Organicism versus

Classicism: Chicago
1890–1910
2
In a lecture entitled ‘Modern Architecture’, delivered in Schenectady
on 9 March 1884, the New York journalist and architectural critic
Montgomery Schuyler set out what he saw to be the problem facing
American architecture. Schuyler presented his argument in the form
of thesis and antithesis. He asserted the need for a universal culture of
architecture such as existed in Europe but was lacking in America due
to the absence of good models. The Beaux-Arts system, he said,
might provide the basis for such a culture, one that would inculcate
the qualities of ‘sobriety, measure, and discretion’, were it not for the
fact that it failed to produce an architecture appropriate to modern
life. Architecture, he says, is the most reactionary of the arts:
‘Whereas in literature the classical rules are used, in architecture they
are copied . . . in architecture alone does an archaeological study pass
for a work of art . . . It is not the training that I am depreciating, but
the resting in the training as not a preparation but an attainment.’ He
went on to describe a confusion between language and architecture: ‘A
word is a conventional symbol, whereas a true architectural form is a
direct expression of a mechanical fact.’
Schuyler praised American architects, particularly those of
Chicago, for attempting to adapt architecture to such technical prob-
lems as the elevator and the steel frame, unhampered by too many
scruples about stylistic purity. Yet he felt that the problem had not been
fully solved. ‘The real structure of these towering buildings—the
“Chicago construction”—is a structure of steel and baked clay, and
19 Dankmar Adler and Louis
when we look for the architectural expression of it, we look in vain.’
Sullivan Such an articulated structure, ‘being the ultimate expression of a struc-
The Auditorium Building, tural arrangement, cannot be foreseen, and the form . . . comes as a
1886–9, Chicago
By combining Richardson’s
surprise to the author’. Schuyler thus came out in favour of a direct and
vertical hierarchy with expressive modern architecture. Yet he never explicitly rejected the
Burnham and Root’s Beaux-Arts tradition. Does he think that ‘sobriety, measure, and dis-
elimination of the wall, Adler
and Sullivan were able to
cretion’ should be sacrificed on the altar of verisimilitude? That Europe
achieve in this building some should be rejected? We are not told, and, in spite of his preference for
measure of balance between the second alternative, one has the impression that the first has not
classical monumentality and
the expression of modern been completely abandoned.
structure. Schuyler’s writings drew attention to a conflict between the

35
architect as manipulator of a visual 'language' (classicist) and as expo-
nent of a changing technology (organicist). This can be broken down
into a series of further oppositions: collectivism versus individualism;
identity (nation) versus difference (region); the normative versus the
unique; representation versus expression; the recognizable versus
the unexpected.
These oppositions constantly reappeared in the architectural
debates of the early twentieth century. But in America, more transpar-
ently than in Europe, they tended to be connected with problems of
high national policy. It is in Chicago that this tendency manifested
itself most dramatically.

The Chicago School

After the fire of 1871 and the subsequent economic depression, Chicago
experienced an extraordinary boom in commercial real estate. The
architects who flocked to the city to profit from this situation brought
with them a strong professional sense of mission. They saw their task
as the creation of a new architectural culture, believing that architec-
ture should express regional character and be based on modern
techniques. The situation in Chicago seemed to offer the possibility of
a new synthesis of technology and aesthetics and of the creation of an
architecture that symbolized the energy of the Mid-west.
The term 'Chicago School' was first used in 1908 by Thomas
Tallmadge to refer to the group of domestic architects, active between
1893 and I 9 I 7> to which both he and Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
belonged. It was not until 1929 that it was also used for the commercial
architects of the i88os and 18908 by the architectural critic Henry
Russell Hitchcock (1903-87) in his book Modern Architecture: Rom-
anticism and Reintegration. Hitchcock associated both groups of
architects with 'pre-modern' Symbolists such as Victor Horta. In the
19408 he made a new distinction between a commercial and a domestic
phase of the school. But in contemporary usage, a complete reversal
has taken place and 'Chicago School' now generally refers to the com-
mercial architecture of the i88os and 18908, while the work of Frank
Lloyd Wright and his colleagues is referred to as the Trairie School'.
This is the terminology that will be adopted here.
The importance of the Chicago School was recognized during the
19208 and 19303, as the writings of Hitchcock, Fiske Kimball (American
Architecture, 1928) and Lewis Mumford (The Brown Decades, 1931)
testify. But it was given a quite new claim to modernity by the Swiss art
historian Sigfried Giedion (1888—1968) in Space, Time and Architecture
(1941), where he presented the Chicago School in Hegelian terms as a
stage in the progressive march of history.
In rejecting the Beaux-Arts eclecticism of the East Coast, the

