Chicago 1890
The Skyscraper and the Modern City
Merwood-salisbury, Joanna
Hardcover
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BOOK SYNOPSIS
Chicagos first skyscrapers are famous for projecting the citys modernity around the world. But what did they mean at home, to the Chicagoans who designed and built them, worked inside their walls, and gazed up at their façades? Answering this multifaceted question, Chicago 1890 reveals that early skyscrapers offered hotly debated solutions to the citys toughest problems and, in the process, fostered an urban culture that spread across the country. An ambitious reinterpretation of the works of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, this volume uses their towering achievements as a lens through which to view late nineteenth-century urban history. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury sheds new light on many of Chicagos defining eventsincluding violent building trade strikes, the Haymarket bombing, the Worlds Columbian Exposition, and Burnhams Plan of Chicagoby situating the Masonic Temple, the Monadnock Building, and the Reliance Building at the center of the citys cultural and political crosscurrents. While architects and property owners saw these pioneering structures as manifestations of a robust American identity, immigrant laborers and social reformers viewed them as symbols of capitalisms inequity. Illuminated by rich material from the periods popular press and professional journals, Merwood-Salisburys chronicle of this contentious history reveals that the skyscrapers vaunted status was never as inevitable as todays skylines suggest.
AUTHOR BIO
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury is assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, Interior Design and Lighting at the Parsons The New School for Design.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction Chapter 1 Western ArchitectureThe Skyscraper as Regional TypeChapter 2 Louis Sullivans DemocraticArchitecture and the Labor MovementChapter 3 The MonadnockJohn Wellborn Root and the Art of Pure ColorChapter 4 The Masonic TempleThe Double Life of a Civic SkyscraperChapter 5 The Reliance BuildingUrban Sanitation and Skyscraper ReformChapter 6 Chicago 1900The City Beautiful Movement and the Decline of the SkyscraperPostscript The Architectonic Anticipation of the Future NotesSelected BibliographyIndex
BOOK REVIEWS
"Impressively researched, splendidly illustrated, and beautifully written, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury's Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City offers a truly fresh reconsideration of the nature and significance of Chicago's iconic turn-of-the-century tall buildings. By focusing her analysis on the remarkably self-aware discussion among architects and critics of the purpose and meaning of such structures in their time combined with a meticulous and insightful examination of the construction process, contemporary context, and actual use of a cluster of key examples, Merwood-Salisbury shows how the history of the Chicago skyscraper is much more rich and complex than previously assumed. The result is revelatory."-Carl Smith, author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0226520781
ISBN(13-digit): 9780226520780
Dewey Decimal: 720/.4830977311
Library of Congress: 2008026986
Book Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 196
