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Reviews
| Pocket Guide to Chicago Architecture. By Judith Paine McBrien; illustrations by John F. Salvo. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Co., 2d. ed., 2004. 176 pp., maps, illus., glossary, indices. $17.95 pb (ISBN 0-393-73155-3).
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Pocket Guide to Chicago Architecture is a concise, authoritative, and easy-to-use study of the architectural landmarks of Chicago, Illinois. McBrien compiled this volume to serve as both a guidebook for first-time visitors and a scholarly resource for long-time residents. Designed to a standardized format, using distinctive black and white illustrations, it chronicles the long history of innovative structural design that has left its mark on the "Windy City."
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McBrien nicely chronicles the evolution of the metal-framed office building, one of the revolutionary developments of Chicago designers. Her approach to this development, which was of worldwide importance, can be readily discerned in the following excerpt describing the Monadnock Building (p. 65):
Initially planned as four connected buildings, the Monadnock Building, in its unadorned functionalism, embodies Chicago commercial architecture. It was developed on a narrow 400- by 68-foot lot by Bostonians Peter and Shephard Brooks, with Owen Aldis as their Chicago agent, and is named after Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire. In the northern section, John Root (1850–91) of Burnham and Root, who had also designed the Rookery for the Brooks brothers, maximized rentable space by stretching the building to an unheard-of sixteen stories and punching out a grid of bay windows that also added light and ventilation. To support this height, exterior masonry walls six feet thick at the base were required. Note how the curve of the corners is repeated in the cavetto cornice. After Root's death in 1891, the firm of Holabird and Roche was hired to develop the southern half of the block. Here, in the last quadrant, the building is supported by the new steel frame construction, rather than the old-fashioned, masonry bearing wall. Thus, in this massive block, constructed over a period of three years, we can see the end of one era in construction and the beginning of another.
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| One of the great strengths of the Pocket Guide is its four-part geographic division of the city's greatest concentrations of notable buildings. These divisions—Michigan Avenue, the Loop, the Riverfront, and Campus Architecture—provide a clear and useful way to organize the notable buildings that are the focus of this book. These groupings allow the author to place vignettes of Chicago's cultural history within the context of architectural evolution, such as the fact that Chicago's Orchestra Hall was built to soothe Theodore Thomas, the first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. During his musical performances, he was enraged by the sight of many empty seats at the too-large Auditorium Building. Thomas personally demanded the erection of a smaller, more intimate building, and threatened to resign. Ironically, he died less than a month after Orchestra Hall's completion. |
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A notable feature of the volume is the author's decision to include the same buildings in more than one of the book's geographic divisions, if such a decision is merited by a building's location and importance. Thus, the iconic Wrigley Building appears in both the Michigan Avenue and the Riverfront sections of the Pocket Guide.
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| The ease of use, authoritative information, and standardized illustration format make Pocket Guide to Chicago Architecture the one book that a first-time visitor to Chicago should have. No other volume so clearly and concisely summarizes the outstanding buildings of Chicago and sets them within the supremely important role that Chicago has played in the evolution of modern urban development. |
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