“The Architecture of Dankmar Adler”

AboutElstein's article is a career-spanning study of Dankmar Adler's independent architectural style, written to counter the tendency — encouraged by Adler's own modest self-assessment — to view him solely as Sullivan's engineering partner. Tracing Adler's training under Detroit and Chicago architects, his Civil War service, and his practice with Ashley Kinney and then Edward Burling, the article identifies recurring stylistic traits in Adler's pre-Sullivan commercial buildings, including the First National Bank, Methodist Church Block, Sinai Temple, and Central Music Hall: an emphasis on wall as plane and texture, subtle floor-to-floor variation in ornament, and a rhythmic patterning of openings. Elstein argues the Borden Block (1881) marks the first collaboration with Sullivan and traces how this synthesis matured through industrial buildings such as the Aurora Watch Factory, Wirt Dexter Building, and J. W. Oakley Warehouse into the soaring commercial vocabulary of the Wainwright and Guaranty Buildings. The essay closes by examining Adler's late, independent work as D. Adler & Company after the 1895 dissolution of Adler & Sullivan — the Mayer Building, the Morgan Park Academy dormitories, and Isaiah Temple — as a continuation, not an abandonment, of the planar, rhythmically ordered approach he had developed since the 1870s. Elstein concludes that Adler's architecture, though less innovative in ornament than Sullivan's, exemplifies the best structural and compositional achievements of the Chicago School.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196712%2926%3A4%3C242%3ATAODA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K