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 conversations are 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]

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. 

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]

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] 

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.]

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[i] Bertold E. Weinberg, M.ASCE, Resident Engineer, Bertrand Goldberg Associates, quoted in “Marina City.”  Civil Engineering, December, 1962.  64. 

[ii] Steve Prokopy, “Chicago’s Marina City.” Concrete Products, vol. 114, no. 1, 2011. 18-20.

[iii] “PCA Centennial Celebration Continues.” Concrete International, vol. 38, no. 8, 2016. 16-19.

[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.

[xiv] Asrow, op. cit., 45.

[xv] Paul James interview with the author, 25 Oct 2024.

[xvi] Both buildings have significant, unoccupied roof elements, including an 80’ steel spire on Two Prudential that is not counted here.

[xvii] “High Strength High Rise.”  Civil Engineering, March, 1988.  63-65.

(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.

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.

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[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.

[3] ibid., 629.

[4] Post, op. cit.,

[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.

Every four or eight years, the age-old question “in what style should we build” seems to enter political discourse; modernism (or in the current iteration, a straw-man “brutalism”) and classicism come to stand in for left vs. right in a way that seems to encapsulate arguments about individualism, tradition, beauty, and whatever else is the argument du jour.

To be clear: there is good classicism and good modernism. There is bad classicism and bad modernism. But looking under the hood at the moral argument–that, somehow, one of these two is genuinely bad for the national soul–leads to an interesting and, IMHO, vastly underrated moment in architectural theory.

Horatio Greenough was one of America’s most skilled and prolific classical sculptors in the 1830s and 1840s. Trained at Harvard and through extended study trips in Rome and Florence, his style was that of a sculptural philologist, looking to translate ancient precedents into modern subjects. His sculptors of Revolutionary War-era heroes, including Washington and Lafayette, stood in or around the United States Capitol for generations.

But when it came to architecture, Greenough was anything but a traditionalist. In his 1843 essay, “American Architecture,” he critiqued the nation’s architectural development to that point as a betrayal of the independent, enlightenment-based roots of the still-young country:

“The mind of this country has never been seriously applied to the subject of building. Intently engaged in matters of more pressing importance, we have been con tent to receive our notions of architecture as we have received the fashion of our garments, and the form of our entertainments, from Europe.”

For sculpture, looking to Europe was fine–making the case that our political roots lay in Greek and (Republican) Roman principles could be illustrated by, say, a sculpture of Washington in sandals and a toga. But architecture, Greenough thought, was fundamentally different. The purity of Greek temples lay in their essentially sculptural quality–they were primarily monuments, designed primarily to evoke spiritual and emotional reactions, not so much to house any sort of complex function. Attempting to adapt their simple, if articulate, forms to increasingly complex functions was, for Greenough, a mistake that had roots in the Roman world’s adoption of Greek styles to mismatched uses:

“If we trace architecture from its perfection, in the days of Pericles, to its manifest decay in the reign of Constantine, we shall find that one of the surest symptoms of decline was the adoption of admired forms and models for purposes not contemplated in their invention. The forum became a temple, the tribunal became a temple, the theatre was turned into a church; nay, the column, that organized member, that subordinate part, set up for itself, usurped unity, and was a monument!”

Greenough had in mind buildings like Jefferson’s Virginia State Capitol, based on the Roman temple at Nimes, France, which was, of course, already based on Greek precedents. The problem? Greek temples did not have the formal agility to reflect the more complicated functions of, say, a State Capitol (or, for that matter, a town bank). In trying to adopt forms to function, he wrote,

“…we have shorn them [Greek precedents] of their lateral colonnades, let them down from their dignified platform, pierced their walls for light, and, instead of the storied relief and the eloquent statue which enriched the frieze, and graced the pediment, we have made our chimney tops to peer over the broken profile, and tell by their rising smoke of the traffic and desecration of the interior.”

Greenough then extrapolated a broader program for American architecture from this complaint. Uniquely freed from what he saw as cultural constraints, he thought Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals would always be “strangers.” Worse, the speed with which America had to build and the lack of time and labor available to invest in the ornament and sculpture that articulated those monuments would always mean that our imitations would “depart from its original beauty and propriety as widely as the crippled gelding of a hackney coach differs from the bounding and neighing wild horse of the desert.”

Instead, Greenough proposed, American architects should look to more universal examples:

Let us consult nature, and in the assurance that she will disclose a mine, richer than was ever dreamed of by the Greeks, in art as well as in philosophy…. If, as the first step in our search after the great principles of construction, we but observe the skeletons and skins of animals, through all the varieties of beast and bird, of fish and insect, are we not as forcibly struck by their variety as by their beauty? There is no arbitrary law of proportion, no unbending model of form….

