Burnham & Root’s other significant skyscraper of this particular moment, the sixteen-storey Monadnock Building begun in 1891, the last tall Chicago building with bearing walls of brick, was and still remains more famous than the Reliance; doubtless it is also finer, although much mid-twentieth-century critical opinion has favoured the Sears, Roebuck Building of Jenney & Mundie and the Reliance because they are more advanced technically. The smooth shank of the Monadnock, varied only by the slight projection of the recurrent oriels, has a most subtle and elegant taper or reverse entasis. The final bending outward of the brickwork to provide a cove cornice unifies the whole formal concept with extraordinary effectiveness. Few large buildings have ever achieved such monumental force with such simple means. There is almost literally no detail of any sort, whether derivative or original.
Sullivan’s Wainwright Building of 1890-1 in St Louis, Missouri, in which he and Adler used ‘skyscraper construction’ for the first time, no longer dominates two- and three-storey neighbours as it did when newly built; thus the prominence that the relatively great height gave it in the city picture of the nineties can hardly be realized today. But Sullivan undoubtedly sought to emphasize what seemed to contemporaries, as they do not to posterity, its very tall proportions (Plate [118]). Continuous pilaster-like piers of brick, quite like those on his Troescher Building of 1884, clad the vertical elements of the steel skeleton, yet identical brick piers with no major structural members behind them also serve as intervening mullions. But at the base the wide windows of the ground storey and the mezzanine reveal the true width of the actual bays of the steel skeleton as the treatment of the shank of the building does not. The piers are considerably broader than most of those on the Sears, Roebuck Building; but they are also topped, like Mundie’s, with ornament that forms a sort of capital. Moreover, the attic storey above is quite hidden behind a deep band of the richest Sullivanian ornament elsewhere restricted, as on the Troescher Building, to the recessed spandrels. The ‘cornice’ above this frieze-like attic is merely a slab, but a much thicker one than that which caps the Reliance Building. Nothing of Richardson’s direct influence is left; but by now Sullivan had learned from the Field store the basic lessons of scale and order, applying them here in a visually sure but not particularly frank way to the new type of metal-skeleton construction. The plan is U-shaped, like those of the McKim, Mead & White buildings in Kansas City and Omaha, but the court is to the rear, so that the block appears unified from the surrounding streets.
In Sullivan’s next important work, the Schiller Building in Chicago of 1891-2, he adopted—exceptionally for him—a truly tower-like shape. Here the masonry piers that clad the structural steel stanchions are not doubled by identical mullions between; instead these piers are linked by arches below a sort of frieze. The ‘frieze’ is really a very ornately arcaded eaves-gallery, not a flat band as on the Wainwright Building, occupying a whole storey below the thick slab cornice.
Interchange of ideas was continuous in these years between the various Chicago architects’ offices, while the influence of the Academic Revival in the East, dominant in almost all the buildings at the World’s Fair of 1893 save Sullivan’s own Transportation Building, was still negligible in the commercial field. Thus Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building of 1893-4 in Chicago borrowed its rather clumsy ground storey and mezzanine, with a cavernously Richardsonian arched entrance, from Burnham’s Ashland Block of 1892 and its oriels from the Tacoma or possibly the Reliance Building. These oriels alternate with horizontal openings of the type known as ‘Chicago windows’ sharply cut through the smooth light-coloured terracotta of the wall plane. ‘Chicago windows’, with a wide fixed pane in the centre and narrower sashes that open on either side, were used by most Chicago architects in this decade and the next. A heavy moulded cornice, not just a thick slab, crowns the whole above a colonnaded eaves-gallery somewhat like the one at the top of the Auditorium tower.
What should probably be considered Sullivan’s masterpiece, the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, N.Y., followed in 1894-5 (Plate [119]). One of the most significant new themes in the design of this skyscraper, whose premonitory character can only be fully appreciated in relation to the use of pilotis in later modern architecture (see Chapter [22]), is already to be found in a project of Sullivan’s of the previous year for the St Louis Trust & Savings Bank. This is the treatment of the ground storey, where the terracotta sheathed piers were isolated from the wall plane by bending back the tops of the shop-windows. The piers are thus nearly free-standing and seem to lift the shaft of the building above them right off the ground. This allows circumambient space to penetrate under the main volume of the building. Thus the fact that the edifice is a hollow cage is very strongly suggested, and the wide shop-windows do not appear to undermine the walls above them as in so much commercial work of the nineteenth century.