36 ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM! CHICAGO 1890-1910

 Chicago architects were not rejecting tradition as such. But the tradi-
tion they endorsed was vague, pliable, and adaptable to modern
conditions. These conditions were both economic and technical. On
the one hand, building plots were large and regular, unencumbered
with hereditary freehold patterns. On the other, the recently invented
electrical elevator and metal skeleton made it possible to build to
unprecedented heights, multiplying the financial yield of a given plot.
The last restrictions in height were removed when it became possible,
due to developments in fireproofing techniques, to support the exter-
nal walls, as well as the floors, on the steel frame, thus reducing the
mass of the wall to that of a thin cladding.1
Ever since the mid-eighteenth century French rationalists such as
the Jesuit monk and theoretician Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier had
argued for the reduction of mass in buildings and for the expression of
a skeleton structure. Armed with this theory, which they had absorbed
20 Daniel Burnham and John
Wellborn Root
The Rookery Building,
1885–6, Chicago
In this early example of a
Chicago School office
building the hidden skeleton
frame is ‘expressed’ by the
windows extending from
column to column, but the
projecting central feature is a
hangover from classical
conventions.

organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910 37

 from the writings of Viollet-le-Duc, the Chicago architects started
from the assumption that window openings should be increased so that
they spanned from column to column and provided maximum day-
light. But they still felt the need to retain the hierarchies of the classical
façade characteristic of the palaces of the Italian quattrocento. This
resulted in a compromise in which the masonry cladding took one of
two forms: classical pilasters carrying flat architraves; and piers with
round arches—the so-called Rundbogenstil which had originated in
Germany in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and been
brought to America by immigrant German architects.2 In the earliest
solutions, groups of three storeys were superimposed on each other, as
can be seen in the Rookery Building (1885–6) [20] by Daniel H.
Burnham (1845–1912) and John Wellborn Root (1850–91) and in
William Le Baron Jenney’s Fair Store (1890). Henry Hobson
Richardson (1838–86) in the Marshall Field Wholesale Store [21] with
its external walls of solid masonry, overcame the stacking effect of
these solutions by diminishing the width of the openings in successive
tiers, and Dankmar Adler (1844–1900) and Louis Sullivan (1856–1924)
adapted this idea to a steel-frame structure in their Auditorium
Building (1886–9) [19, see page 34].
While these experiments and borrowings were taking place, an alter-
native, more pragmatic approach was also being explored. In the
Tacoma Building (1887–9) by William Holabird (1854–1923) and Martin
21 Henry Hobson Richardson
The Marshall Field Wholesale
Store, 1885–7, Chicago
(demolished)
Here the unpleasant
‘stacking’ effect of the
Rookery Building is overcome
by diminishing the width of
the openings in the
successive layers. But since
this building had external
walls of solid masonry, the
‘Chicago problem’ of
expressing the frame did not
arise.

38 organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910

22 Burnham and Co.
The Reliance Building,
1891–4, Chicago
Designed by Charles Atwood,
this building has always been
seen as proto-Modernist in its
lightness and lack of
hierarchy. Without striving for
the monumental, Atwood
achieved a different kind of
harmony through the use of
materials—it is faced entirely
with terracotta tiles—and the
subtle handling of the
simplest tectonic elements,
such as the proportion of the
windows and the dimensions
of glazing mullions.

