Architecture and Design Atlas

How Space Is Shaped
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Styles and Movements

Chicago School

Also Known As Commercial Style
Modern

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

The group of architects, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Le Baron Jenney and Dankmar Adler among them, who rebuilt Chicago's commercial core after the fire of 1871 and, working with the new metal frame and the safety elevator, developed the tall commercial building's basic modern grammar: an expressed structural grid, large plate-glass Chicago windows, and Sullivan's tripartite base, shaft and capital composition. The Home Insurance Building of 1885 is usually credited as its first complete statement, though earlier partial iron-framed buildings complicate any claim to a single, undisputed first skyscraper.

Facts
Period
from 1871 1
Period
to 1893 1
The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 turned prevailing American taste back toward classicism, commonly cited as the school's decline.
Origin Region
Chicago, United States 1
Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Louis Sullivan, Architects and Designers
Source Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of ArchitectureBanister Fletcher, edited by Dan Cruickshank (20th edition)
The First Skyscraper, Milestones
Source Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of ArchitectureBanister Fletcher, edited by Dan Cruickshank (20th edition)
Sources
1. Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture
Banister Fletcher, edited by Dan Cruickshank (20th edition), Architectural Press, 1996
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.