There are several reasons, not intrinsic to Sullivan’s design, that explain why the Guaranty remains the most effective of all the early skyscrapers. Since downtown Buffalo has not filled up with buildings of equal or greater height in the way of downtown St Louis and the Chicago Loop, the Guaranty still rises high above most of its modest neighbours, in effect a tower as well as a slab, although actually of U-shaped plan like the Wainwright. In this city, moreover, which has in the last sixty years remained considerably cleaner than Chicago, the colour of the tawny terracotta sheathing has not been so much obscured by grime as on the Stock Exchange Building. These were happy local conditions that Sullivan could not foresee.
The plastic handling of the crown of the Guaranty was perhaps suggested to Sullivan by the effectiveness of the cove at the top of Burnham & Root’s Monadnock Building. Here the crowns of the arched façade bays—two to each structural bay, as the wide spacing of the piers at ground-storey level so clearly reveals—are related to the outward curve of the top of the wall below the terminal slab. The profuse and melodious curvilinear ornament, subsuming the round attic windows, echoes and complements the plastic theme. This is an example, rare even in Sullivan’s most mature work of the mid and late nineties, of the successful integration of architectonic and decorative effects. The treatment of the terracotta cladding throughout the exterior of the Guaranty, moreover, covered all over as it is with lacy geometrical ornament in very low relief, seems to lighten the whole. The cladding is read as a mere protective shell carried by the underlying steel structural members and not as solid brickwork like the piers of the Wainwright Building.
Just as the Wainwright Building may be contrasted on the one hand with the still greater solidity of the Monadnock Building—in that case justified by the bearing-wall construction—and on the other with the openness of the Reliance, so it is of interest to compare the Guaranty with two other big business buildings of 1895 by other Chicago architects. In the Ellicott Square Building, also in Buffalo, Burnham was strongly influenced by his close association with McKim at the World’s Fair. With the assistance of his designer Atwood, whose short life ended this same year, he adopted the elaborate Renaissance membering and the heavy masonry vocabulary of the New York skyscraper architects, although he retained the quadrangular plan and the glass-roofed central court of the Rookery. On the other hand, in Chicago Solon S. Beman (1853-1914) in the Studebaker (now Brunswick) Building came very close to providing an all-glass front, despite the profusion of Late Gothic frippery with which he detailed his very restricted terracotta cladding.
Adler had parted from Sullivan in 1895, but Sullivan’s career as a skyscraper builder continued for a few more years at a very high level. In his next skyscraper, the Condict Building in New York of 1897-9, he reduced very considerably the width of the mullions between the piers so that they became mere colonnettes, and even these are omitted in the first storey. But this highly logical differentiation between pier and mullion, related to the treatment of his Rothschild Store of 1880-1, still gets lost at the top in a flurry of ornamentation almost as turgid in its very different and almost quattrocento[[316]] way as the top of that very early façade. The treatment of the ground storey was originally like that of the Guaranty, but has been modified by later shop-fronts.
The next year Holabird & Roche built three contiguous buildings on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for Harold McCormick (Plate [120]). The two southerly ones are excellent examples of the work of the Chicago School; they are a little less extensively glazed than Beman’s Studebaker Building or Holabird & Roche’s own McClurg Building of 1899 but with crisp and simple, if quite conventional, moulded brick detail on the piers and rather plain cornices of wholly academic character. Standard Chicago windows are used throughout. The third façade on the north, that of the Gage Building at 18 South Michigan Avenue, while fronting a structure also by Holabird & Roche, is itself by Sullivan. A different arrangement of the windows, a bolder moulding of the terracotta cladding of the piers—there were no intervening mullions now, any more than on his Troescher Building of 1884—and a strategic spotting of the chicory-like ornament—as well as, originally, a rich picture-frame-like band around the ground-storey shop-window—produce an entirely different effect. This effect is no less expressive of the underlying structure, but it represents a fuller and subtler deployment of architectural resources than Holabird & Roche provided on the façades next door.