The history of Chicago architecture is fascinating. The history of the history of Chicago architecture is even more fascinating. “This book grew out of an effort to understand the vast and varied man-made landscape that constitutes the Chicago metropolitan area and its hinterland.” So begins Robert Bruegmann’s study of the Chicago architectural firm of Holabird & Roche. The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880–1918 will, the author says, be supplemented by a second volume, covering the architects’ works in the 1920s and 1930s, when the firm became Holabird & Root. The author, a professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is part of a revisionist band of interpreters of Chicago’s architectural heritage. These historians have done much to rekindle interest in relatively neglected facets of the city’s built environment, in particular the “Art Deco” or “modernistic” towers of the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps best exemplified by such Holabird & Root creations as the Palmolive Building on North Michigan Avenue.

Though never considered the pace setters or form givers that Chicagoans Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were, Holabird and Roche have been seen as embodying the mainstream of the so-called “Chicago school of architecture” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chicago school, for better or worse, has an honored place in the history of modernist architecture, a place accorded by giants no less than Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Sigfried Giedion. These were the historians who were eager to present a progressivist view of architectural history, in which the modernism of the Bauhaus and the International Style could be seen to have risen, with historical inevitability, from the architecture of the past. In Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design and Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, the idea was to establish a modernist pedigree, to enumerate the stages leading to twentieth-century modernism. (In any field but architecture, this approach is labeled historicism; in architectural studies, where general cultural literacy is often curiously lacking, historicism is used to mean its opposite, i.e., architects who choose to continue to design in traditional styles.) Young architects and architectural historians long tended to swallow whole this Hegelian framework erected by a handful of art historians in the first half of this century, never questioning its often rather startling philosophical presumptions.

The standard history of Chicago architecture goes something like this: the rehabilitation of the city after the Great Fire of 1871 necessitated a sequence of innovations in building construction that, circumscribed by severe economic constraints, produced a new mode of commercial architecture, in which steel-framed office buildings rose with a minimum of aesthetic embellishment. It was largely an inchoate development prompted by necessity, later receiving a kind of ex post facto aesthetic rationalization, first in the writings of the Chicagoan Sullivan, then in the writings of various European commentators, from Adolf Loos to Walter Gropius to Pevsner and Giedion. The operative notion is that Chicago in the late nineteenth century provided a foretaste of modernist architecture, and might actually have had some small direct influence on European practice, as codified in Gropius’s Bauhaus in the 1920s. The coup de grâce came when Sullivan wrote about the aesthetic counterreformation of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, with its promotion of the precepts of the Ecole des Beaux Arts (of which institution Sullivan himself was a product), that the blow dealt to Chicago’s architecture would require fifty years to be corrected. Then, as if on cue, fifty years later Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was installed at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, fomenting what came to be known as the “second Chicago school.” Everything in between, from the Beaux Arts of Daniel H. Burnham to Art Deco, was consigned to the dustbin of history.

The current generation of Chicago’s architectural historians, however, has chosen other tacks in its interpretations of this great city. The older approach, particularly as exemplified by Giedion, was grounded in the art-historical methodology of Giedion’s master Heinrich Wölfflin. (Intriguingly, the early modernists’ most articulate and informed opponent, Geoffrey Scott, also appealed to Wölfflin.) The new historians will have no truck with Wölfflin or with any of the standard art-historical approaches. The new historians prefer to cloud their works with all kinds of extra-aesthetic considerations, primarily a quasi-Marxian adumbration of economic conditions which, while it has uncovered much primary material of great interest, nonetheless has created historical fantasies no less complete and perhaps even more pernicious than those it ostensibly set out to correct.

Bruegmann states that he has “tried to create a framework for discussing the work of the firm outside the traditional plot of the two ‘Chicago schools’ and to deal with the work not as part of the evolution of ‘progressive’ styles but as a record of intervention by the architects into the built fabric of the city.” It was an enormous task that he set for himself:  

Between 1880 and 1940 Holabird & Roche was responsible for thousands of commissions … ranging from tombstones and boiler room alterations to entire industrial and institutional complexes. Holabird & Roche worked on programs as diverse as racetrack grandstands and public housing projects, for sites all over the country and abroad, often making it difficult to imagine that the projects were all the work of the same architectural office.

