and Poop” lecture, great), I’ll weigh in on the business end of things.
The American flush toilet dates back to this patent, issued in 1857 to James Henry and William Campbell, both of Philadelphia. Almost all the parts of a modern toilet are there–the bowl, the reservoir of fresh water to wash down the contents, and a lever to get the fun started. What’s missing is a trap — a way to keep a water seal above the foul gases in the sewer pipe. That technical innovation had been thought of, as early as 1775, by Scotsman Alexander Cummings, but somehow that didn’t make it into Henry and Campbell’s patent.
(New York Public Library)
Still, manufacturers added S-traps to fixtures based on that early patent — above are two from J.L. Mott’s Iron Foundry catalogue from 1888. These have a raised tank to improve water pressure, a pull chain for convenient control, and S-traps to keep sewer gases out of the room.
All well and good, but the provision of toilets inside a large Washington residence only got sewage so far. That city, like many of the era, laid pipes to provide fresh water to much of the city in the early 19th century in an effort to address the constant problem of cholera and typhoid outbreaks. But providing ample fresh water had the unfortunate effect of encouraging residents to… use it. Where to take that water once it had been fouled remained a problem, whether it was used for washing, chamber pots, or, later, fancy toilets. Chemical engineer Edward C.C. Stamford noted in 1869 that:
“The present water closet system, with all its boasted advantages is the worst that can be generally adopted, briefly because it is a most extravagant method of converting a mole-hill into a mountain. It merely removes the bulk of our excreta from our houses, to choke our rivers with foul deposits and rot at our neighbors’ doors. It increases the death rate, as well as all other rates, and introduces into our houses, a most deadly enemy, in the shape of sewer gases.” (Scientific American, July 24, 1869).
Stamford and others argued for large landfills, treated with various chemicals, to gradually turn waste water and sewage into compost, but it wasn’t until 1871 that Washington began to build sanitary sewers–until then, water closets (whether Lincoln’s or any other resident of the District) simply discharged into the nearest convenient ditch, canal, creek, or river, all of which festered and contributed to the spread of disease–not to mention a general stink throughout the city. Even early efforts by the city (detailed here) were problematic, combining storm and sanitary sewage into one stream that washed everything into local waterways. Not until 1890 was a single sanitary system built, ensuring that all wastewater in Washington would be discharged downstream from the city into the Potomac.
Detail of a map showing Washington’s sewers, ca. 1888. Discharge from the White House–“Lincoln bathroom” and all, is directly into the marshes that would later be filled to form the western end of the Mall. Planned extension shown in dot-dashed line. (Library of Congress)https://www.loc.gov/item/87695545/
Like Chicago and many other cities, simply moving the foul discharge as far away from any source of drinking water reduced mortality from waterborne diseases, but it wasn’t until 1938 that Washington built its first treatment plant, which used sedimentation and organic methods to break down and purify the city’s sewage.
All of which is to say that any effort to restore the “Lincoln bathroom” to its alleged 1860s status probably doesn’t understand the full scope of the issue. Unless the renovation included a handy chamberpot, or a Henry + Campbell, wooden-seated water closet discharging into the Rose Garden, it’s probably best to avoid any talk about authenticity. Especially, as noted by plumbing engineer John Lansing, the choice of water closet appears to be a Home Depot-stocked Kohler Highline model
A contestant in Chicago’s first official International Aviation Meet, August, 1911.
With NASCAR racing in Grant Park earlier this summer and Chicago’s annual Air + Water Show warming up over the lake, this seems an appropriate time to point out that Chicago has a long history of racing and aviation in its otherwise pastoral ‘front yard.’
My current research project is a history of Chicago’s airports. Many of the same factors that shaped the city’s skyscrapers–rapidly advancing technology, new commercial imperatives, political friction within and outside the city limits, etc.–were also manifest in the city’s efforts to take advantage of its geographical position. First, as the country’s center of population migrated westward, Chicago was a natural hub for the developing network of air mail routes in the 1920s and for passenger travel in the ensuing decades. As jet aircraft made international travel commonplace in the 1950s and 60s, the city found itself at a natural position on great circle routes to Europe and Asia, spurring the development of O’Hare Airport.
That story’s beginnings take place at the most unlikely of “airports.” In 1910, a failed effort to stage a cross-country aviation race from Chicago to New York made Cicero Field, a half-mile square of turf at Cicero Ave. and 22nd Street, the epicenter of aviation for a summer. Would-be contestants gathered there to assemble their fragile planes and to fly them for paying spectators at nearby Hawthorne Race Track. Cicero Field was owned by Harold McCormick, a scion of the family that had earned its fortune with the original McCormick Reaper and would go on to own the Chicago Tribune. Harold’s fascination with Aviation led to his founding and funding the Aero Club of Illinois, which ran Cicero Field and sponsored local competitions and exhibitions designed to increase public awareness while advancing aviation technology.1
Most of the flying done at Cicero Field was of the “grass mowing” type–short, low-altitude hops in amateur craft, but the influx of national and international aircraft in 1910 led McCormick to propose a larger, more formal exhibition in 1911. That took place in August, turning the newly-completed Grant Park into a hive of flying activity for nine days. McCormick cleverly based prize money on both accomplishments–altitude, speed, and duration, among them–and on total flying time, encouraging participants to keep their machines in the air as much as possible. The 1.3-mile course, laid out from Randolph Street to 12th Street, was a narrow oval lined with seating for 70,000 that allowed spectators to view a constant parade of machinery with the lake as a backdrop in the afternoon sun.2
Geo F. Campbell Wood, “The Chicago Meet.” Aircraft, Aug. 1, 1911. 190.
The meet was an extraordinary success, spurring plans for a second event, held in 1912. But even as it highlighted the rapid progress that had been made in American aviation, it also revealed the problems confronting aircraft builders and pilots; one contestant was killed when the wings of his aircraft collapsed during a high-speed turn in front of the grandstand, and another drowned when his plane crashed a mile offshore.3 After 1912, exhibitions like the Grant Park event faded in favor of more ambitious cross-country races as aircraft became more reliable and their appearance less remarkable.
Aircraft aloft and awaiting flight at the International Aviation Meet in Grant Park, 1911. Chicago Yacht Club in the background (Contemporary Postcard, Author’s Collection).
With five international aircraft and their pilots competing, Grant Park can make a claim as Chicago’s first international airport. It would continue to serve as a landing strip for recreational craft and, for a short time, for air mail when that service began in 1918.
A final note. The 1911 and 1912 events took place after a boom in skyscraper construction in the city, and a couple of press accounts that related the aviation meets to the city’s high rises stand out. The first is the entertainment trade journal The Billboard, which reported on aviation mostly in terms of the crowds these exhibitions drew. Chicago, it reported in 1911, was a ready-made arena for such displays:
“There is not another city in America, if indeed in the world, that possesses such a remarkable aviation field right at its doors, as does Chicago in Grant Park, the 160-acre park on the downtown lakefront. where the meet takes place….with the sightseeing space afforded by the skyscraping hotels and commercial buildings along Michigan Avenue, as well as the standing space for the multitude outside the pylons and west of the Illinois Central tracks, over a million people will be able to witness the event.”4
And, marking the turn in public fascination from buildings that appeared to climb skyward to machines that actually did, the Tribune offered some intriguing comparisons5 in reporting on the record altitude achieved by aviator Oscar Brindley during the meet:
Howard Lee Scamehorn, “Balloons to Jets: A Century of Aeronautics in Illinois, 1855-1955.” (Chicago: Regnery, 1957). 53, 81. ↩︎
“Advertisement: International Aviation Meet.” Town & Country, suppl.The Air-Scout, vol. 66, no. 22, Aug. 12, 1911, pp. 2.↩︎
“AVIATORS BADGER AND JOHNSTONE DROP TO DEATH: 50,000 LOOK ON.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 16, 1911, pp. 1.↩︎
“INTERNATIONAL AVIATION MEET IN CHICAGO.” The Billboard, vol. 23, no. 33, Aug. 19, 1911, pp. 4-4, 55.↩︎
“WORLD RECORD BROKEN; FLIES UP 11,726 FEET: B.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 19, 1911, pp. 1.↩︎
Parth Solanki and Siddharth Shah (UIUC), with Alice Wimbe (SAIC)
We finished up a challenging but exciting studio project this week with final reviews at the Chicago Architecture Center–many thanks to CAC for hosting. The project has been a visionary adaptive reuse of the Consumers and Century Buildings, at State and Adams Streets in the Loop. As previously noted, these buildings are threatened as the Federal Government seeks to address security issues with the Dirksen Federal Courthouse next door. Landmarking by the City of Chicago has forced the government to solicit proposals for developing the two structures, but their RFP puts onerous restrictions on their use. Our studio sought ways to develop the buildings as residential and hotel structures while addressing issues of sightlines and proximity that, understandably, have the GSA worried.