Roche (1853–1927), in the Monadnock Building (1884–91, a severe

masonry structure, completely without ornament) by Burnham and
Root, and in the Reliance Building (1891–4) by Burnham and Co., the
floors were not grouped in a hierarchy but expressed as a uniform series,
the loss of vertical thrust being compensated for by projecting stacks of
bay windows. In the Reliance Building the cladding was of terracotta
rather than stone and achieved an effect of extraordinary lightness [22].
It was Louis Sullivan’s achievement to have synthesized these two
antithetical types. If the palace type, as represented by the Auditorium
Building, can be said to have had a weakness, it was that it did not
reflect the programme, since, in fact, every floor had exactly the same
function. The type represented by the Tacoma Building suffered from
the opposite fault: the similarity of functions was expressed, but the
building, being a mere succession of floors, was lacking in monumental
expression. In the Wainwright Building in St. Louis (1890–2) [23]
Sullivan subsumed the floors under a giant order rising between a
strongly emphasized base and attic. At the same time he ignored the
column spacing of the ‘real’ structure, reducing the spacing of the
pilasters to the width of a single window. In doing this, he produced a
phalanx of verticals that could be read simultaneously as columns and as
mullions, as structure and as ornament, one of the effects of which was
that the intercolumnation no longer aroused expectations of classical

organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910 39

40 organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910
23 Dankmar Adler and Louis proportion. This system was independent of the exact number of floors,
Sullivan
though it would certainly not have worked visually in a building of rad-
The Wainwright Building,
1890–2, St. Louis ically different proportions from those of the Wainwright Building.3
The problem that Sullivan In his essay entitled ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Con-
solved so brilliantly in the
sidered’ (1896), Sullivan claimed that the organization of the
elevations of this building
was that of reconciling the Wainwright type of building into three clearly stated layers, with their
monumental classical façade corresponding functions, was an application of ‘organic’ principles. In
with the ‘democratic’
repetition inherent in an
order to judge the validity of this claim, it will be necessary briefly to
office building. consider Sullivan’s architectural theory, as found in his two books,
Kindergarten Chats and The Autobiography of an Idea. More than any of
the other Chicago architects, Sullivan had been influenced by the New
England philosophical school of Transcendentalism. This philosophy,
whose chief spokesman had been Ralph Waldo Emerson, was largely
derived from German Idealism, into which Sullivan had been initiated
by his anarchist friend John H. Edelman. The ‘organic’ idea can be
traced back to the Romantic movement of around 1800—particularly to
such writers as Schelling and the Schlegel brothers, who believed that
the external form of the work of art should, as in plants and animals, be
the product of an inner force or essence, rather than being mechanically
imposed from without, as they judged to be the case with classicism.4
Those architectural theorists who, in their different ways, were
heirs to this idea and to the concomitant notion of tectonic expres-
sion—such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Horatio Greenough, and
Viollet-le-Duc—had acknowledged that, when applied to human
artefacts, the concept of a ‘natural’ aesthetic had to be extended to
include socially derived normative values.5 Sullivan ignored this cul-
tural factor and based his argument purely on the analogy between
architecture and nature. But in practice he tacitly accepted customary
norms. The Wainwright façade was derived from the tradition he so
vehemently condemned—the classical–Baroque aesthetic enshrined
in Beaux-Arts teaching. In ‘correcting’ the Chicago architects’ mis-
taken interpretation of this tradition, he was, in fact, returning to the
classical principle they had discarded: the need for the façade to have a
tripartite hierarchy corresponding to the functional distribution of the
interior.
The Wainwright Building can certainly be called a ‘solution’ to the
problem of the Chicago office façade. But its very brilliance brought
with it certain problems. The ‘impure’ solutions of the Chicago
School, including Sullivan’s own Auditorium Building, had the merit
of presenting to the street a complex, contrapuntal texture capable of
being read as part of a continuous urban fabric. The Wainwright
Building, with its vertical emphasis and strongly marked corner
pilasters, isolated itself from its context and became a self-sufficient
entity, emphasizing the individuality of the business it both housed
and represented. In this, it anticipated later developments in

organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910 41

24 Louis Sullivan
‘The High Building
Question’, 1891
In this drawing, Sullivan
attempted another
reconciliation, this time
between the demands of real
estate and those of urban
aesthetics. Human scale and
a sense of order were
maintained by establishing a
datum at about eight to ten
storeys and allowing random
development above it.

