Building ChicagoCommercial Real Estate and the Urban Core
October 11, 2012 FIN/REES 201 Fall 2012
The 1893 World’s Fair
•Why a World’s Fair?
•Should a Fair project a vision of the City
of the Future or just show the World
Chicago can throw a great party?
Choice of Architects
• Chicago or the East?
• Beaux-Arts trainees vs. functional
minded engineers?
• Chicago architects with strong
engineering background & “on the
job training” in architecture.
• Eastern architects and artists were a • Eastern architects and artists were a
“formidable clique.”
• The Fair was an Architectural show.
• The Fair offered little new in
technology. Electricity lit up the
night as an entertainment. An
urban/architectural embellishment?
Did the Fair kill architecture in the United States?
• The Fair was extraordinarily successful for the White City style with its title of nobility in the East. It was a novelty in the rest of the nation.
• For Louis Sullivan, it brought to an end tendencies, chiefly in Chicago, to produce relatively unadorned commercial buildings framed in steel with curtain walls, in which the outer appearance in which the outer appearance was nearly a pure expression of the structural elements.
• That style was reimported from Europe in the 1930s (with Mies).
• But Chicago had J. W. Root’s Romanesque/Gothic Woman’s Temple and the Venetian/Tudor Masonic Temple.
From “The Architectural
Program”, Stanley Appelbaum,
The Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893
Burnham & Root,
Masonic Temple (1892)
Burnham
PostVan
Brunt
Millet
Saint-
Gaudens
McKim
Burnham hired the country’s leading architects, artists and
designers (primarily from New York) to come to Chicago to create
the World’s Fair. Louis Sullivan was included to design the
Transportation Building.
Richard Morris Hunt, Administration Building
Designed Metropolitan Museum of Art facade
Frederick Law Olmsted
Landscape Design
Designed New York’s Central Park
Portrait by John Singer Sargent
George B. Post, Manufactures Building
Designed Cornelius Vanderbilt Mansion
Henry Van Brunt,
Electricity Building
Designed Memorial Hall,
Harvard University
Francis Millet,
Director of Decoration
F. Millet, An Autumn Idyll
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
Sculpture
Lincoln Statue
Lincoln Park
Charles McKim, Agriculture Building
Designed Boston Public Library (firm of McKim,
Mead and White)
Chicago housing in neighborhood of the White City
Urban Planning. Utopian Vision? Architectural Styles.
Views of the Worlds Fair:
Urban/ Rural Hub/Hinterland Good/Evil
• Why Devil in the White City?
• Haymarket Sq (1886) – 8 hour day
• Pullman strike (1894) in paternalistic city
• Labor opposed the Fair (Larson)
• Distrust and wonder for Hinterland guests
• Guides to Gentleman’s clubs• Guides to Gentleman’s clubs
• Stock Yards a draw with tenements to view on the way
• Would the Fair turn a profit?
• Would it confirm Chicago as the City of the Century?
• Did it describe the City of an Empire?