Sharanya Mathrudev and Elizabeth Tabisz (UIUC) with Rich McKee (SAIC)
Student teams from our M.Arch. Program, working with historic preservation students from the School of the Art Institute, tackled this by looking at programming and detail strategies that carved apartments and hotel rooms out of the exiting building fabric while creating new semi-public spaces in the gap between the two buildings, all while focusing views and circulation toward the street and away from the courthouse and its associated exterior driveways, loading, and prisoner handling areas. We worked with Rachel Will and Kim Clawson, of Wiss, Janney, Elstner, Ken DeMuth of Pappageorge Haymes, and Mark Kuberscki of Central Building and Preservation to understand the conservation and restoration issues, but student teams had a long leash in considering how best to transform the two structures. The fact that both are “vernacular” skyscrapers–good examples but not, say, Sullivan masterpieces–allowed some creative extensions and additions that wouldn’t meet Secretary of the Interior standards, but that allowed some visionary thinking and innovative approaches, especially to the central space and the buildings’ rooftops.
Omar Abunnaja and Jasbir Bhamra (UIUC) with Katrina Lewis (SAIC)
Our jury included practitioners, preservationists, and engineers from firms in the city, who lived up to the challenge of critiquing a wide range of approaches. Many thanks to those who took part, and to a particularly energetic, dedicated group of students–hire these folks!
Noushin Anjum & Nupur Agarwal (UIUC), with Leah Zuberer (SAIC)Anusha Ronda and Shravani Keesara (UIUC), with Tucker Jaroll (SAIC)Odin Babcock and Deyang Hu (UIUC), with Zach Waters (SAIC)
As part of our research for the Skyscraper Museum’s Modern Concrete Skyscraper exhibition, Carol Willis and I worked to understand how and why Chicago became the acknowledged center of high-strength and high-rise concrete design for much of the last half of the 20th century. What follows has relied on perspectives and input from conversations and virtual lectures held with, among others, Bill Baker, Paul James, Kim Clawson, Ken DeMuth, Geoffrey Goldberg, Matthys Levy, Joseph Colaco, and, especially, the late Charlie Thornton.Many of those conversationsare available in video form on the Skyscraper Museum’s website.
Supertalls and Industry Changes
Fig. 10. 311 S. Wacker (right) with friend. KPF, 1990. Authors’ photo.
At 961′, 311 S. Wacker reclaimed the title of “world’s tallest reinforced concrete building” for Chicago in 1990, after a short reign by Toronto’s Scotia Tower (Webb, Zefara, Menkes, Housden, 1988, 902′). 311 S. Wacker was, however, designed by New York architects KPF and a Dallas engineering firm; the contractor was Charlotte-based. Its structural system, a frame-shear-wall interactive design, “was developed in the 1960s,” according to one-time PCA engineer Mark Fintel.[ii] High-strength knowledge had diffused well beyond Chicago by the 1980s and plateaued. Changes to the industry saw the Portland Cement Association and Materials Service evolve; PCA spun off its research arm into Construction Technology Laboratories, Inc., and General Dynamics, the conglomerate that had owned Materials Service since the Crown family engineered a financial merger, taking the larger company over in 1959, gradually distanced itself from the construction market, finally selling Materials Service to Hanson, a large aggregate supplier, in 2006, Hanson was acquired, in turn, by the international materials supply corporation Heidelberg the following year.[iii] While the McCook quarry remained active under the Heidelberg name, the Thornton pit was taken over as a surface reservoir for Chicago’s Deep Tunnel stormwater project.
Structural design for high rises evolved, as well. Concrete and steel construction economics have always balanced time, cost, and labor. As the speed of curing, strengthening, and formwork placement increased through the 1980s, many traditional hurdles to building tall concrete disappeared. Steel’s globalization also made it a more volatile commodity. Hybrid forms that optimized construction schedules, materials costs, and labor emerged in Chicago and elsewhere, particularly so-called “composite” construction that paired the shear resistance and fire protection of concrete cores with the rapidity and light weight of steel framing. Composite structures were not new—Emperger columns and combinations of steel and concrete framing meant that engineers and builders had experience with hybrid performance and forming as early as the 1926 American Furniture Mart in Chicago.
Fig. 11. Gateway Center III (SOM, 1972). (Authors).
Later, hybrids included SOM’s Gateway Center III, adjacent to Chicago’s Union Station, which paired a rigid concrete tube exterior with a lightweight internal core. This was partly a response to the irregular layout of railroad tracks underneath, but its construction demonstrated that pouring and erecting schedules could be coordinated and that the structural results were promising. Interest in optimizing construction speed, material, labor expenses, and building weight led engineers to new hybrids that took advantage of concrete’s improving speed and performance. Developer Miglin-Beitler’s Oakbrook Tower (1987), a 34-story office building designed by Helmut Jahn in the western suburbs, was one of the first that was consciously designed with a rigid concrete core and a lighter steel frame; the core was started first, providing stability, and the steel ‘caught up’ around it. Tacit agreements with steelworkers in New York, where union arrangements stipulated that no work could be done above the topmost steel crew, made this construction impossible there, but it quickly proved itself in Chicago.[iv]
Fig. 12. Oakbrook Tower, Oak Brook, IL. Helmut Jahn, 1987. CECO Construction.
As strengths continued to rise, pumping grew more efficient, and curing times were reduced through new admixtures. Concrete became more competitive for commercial towers in Chicago. Miglin-Beitler’s 1988 “Skyneedle” proposal was one of several unrealized projects for the city that sought to take fuller advantage of concrete’s newly achievable strength and speed. The site at the corner of Madison and Wells was just 40,000 square feet—too small to allow a conventionally-framed tower. But with stronger concrete and advanced calculation techniques, engineers Thornton Tomasetti developed a stiff, solid concrete core with bracing perimeter fin columns to brace and support a 2000-foot tower “by taking advantage of the mass and stiffness of the high-strength concrete that is available in the Chicago area and combining it with the advantages of a structural steel floor system with its inherent strength, speed of construction and flexibility to allow tenant changes.”[v] The exterior fins were connected to the core by haunched concrete link beams and three pairs of intersecting, two-story deep cross walls at regular vertical intervals. Further stiffening the slender structure was done with steel Vierendeel trusses that filled in between the fin columns on the building perimeter, making the structure a complex collection of techniques—stiff core, perimeter shear walls, and outrigger columns. The interactions of these various elements in three dimensions were calculable only with the help of new computer technology; engineer Charlie Thornton noted that the software running on the firm’s VAX-11/750 mainframe was “like an SST” compared with earlier generation’s “Model T” programs. This, he explained, allowed them to calculate the structure’s behavior in multiple dimensions instead of “uncoupling” north-south and east-west systems to allow manual, linear calculations.[vi]
Fig. 13. 7 S. Dearborn (SOM, 2004, unbuilt). SOM.
Thornton Tomasetti were New York-based, and the Skyneedle’s architects, Cesar Pelli & Associates, were located in New Haven. Still, expertise in Chicago was also vital to supertall concrete and hybrid structures for the city. SOM’s 7 South Dearborn (1999), engineered by a team led by William F. Baker, developed a “stayed mast” system on the 33,000 square foot site for another 2000’ tower scheme. This system improved on the Miglin-Beitler tower concept by substituting steel perimeter columns for the earlier project’s concrete fins, taking up less space and connecting them to the central core—just 66’ square—with outrigger trusses. The design relied on 12,000psi concrete and advanced digital techniques, including aerodynamic analysis and multifactor optimization, which Baker credited with “breaking through several barriers that have limited buildings in the 100+ story range,” mainly drift and spatial efficiency on lower floors.[vii] While 7 South Dearborn remained unbuilt in the aftermath of 2001, the concept of a stiff core, braced by vertical elements set at the building perimeter—or, at least, a distance far enough to establish a reasonable moment arm—was a key step in the “buttressed core” that Baker and the SOM engineering team developed for Tower Palace III in Seoul, South Korea (2004), and the 2700’ Burj Khaliffa in Dubai (2010).[viii] Chicago has continued to build tall concrete—SOM’s 1362’ 401 N. Wabash, completed in 2009, relies on a core-and-outrigger system with two-story walls of 16,000 psi concrete connecting the core to perimeter columns. McHugh Construction and Materials Service collaborated on the tower’s concrete mixes and pours, carefully selecting high-strength limestone, using admixtures to create a particularly dense product, and employing a 680-horsepower concrete pump to move 6000 pounds of concrete per minute to the upper floors. Self-jacking formwork on the core and specially produced formwork enabled a pour rate of one floor every three days. The tallest building constructed in Chicago since 1974, 401 N. Wabash sits just 400 feet from Marina City. The two projects provide a convenient illustration of concrete’s evolution as a structural material and of the collaborative engineering and construction communities in Chicago that raised concrete to ever-new heights.