By way of an explanation of the vast variety of the firm’s productions, we are treated to lengthy disquisitions on real estate economics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chicago. This is one of the current fashions in the study of American architecture. Where an earlier generation tended to wish to discuss engineering more than art, the present generation seems much more interested in real estate economics than in anything else. What we get, in Bruegmann’s as in other recent books, is a treatment of the real estate finance that reduces an intelligent reader to uttering an eight-year-old’s duh!

That someone had to pay for the buildings; that they were required to return a profit; that design decisions were deeply affected by such considerations—who but an architectural historian would ever have thought otherwise? There is, in so many recent works of architectural history, a deliberate, pervading sense of Gothic foreboding, not unlike that to be found in Victorian ghost stories, except that in the recent works the specter is that of men making money—surely the scariest of ghouls.

That said, Bruegmann’s book is a triumph. This is in part because when he gets going, he casts away the trendy political obfuscations that, in his more self-conscious moments, he feels obliged to regurgitate. And, when he writes about certain individual buildings, he shows himself to be an excellent architectural critic.

Indeed, what attracts scholars and some others to downtown Chicago is not its streets’ status as artifacts of the expropriation of the working classes, but, from the first, their extraordinary aesthetic quality. The Chicago Loop exudes (or did until very recently) a remarkably consistent quality of depth, mass, appropriate embellishment--in Bruegmann’s words, “an air of classical solidity, permanence, and repose.” The historian Reyner Banham once said that “for sheer commercial splendor, Chicago is the rival of Baroque Rome.” That’s overstating things a bit, but the point is nonetheless well taken. Of American downtowns, only Chicago’s Loop seems to have pulled off the trick of giving some semblance of hierarchy, relation, and formal coherence to the full extent of its central business district. Explanations for how this came to be have ranged from minute analyses of the engineering and form-defining properties of the structural steel framing of tall buildings, to the latter-day emphasis upon real estate economics, and in particular the desire of the major developers to build as cheaply as possible.

Bruegmann truly seems to understand that it is a bit of both those things, combined with the conscious determination of certain architects and clients to evolve a sort of downtown vernacular that could, in the wake of the Victorian free-for-all, provide regularity and dignity to the rapidly multiplying business blocks of the central district. And Bruegmann is shrewd enough to demonstrate, quite eloquently, how the whole shebang acquired its ultimate coherence largely through the realizations, however fitful, of Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett’s Plan of Chicago of 1909.

At the center of it all stood William Holabird (1854–1923) and Martin Roche (1855–1927). Holabird, the son of a career officer in the U.S. Army, was a West Point- trained engineer who, knowing there was an enormous demand for engineers in post-fire Chicago, got a job there with the technologically pioneering engineer-architect William Le Baron Jenney in 1875. Roche, who had grown up in Chicago and attended its public schools (he had no higher education), had taken a job as a draftsman in Jenney’s office in 1872; he eventually became head draftsman. Together with another Jenney employee, the gifted landscape architect Ossian Simonds, Holabird and Roche formed their own partnership in 1880. Simonds soon left, and Holabird & Roche grew into one of the largest architectural practices in the world.

The Chicago firms were organized as businesses, in contrast to the leading East Coast firms, which operated on the atelier system adapted from the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Many of the leading eastern practitioners—preeminently, McKim, Mead & White—considered themselves artists and reserved their best efforts for civic structures, museums, libraries, monuments, and the like. The Chicagoans, by contrast, concentrated their energies on the design of economical buildings for business. And when Chicago got around to putting up its own monumental edifices—e.g., the public library, the Art Institute—it was none of the Chicago architects but East Coast firms like Boston’s Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge that were handed the commissions. Just so, when the Chicago developer Bryan Lathrop, who routinely employed Holabird & Roche, came to build his own palatial residence in Chicago’s Gold Coast, he selected McKim, Mead & White to design it.

This would change in due course. For one thing, Chicago’s most domineering architectural personalities were the Beaux Arts-trained Louis Sullivan and John Wellborn Root. And by the early 1890s, Daniel Burnham, the city’s single most successful practitioner, though not himself Beaux Arts-trained, turned to the Beaux Arts with a vengeance—much, ironically, to Sullivan’s dismay. Eventually, Holabird & Roche followed suit. It is fascinating to observe the manner of self-education that got them to where, after several false starts, they could design competent, even innovative, classical buildings. Alas, the records are not extant that can give Bruegmann—or us—a solid understanding of how this went, though it is not hard to imagine the dogged, nerdy Martin Roche simply pounding away till he got it right.