Greenough also suggested another analogy, that of the machine–particularly the most advanced machines being built at the time, symbols of American engineering and technology:

Observe a ship at sea! Mark the majestic form of her hull as she rushes through the water, observe the graceful bend of her body, the gentle transition from round to flat, the grasp of her. keel, the leap of her bows, the symmetry and rich tracery of her spars and rigging, and those grand wind muscles, her sails! Behold an organization second only to that of an animal, obedient as the horse, swift as the stag, and bearing the burden of a thousand camels from pole to pole!  What Academy of Design, what research of connoisseurship, what imitation of the Greeks produced this marvel of construction?

These two models–nature and the machine–were also touted by the great French theorist Viollet-le-Duc as ideal sources for the new principles necessary to develop authentic architecture in the face of industrial construction and materials.

Greenough anticipated so much in this essay–there are echoes of Darwin in his description of natural adaptation–sixteen years before Origin of Species–and he uses the phrase “organic” to describe not a metaphorical inspiration from nature (buildings that ‘look like’ plants or animals) but an analogical one: “formed to meet the wants of their occupants.” Most remarked upon has been Greenough’s anticipation of Louis Sullivan’s “form follows function.” There’s no doubt that Sullivan knew of Greenough’s writings, but the 1896 “Tall Building Artistically Considered” was primarily a visual argument–“proud and soaring things.” Greenough goes slightly further, agreeing with Viollet-le-Duc that all aspects of the design, from massing and arrangement to proportion and detail, should rigorously adhere to functional precepts. Sullivan, remember, was Beaux-Arts trained, and buildings like the Wainwright in St. Louis retain some of his preference for symmetry, rhythm, and classical proportion. Greenough thought more radical aesthetic potential lay in throwing out all of these compositional niceties and finding, instead, architectural meaning and beauty within the principles underlying building:

“…let us begin from. the heart as a nucleus and work outward.; The most convenient size and arrangement of the rooms that are to constitute the building being fixed, the access of the light that may, of the air that must, be wanted; being provided for, we have the skeleton of our building. Nay, we have all excepting the dress. The connexion and order of parts, juxtaposed for convenience, cannot fail to speak of their relation and uses. As a group of idlers on the quay, if they grasp a rope to haul a vessel to the pier, are: united in harmonious action by the cord they seize, as the slowly yielding mass: forms a thorough bass to their livelier movement, so the unflinching adaptation of a building to its position and use gives, as a sure product of that adaptation, character, and expression.”

What would that look like? The closest example I can find that’s remotely contemporary is the work of H.H. Richardson, whose “romanesque” style certainly recalls ancient precedent, but in spirit more than detail. The semi-circular arches and peaked roofs that characterize his designs don’t have the academic adherence to Roman forms that, say, Jefferson’s did; instead, Richardson developed compositions out of functional arrangements, and ornamental styles out of the techniques used to shape the sandstone and granite that were native to the New England region in which he practiced. The Crane Library in Quincy, MA., is a great example of this; the functional division of the building–entry, stacks, reading room, staircase–is clearly the basis of the building’s asymmetrical, very not-Roman composition:

Greenough concluded by arguing that a truly American architecture, a democratic one, would spring from this sort of plain-spokenness, a confidence that such honesty in massing, proportion, and detail would appeal to the particularly American common sense and that we, as a nation, would come to find beauty in functionality:

If this anatomic connexion and proportion has been attained in ships, in machines, and, in spite of false principles, in such buildings, as make a departure from it fatal, as in bridges and in scaffolding, why should we fear its immediate use in all construction? As its first result, the bank would have the physiognomy of a bank, the church would be recognized as such, nor would the billiard room and the chapel wear the same uniform of columns and pediment.

There was also a moral dimension to this argument. Dressing buildings up in styles and ornament that weren’t native or that were borrowed from another culture had the whiff of dishonesty to it, betraying (or, perhaps, instilling) a lack of character:

The monuments of Egypt and of Greece are sublime as expressions of their power and their feeling. The modern nation that appropriates them displays only wealth in so doing. The possession of means, not accompanied by the sense of propriety or feeling for the true, can do no more for a nation than it can do for an individual. The want of an illustrious ancestry may be compensated, fully compensated; but the purloining of the coat of arms of a defunct family, is intolerable.

That sense of unearned wealth hews nicely to the Protestant work ethic permeating much of early America–adopting the fancy ‘clothing’ of ancient models is an inheritance, not an achievement. Greenough closed with an appeal to another fundamentally American tenet, the right to express his opinion, and in so doing, he hinted that the Greek Revival architecture he was arguing against was unlikely to survive a rigorous, generational inquiry into what a truly “American Architecture” should be.