skyscraper design. However, Sullivan showed that he was aware of the

danger to urban unity that this kind of solution implied when, in 1891,
in the journal The Graphic, he sketched a hypothetical street of varie-
gated skyscrapers united by a common cornice line [24].
All Sullivan’s buildings depend to a greater or lesser extent on orna-
ment, and in his theoretical writings he refers to ornament as an
extension of structure. In a body of delicate drawings he developed an
ornamental system of arabesques analogous to that of Horta, though
denser and less fluid and more independent of the structure. This
ornamentation is applied in large bands of terracotta, and contrasted
with flat, unornamented surfaces, suggesting the influence of Islamic
architecture, and also relating his work to the European Art Nouveau
movement.
Sullivan was originally offered a partnership by Adler on the
strength of his skill as an ornamentalist and designer of façades.
Sullivan believed that the visible expression of a building spiritualized
an otherwise inarticulate structure. Adler, on the other hand, thought
that the façade merely gave the finishing touches to an organizational
and structural concept. This difference of view, whether it shows Adler
to have been the better organicist or merely more practical, seems to
have given rise to a simmering conflict between the two men, and this
is indirectly revealed in a statement made by Adler after the partner-
ship had broken up (due to lack of commissions): ‘The architect is not
allowed to wait until, seized by an irresistible impulse from within, he
gives the world the result of his studies and musings. He is of the world
as well as in it.’6
Sullivan’s catastrophic professional failure a few years after the

42 organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910

dissolution of the partnership was no doubt due to a complicated
mixture of psychological, ideological, and economic factors. But already
in the 18908 the climate of opinion in Chicago was changing. Architects
no longer listened to the Transcendental message they had found so
compelling a short time before, nor were they so interested in Sullivan s
doctrine of the redemption of a materialistic society through inspired
individual creativity. As was soon to be the case in Europe, individual-
ism was giving way to a more nationalistic and collectivist spirit.

The World's Columbian Exposition

The turn towards classicism inaugurated by the Chicago World s
Exposition of 1893 was related to a number of contemporary political
and economic events in America. The most important of these were
the change from laissez-faire to monopoly capitalism, the inaugura-
tion of the 'open-door' trade policy for a country now ready to take its
place on the world stage, and the rise of a collectivist politics both
mirroring and challenging the emerging corporatism of industry and
finance. In The Autobiography of an Idea, Louis Sullivan was to recall
these developments: 'During this period [the 18908] there was well
under way the formation of mergers, corporations, and trusts in the
industrial world . . . speculation became rampant, credit was leaving
terra firma . . . monopoly was in the air/ According to Sullivan,
Daniel Burnham was the only architect in Chicago to catch this
movement, because, 'in its tendency towards bigness, organization,
delegation, and intense commercialism, he sensed the reciprocal
workings of his own mind'. These developments were responsible for
sounding the death knell of the philosophy of individualism that had
inspired the Chicago School and been the basis of Sullivan's theory.
Despite his own generalizing and typological propensities, Sullivan
resisted the emerging tendency towards collectivism, standardization,
and massification that Burnham welcomed so avidly.
Although Chicago was chosen as the site for the World's Fair
because it was seen to represent the dynamism of the Mid-west, the
fair's promoters were more interested in the creation of a national
mythology than a regional one. They were looking for a ready-formed
architectural language that could allegorically represent the United
States as a unified, culturally mature, imperial power. According to
Henry Adams, 'Chicago was the first expression of America thought
of as a unity: one must start from there.'7
Planning for the World's Fair started in 1890, under the joint direc-
tion of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) (landscape) and Daniel
Burnham (buildings). The site chosen was that of Olmsted's unbuilt
project for the South Park System. It consisted of two parks—Jackson
Park on the lake shore and Washington Park to the west—linked by a

ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM: CHICAGO 1890-1910 43

25 Daniel Burnham and long narrow strip called Midway Plaisance [25]. The core of the fair
Frederick Law Olmsted
was Jackson Park, where all the American pavilions were sited.
World's Columbian
Exposition, 1893, Chicago,
Midway Pleasance contained the foreign pavilions and amusements,
plan showing Jackson Park while Washington Park was laid out as a landscape.
and Midway Plaisance
Jackson Park was conceived on Beaux-Arts principles. The Beaux-
Note the contrast between
the classical regularity of the Arts system had already made inroads on the East coast by the
Court of Honor to the south mid-i88os. By ensuring that at least half the architects selected to design
and the picturesque
irregularity of the lake
the pavilions came from the East the promoters signalled their support
development to the north. for classicism as the style of the fair's architecture.8 This choice reversed
the Chicago Schools practice in two ways: it proposed first that groups
of buildings should be subjected to total visual control, and second that
architecture was a ready-made language rather than the product of indi-
vidual invention in a world ruled by contingency and change.
Daniel Burnham had no difficulty in adjusting to these ideas.

