“Pioneer Caisson Building Foundations: 1890”

AboutDonald L. Hoffmann corrects the standard historical account, which credited Chicago's Adler & Sullivan Stock Exchange Building (1893) with pioneering caisson foundations for tall buildings, by documenting a more extensive caisson system used three years earlier under the Kansas City, Missouri City Hall, completed in 1890. Hoffmann opens by describing the well-known settlement problems of Burnham & Root's Monadnock Building and of Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building—quoting Frank Lloyd Wright's account of Dankmar Adler's anxiety over the Auditorium tower's continuing settlement into cast-iron box fronts—before presenting evidence, drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts and 1890 American Institute of Architects convention proceedings, that architect Louis Curtiss, then assistant superintendent of Kansas City buildings, devised ninety-two brick-and-steel-cylinder caissons for the City Hall, correcting attributions made by earlier historians including Hugh Morrison, Frank A. Randall, and Carl Condit, all of whom had credited Chicago's Stock Exchange as the first true caisson foundation.

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