Fig. 14. 401 N. Wabash. SOM, 2009.
[i] “High Strength High Rise.” Civil Engineering, March, 1988. 63-65.
[ii] Lorraine Smith, Janice Tuchman, and Jeffrey Trewhitt. “All-Concrete Design Fits Bill for 946-Ft Tower.” Enr, vol. 220, no. 5, 1988. 42.
[iii] Bob Tita,“Material Service sold to Hanson.” Crain’s Chicago Business, June 19, 2006.
[iv] Paul James interview with the author, 25 Oct 2024.
[v] Charles Thornton, Udom Hungspruke, and Jagdish Prasad, “The Miglin-Beitler tower Chicago, IL (USA).” IABSE Congress Report, Vol. 14, 1992. 272-282.
[vi] Ellis Booker, “Computers Help Shape Chicago Skyline.” Computerworld vol.23. Aug 14, 1989. 25.
[vii] William F. Baker, Robert C. Sinn, Lawrence C. Novak, and John R. Viise, “Structural Optimization of 2000-Foot Tall 7 South Dearborn Building.” Advanced Technology in Structural Engineering, Proceedings of Structures Congress 2000. (Reston, VA., American Society of Civil Engineers, 2000). 1-8.
[viii] William F. Baker, P.E., S.E., F.ASCE, and James J. Pawlikowski, S.E., LEED AP, M.ASCE, “Higher and Higher: The Evolution of the Buttressed Core.” Civil Engineering, Oct., 2012.
As part of our research for the Skyscraper Museum’s Modern Concrete Skyscraper exhibition, Carol Willis and I worked to understand how and why Chicago became the acknowledged center of high-strength and high-rise concrete design for much of the last half of the 20th century. What follows has relied on perspectives and input from conversations and virtual lectures held with, among others, Bill Baker, Paul James, Kim Clawson, Ken DeMuth, Geoffrey Goldberg, Matthys Levy, Joseph Colaco, and, especially, the late Charlie Thornton.Many of those conversationsare available in video form on the Skyscraper Museum’s website.
Portland Cement Association and Materials Service Corporation
McHugh’s innovations in formwork, reinforcing, and scheduling were matched by advances in Marina City’s concrete itself, which relied on a low water/cement ratio, lightweight vermiculite aggregate, careful grading, and slag from nearby steel mills to achieve then-remarkable strength, at 5000 psi in its caissons and lower levels, and lightness, at 100 pounds per cubic foot in 3750 and 3000 psi concrete higher up.[i] These advances relied on research conducted by the Portland Cement Association, an industry organization based in Chicago that began providing advice and data to engineers, architects, and builders in 1916.[ii] PCA was founded to compete with the ease of specification and engineering that the American steel industry enjoyed since Carnegie Steel’s ubiquitous handbooks were published in the 1890s. PCA advanced concrete engineering and construction practices from a relatively unsophisticated and inefficient knowledge base to a discipline rivaling steel’s precision and scope by establishing practices, mixes, and standards. Constant experimentation in their laboratory at 33 West Grand Avenue, just north of the Loop, in the prewar years led to reliable knowledge in areas that had previously frustrated contractors and designers alike, producing gradually stronger mixes based on adjustments to water/cement ratios and more reliable interaction between concrete matrices and reinforcing bars. Research scientist Duff Abrams led much of this work, relying on equipment at PCA and the Lewis Institute, one of the academic entities that would merge to form the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1940.[iii] By 1962, PCA had opened a large testing laboratory in Skokie, employing more than 600 engineers and publishing widely on concrete strength, forming, and maintenance.[iv] Other academic collaborations, in particular with the Talbot Laboratories at UIUC, were vital contributions to understanding and improving strength and versatility.
PCA’s proximity to Chicago engineers and contractors alone would have made the city a natural center for innovation, but the local industry provided tangible research efforts in real-world conditions, too. One supplier, Material Service Corporation, adopted practices that ensured knowledge and experience were shared among practitioners throughout the city’s construction and engineering communities. Founded by Henry Crown and two of his brothers in 1919, the company quickly grew to dominate the market for cement and aggregate in Chicago. By mid-century, it owned eight quarries that provided good-quality limestone, four cement factories, and five gravel plants. The stone, sand, and cement from these sources were collected and mixed at 13 distribution yards located strategically throughout the city, ensuring that concrete could be delivered to any construction site in Chicago well within the 90 minutes that was agreed, industry-wide, as the maximum time between initial mixing and placement for concrete.[v] Materials Service developed its own mixing trucks and built a fleet of low-profile barges that could bring gravel from outlying locations via lake and river, saving time by slipping under Chicago’s river bridges; competitors, with larger vessels, were slowed by the time it took for bridges to raise and lower. The company’s primary mixing plant, “Yard One,” was located alongside the River at Chicago Avenue, making it an ideal transfer point for river-borne raw materials and a convenient 15-minute drive for ready-mix trucks to construction sites in the Loop. This proximity gave concrete in Chicago a considerable advantage over cities, where land prices kept ready-mix plants at a much farther distance—across the Hudson River, in New York’s case, and only accessible by tunnels and bridges prone to traffic jams.[vi]
Fig. 5. Materials Service Corporation’s “Yard One” on the Chicago River in the mid-1970s. (Photo courtesy Paul James).
Yard One and Materials Service had provided the strong, rapidly delivered concrete for McHugh at Marina City, and that expertise became the basis for hands-on testing and experiments with mixes, aggregate grading, and admixtures, especially under the leadership of two engineers who became key figures in Chicago’s high-strength concrete development. Technical Marketing Manager Jaime Moreno and Quality Control Manager John Albinger, in conjunction with another industry specialist, Flood Testing Service, led an outreach program that actively fostered collaboration and communication among the city’s contractors, engineers, and architects. Materials Service leveraged their expertise to use job sites as laboratories, often trying to exceed specified strengths in column pours to gradually ratchet up what was achievable.[vii]
Moreno’s program was one of constant refinement, which he and Albinger described in a 1981 Concrete Construction article:
“Selecting the proportions of a high-strength concrete mixture is a combination of art and science. Because of the innumerable types of gradings of aggregates, chemistries of various cements, fly ashes, and admixtures, and the subsequent interaction of any combination of these materials, arriving at the optimum combination is often a matter of trial and error…as in blending blue and yellow to make green, many combinations must be tried to attain the desired mix.”[viii]
Moreno and Albinger contributed papers and columns in technical and industry literature, and Moreno, in particular, was an active member of the Chicago Committee on High Rise Buildings, an industry organization founded in 1968 that brought together skyscraper engineering, design, and construction experts to share best practices. Albinger summarized his company’s ethics in a 2006 reminiscence:
“By design, every job was used to investigate the next higher strength. Either a couple of columns were poured using higher strengths than required, or in situ tests were conducted to measure such attributes as creep or the effect of temperature. By the time the next high-rise was on the drafting table, all interested parties had enough data and confidence to justify using higher strength concrete. The results of all these tests and experiences were shared with the entire concrete community. No single company benefited. Such cooperation is rare in any industry.”[ix]
Moreno and Albinger championed the use of fly ash and superplasticizers in concrete mixes as ways to reduce the amount of water required while achieving low enough viscosity to handle, and much of Materials Service’s research went into fine-tuning proportions of these, along with intensive quality control, to refine and improve strength gradually.[x] The short times required for transporting batches from Yard One were crucial to this program—fresher concrete was more liquid, and the time gained by the proximity of the mixing plant to job sites allowed for precise, careful on-site slump testing.[xi] Chicago’s naturally occurring limestone provided a sound basis for strong concrete—limestone from Materials Service’s quarries at Thornton averaged around 22,000 psi. This was less than granite from eastern sources, but limestone had the advantage of being seamed and, thus, easy to split and crush into useful aggregate.