44 ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM: CHICAGO 1890-1910

 Unlike Sullivan, he was able to see ‘functionalism’ as valid for a com-
mercial architecture ruled by cost, and classicism as valid for an
architecture representing national power and cosmopolitan culture.
This theory of ‘character’ was shared by the brilliant young Harvard-
trained architect Charles B. Atwood (1849–95), who had been hired to
take the place of John Root, after Root’s sudden death. Atwood was
capable of designing the spare ‘Gothic’ Reliance and Fisher buildings,
with their light terracotta facing, at the same time as the florid Baroque
triumphal arch for the fair.
26 Daniel Burnham and
The plan of the Jackson Park site was a collaborative exercise in
Frederick Law Olmsted landscape and urban design. The visitor, arriving by boat or train, was
The Court of Honor immediately presented with the scenic splendour of the ‘Court of
(demolished)
Apart from the style of the
Honor’—a huge monumental basin surrounded by the most important
façades, what was new for pavilions [26]. A second group of pavilions, with its axis at right angles
Chicago about the Court of to that of the Court of Honor, was more informally disposed round a
Honor was its embodiment of
the Baroque concept of a
picturesque lake. The pavilions themselves were huge two-storey sheds
visually unified group of faced with classical–Baroque façades, built in lathe and plaster and
buildings. In his plan for painted white (hence the name ‘White City’ often given to the fair).
Chicago, Burnham was to
combine this idea with the The contrast between a strictly functional ‘factory’ space and a repre-
additive city grid. sentative façade followed the international tradition of railway station

organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910 45

27 Burnham and Co. design, and was to be revived in the 1960s by Louis Kahn at the Salk
The Conway Building, 1912, Institute in La Jolla within a Modernist idiom (see pages 248‒54). Until
Chicago
This was one of the many the Paris Exposition of 1889, international exhibitions in Europe had
offices built in American favoured the display of new technologies in their buildings, but the
cities after about 1910 that
Paris Exposition of 1900 marked a change to something more decora-
conformed to the new
classical fashion of the City tive and popular. The Chicago World’s Fair, though it lacked the Art
Beautiful movement. Nouveau aspects of the Paris Exposition and maintained an unremit-
ting pompier style, anticipated this approach, differing only in its
display of uninhibited kitsch (according to the original plan, authentic
gondoliers were to be hired to navigate the basin).

The City Beautiful movement

The World’s Fair initiated a wave of classical architecture in America.
As the historian Fiske Kimball was to write in 1928: ‘The issue whether
function should determine form or whether an ideal form might be
imposed from without, had been decided for a generation by a sweep-
ing victory for the formal idea.’9 One of the consequences of the fair
was that, after the turn of the century, tall commercial buildings in
America began to show increased Beaux-Arts influence. This can be
seen in the evolution of Burnham’s work. In his Conway Building in
Chicago (1912) [27], and in many other examples, he followed
Sullivan’s clear tripartite division, but ornamented it with a classical
syntax, often treating the attic as a classical colonnade, reducing the
size of the windows in the middle section of the façade and playing
down the expression of structure.
The World’s Fair had a great effect on the ‘City Beautiful’ move-
ment. The movement was triggered by the Senate Park Commission
plan for Washington (the ‘Macmillan Plan’), which was exhibited in
1902. Both Burnham and Charles McKim (1847–1909) were on the
commission, and they were responsible for the design, which envis-
aged the completion and extension of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s plan of
the 1790s. After this Burnham was asked to prepare many city plans,
only a few of which—the plan for the centre of Cleveland, for
example—were executed. The most spectacular of these was his plan
for Chicago, prepared in collaboration with E. H. Bennett (1874–1945)
[28].10 The plan was financed and managed by a group of private citi-
zens, and was the subject of an elaborate public relations campaign. Its
most characteristic feature was a network of wide, diagonal avenues
superimposed on the existing road grid in the manner of Washington
and of Haussmann’s Paris. At the centre of this network, there was to
be a new city hall of gigantic proportions. Though never executed, the
plan was to some extent used as a guide for the future development of
the city. One enthusiastic critic, Charles Eliot, called it a representa-
tion of ‘democratic, enlightened collectivism coming in to repair the

