Preservation, Polemics, and Power: Carl W. Condit’s The Chicago School of Architecture

Preservation, Polemics, and Power: Carl W. Condit’s The Chicago School of Architecture

Sharon Irish

In 1952 the University of Chicago Press published a book by a thirty-eight-year-old assistant professor of English and humanities at Northwestern University, Carl W. Condit, titled The Rise of the Skyscraper. Twelve years later, in 1964, this book was revised, expanded, and published as The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875–1925.{1} The Chicago School remains in print to this day, the press estimating that it has sold 10,000 copies. Like many influential books, it both conclusively shaped the issues under discussion and opened new areas for further investigation.

Condit was a transdisciplinary scholar. After receiving his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Purdue in 1936, he followed with an M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Cincinnati in 1939 and 1941. He taught mathematics and mechanics during World War II and then became an assistant design engineer with the New York Central Railroad’s Building Department in Cincinnati. When the war ended, he was hired by Northwestern to teach English. During the late 1940s, he published several articles, including “The Chicago School and the Modern Movement in Architecture.”{2} Then, in 1951–52, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant that supported him as a postdoctoral fellow in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin. While at Wisconsin on leave from Northwestern, Condit was able to complete The Rise of the Skyscraper.

In the years between The Rise of the Skyscraper and The Chicago School, Condit published much else, including his two-volume American Building Art and an article in the very first issue of Technology and Culture.{3} He also inaugurated the history of science program at Northwestern and, as Mel Kranzberg wrote in the special issue of Technology and Culture that I edited in Condit’s honor, “introduced courses in the history of building technology and the history of urban form.” Kranzberg continued: “These were among the first of their kind, if not the very first, at any American university. There were few textbooks and precedents to follow, so Condit’s own research provided much of the substance for the students who took these courses.”{4}

Preservation and Polemics

I have written before about Condit’s contributions to historical scholarship.{5} Here I want to consider the milieu in which The Chicago School was published and some of the ideas that have coalesced since then that have stimulated my own thinking. But first, a few words about the word “polemics” in the heading. Condit used polemics strategically to advance his case that architecture should be an art in which modern structural techniques predominantly shaped form. He defended his strongly held position by using generalizations that often reduced complex situations to either/or stances and by glossing over nuances and distinctions that made these either/or positions difficult to maintain. In the last section of this essay, I introduce some ideas about “performance.” Rather than offering “performance” as a counterpolemic to Condit’s argument, I hope to suggest—in keeping with the performative—that there is room for movement, for shifting interpretations, for recentering our investigations around different constituencies. My stance is polemical to the extent that I firmly believe this recentering is long overdue and urgently needed.

One catalyst for Condit’s revision of The Rise of the Skyscraper was the demolition of so much of Chicago’s commercial architecture in the dozen years between 1952 and 1964. As Condit told the history of tall office buildings in Chicago, he simultaneously noted how many of the buildings had met the wrecking ball since his original publication: seventeen by my count.{6} One strategy to try and prevent further destruction of a historic heritage is to unify threatened buildings into a “school” or other grouping that would amplify the importance of single buildings by categorizing them under a label of significance. To do this, Condit recruited the work of art historian Sigfried Giedion, whose highly polemical and influential Space, Time, and Architecture was published in 1941 and issued in many subsequent editions.{7} Condit adopted a term from Giedion, “the Chicago School,” that had also been used with respect to writers, sociologists, or designers of residential architecture (the latter more commonly known now as the Prairie School).{8}

While it may not have been Condit’s only intention, he popularized Giedion’s usage of “the Chicago School” and thus strengthened the links among Chicago’s commercial buildings, Prairie School architecture, and the modernist work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other European émigré-architects. It was a clever way to make a declaration of importance. For example, taking off from Giedion, Condit connected the commercial buildings built in the 1890s by the firm of Holabird and Roche to Chicago designs by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: “An unbroken if irregular line extends from the mature buildings of Holabird and Roche through the concrete structures of Richard Schmidt [Montgomery Ward Warehouse, 1908] and the [1922] Tribune project of Gropius and Meyer to this apartment tower [the Promontory Apartments in Chicago by Mies van der Rohe, 1948–50].” And again, Condit wrote of an 1895 design by D. H. Burnham and Company: “One short step further in the design of the Reliance [Building] and he [chief designer Charles Atwood] would have produced the transparent tower that Mies van der Rohe imagined in his Berlin project of 1919” (TCS, 218, 110).{9}