FIg. 6. DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments, Streeterville. Bruce Graham, Fazlur Khan, and Myron Goldsmith (SOM), 1961. (Chicago Daily News).
Flat Slabs and Tubes
Putting theory into practice, however, demanded clients, builders, and engineers willing to see the drafting table and construction site as laboratories. Chicago’s high-rise community developed an innovation-friendly mindset early; Fazlur Khan, Hal Iyengar, Bruce Graham, and others at SOM experimented with new forms of structural design that led to that firm’s well-known tube structures, beginning with the 1961 Brunswick and DeWitt-Chestnut buildings, both of concrete deployed around those buildings’ extreme perimeters. While the concrete tube represented a radical “return to the bearing wall” in structural engineering, Brunswick used regular 5000 psi concrete on its lower floors and lighter-weight, 4000 psi concrete above. The first Chicago building to reach 6000 psi was 1000 Lake Shore Plaza (1962), a 57-story apartment tower designed by Sidney Morris and engineered by William Schmidt. This building’s relatively small footprint, at just 85’ x 90’, put a premium on floor space and efficiency, driving the need for smaller columns.[xii] While snaring the concrete height record from Marina City, at 590 feet, the jump in concrete strength was relatively easy, adding fly ash and pozzolith to achieve a higher cement-to-water ratio. For the 645’ Lake Point Tower at the foot of Navy Pier, Schmidt’s next project relied on further experimentation and tighter quality control procedures to achieve 7500 psi. As the tower rose, its structure was instrumented with seismographs to provide data on its deflection under wind loading and the long-term effects of creep.[xiii]
Fig. 7. The 645’ Lake Point Tower, engineered by William Schmidt, showing flat slab construction. (ALCOA).
Khan and SOM designed One Shell Plaza, a 714-foot tall tower in Houston that relied on high-strength, lightweight concrete to surpass Lake Point Tower. Still, the height record came back to Chicago in 1975 with the completion of Water Tower Place (Loebl, Schlossman, Bennett, and Dart, architects, C.F. Murphy Associates, engineers), a mixed-use complex composed of a 76-story, 859-foot tower housing a hotel and condominiums atop an eight-story shopping mall and a large theater. This mélange of programs required complex transfer structures to bring the tower’s columns and shear walls to the foundations. To save space on the lower floors and to enable the entire structure to sit on shallow, hardpan caissons instead of deep bedrock foundations, concrete was specified in various weights and strengths throughout: 4000-psi, lightweight concrete for all floor slabs, 6000-psi concrete for the podium structure, and 4000-psi up to 9000-psi for the tower columns. Materials Service provided its most sophisticated mix to date for the latter, incorporating 100 pounds of fly ash per cubic yard to reduce the water-to-cement ratio content to just 36%.[xiv]
Fig. 8. Water Tower Place (Loebl, Schlossman, Bennett, and Dart, architects, C.F. Murphy Associates, engineers), 1975. Construction showing flat slabs and drop panels over theater. (Photo courtesy Paul James).
McHugh, the concrete contractors for the project, adhered to strict requirements that saw cylinders from multiple trucks sent to PCA’s Skokie laboratories overnight for testing. Additionally, they developed ‘puddling’ techniques that blended higher-strength column concrete into floor slabs where punching shear forces were highest.[xv] The result was a structure that held the height record for concrete for 14 years, until a pair of Chicago towers—311 S. Wacker Dr., by Kohn Pedersen Fox and Two Prudential Plaza, by Loebl, Schlossman, and Hackl with CBM, structural engineers—surpassed it at 961’ and 915’, respectively, in 1989-90.[xvi] 311 S. Wacker was particularly noteworthy; columns on its lower levels achieved 12,000 psi using microsilica admixtures, and its floor slabs were post-tensioned, requiring 9000 psi compressive strength. Its 8’ thick mat foundation, designed to spread the tower’s load out over 102 caissons below, was the largest single high-strength concrete pour ever, involving 60 trucks coordinated to arrive precisely four minutes apart.[xvii]
[Cont.]
Fig. 9. Water Tower Place at topping out, 1975. (Chicago Daily News).
[i] Bertold E. Weinberg, M.ASCE, Resident Engineer, Bertrand Goldberg Associates, quoted in “Marina City.” Civil Engineering, December, 1962. 64.
[iv] Robert L. Bartley, “Strides in Cement: Research Push Pays Off in Stronger, Lighter Concrete for New Uses.” Wall Street Journal, Nov 9, 1962. 1.
[v] Joseph Egelhof, “Supply Firms Fill Chicago’s Building Needs.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 30, 1952. A7.
[vi] Paul James interview with the author, 25 Oct 2024.
[vii] Pierre-Claude Aitcin and William Wilson, “The Sky’s the Limit: Evolution in Construction of High-Rise Buildings.” Concrete International, Jan., 2015. 45-50.
[viii] John Albinger and Jaime Moreno, S.E., “High-Strength Concrete, Chicago Style.” Concrete Construction, Mar. 1, 1981. N.p.
[ix] John Albinger, “High-Strength Concrete: Fifty Years of Progress.” Concrete Construction, Sept. 9, 2006. N.P.
[x] Arthur H. Nilson quoting Moreno, “Summary of Floor Discussion: Structural Design Considerations for High Strength Concrete,” in S.P. Shah, ed., High Strength Concrete: Proceedings. (Chicago: National Science Foundation, 1979). 217-218.
[xi] Paul James interview with the author, 25 Oct 2024.
[xii] Sherwin Asrow, et al., “Task Force Report # 5: High-Strength Concrete In Chicago High-Rise Buildings.” (Chicago: Chicago Committee on High-Rise Buildings, 1977). 2.
[xiii] “New Tower to be a Giant Test Station.” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 9, 1966. 1-e1.
As part of our research for the Skyscraper Museum’s Modern Concrete Skyscraper exhibition, Carol Willis and I worked to understand how and why Chicago became the acknowledged center of high-strength and high-rise concrete design for much of the last half of the 20th century. What follows has relied on perspectives and input from conversations and virtual lectures held with, among others, Bill Baker, Paul James, Kim Clawson, Ken DeMuth, Geoffrey Goldberg, Matthys Levy, Joseph Colaco, and, especially, the late Charlie Thornton.Many of those conversationsare available in video form on the Skyscraper Museum’s website.
Early Concrete in Chicago
Even as the city’s earliest iron frames emerged in structures like the Home Insurance and Rookery, Chicago’s builders experimented with 19th-century versions of concrete—mainly as a replacement for natural stone. Like the history of terra cotta fireproofing businesses in Chicago, the 1871 fire inspired entrepreneurs and inventors to join the massive rebuilding effort. Portland cement, a mixture of crushed limestone and calcium silicates, was first patented in England in 1824 and gradually improved over the following decades, forming a crucial ingredient in producing strong “artificial stone” that won favor for its resistance to fire and manufacturing processes that limited labor costs. By 1876, there were more than 100 buildings with artificial stone fronts or structural elements in Chicago and five manufacturers, among them Ransome and Smith, an enterprise of concrete pioneer Ernest Ransome.[i] Ransome himself relocated to the city from 1890 to 1895 before settling in New York City in 1896. Ransome and others patented systems for fireproof concrete floors, reinforced with twisted or shaped steel bars, in the late 1890s that became the basis for more comprehensive building systems.[ii] Ransome’s patented system was used for the first reinforced concrete skyscraper, the Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, in 1903-5. Builders in Chicago and elsewhere quickly saw the advantages of the hybrid material’s durability and strength. Montgomery Ward’s 2,000,000 square foot Catalogue House, designed by Schmidt, Garden, and Martin, deployed a concrete frame over a winding, six-acre site along the Chicago River in 1908, and Studebaker built a seven-story building at Michigan and 21st Street in 1909 that used paneled slabs to span 24’ x 24’ column bays.[iii] Henry Ericsson, the city’s Commissioner of Buildings, was fascinated by the new material’s fire resistance but concerned about its structural performance and durability. After commissioning laboratory experiments from Arthur Talbot at the University of Illinois and W.K. Hatt at Purdue University in 1911, he drafted one of the first building codes in the United States to address flat-slab construction, which had vexed engineers because of its hyperstatic performance. “Owing to the complication of methods used in designing reinforced concrete flat slab or girderless floor systems,” Cement Age noted,
“…there is little agreement among designers of this type of construction in determining the thickness and reinforcement of flat lab floors. Therefore, the ruling drawn up by the Chicago Building Department should prove both rational and simple, since it is the result of nearly four years’ study and testing.”[iv]
Typical early-20th-century concrete construction in Chicago: the Moser Paper Co. Bldg., Plymouth Ct. The Construction News, Nov. 27, 1909.