46 organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910

organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910 47
48 organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910
28 Daniel Burnham and damage caused by democratic individualism'.11 Others criticized the
Edward Bennett
plan because it neglected the problem of mass housing, leaving most of
City plan for Chicago, 1909
This beautiful drawing by the city in the hands of the speculators.
Jules Guerm gives a clear But in spite of this apparent conflict between two incompatible
idea of the unprecedented
concepts of city planning, one aesthetic and symbolic and the other
scale of the architects'
conception. The existence of social and practical, many social reformers, including the sociologist
technical innovations such as Charles Zueblin, supported the City Beautiful movement, claiming
the underpass at the street
crossing should also be
that the World's Fair had instituted 'scientific planning', stimulated
noted. efficient municipal government, and curbed the power of the bosses. It
is clear that 'enlightened collectivism', with its rejection of laissez-faire
and its stress on normative standards, was able to carry both conserva-
tive and progressive connotations. In Europe, where there was a
simultaneous burst of planning activity, a reconciliation between the
aesthetic and the social was consciously attempted. At the London
Town Planning conference of 1910, the German planner Joseph
Stiibben claimed that planners in his own country had been able to
combine the 'rational' French with the 'medieval' British traditions.
Whether justified or not, this claim was only plausible within the
context of the traditional European city. In America, the conceptual
and physical split between living and work, the suburb and the city,
made such a reconciliation impossible.

Social reform and the home

The reaction of intellectuals against the excesses of uncontrolled capi-
talism in i88os America is represented by two Utopian texts: Henry
George's Progress and Poverty (1880), which proposed the confiscation
of all yield from increased land value, and Edward Bellamy's novel
Looking Backward (1888), which described a future society based on a
perfected industrial system, in which there was no longer any space
between freedom and total political control (see pages 220-2: 'Systems
theory'). A third text—Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899)—is of particular interest, not only because Veblen taught at the
University of Chicago in the 18905, but also because his book advanced
the theory that there was a conflict in capitalism between the produc-
tion of money and the production of goods.12
Chicago was the centre of a vigorous social reform movement
which reflected this anti-laissez-faire mood. Whereas the Transcen-
dentalists had rejected the city as a corrupting influence, the Chicago
reformists saw it as an essential instrument of industrialization, but
one that needed to be domesticated. The Department of Social
Sciences and Anthropology, which opened in 1892 in the University of
Chicago under the leadership of Albion Small, became an important
centre of urban sociology, its wide influence continuing into the 19205.

ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM! CHICAGO 1890-1910 49

The department and the institutions connected with it, such as the
Department of Household Science at the University of Illinois,
focused their attention on the nuclear family and the individual home
in the belief that the reform of the domestic environment was the nec-
essary first step in the reform of society as a whole. Thus, the design
and equipment of the home became one of the key elements in a
radical and wide-ranging social and political agenda.13
The problem of the home was addressed at two levels. Hull House,
founded by Jane Addams in 1897, and the numerous settlement houses
that it helped to set up, worked at the grass-roots level, providing
domestic education to immigrant workers living in slum conditions.
One of the essential ingredients of this education was training in the
crafts, which was organized by the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society,
also based at Hull House. Classes and exhibitions in cabinet-making,
bookmaking, weaving, and pottery were set up. Some small workshops
were founded, but much of the furniture was made by commercial
manufacturers, sometimes, but not always, under the supervision of
outside designers. The work was promoted by mass-circulation maga-
zines like the Ladies'Home Journal'and The House Beautiful'and sold by
mail order. Low income groups were targeted, and the furniture was
mass produced. In design, it was somewhat heavier and simpler than
contemporary Arts and Crafts furniture in England and Germany,
tending towards the geometrical forms in the work of Hoffmann and
Mackintosh, but without their hand-crafted refinement.
At a more theoretical level, the problem of the modern home was
analysed in the department of Social Sciences and the closely affiliated
Home Economics group. This nationwide movement had its epicentre
in Chicago and one of its leading figures, Marion Talbot, taught at the
Department of Social Sciences. The movement was strongly feminist
and sought to revolutionize the position of women, both in the home
and in society. According to the Home Economics group there was an
imperative need to rethink the house in the wake of rapid urbanization
and inventions such as the telephone, electric light, and new means of
transport. The home should be organized according to Frederick
Winslow Taylors principle of scientific management. The more
radical members of the group, like the Marxist Charlotte Perkins
Gillman, argued against the nuclear house and advocated the social-
ization of eating, cleaning, and entertainment in serviced apartment
buildings, but generally the group accepted the nuclear house.
In matters of design the Home Economics group followed William
Morris in his belief that the house should contain nothing but useful
and beautiful objects. But they also believed in mass production and
the use of new, smooth materials, invoking the railroad-car buffet and
the laboratory as models for the design of kitchens, and stressing the

