Constructing Chicago

by Daniel Bluestone

Chicago’s impressive industrial expansion in the late nineteenth century convinced most observers that the city was defined by the crass pursuit of wealth and that its architecture was, as described by Lewis Mumford, “a brutal network of industrial necessities.” In a major new book, Daniel Bluestone disputes this vision of the city. Combining architectural history and cultural analysis, Bluestone explores the creation of Chicago’s parks, churches, skyscrapers, and civic buildings. He finds that the structure of the city was influenced as much by the moral, cultural, and aesthetic aspirations of its local elite as by the untempered forces of commerce and capital. Bluestone shows how nineteenth-century Chicago architects and their clients attempted to create a distinctive landscape that could distract residents and visitors form the gritty commercial workings of the city while demonstrating a commitment to urbanism that went beyond the marketplace. He surveys the parks that were created to mediate relations between social classes; the churches relocated in residential areas so that they could avoid the dominance of new downtown buildings; the plans for lakefront civic centers architecturally distinguished from the forms of the city’s famous early skyscrapers―including the Rookery, the Monadnock, the Columbus Memorial, and the Masonic Temple. And he examines these early Chicago skyscrapers, noting how their monumental entrances, embellished lobbies, artistic elevators, and spacious light courts were designed to soften their commercial edges to recast the city’s image, and to cultivate an emerging middle class of white-collar workers. A richly illustrated contribution to urban and architectural history, Bluestone’s book is also a perceptive look at central features in the design of this quintessential American city.

Genres: Architecture

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 23, 1991

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating history of 19th century Chicago architecture that challenges the traditional view that the city was obsessed only with commerce and lucre. In fact Bluestone surprisingly and convincingly argues almost the exact opposite, that Chicago's upper classes were peculiarly concerned to minimize the dominance of commerce, and worked hard to construct worlds that could be free from its clutches. From its parks to its churches to even its skyscrapers, much of the particular world of Chicago was pitched as an escape from the perils of money-making. Even Louis Sullivan, the originator of that modern architectural shibboleth "form follows function," argued that his skyscrapers should look beyond mere mercenary pursuits and strive for that "peaceful evangel of sentiment, of beauty, the cult of the higher life." Burnham and Root's "Women's Temple building" was, they argued, both a "humming hive of business" and a "quiet retired holy place." Thus the skyscrapers were pitched as freeing office workers of the noise and pollution of downtown, and were therefore corrollaries of the newly developing suburbs which were also formed from commerce but looked to escape it. Even William Ogden, the "father of Chicago," who spent most of his life in real estate speculation and trade, desired most of all to have a "quiet house & enjoy nature...pure and uncontaminatined by the strife for gain or place which so degrade this busy world," and to this end he worked to encourage Chicago gardening (helping form of the Chicago Horticultural Society in 1847).

In sum, this is a great work of vernacular architecture history that shows how much of the built environment was constructed out of almost explicitly anti-commercial desires. It also convinced me that the American 19th century elite was surprisingly uncomfortable about its role in business and trade, and longed for the quiet life of cultured gentility.

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Constructing Chicago, Daniel Bluestone. 1991. Author Daniel Bluestone contends that an elite class of benevolent aristocrats embellished Chicago with parks, boulevards and conservatories for altruistic purposes, intentionally creating a democratic place for which both the lower and highly cultivated social classes could mix. The entire book has the trappings of a weak, verbose doctoral thesis. Chicago's early history, a subject that has been been told many times before, coupled with a faulted premise, dialectically effects what could have been a factually interesting book. Bluestone proposes that early Chicago civic leaders were intellectuals who embraced sophisticated art and culture. Ogden, Chicago's first mayor, is depicted as a refined, stately prince who was deeply concerned with promoting high culture in his great burgeoning city. The reality is that Chicago was built by ambitious, roughly hewn men, driven by entrepreneurial goals. Capitalism shaped and built Chicago, not princely deeds. It was not until much later, well after Chicago's parks had been planned and the city had been burned, that Chicago finally opened it's first library, it's first museums or had any notable architecture or culture. Parks were added out of necessity to combat the heavily polluted skies driven by the greed of the industrialists. Land speculators, like Mayor Ogden himself, the very perpetrators of the park system, profited handsomely by buying and selling property. In fact, Diversey Parkway was never to become a parkway, because the city could not afford to purchase the property from speculators. Bluestone, it appears, intentionally fails to mention these facts. Despite being misleading and grossly over intellectualized, Bluestone's book is made semi-tolerable due to the shear quantity of information presented coupled with a few interesting turn of the century photographs.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haven't read at all, but it has CHICAGO in the title.