From the structurally inventive Tacoma Building (1888–89), through the Marquette Building (1891–95) and the lovely Old Colony Building (1893–94), to numerous Loop department stores and hotels, the firm designed many of the buildings in which Chicagoans did their day-to-day living, working, and shopping.

I do not think I have read better accounts of two of the three Holabird & Roche works that I personally most admire: the Marquette Building, an office block in Chicago’s Loop; and the University Club, on Michigan Avenue. The third, the Cook County Courthouse and Chicago City Hall complex in the heart of the Loop, is not dealt with quite so convincingly by Bruegmann, and I will continue to prefer Carl W. Condit’s treatment in his masterly Chicago 1910–29: Building, Planning, and Urban Technology, published in 1973. (Bruegmann does, however, quote at length the excellent turn-of-the-century critic Montgomery Schuyler’s assessment of this building; Schuyler frequently and admiringly commented upon Holabird & Roche’s works.) On the widely influential Marquette design, I do not think anybody excels Bruegmann’s nuanced appraisal. And on the remarkable University Club building, a private club built for the city’s elite, there is, in Bruegmann’s treatment, not the remotest whiff of PC—an occasion, in this day and age, for hosannas. I was disappointed, however, that there was not a fuller treatment of the sadly demolished Republic Building on State Street, which strikes me, from photographs (including one on the dust jacket of the present volume), as one of the more remarkable Loop skyscrapers of its day.

The book is splendidly produced, from the stunning dust-jacket photograph, to its superb documentation, logical organization, and, above all, its magnificent illustrations: I do not recall an architectural book in recent years that was more thoughtfully and beautifully illustrated. There are both current and stock photos, drawings, plans galore, even wonderfully useful schematic topographical charts, all sensibly related to the text. Typefaces and paper density make browsing the 540-page book a delight.

Why then can’t the University of Chicago Press’s copyeditors manage a comparable level of quality? On page 19 we are led to believe, through ambiguous syntax, that William Holabird died in 1929; the following page has him dying in 1923. Dutchess County, New York, is Duchess County in the book. Levi Leiter becomes Levy Leiter. And so on. These are hardly obscure matters. I have found in recent years that the very worst copyediting is done by the major university presses. I wonder if this is because the presses subscribe to the notions of certain harebrained academics that spelling and sentence structure are tools of bourgeois oppression.

And why must the academic environment be such that Robert Bruegmann is compelled to address certain issues that he clearly would rather not address? For example, Martin Roche was a lifelong bachelor. Right off, in today’s academia, this means one thing and one thing only: he had to have been homosexual. Thus, in quoting a colleague of Martin Roche’s saying that Roche and his friend the sculptor Hermon MacNeil were “more than brothers,” Bruegmann is compelled to quip: “It is tempting, from the viewpoint of the late twentieth century, to raise an eyebrow … particularly in light of some of the voluptuous male sculptural figures of Hermon MacNeil, but there is not enough evidence to know how telling this stock phrase may be.” Well, if there is “not enough evidence,” why bring it up at all? At least this is better than the historian a few years ago who suggested that when Louis Sullivan famously said that a skyscraper should be “every inch of it a proud and soaring thing,” he wasn’t really referring to skyscrapers. (That Sullivan was a well-known womanizer is perversely adduced as evidence that he was gay!) Bruegmann does not bring up Martin Roche’s sexuality again, and well this should be, because, frankly, I cannot conceive of a less interesting subject.

Most distressing of all is a throwaway comment of Bruegmann’s. About three-quarters of the way through the book, he snidely refers to “one of the amateur Chicago architecture ‘experts,’ apparently as numerous then as now.” What is troubling is that the amateur expert to whom he refers made, by Bruegmann’s own account, an important contribution (an influential study of the fenestration of the County Courthouse building); more troubling still is the author’s clear implication that “amateur” means non-academic. I would like to remind Mr. Bruegmann that each of his own ostensible areas of “expertise”--architectural history, Chicago history, and real estate economics—was pioneered by non-academics, independent scholars, “amateurs.” And how sad it is that the one “hegemony” the academics seem not to have a problem with is their own over the institutions and processes involved in the research, writing, and distribution of scholarly monographs.

These reservations aside (and that last one does leave a bad taste in my mouth), The Architects and the City is one of the best-written, best-produced, best-researched, and most useful architectural monographs I have read in years.