(Continued here.)

I was honored to be part of the Chicago Temple’s 100^th birthday celebrations earlier this month.  UIC’s Robert Bruegmann, Lee Bey from the Sun-Times, and the Chicago History Museum’s Rebekah Coffman, and I all offered context to the 556-foot skyscraper church (or is that skyscraper/church?).  I’ve written about the Temple in Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934 and on ArchitectureFarm here; this was a chance to dive more deeply into the politics—and scandal!—surrounding the tower’s permitting and its ultimate effect on the city’s skyline.

“METHODISTS SEE DREAM REALIZED IN LOOP TEMPLE,” announced headlines in the Chicago Tribune in March 1922, alongside a rendering showing a skyscraper church—260 feet of commercial office space sandwiched between a new sanctuary for the First Methodist Episcopal Church on the ground floor, and a 140-foot spire atop the commercial block.[1]

The early 1920s were banner years for skyscraper construction, but Chicago’s efforts were hindered by a building code that had resolutely capped building height.  While the limit was raised and lowered several times, it hovered between 200 and 265 feet during the 1910s, frustrating downtown developers with the technology to build higher.  Led by landowners in surrounding wards who sought to “press out” the Loop’s land value, the building height limit left Chicago a city of flat tops, far lower than the 792-foot tall Woolworth Building that New York boasted.  Completed in 1913, it wrested the title of “world’s tallest” from Chicago—seemingly for good.

The city grudgingly allowed an exception in 1920, permitting “spires” to rise above the absolute limit (then set at 260 feet) to 400 feet, provided they did not occupy more than 25% of the “building frontage.”  The Wrigley Building, designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White and completed in 1921, was the first and most visible tower to exploit this loophole.  Holabird and Roche, the architects for the Chicago Temple, proposed this strategy for the new building; the commercial block would touch the cornice height restriction, while the spire would exactly hit the ultimate 400’ limit. 

Within a month, however, Chicago’s Building Commissioner, C.A. Bostrom, announced that the Methodists’ permit would be denied.  The tower’s width was based on 25% of the total frontage of the lot along Washington and Clark Streets.  The code, Bostrom argued, required the spire’s width to be based only on the main frontage.  Given the skinny lot’s frontage on Washington, the spire could, effectively, be nothing more than a flagpole.  Just one day later, however, Bostrom seemed to relent and then, after eight months, announced that the Church had been granted a permit for a 556-foot spire—a foot taller than the Washington Monument and far taller than any building in Chicago, religious or commercial.

Other building owners were apoplectic at this exception—far beyond anything permitted up to that point in the city.  The Tribune, which had just announced its code-compliant tower and spire, designed by Hood and Howells to reach precisely 400 feet with its gothic tower centered in the plan and exactly 25% as wide as its main front, was particularly vexed.  “The Methodists,” the paper wrote, “have found the way to break through the 400-foot crust which truncates Chicago architecture.” 

“In obtaining the grant of this spectacular exception to the provisions of the existing building ordinance the Methodists have done a big thing for art and inspiration in Chicago. Its value as a precedent is obvious and will prove a source of encouragement to architects…

“Meanwhile the ordinance stands just as it did.  Every exception to it that is made in behalf of builders and of art must be a special order of council.  That many such exceptions can be made without causing tedious and costly litigation seems improbable.  In short, the projectors of the great temple in the loop have brought to a head a situation that long has been commercially irksome and artistically deadening.  Thorough revision of an ordinance which creates conditions so benighted now appears inevitable.”[2]

The paper commissioned Hood and Howells to draw up versions of the Tribune Tower at 570 and 650 feet high.  “The churchmen will find that there are others who have as much at heart as they have in the cause of beauty in city buildings,” they wrote, threatening to beat the Methodists to the title of the tallest building in Chicago.

What happened?  Why would the Temple receive permission not just to build their planned design but also to exceed the limitations of every other city tower?  The answer may lie in news reports of the original denial.  Just after Bostrom’s initial decision, reporters queried whether “the difficulties over the permit have any connection with the refusal of the Methodist ministers to indorse the Rev. John H. Williamson, city hall law enforcer, whose please for law enforcement have been mingled with speeches lauding Mayor Thompson.”[3]

Therein lies a tale, one that could only happen in Chicago.  Mayor Thompson was William Hale Thompson, by later accounts, “not only the most corrupt politician in America but the most corrupt politician in Chicago.”  Thompson, a “non-practicing Methodist” by his admission, had risen to power in 1915 partly by courting the “temperance vote,” a bloc of largely Methodist voters who pushed for prohibition.  His campaign had promised to enforce Sunday blue laws that were already on the books but widely ignored, and the early years of his mayoralty were marked by a prominent campaign to do so.  Keen to hang on to this vital demographic, Thompson campaigned for re-election in 1919 by appealing directly to the Methodists in campaign rallies, some of them held within the First Church itself.  Clergy grew increasingly skeptical as they saw saloons remaining suspiciously open on Sundays, drawing connections between those and a notoriously corrupt police force led by Commissioner F.W. Fitzmorris.