While reliant on rules of thumb instead of mathematical analysis, the code gave builders and engineers confidence in the material; 1911-12 saw half a dozen major warehouse, manufacturing, and office structures built concrete in Chicago. “Never before in the city’s history,” reported the journal Concrete, “have cement and crushed stone played so prominent a part in building construction.” Among these were the Sharples Cream Separator Building, designed for 225 psf loads, the Rand-McNally Building, which reached a height of ten stories, and the Dwight Paper Co., another ten-story structure that rose at a record rate of one floor per week.[v] Laboratory research at Purdue and Illinois was supplemented by extraordinary static and dynamic testing supervised by Talbot and others on the Western Newspaper Union Building. This 1910 nine-story concrete structure was demolished in 1917 as part of the city’s Union Station project, and it served as a test bed for developing theories and rules of thumb for concrete engineering. The structure’s floor slabs withstood over 900 psf loads, suggesting that the city’s codes and engineering practices were overly conservative.[vi]
Flat slab construction saw a natural market in residential high rises in the 1910s and 1920s as advances in reinforcement allowed thinner structural depths than steel construction, maximizing the number of floors possible within a given height. The original Edgewater Beach Hotel, built to designs by Marshall and Fox in 1917, used dense reinforcement mats to resist punching shear, eliminating the mushroom capitals and drop panels of typical industrial construction.[vii] Similar reinforcing was used in the all-concrete Bournique Apartments on Goethe St. in 1916.[viii] Concrete became standard for Chicago’s high-rise residential construction, such as the 22-story Powhatan and Narragansett Apartments (both 1929) as its malleability allowed designers to take advantage of the city’s post-1922 setback code while providing reliable fire separation between floors. Its durable, inexpensive construction made it ideal for the city’s public housing projects, beginning with the low-rise Ida B. Wells Homes in 1939 and extending upward into the Chicago Housing Authority’s early high-rise projects, in particular, the Dearborn Homes (1949-50) and Loomis and Ogden Courts (1951, 1953). Mies van der Rohe’s Promontory Apartments (with PACE and Holsman, Holsman, Kleklamp, and Taylor, 1949) featured exposed concrete columns and slabs, suggesting that the material had aesthetic possibilities alongside its affordability and fire resistance.
Promontory Apartments, Hyde Park. Mies van der Rohe; Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp, and Taylor, and PACE Associates, 1949.
Marina City
Engineer Henry Miller and architect Milton Schwartz set a record for tall concrete construction with the 40-story Executive House Hotel on Wacker Drive in 1958. Executive House relied on two-foot-thick shear walls of heavily reinforced concrete around its elevator core for stability, but these were hidden behind a slick, stainless steel and glass exterior. More dramatic structural performance and architectural expression came with the 60-story, 588’ tall twin towers of Marina City, built across the River from the Executive House beginning in 1959. Designed by visionary Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg, Marina City catalyzed advanced concrete construction in Chicago even as it set new urban development and architectural design standards. Goldberg’s design called for cylindrical shafts of apartments that would open outward toward views of the city and the Chicago River with curving, cantilevered balconies. The structure, based on stiff central cores surrounded by rings of columns, all connected with moment-framed girders, was engineered by a team including Frank Kornacker, Bertold Weinberg, and Fred Severud from New York City. Goldberg’s relentlessly circular geometry expanded into three dimensions and produced doubly-curved forms that would have required extensive skilled carpentry. Further issues arose with scheduling; traditional concrete construction would have pushed the schedule out to three or more years, while financing requirements made it necessary to begin renting in 1962.
Marina City under construction, showing fiberglass formwork and slip-form core construction. (Chicago History Museum).
McHugh Construction, a local firm founded by bricklayer James McHugh at the turn of the century, had developed concrete expertise through winning bids on Chicago Housing Authority projects throughout the 1950s. By 1960, they had established a reputation for reliable concrete work that supported their successful bid on Marina City. McHugh developed innovative solutions to form Goldberg’s complex, curving shapes and meet the aggressive construction schedule, developing fiberglass formwork that could be mass-produced and used up to 60 times apiece.[ix] They also proposed using the cores as the bases for self-climbing Linden cranes, which could rotate 360° and hoist up to 8,000 pounds—about two cubic yards of concrete—from ground locations up to 90’ distant. McHugh matched the speed of the Linden equipment with an extraordinary coordination of concrete delivery and placement. Ironworkers assembled reinforcement panels on the ground, relying on the Linden’s capacity to lift them, fully assembled, into place. The fiberglass forms were staged to allow them to ‘jump’ three stories above as concrete came to strength. With these advances, McHugh averaged a new floor every two days.[x] Concrete surfaces were left as-struck and painted; the smooth finish imparted by the fiberglass required no additional work, and exposed concrete became a signature element in the building’s space-age aesthetic.[xi] McHugh would go on to use fiberglass formwork in sculpturally rich concrete apartment towers such as 2020 Lincoln Park West (1971) and in “rib-cage” high-rises including Eugenie Square in Lincoln Park (1972); rigid concrete tubes of closely-spaced concrete mullion-columns formed by steel jump forms that matched Marina City’s record for floor construction.
Eugenie Square, Lincoln Park. Dubin, Dubin, Black, and Moutoussamy, 1972.
[i] “Building: Concrete and Artificial Stone in Chicago.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 6, 1876. 10 and “Chicago Manufactures.” The Lumberman’s Gazette, vol. 3, no. 5, 1873, pp. 145.
[ii] Ernest L. Ransome and Alexis Saurbrey. Reinforced Concrete Buildings. (New York [etc.]: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1912). Chapter 1, “Personal Reminiscences,” 1-18.
[iii] “Two Model Business Structures Now Being Erected in Chicago.” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 18, 1909. I18.
[v] “Many New Chicago Buildings of Concrete.” Concrete; Feb 1, 1912; vol. 12, no. 2. 27..
[vi] “Unusual Test of Flat-Slab Floor.” The American Architect, Nov. 28, 1917. Vol. 112, no. 2188. 393.
[vii] “The Edgewater Beach Hotel, Chicago, Il.” The American Architect, Sept. 26, 1917. Vol. 112, no. 2179.. 233.
[viii] “New Wrinkle in Building: Radical Departure From Usual Construction Methods Contemplated in Bournique Apartments.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 19, 1916. 19.
[ix] Richard J. Kirby, “Fiberglas Forms—A Progress Report.” Concrete Construction, July 1, 1962.
[x] “Huge Project Overlooks Chicago River: Compared to Sunflower Climbing Cranes Used.” The Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 2, 1962. 10.
[xi] James M. Liston, “Amazing Marina City.” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 182, no. 4. April, 1963. 82-85, 194.
University Towers, NYC. I.M. Pei. 1966-1967. JSTOR
Happy to announce that after a couple of years of great conversations, deep dives into obscure 1920s issues of Cement Age, and ace model-making by a student team here, The Modern Concrete Skyscraperis opening this week at the Skyscraper Museum in New York. Carol Willis, the Museum’s Director and Founder, approached me about helping to curate an exhibition that would be a ‘gentle corrective’ to the idea that the skyscraper’s evolution was primarily a steel story. “”Steel is a chapter, but it’s not the whole story” is the consistent theme throughout. What we’ve heard from engineers, architects, historians, and what we’ve seen in the historical record presents a much more nuanced and interesting story, where the two materials often worked in concert, often in competition, as skyscraper heights rose throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
The exhibition looks at the history of concrete–one could argue that the first concrete ‘skyscrapers’ were the Roman insulae, apartment blocks that rose at least five and possibly as high as seven stories–and how the drive for greater height, safety, and efficiency led builders and designers to experiment with concrete as a more fireproof replacement for steel. Over time, research and development also made it competitive in terms of spatial efficiency and speed of construction. Today, the world’s tallest towers and construction sites are concrete, not steel, and the material’s emergence as the system of choice for supertalls is the result of a century of painstaking chemical, structural, and fabricational developments. “The rise of reinforced concrete skyscrapers evolved in several stages and from many influences,” Carol’s summary notes,
“…including architectural aspirations, engineering innovations, advances in the strength of materials and efficiencies in building construction, wind engineering, and computer-assisted design. While most of those changes were hidden from view behind sleek curtain walls or Postmodern ornament, the exhibition exposes the material concept and process in multiple structural models, construction views, and videos.”
