Chicago was a beehive of construction activity in the 1870s as the city rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871 with structures that were more permanent in both fabrication and appearance. Technical advances such as steel-frame construction with terra-cotta fireproofing and the passenger elevator dovetailed nicely with the hardheaded pragmatism of real-estate investors who demanded the maximization of rentable square feet. On hand to guide the design and construction of the new city was a group of architects who possessed mainly practical experience and little academic training. The response of this group, called the Chicago School, to the problems set before it achieved a union between architecture and engineering that later elicited the praise and admiration of European modernists active between the World Wars. At least two of the Chicago School’s seemingly provincial architects, John Wellborn Root and Louis Sullivan, saw in this climate an opportunity to create a truly American form of architecture and were explicit in their desire to pursue this possibility.

Sullivan arrived in Chicago in 1873 after brief stays at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the École des Beaux Arts, and the office of Frank Furness in Philadelphia. After apprenticing with skyscraper pioneer William LeBaron Jenney, he entered into a partnership with Dankmar Adler, a former army engineer twelve years his senior, in 1875. Together, with Adler’s prowess at planning and construction and Sullivan’s guidance of overall aesthetic concerns, they developed a reputation through their designs of theater renovations and office blocks. Sullivan is widely recognized for developing an appropriate architectural form for the skyscraper with his and Adler’s Wainwright Building (1890–91) in St. Louis. Where the standard approach at the time consisted of stacking classically inspired modules to achieve the needed height of a building, the vertical piers of the Wainwright ran uninterrupted from the second-floor mezzanine to a capping cornice and frieze adorned with Sullivan’s distinctive foliate ornament. The arrangement served to emphasize the upward thrust of the building. Per Sullivan: “Every inch of it [is] tall … a proud and soaring thing.”¹ Sullivan’s reputation rests equally on his writing, which became his primary form of expression as commissions waned toward the end of his career.

Throughout the twentieth century, Sullivan was many things to many people. Modernist critics praised him as a “prophet.” Sullivan’s buildings, most notably the Carson, Pirie, Scott Store (1899/1903–04) in Chicago, and his dictum “form follows function” positioned him as a direct, but imperfect, antecedent to the International Style. Sigfried Giedion, for one, ultimately regarded Sullivan as a “nineteenth century architect” for his dependence on ornament and his departures from direct structural expression. When architects and the nation as a whole grew dissatisfied with the strictures of the modern movement at midcentury, Sullivan’s work and writings received renewed critical attention. The ornament that modernists considered a blemish became evidence of Sullivan’s humanist approach to architecture. This interest was followed by a burst of significant monographs and biographies in the 1980s and 1990s. At the turn of another century, it would seem that there is little about Sullivan that has not already been said.

The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler & Sullivan’s Architecture and the City is Joseph Siry’s second contribution to the body of scholarship devoted to the firm of Adler & Sullivan. While this new text contains the standard exposition of influence and counterinfluence that is familiar to anyone well versed with the architecture of this period, it adds more to the story. Siry’s 1988 examination of the Carson, Pirie, Scott Store was remarkable for providing the overall context in which that influential building took shape. Siry aims for and achieves a similar breadth of analysis in this new book. The author sets the table by carefully detailing the evolution of state-sponsored theater design throughout the nineteenth century in Europe, which served as the gold standard on this side of the Atlantic, and the Americanization of that standard as commercially run venues were built in the United States. This exploration, coupled with a review of Adler & Sullivan’s previous theater projects, imparts to the reader an understanding of typological precedents and defines the environment in which the architects and the Auditorium Building Committee made their decisions.

