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?