However, this history hasn’t been adequately documented or presented previously. Carol asked questions throughout the project that seemed simple–how did flat plate construction become the global standard for residential construction as early as the 1920s, for instance, or why did composite construction–concrete cores with steel framing–become the norm for mid-sized office towers beginning in the late 1980s? The answers to these proved to be complicated but enlightening. Subsequent research uncovered some new stories, found some new heroes, and suggested a handful of buildings that should be in the skyscraper ‘canon’ but have so far been underappreciated by historians of construction and architecture alike.
1000 Lake Shore Plaza, Chicago, IL. Sidney Morris/William Schmidt, 1963-1965).
The exhibition includes models of key buildings–some from the firms that designed them, others newly built by UIUC architecture students–as well as photographs, both new and historical, and diagrams that show the progression of height and technology from the 1905 Ingalls Building in Cincinnati at 16 stories and 210′–what I now think of as a steel framed tower re-imagined in concrete–to the 163-story, 2722′ tall Burj Khalifa, which SOM structural engineer emeritus Bill Baker, has described as a tower “cantilevered out from the crust of the earth.” “The strength and moldability of “liquid stone” into any form,” as the press release for the exhibit notes, “
“…has enabled bold experiments in forms, inside and out, as can be seen in the dramatic voids of the atriums of the architecture of John Portman, the open core of SOM’s Jin Mao tower in Shanghai, or Zaha Hadid’s 1000 Museum in Miami. Another advantage of high-strength concrete is the stiffness it affords for extremely slender buildings such as the “pencil towers” of Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row, including 432 Park Avenue, a model of which is featured in the show.”
All of this is supplemented by eleven online lectures that have taken place throughout the exhibition’s conception and creation with engineers, architects, critics, and historians who have helped shape the narrative–these are all available online here. They form an outstanding companion to the show now open at the Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park City.
The Skyscraper Museum General Information
Location: 39 Battery Place, Battery Park City, New York, 10280
Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm
Admission is FREE, but timed tickets are recommended
Guided gallery tours are available for groups by appointment booking on Tuesday from 10:15am-5pm and on Wednesday-Friday from 10:15am-12pm.
For directions and more information, visit skyscraper.org. For questions, email info@skyscraper.org or call 212-945-6324.
For image inquiries, please contact Daniel J Borrero at Borrero@skyscraper.org or call 212-945-6324. For exhibition & press inquiries, please contact Carol Willis at Caw3@columbia.edu.
CBS Tower, NYC. Eero Saarinen/Paul Weidlinger, 1965. (Image courtesy Eero Saarinen Collection (MS 593). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library).
(A version of this appears in Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986. Dusting thisoff as Kluczynski Building has–supposedly–been on the list of federal properties the current administration is looking to sell). (Update—Or not).
Everett McKinley Dirksen Building, John C. Kluczynski Building, and United States Post Office (Chicago Federal Center Architects, a joint venture of Schmidt Garden & Erickson, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, C.F. Murphy Associates and A. Epstein & Son, 1958-1974).
The first of the city’s postwar civic monuments to be announced would take the longest to realize, outliving its key architect and leaving a block-wide hole in the Loop for much of the decade. The need for new federal offices in Chicago was acute. Plagued by cost and schedule overruns, Henry Ives Cobb’s 1905 Federal Building and Post Office was obsolete when it opened. Burnham and Bennett suggested its replacement just four years later, calling it “already inadequate” and proposing “a building exclusively for that one purpose…the dignity and the business of the United States courts.”[i] The Post Office moved to its Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White building west of the River in 1932, but the Cobb building’s clumsy, cross-axial plan remained crowded and inefficient even as just a courthouse. Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen and Representative Sidney Yates sponsored legislation to build new government buildings nationwide in 1957, and in December 195,8 the General Services Administration announced a $98 million Federal complex for Chicago.[ii]
“Government Center,” Fort Dearborn Project, 1958. View looking east from State Street. (Chicago Public Library, Municipal Collection).
Where such a massive investment would go was controversial. The Central Area Plan, released just four months earlier, suggested a new Federal Center along the River, between Dearborn and LaSalle—a gentle nod toward Rubloff’s Fort Dearborn vision. Daley and Ira Bach hoped to anchor the North Loop as a political center, rejuvenating this run-down part of downtown. The Central Area Committee, however, sought to anchor the South Loop with this captive population, seeing it as a buffer to South Side ‘blight’ and predicting that several thousand government employees would support retail development south on State Street. Holman Pettibone made the case that a federal presence there would also spur development along Congress, supporting two other Plan elements—a new University of Illinois Campus, planned for a large tract of railroad land just southwest of the South Loop site, and the consolidated railway terminal being planned a few blocks west on Jackson.
The GSA disappointed both sides in January 1959 by selecting the southern site, but only for one phase of the overall project: a 1,300,000 square foot building containing new courtrooms and half its required office space, to be combined on the half-block east of the existing courthouse. According to administrator Franklin Floete, this would allow the existing courthouse to remain open while the new structure was completed, but where the remaining office space would be built was still uncertain. Floete suggested that it could be built in a second phase on the site of the Cobb building or elsewhere in the Loop if the GSA could get a good price for that building’s site.[iii] For the moment, however, plans for the combined courthouse and office building would be a “five story base, with…twin towers rising above that level.” The GSA solicited bids from architects to develop the idea further in April 1959.[iv]
Everett McKinley Dirksen Building (Chicago Federal Center Architects, 1959-64). Architectural Record, March 1965.
Charles Genther of PACE convinced Mies to present their joint qualifications. Mies had rarely entered competitions, but 1959 was a turning point. He had retired as Director of the Department of Architecture at IIT in September 1958, forced out after 21 years by internal politics. Herbert Greenwald had died in February, leaving the office without its primary client, and his daughter, Waltraut, who had moved to Chicago to be with him, was ill with cancer and would die that November.[v] With neither the IIT’s Director’s salary to bolster it nor the steady income from Greenwald’s projects, his office shrank. Yet he enjoyed global acclaim after the Seagram’s opening, traveling to Europe in Spring 1959 to receive honors and awards in England and Germany. At 72, he could well have closed his office and enjoyed a comfortable retirement, but word came on this trip that the GSA had selected him as part of a carefully picked architectural team. PACE, however, wasn’t included. Instead, the GSA asked Mies to collaborate with Schmidt, Garden, Erickson, C.F. Murphy, and A. Epstein & Sons. PACE had hedged its bets, secretly submitting an independent bid, an ethical lapse that Mies felt left him free to take the project without them; the two firms would not work together again. The GSA announced the team in May 1959, along with word that the second phase would, in fact, be built on the site of the old courthouse.[vi]
Mies’ office team for the project included Gene Summers, Bruno Conterato, and Joseph Fujikawa. They presented three schemes to the GSA: one combining the two phases into a single, 56-story tower containing offices and courtrooms, a second for a 30-story courthouse and office tower on the eastern site and a taller block to be built later on the full block opposite, and a third, variant of the two-building scheme that split the remaining office program into two blocks, symmetrically disposed and framing the first structure. Mies and his team preferred the first scheme for the full-block plaza it allowed, but realized it presented intractable problems. Not only could it not be phased as the GSA planned, it would have been among the tallest buildings in the Loop—monumental, for sure, but overbearing for government agencies wanting to seem approachable. GSA’s advisers picked the second scheme of two tall buildings fronting an asymmetrical plaza instead.
