CHAPTER 14 - Notes
[295]. See Note [[97]], Chapter [5].
[296]. Somewhat fuller accounts of English commercial architecture in this period will be found in Hitchcock, ‘Victorian Monuments of Commerce’, Architectural Review, CV (1949), 61-74, and in Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture, Chapters XI and XII. Most of the English buildings mentioned in this chapter are illustrated either in the book or the article.
[297]. See Weisman, W., ‘Commercial Palaces of New York’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XXXVI (1954), 285-302.
[298]. See Bogardus, J., Cast Iron Buildings: Construction and Advantages, New York, 1856.
[299]. See Hitchcock, H.-R., ‘Early Cast Iron Façades’, Architectural Review, CIX (1951), 113-16.
[300]. See Weisman, W., ‘Philadelphia Functionalism and Sullivan’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XX (1961), 3-19.
[301]. See Sturges, W. K., ‘Cast Iron in New York’, Architectural Review, CXIV (1953), 233-8.
[302]. See Peterson, C., ‘Ante-bellum Skyscraper’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, IX (1950), 27-9; X (1951), 25. The Jayne Building, begun by Johnston, was completed by Thomas U. Walter. It has unfortunately been demolished since 1958.
[303]. See Woodward, G., ‘Oriel Chambers’, Architectural Review, CXIX (1956), 268-70. Fine measured drawings by students of the University of Liverpool School of Architecture were published in Architectural History, II (1959), 81-94.
[304]. See Note [[277]], Chapter [13].
[305]. See Weisman, W., ‘New York and the Problem of the First Skyscraper’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XII (1953), 13-20. For a rather different opinion, see Webster, J. C., ‘The Skyscraper: Logical and Historical Considerations’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XVIII (1959), 126-39.
[306]. It is worth noting that neither cast-iron façades nor the vertical articulation of the Philadelphia buildings of the fifties was used in either case. Both developments of the mid century proved cul-de-sacs since the New York architects followed the established modes of the sixties for monumental buildings in these first two skyscrapers. In the same years 1873-4, however, Hunt did build the five-storey edifice at 478-482 Broadway in New York with an all cast-iron front, employing a sort of attenuated ‘giant order’ subsuming the three middle storeys.
[307]. Giedion first called attention to the importance of ‘balloon-frame’ construction in Space, Time and Architecture in 1941; but see Field, W., ‘A Re-examination into the Invention of the Balloon Frame’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, II (1942), 3-29.
[308]. See Randall, G., The Great Fire of Chicago and its Causes, Chicago [1871].
[309]. See Hope, H., ‘Louis Sullivan’s Architectural Ornament’, Magazine of Art, XL (1947), 110-17. Sullivan thought of his early ornament as somehow ‘Egyptian’, but it is not very easy to see why. A later, so far unpublished study by Etel Kramer seems to establish, contrary to his own statements, that Sullivan owed a good deal to the theories of Owen Jones and that his ornament matured, earlier than has hitherto been supposed, in 1884-5.
[310]. This is not the same as the Revell Store.
[311]. Several more storeys were added later and appear in many of the published views.
[312]. One must say ‘metal’, because structural steel was only gradually replacing cast and wrought iron at this time; all these types of ferrous material were probably used in the Home Insurance, the Rookery, and other skyscrapers of the mid eighties. Two books by W. Birkmire, Architectural Iron and Steel, New York, 1891, and Skeleton Construction in Buildings, New York, 1893, best present the technical aspects of large-scale metal construction as it matured in the eighties and early nineties.
[313]. An American edition of this book appeared in 1880. See Note [[309]], supra.
[314]. I owe this suggestion to Vincent Scully.
[315]. Incidentally, the signature Frank L[loyd] Wright on the drawings for a rather Richardsonian group of three masonry houses in Chicago, designed in the Adler & Sullivan office in 1888 for Victor L. Falkenau, suggests that it was Sullivan’s brilliant draughtsman, as it was Jenney’s assistant on the Leiter Building, who was responsible for this example of overt Richardsonian influence.
[316]. The discovery by Condit that this building was begun in 1890 seemed to lend it a special importance, up until then unrecognized. But the text gives the correct dating.
[317]. It is so generally assumed that Sullivan’s mature style is without historical antecedents that the even more definitely quattrocento character of the entrance here, as well as of those of the Guaranty Building, is rarely noted.
[318]. The five southernmost bays are an addition made in 1906 by D. H. Burnham & Co. They follow, with some slight diminution in the bay-width, Sullivan’s original design.
The form of the Burnham firm’s name in these years is significant of the increasing anonymity of architectural practice in America as the scale of operation increased (see Chapter [24]).
[319]. See Purcell and Elmslie Architects (Walker Art Gallery Exhibition Catalogue), Minneapolis, 1953, and Gebhard, D., ‘Louis Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 62-8, and A Guide to the Existing Architecture of Purcell and Elmslie, Roswell, N. M., 1960.
[320]. Of more interest than the skyscraper is a smaller and earlier Singer Building, also by Flagg. Flagg was one American who retained contact with the French tradition of exposed metal construction as well as with the academic aspects of ‘Beaux Arts’ design as his first Singer Building illustrates.
[321]. See Schuyler, M., ‘The Work of N. LeBrun & Sons’, Architectural Record, XXVII (1910), 365-80. The Metropolitan Tower is, of course, the work of a firm not of a single architect; LeBrun himself had been dead for some years.
[322]. See Schuyler, M., ‘“The Towers of Manhattan” and Notes on the Woolworth Building’, Architectural Record, XXX (1913), 98-122.