Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago: Architecture, Institutions, and the Making of a Modern Metropolis

Chicago Architecture and Urbanism

by Edward W. Wolner

When championing the commercial buildings and homes that made the Windy City famous, one can’t help but mention the brilliant names of their architects—Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. But few people are aware of Henry Ives Cobb (1859–1931), the man responsible for an extraordinarily rich chapter in the city’s turn-of-the-century building boom, and fewer still realize Cobb’s lasting importance as a designer of the private and public institutions that continue to enrich Chicago’s exceptional architectural heritage. Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is the first book about this distinguished architect and the magnificent buildings he created, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Athletic Association, the Fisheries Building for the 1893 World’s Fair, and the Chicago Federal Building. Cobb filled a huge institutional void with his inventive Romanesque and Gothic buildings—something that the other architect-giants, occupied largely with residential and commercial work, did not do. Edward W. Wolner argues that these constructions and the enterprises they housed—including the first buildings and master plan for the University of Chicago—signaled that the city had come of age, that its leaders were finally pursuing the highest ambitions in the realms of culture and intellect. Assembling a cast of colorful characters from a free-wheeling age gone by, and including over 140 images of Cobb’s most creative buildings, Henry Ives Cobb’s Chicago is a rare a dynamic portrait of an architect whose institutional designs decisively changed the city’s identity during its most critical phase of development.

400 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2011

Reviews

[Nigel Ewan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was longer and more detailed than my casual interest required, but I read it all and enjoyed it. A good study of a particular architect's career as well as a broader story about the late-Victorian world he inhabited (mostly in Chicago). Why read about Cobb? The answer appears on p. 334 (emphasis mine):

Architecturally, he was both behind and ahead of his peers. Despite Cobb's engineering education, William Le Baron Jenney used steel in office buildings earlier, and more forcefully expressed its structural realities in design. Cobb's ornamental and compositional skills were advanced enough, especially in the neo-Romanesque idiom, but he was not as original in any of these areas as Louis Sullivan and John Wellborn Root. Although he reorganized architectural practice by abandoning the atelier and embracing modern divisions of labor, Cobb was not the indomitable or inspiring manager that Daniel Burnham was. Still, in the midst of Chicago's metropolitan ferment only Cobb did so well in every one of these areas. Only he mastered so wide a variety of traditional and modern building types and architectural languages. These embraced the city's most picturesque skyscraper in the Queen Anne turrets and gables of the Owings Building, varieties of the Romanesque as distinct as the Chicago Historical Society and the Fisheries Building, the university's English Gothic, the Athletic Association's Venetian variant, and the disciplined neoclassicism of the imposing Federal Building and the revised design for the Pennsylvania State Capitol.