50 ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM: CHICAGO 1890-1910

importance of sunlight, ventilation, and cleanliness. They coined the
word 'Euthenics' to describe the science of the controlled environ-
ment, a word evidently intended to rhyme with Eugenics. They called
for standardization at all levels of design, attaching great importance at
the urban level to the design of groups of identical houses—order and
repetition being thought to make a harmonious and egalitarian com-
munity.14 In this, their views were not unlike those of the City
Beautiful movement, with its preference for classical anonymity in the
planning of unified groups.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School

The Prairie School was a closely knit group of young Chicago archi-
tects continuing to design houses in the organicist tradition under the
spiritual leadership of Louis Sullivan, and active between 1896 and
1917. The group included, among others, Robert C. Spencer, Dwight
H. Perkins, and Myron Hunt. The group was closely associated with
Hull House and the Arts and Crafts Society. Some of the original
group later reverted to eclecticism—notably Howard Van Doren Shaw
(1869-1926), whose work resembles that of the English architect
Edwin Lutyens in its simultaneous allegiance to the Arts and Crafts
and to eclectic classicism.15
The most brilliant member of the group was Frank Lloyd Wright.
He, more than any of the others, was able to forge a personal style that
embodied the group's common ambitions. Wright's natural talent was
stimulated and guided by the theory of 'pure design', which was the
subject of lectures and discussions at the Chicago branch of the Archi-
tectural League of America around 1901.16 This concept was promoted
by the architect and teacher Emil Lorch, who had transferred to
architecture the geometrical principles of painting and design taught
by Arthur Wesley Dow at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
According to this theory, there were fundamental ahistorical principles
of composition, and these principles should be taught in schools of
architecture.17 This idea was a commonplace of late-nineteenth-
century and early-twentieth-century art and architectural theory in
Europe in academic as well as avant-garde circles.18 Although it was
antagonistic to eclecticism, its promotion of systematic design theory
in architectural schools was probably due to the example of the
Beaux-Arts.
Wright's houses show the influence of this theory [29, 30]. Their
plans are geometrically more rigorous than anything being built in
Europe at the time. They also share with the work of Mackintosh,
Olbrich, and Hoffmann (see pages 28-9) a geometrical stylization of
ornament, but go further in the abstraction of the elements of wall and

