“Un siècle d'architecture à Chicago”

AboutEtienne Fouilloux's French-language review essay, occasioned by a 1983-84 Paris and La Rochelle photography exhibition ("Chicago, 170 ans d'architecture 1833-1983"), surveys a century and a half of Chicago architecture for a French readership, working to dispel Prohibition-era gangster-city clichés. Fouilloux traces the city's explosive growth after the 1871 fire, the emergence of the first "Chicago School" under William Le Baron Jenney with Louis Sullivan as its most gifted product, the eclectic reaction following the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (which Sullivan himself denounced as a calamity that cost him clients and preceded his death in near poverty in 1924), Frank Lloyd Wright's parallel but distinct organic and residential practice in and around Chicago, the mid-century "second Chicago School" under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe following his 1938 arrival as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and the postmodern reaction of the 1970s-80s led by German-born Chicago architect Helmut Jahn. The essay situates Sullivan's functionalism and Wright's organicism as the twin poles around which subsequent Chicago architecture, including that of Mies and his successors at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, continually re-orients itself.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0294-1759%28198404%290%3A2%3C95%3AUSDAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2