With the new courthouse forming a wall along Dearborn, Mies concluded that the second phase should be taller, terminating the plaza to the south and concealing the eclectic row of buildings opposite Jackson Street, which included the Monadnock and Mundie and Jensen’s beaux-arts 1926 Union League Club. On the other hand, the plaza’s north side would open toward Holabird and Roche’s 1895 Marquette building. The final structure, a low, clear-span post office, would take up the western 2/3 of the full block, adding a final edge to the plaza and forming a horizontal foil to the two vertical structures. Mies paid particular attention to the three elements’ proportions: the post office was square in plan, the courthouse almost square in elevation—383 feet tall (357 feet from the top of its colonnade) by 368 feet wide—and the second phase’s elevation just taller than a double square—547 feet by 228 feet.[vii]
EEverett McKinley Dirksen Building (Chicago Federal Center Architects, 1959-64). Typical floor plan (drawing based on plans printed in Architectural Record, March, 1965).
Mies’s team developed the courthouse block through 1960 in a split-core arrangement, with double-height courtrooms on the building’s upper levels filling in as low-rise elevators dropped off at the 16th floor. The building was planned around 28-foot structural bays of steel columns and girders, each divided into a 6 x 6 grid of 4’-8” modules. Courtrooms and cores were concentrated toward the floor plates’ centers, with private corridors for judges and jurors along the east façade and public corridors overlooking Dearborn. Prisoner circulation and holding cells were contained in the cores, with elevators connecting to a secure garage in the basement. The split cores framed the axis of Quincy Street through the glass lobby at street level, a grand space rendered in flame-finished granite, stainless steel, and a white plaster ceiling—the 860-880 lobby scheme expanded to city scale.[viii]
Summers sketched cladding options that telegraphed these double-height courtrooms onto the broad Dearborn Street elevation, but Mies overruled this expressive approach. Instead, the curtain walls continued the evolution of the 860-880 system, with floor-to-ceiling glass framed in aluminum and stiffened by exterior I-beam shapes. By 1960, steel curtain walls had been superseded by aluminum; Mies, however, insisted that steel frames should be rendered in like material.
Everett McKinley Dirksen Building (Chicago Federal Center Architects, 1959-64). Curtain wall detail.
Two steel channels form each mullion’s chassis, with square bars welded to either side framing aluminum stops that hold single sheets of plate glass. A standard W8 shape welded to the main chassis provides vertical articulation, while floor and ceiling finishes were detailed to align with window tops and bottoms. The system is punctuated by narrow shadowgaps surrounding each window frame, highlighting their infill nature and the change between aluminum mullion and steel support. The resulting façade shows Mies’ preference for steel’s continuity and texture over the gap-detailed aluminum cladding on Esplanade and Commonwealth, clarified with shadowgaps that would see further evolution at the Home Federal building in Des Moines (1960-63) and the Toronto Dominion Center (1965). Construction, by Paschen Contractors, began in 1962 and proceeded quickly, enabled by the design’s standardized details. The enclosure was finished a month ahead of schedule, and the building was dedicated in October 1964.
Everett McKinley Dirksen Building (Chicago Federal Center Architects, 1959-64). Photograph in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-DIG-highsm-45043
The same architectural and engineering team was awarded contracts for the second tower and post office in August 1963. Paschen began demolishing Cobb’s courthouse in January 1965, and the GSA accepted the team’s detailed designs for the post office and office building the next month.[ix] Paschen, now in a joint venture with Gust Newberg, finished the substructure in late 1966, at which point Congress, facing rising labor costs and funding an increasingly dire war in Vietnam, slashed the federal building budget, halting work. For three and a half years, the site sat vacant, the roof of the substructure serving as a parking lot.[x] U.S. Representative John Kluczynski, a Chicago Democrat, led a charge in 1969 to resume work on the building, but the Nixon administration held contracts until 1971.[xi] Detailed with the same steel and aluminum cladding system as the courthouse, the office building and post office were completed in October 1975, graced by the red steel “Flamingo,” by Alexander Calder.[xii]
The Federal Center’s construction outlasted its primary architect and two political champions. Everett Dirksen died weeks after Mies, in September 1969. Senate Republicans voted to name the entire complex for him, but Democrats objected, suggesting that the two tall buildings should be bipartisan. The Everett McKinley Courthouse was dedicated in May 1970, and the office building was nearly named for Illinois’ “fighting liberal,” Senator Paul Douglas, who had lost to Republican Charles Percy in 1967. Illinois’ House delegation argued that they should be represented as well as Senators, though, and after Kluczynski died in March 1974, Congress agreed that the newer building should bear his name.
[i] Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, Plan of Chicago. (rep. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993. 117.
[ii] “Site Selection for New U.S. Buildings Near.” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 10, 1958. B4.
[iii] “Federal Building Site Picked.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 7, 1959. 1.
[iv] “U. S. Acquires Loop Site For Courthouse.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr. 1, 1959. 1-c11.
Any University of Illinois School of Architecture graduate will recognize the name Nathan Clifford Ricker. Our library and two school publications are named for him. We’ll waste no opportunity to point out that he was the first American to receive a home-grown architectural degree—in 1873. He designed several key buildings on the Urbana-Champaign campus, in addition to his own home nearby, and he stayed on as a faculty member (1916), director of the nascent architecture program (1910), and general guiding spirit until 1922. The School’s reputation for turning out technically-fluent graduates was primarily due to his vision of a program emphasizing building construction, bucking the national trend toward education inspired by the compositional theories and tropes of the French Beaux-Arts. “Shop Practice,” a hands-on introductory course requiring students to draft and fabricate elements in wood and metal shops, set the early School’s high bar for practical, real-world knowledge and know-how.
Image of the Fair Building under construction, one of many contemporary journal illustrations reprinted by Ricker in The Elements of Construction.
Ricker also compiled a comprehensive textbook on building technology of all sorts for use in his classes here, based on his practice and his diligent reading of seemingly every journal or book that came out on the subject (among other things, Ricker translated and published excerpts from Viollet-le-Duc during his career). The two volumes of his Elements of Construction were constantly updated; master copies were typed onto vellum. New students ‘printed’ their copies using sunlight and blueprint paper, an agile process that allowed Ricker to slip in new pages as new technologies came online.
The Elements of Construction must have been profoundly influential—Illinois’ students would have taken their copies with them to offices in Chicago and throughout the Midwest. However, the fragile nature of blueprint paper also meant that the copies would have disintegrated, making it an ephemeral book at best.
Newton A. Wells, Portrait of N. Clifford Ricker, 1917, etching, 7 x 6 in. (17.8 x 15.2 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chicago Society of Etchers, 1935.13.379
Until now. My colleague here at Illinois, Marci S. Uihlein, has just published the result of her painstaking research into and reconstruction of Ricker’s book from original blueprints in the School’s archives. The Elements of Construction: N. Clifford Ricker, Architecture, and the University of Illinois makes the convincing case that Ricker and his textbook deserve to be seen alongside the most important authors on building technology of the era—J.K. Freitag and William Birkmire. Freitag and Birkmire published vital books on skyscraper design that Elements echoes and enhances. Since Ricker was writing for students who would go on to design many different building types, his book is broader in scope, covering stonework and masonry in addition to iron and steel. It’s a holistic work that addresses skyscraper technology in the wider context of architectural engineering in general.
This new book reproduces four complete chapters of Ricker’s Elements of Construction: Foundations; Stone Masonry; Bricks, Tiles, and Terra Cotta; and Iron and Steel Construction. It includes original and reconstructed illustrations from Ricker’s vellums and framing essays by Construction History scholars, including Don Friedman, Tom Peters, Rachel Will, and myself, that put Ricker’s text and pedagogy in context. The result is a richly detailed overview of architectural technologies and construction in the late 19th and early 20th century—but also of the unique pedagogy that went hand-in-hand with the innovation happening in Chicago, especially, at the time. It’s also a good read for alumni of the School and anyone interested in the era’s building culture.
Construction of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in December, 1933. (Architect of the Capitol).
(Update: The New York Times weighs in on some of this here today).
Greenough’s argument against “the adoption of admired forms and models for purposes not contemplated in their invention,” particularly the use of classical architecture for modern programs, found a resonant application nearly a century after his death when the Maison Carree was once again the model for a monumental government structure.