ORGANICISM VERSUS CLASSICISM: CHICAGO 1890-1910 51

52 organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910
29 Frank Lloyd Wright roof, which lose their conventional associations and are reduced to a
Ward Willits House, 1902, system of intersecting and overlapping planes. The plans of Wright’s
Highland Park, Illinois
This external view shows houses consist of an additive system of simple volumes interlocking
Wright’s transformation of with or relating freely to each other in a way that resembles the Arts
roofs into abstract hovering
and Crafts tradition. However, not only is there greater continuity
planes.
between one space and another than can be found in the English
movement, in which the traditional room remains dominant, but the
plans exhibit a geometrical order which stems from Beaux-Arts rather
than English sources. At the macro scale, the plans tend to develop
along the two orthogonal axes, crossing at a central hearth and reach-
ing out into the surrounding landscape, while at the micro scale there
are carefully controlled local symmetries and sub-axes, showing the
influence of the Beaux-Arts-trained H. H. Richardson. Internally, as
in the houses of Voysey, Mackintosh, and Hoffmann, the rooms are
unified by low cornices at door-head level. But in Wright’s work these
have the effect of compressing the vertical dimension, producing a
primitive, cave-like sensation [31].
The system of ornament consists of dark-stained wood trim, recall-
ing that of Mackintosh and Hoffmann. Electric light and ventilation
fittings are absorbed into the general ornamental unity. ‘Art’ still dom-
inates, but it is now produced by the machine, not by the craftsman,
and is totally controlled by the architect working at his drawing-board
[32]: ‘The machine . . . has placed in artist hands the means of
idealizing the true nature of wood . . . without waste, within reach of
30 Frank Lloyd Wright
Ward Willits House, 1902,
all.’19
Highland Park, Illinois, In fact, Wright came early on to the conclusion that mass produc-
ground-floor plan tion was necessary if good design was to be democratically enjoyed. In
The Willits House was one of
the earliest examples of
1901 he gave a lecture at Hull House entitled ‘The Art and Craft of the
Wright’s revolutionary system Machine’ in which he argued that the alienation of the craftsman due
of composition. This was to machine production would be outweighed by the artist’s ability to
influenced by the theory of
‘pure design’ which was create beauty with the machine—an anti-Ruskinian argument that
being discussed at the would soon be taken up within the Deutscher Werkbund in its support
Chicago branch of the
Architectural League in
of machine work as opposed to handwork. This philosophy was com-
1901, by means of which pletely consistent with Wright’s search for universal laws of design,
Wright hoped to create a pure with its privileging of the artist over the craftsman.
Mid-western architecture.
Yet Wright’s position on industrialization was ultimately ambiva-
lent. It was poised between an endorsement of ‘that greatest of
machines’, as he called the industrial city, and a nostalgic image of the
American suburb as a new Arcadia uncontaminated by industrialism.
This conflict was reflected in his daily life, divided between his radical
friends at Hull House and the suburb of Oak Park where he practised
and lived with his young family, and where his neighbours were the
practical-minded businessmen who commissioned his houses.20 This
enormously creative and influential phase of Wright’s life came to an
abrupt end when in 1909, at the age of 42, he abandoned Oak Park,

organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910 53

54 organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910
31 Frank Lloyd Wright his family and his architectural practice, having concluded that the
Coonley House, 1908, unity between art and life that he craved was not possible in the
Riverside, Illinois
In his interiors, Wright uses suburb.
all the main elements of the
Arts and Crafts tradition but
Montgomery Schuyler, in his anticipation of an American architec-
exaggerates the horizontality
of the space and gives the ture, had been concerned with public and urban buildings, whether
fireplace a new symbolic they took the form of cultural representation or organic expression.
status. The effect in the
Coonley House is one of
Frank Lloyd Wright, working within the tradition of the Arts and
spatial generosity Crafts movement, turned away from such problems to concentrate
paradoxically combined with mostly on the private house, the nuclear family, and the small commu-
cave-like protection.
nity. Reviving dreams of the frontier, he sought, more passionately
than any of his colleagues, to create a regional Mid-western domestic
architecture of rural innocence.
It was the formal skill with which Wright deployed an abstract and
astylar architecture that impressed the European avant-garde archi-
tects when his work was published in Germany by Wasmuth in 1910, at
the moment when they were searching for a formula that would free
them from traditional forms. But with this abstraction came an archi-
tecture that was primitivist, regionalist, and anti-metropolitan.
Through the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, international Mod-
ernism had at least one of its roots in the regional and democratic
concerns of the American Mid-west and in the organicist theories of
its architects.

32 Frank Lloyd Wright

The Robie House, 1908–10,
South Woodlawn, Chicago
The rhyming of the tectonic
ornament and fixed furniture
in the Robie House, shown
here in the dining room, is
almost obsessional. Even the
free-standing furniture has
become monumentalized.
The aesthetic control is total
and somewhat oppressive—a
Gesamtkunstwerk of the
T-square.

organicism versus classicism: chicago 1890‒1910 55