As the next election drew near, Thompson responded by installing a Methodist minister, Rev. Williamson, as a “super law enforcer.”  Williamson drew a $10,000 salary with no clear portfolio of responsibilities, but he was brought out to stand with the Mayor and denounce alcohol and other vices regularly.  First Methodist minister, John Thompson, finally had enough, declaring in March 1922 that Williamson’s hire had been mere window dressing—“a political trick and not on the square,” in his words.[4]  Williamson, for his part, seems not to have understood his assignment.  Throughout the summer, he announced investigations into bribes paid by saloon owners and a gambling ring run by higher-ups in the police force.  Thompson summarily fired Williamson, and in early December, he implicated the Mayor and Police Commissioner in a prostitution ring being run in the Levee, the city’s vice district.[5]  Fitzmorris resigned.  Thompson announced in January 1923 that he would not run for Mayor again.[6]  All of this took place while the controversy over the Methodist’s tower simmered behind the closed doors of the Building Department.  There is no direct evidence that the Methodists were “squeezed” in April when Bostrom denied their permit or that the 556-foot exception was granted to buy their goodwill amid a lurid Mayoral scandal, even by Chicago standards.  However, it is hard not to see those decisions in this context.

 The April 1923 election was a race between two candidates promising to clean up city government and to put the brakes on the development that threatened, to many, to change the Loop and its surroundings into “Skyscraperville.”  William E. Dever, a former judge, ran as a Democrat against Thompson’s replacement, a city tax assessor named Arthur Lueder.  While the Tribune campaigned for “a realtor for Mayor,” hoping that Lueder would continue Thompson’s laissez-faire approach to development, Dever, however, won handily.

Chicago’s city council was also radically reshaped in that election as the aldermanic structure changed from 35 wards with two representatives each to 50 wards with just one alderman apiece.  About to be swept out wholesale, the departing council rushed through the city’s new Zoning Ordinance, which the city’s Real Estate Board had primarily assembled.  Initially recommending a strict 265-foot limit, the Board had made a last-minute suggestion, authored by architect George Nimmons, that would allow “setbacks” above this cornice as long as they met certain area limitations and were contained within a 4:1 slope measured vertically from the cornice limit.  Two days after the election, the lame-duck city council enacted the new Ordinance with this exception, but—in what was perhaps a spirit of generosity or an effort to please developers and owners who might be convinced to fund departing aldermen’s future campaign coffers—they increased Nimmons’ recommended slope to 10:1.  The resulting “block and towers,” “setback skyscrapers,” or “streamlined pylons” quickly became a signature of Chicago during the roaring 20s, marking, in particular, the panorama surrounding the newly finished Michigan Avenue Bridge; The London Guarantee Building, 333 N. Michigan, Mather Tower, and the Jeweler’s Building all feature cornices at 265 feet, with towers above that—often precisely—meet the setback lines of the expanded “Nimmons Loophole.” 

POSTSCRIPT:  Prohibition passed nationally in 1920.  After publicly re-confirming his Methodist faith, William Hale Thompson survived the vice scandal and was re-elected as Chicago’s Mayor, defeating William Dever in 1927.  Thompson’s campaign was partly bankrolled by proceeds from bootlegging operations in Chicago.  The Chicago Temple remained the tallest building in Chicago until 1930 when the 605’ Board of Trade opened.

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[1] Norton, W. B. “Loop’s Spiritual Fortress: Methodists See Dream Realized in Loop Temple.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar 26, 1922. 6.

[2] James O’Donnell, Bennett. “M. E. Building Opens New Era Of Sky Scrapers.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec 27, 1922. 1.

[3] “New First M. E. Church Permit Tangle Bared.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr 28, 1922. 7.

[4] Norton, W. B. “Seeks Probe Of Appointment of Rev. Williamson: M. E. Pastor Sees Joker in Enforcer Job.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar 20, 1922. 10. 

[5] “Rev. Williamson Hears ‘High Cops’ Take Vice Graft: So Enforcer Aims To Start Something.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep 07, 1922. 17.

[6] “Thompson Won’t Run Again: Mayor Quits Race.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan 26, 1923. 1.