The Supreme Court building was a pet project of Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft. Long housed within the Old Senate Chamber in the U.S. Capitol, the Court, Taft believed, needed its own monumental presence signifying its coequal nature as one of three branches of government. There was general agreement that it deserved a presence in Washington to balance that of the legislative Capitol and executive White House. Still, Taft injected a personal agenda into the design. He believed that the Court needed surroundings emphasizing the “purity, eternity, and the majesty of law” rather than the casual surroundings of its temporary homes, which encouraged casual deliberation.[1]
Taft engineered the appointment of Cass Gilbert to the project in 1926. Gilbert had distinguished himself as a first-rate classicist, adopting the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica to the Minnesota State House in 1896-1905 and the Trevi Fountain to the facade of the U.S. Custom House on Lower Broadway in New York in 1901-1907. He also designed the world’s tallest building at the time, the Woolworth in New York (1910-1913). Gilbert ran in elite circles and came to espouse nationalist, even exceptionalist, politics.[2] He had supported Taft in his doomed bid for a second term as U.S. President, campaigning against his opponents-Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican Theodore Roosevelt–as “radical socialist-pacifists.” During WWI, however, he became an isolationist, eventually opposing U.S. involvement, and his conservatism intensified. As Blodgett recounts, he courted Mussolini, paying il Duce a fawning visit during the 1920s and deepening his belief that Roman architecture, in particular, carried with it a moral force very much in line with his hardening politics. Speaking to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1930, he railed against modern architecture and called for a wholesale return to classical models:
“There are paths that lead back to barbarism and it is among the functions of this Academy to . . . guide public taste toward the paths that lead to the higher realms of Arts and Letters and warn them against perversion.”[3]
Taft concurred, pushing for Gilbert’s appointment even as the Depression took hold. He recognized that the expense would be enormous but insisted on the marble and stonework that would produce an authentic (if steel-framed) classical building. For his part, Gilbert created a recognizable homage to Jefferson’s State Capitol and, thus, to the Maison Carree. Gilbert echoed Greenough in recognizing that the building would have to be both monumental and functional:
“[I]t must, so far as possible, have all the beauty, charm and dignity of the Lincoln Memorial, and all the practical qualities of a first-rate office building – a combination rather difficult to achieve, but nevertheless possible.”
But the design he produced for Taft in 1929 showed that he fell on the side of monumental expression rather than Greenough’s proto-modern call for a more functional articulation:
Both Taft and Gilbert died before the building was completed, but the end product brilliantly illustrated one pole of Greenough’s formula: a sublime, overpowering image of authority that cloaked its complex functions behind a symbol of ancient power and authority. As Robert Post noted, the religious overtones of the temple front were matched by the ritualistic nature of the inner sanctum:
“The Old Senate Chamber had exuded a distinctly different flavor. It was infused with an “easy informality.” Justices “often strolled through the public halls, and the procession from the robing room to the courtroom proper was a twice-daily spectacle which tourists always tried to see.” In the Court’s new home, by contrast, Gilbert deliberately screened off from public view the justices’ quarters, entries, and exits. The justices became visible to “the public gaze” only when they magically appeared from behind red curtains to take their seats on the bench, fully robed. In the new courthouse, law became spectacle, detached from ordinary human interaction. Gilbert’s building symbolized an ideal of judicial office that stressed formality, abstraction, and authority. In such a setting, the pronouncements of a judge are no longer a communal project. They are instead disinterested words from above or beyond.”[4]
Speeches at the building’s cornerstone ceremony made this explicit. Guy A. Thompson, then president of the American Bar Association, called it “a monument to justice…justice that is the final attribute of God himself…. This will be her temple. Here her shrine will be. Here she shall abide.”[5]
Not all of the Court’s residents approved. More liberal justices found it pretentious and oppressive. At the cornerstone ceremony, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said that the Court’s old, casual chambers would be “left with keen regret” and that it would “be a long time, indeed before this beautiful building can boast of the spiritual endowment which has blessed the old home.”[6] Louis Brandeis was more forceful; according to one of his clerks, he “detested” that it represented “everything ‘Roman’ about Washington.”[7] Brandeis preferred the “Greek” vision of the polis and missed the informal scale of the Court’s former home; for him, the Court building should have emphasized the empowerment, rather than the submission, of the populace. The choice of a building from Imperial Rome, rather than Republican—constructed, in part, as a statement of the empire’s conquering power over the native inhabitants of southern France—was for Brandeis a clear statement of power over reason or, in Greenough’s phrase, an “appropriation…displaying only wealth” instead of a “sure product of adaptation, character, and expression,” the formulation that Greenough argued would be uniquely American.
As if to make the point, Gilbert specified Vermont and Georgia marble for the Court’s exterior, albeit as a veneer applied to a steel frame. However, when it came to columns in the Court’s chambers, he felt American stone would not suffice and insisted on Italian marble from quarries in Siena. This, alone, seems an odd choice for an ardent nationalist. The lengths Gilbert went to obtain that marble are even more striking; in 1933, Gilbert again traveled to Rome and met personally with Mussolini to procure the stone he desired.
Much of federal architecture since Gilbert’s imperial court building has aimed at functional expression, with mixed results. Marcel Breuer’s HUD Building (1968) is arguably a “sure product” of its program–a functional home for a bureaucracy. Neither as iconic nor monumental as the Supreme Court, it–and other functionally expressive structures–have gained appreciation in recent years by admirers of “brutalism” and other modernist approaches. Greenough would have far preferred the robust honesty of Breuer’s facade to Gilbert’s pomposity. And H.H. Richardson’s aggressively detailed stone facades, willingness to work with asymmetry when called for by a program, and commitment to ornamental development of constructive and functional necessities might–possibly–mark him out as a proto-brutalist in the most American sense.
There are, however, examples of modern court buildings that pair frank statements of process and bureaucracy with genuine civic monumentality. Just blocks apart, Chicago boasts two of them in Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Center (1961-74) and the Richard J. Daley Civic Center (1961-67). Nothing could speak more to the repetitive, even numbing processes that dominate actual courthouse business than the Federal Center’s relentless staccato facades. Still, the composition of those around a finely scaled plaza that invites public activities ranging from farmers’ markets to vocal protests is a precise architectural framing of the courthouse’s dual nature. There’s a great anecdote from its design involving early schemes that would have telegraphed the position of the double-height courtrooms within the building. Greenough would undoubtedly have approved of this, but Mies insisted on carrying the same cladding pattern across the entire façade, leaving the monumental expression in the plaza itself.[8] The Daley Center is more expressive; its 96’ spans, designed to accommodate column-free courtrooms, are exceptional examples of a structural function creating a monumental effect without recourse to traditional style or ornament. Like at the Federal Center, the plaza in front became the city’s principal place of civic celebration, protest, and commemoration from its opening.
Federal Center, Chicago, IL. Mies van der Rohe et al., 1961-64. Chicago Civic Center [Richard J. Daley Center] during Vietnam War protest, 1969. Associated Press.
One other thing to note. The Virginia State Capitol and the Supreme Court were constructed during periods of profound national anxiety; Jefferson designed amidst the early rumblings of American independence–1785-1788. One can understand being keen to build something “permanent and timeless.” Similarly, Gilbert and Taft both saw “bolshevism” and socialism as real threats to their vision of America; the fact that the marble temple was built in the depths of the most significant economic depression the country had seen adds context to their anxious aesthetic conservatism. In contrast, Richardson’s greatest civic works came in the 1880s, an era of rapid economic expansion and relative security; Washington’s modernist government buildings and the two Chicago examples were built in the 1950s and 1960s, maybe the most optimistic era the country has seen. The confidence of those decades is reflected by Greenough’s prescription for having the architectural conviction to ‘speak plainly’ about the functional and material ‘stuff’ that we have to work with. How we make an “American Architecture” has always been caught between these two poles.
[1] Post, Robert C. “Creating a New Supreme Court Building.” The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 550–594.
[2] See Blodgett, Geoffrey. “Cass Gilbert, Architect: Conservative at Bay.” The Journal of American History 72, no. 3 (1985): 615–36.
[5] Quoted in Keeffe, Arthur John. “The Marble Palace at 50.” American Bar Association Journal, vol. 68, no. 10, 1982. 1224–29.
[6] “Corner Stone Laid at Supreme Court.” The Washington Post (1923-1954), Oct 14, 1932. 3.
[7] David Riesman, quoted in Blodgett, op. cit., 634
[8] Famously, the trial of the Chicago Seven took place in the Dirksen Courthouse, where Judge Hoffman scolded attorney William Kunstler for casually leaning on the petitioner’s lectern: “You know, Mr. Mies van der Rohe designed that lectern for the use of counsel and I wish you would stay behind it, sir.” The Beaux-Arts “courthouse” used for the 2020 film, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, was actually Newark, New Jersey’s City Hall.
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