This thoroughness extends to the treatment of practical matters confronted as the architects guided the design from idea to reality. Among these is the provision of suitable foundations for Chicago’s notoriously poor soul-bearing conditions, which posed a vexing engineering problem that was conquered in the years leading up to the Auditorium’s design; the manner in which Adler dealt with issues of acoustics in the absence of any quantifiable means of addressing the subject (as developed by Wallace Sabine in 1898); the incorporation of electric lighting into the design; and solutions to the problem of providing heating, cooling, and ventilation to the building. For those who deal with the matter of integrating design and construction on a daily basis, this is a welcome opportunity to see how such issues were resolved in one of the pivotal works of American architecture. This emphasis also provides a glimpse of the seldom documented yet significant role Adler played within the partnership. Sullivan’s efforts to establish an American idiom through his ornamental detail as well as the role that various trades played in the actualization of his designs both receive an equal level of attention as Siry directs the reader through the design and realization of each of the major interior spaces of the building, which opened in December 1889.

Where the book really shines, however, is Siry’s reconstruction of the social and historical context that gave rise to and helped guide the development of the Auditorium Building. This makes the text a true find for architectural historians and worthwhile reading for a much broader audience. The vision, clout, and energy that hatched the Auditorium Building and saw the project to its conclusion was provided by Ferdinand Peck, who had inherited significant real-estate holdings from his Providence-born father. Peck’s Chicago was becoming a mature city that was concerned as much with philanthropy and its regional and civic identity as it was with the economic concerns that kept it vibrant. Chicago was also a city increasingly plagued by economic disparity that was readily defined along ethnic lines as well as by labor and social unrest that often resulted in strikes, political socialism, anarchism, and sporadic violence.

Siry recounts the development of separate forms of entertainment for the upper class in substantive theater buildings and for the German-speaking immigrants in neighborhood turnvereins. He also studies the ways in which such entertainment became politicized through the staging of productions by radical labor unions. Peck’s plan for the Auditorium was to provide the city with a grand civic institution that would, above all, allow people of all classes to view performances by maintaining affordable ticket prices. Peck, according to Siry, “envisioned access to cultural privilege as a politically effective counterweight to labor agitation and violence” (121). These philanthropic and civic aspects of the project, Siry explains, flavored many of the decisions made by both client and architect. The name “Auditorium” was chosen for the word’s civic and communal overtones. A large seating capacity was sought to minimize the cost of seeing a performance. Peck also forswore ostentatious private boxes until it became clear that their presence would please Auditorium investors. To ensure comfortable conditions at all levels of the theater, the architects conditioned the air by having it blown over blocks of ice in the basement. They also placed air supply vents in the ceiling and returns below the parquet seats to avoid having polluted air pass up to the less-expensive balcony seats. Sullivan’s organic ornamental motifs and the iconography chosen for the various mural paintings in the building meshed with Peck’s desire to create an institution reflective of the city’s regional importance. These motivations sometimes resulted in contradictory decisions. One such inconsistency occurred when the building committee insisted upon a more “civic” limestone cladding to replace the brick and terra-cotta surface proposed by the architects. Since the highly touted foundations (sized for the lighter load) had already been placed, the additional weight of the limestone resulted in a differential settlement of eighteen inches at the perimeter walls. These architectural, typological, social, and historical contexts combine to form the “situational framework” for the building. Through his detailed accounts of each, Siry provides as clear a picture of an architectural work and its development as can be found.

The Chicago Auditorium Building is exhaustively researched and richly illustrated. Annotated notes occupying roughly one hundred of the book’s five hundred and eighty pages testify to the thoroughness and doggedness of the author’s research. With few exceptions, passages that require visual evidence for full comprehension are accompanied by well-chosen illustrations. Siry’s desire to provide a thorough accounting of the building’s context results in a certain noticeable sprawl. Tying such research together into a coherent narrative, however, can be likened to picking up and organizing an upended box of marbles. There is a certain rigor to the author’s exposition that allows all of the various strands to relate to each other when all is said and done. The result is a book with a scope and detail to match the both the magnificence of the building and the depth of thought that went into its conception, design, and construction. The text is also a welcome investigation of architecture as a social discipline that is inextricably linked to the environment that surrounds a project at its inception and completion.