This argument went both ways. Robert Bruegmann pointed out in his 1991 critique of the term “the Chicago School” that the modernist designs were claimed by critics to be in line with buildings of 1890s Chicago, lending the former a historical pedigree and legitimating them in some circles. Condit, he noted, aligned himself with European critics by making the connections that they did as well: “Throughout the 1920s, pictures of American engineering works and utilitarian buildings, primarily industrial structures but also Chicago office buildings from the 1880s and 1890s, appeared in the pages of the books and magazines published by avant-garde architects.”{10} That a U.S. wholesale store and a French apartment block had different contexts, uses, and ownership did not enter into the argument. Condit asserted: “The new architecture has come full circle, without quite realizing what it was doing, from Chicago through France and Germany and back to its native home” (TCS, 147). This interest in “formal analysis,” an in-depth discussion of the aesthetic qualities of an artifact, was commonplace in art history at mid-century.

In hindsight, Condit’s 1960s writings seem to be a valiant attempt to create a sort of textual utopia, a totalizing explanation that could withstand the “tide of new construction” as well as so many uncertainties of the atomic age. He eloquently argued that “[t]he most destructive consequence of a consumers’ economy resting on a militaristic basis, other than war itself, is that works of art may be consumed like the most ephemeral of material goods”

Throughout The Chicago School, Condit revealed his sympathies with Giedion. Both scholars disdained the eclecticism of much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture in Europe and the United States, dismissing building ornamentation in no uncertain terms. Condit claimed that architect Louis Sullivan had a “capriciously experimental temperament in ornamentation” that obscured the form and “produces an effect of shallowness and indecisiveness” (TCS, 38–39). The firm of Holabird and Roche exhibited a “misguided traditionalism” on the Marquette Building, and its Old Colony Building had a “ridiculous colonnade” (TCS, 122, 124). Several other passages provide evidence of Condit’s modernist preference for austerity: He praised the “inherent power that the unadorned building possessed,” while the Woman’s Temple (Burnham and Root, 1891–92), commissioned by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, was an “excursion into the romantic. . . . It was florid work—arty and feminine, perhaps,” according to Condit (TCS, 101, 103, 104). This was not praise, but a sort of gender essentialism, not surprising in an era when Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had just been published to wide notoriety.

In contrast to Giedion, however, Condit focused on Chicago buildings and was far more specific about construction, patronage, and other contributors to the creation and execution of the buildings. Being a Chicagoan himself, Condit was rather boosterish about his hometown, insisting on the late-nineteenth-century sophistication of his city.{11} Like the anonymous authors of Industrial Chicago (1891), he praised “the structural-utilitarian-aesthetic unity of the best Chicago buildings” (TCS, 12). He also believed at this point in his career that the “transmutation of vernacular building . . . into a genuine architectural style was in part the product of a relatively long theoretical preparation” (TCS, 9). Tracing what he viewed to be the theoretical bases of the Chicago School was another strategy to give the commercial buildings a historical lineage. Condit thus went beyond formal analysis to discuss concepts of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Horatio Greenough, for example.{12}

Condit’s book argued for understanding nineteenth-century vernacular urban commercial buildings because of their role in providing “ultimate meaning for the architecture of our own day” (TCS, v). The effort to link modernist architecture to that of vernacular buildings of the late nineteenth century was two-pronged and reciprocal on Condit’s part: to highlight a neglected and increasingly threatened type of building and to defend the spare, abstract designs of European and U.S. modernism.{13} One part of the historic fabric was sewn to another, if you will, to strengthen both. In hindsight, Condit’s 1960s writings seem to be a valiant attempt to create a sort of textual utopia, a totalizing explanation that could withstand the “tide of new construction” as well as so many uncertainties of the atomic age. He eloquently argued that “[t]he most destructive consequence of a consumers’ economy resting on a militaristic basis, other than war itself, is that works of art may be consumed like the most ephemeral of material goods” (TCS, 134).

Preserving Polemics

Condit seemingly willed Chicago architecture to achieve what he valued: “[Charles] Atwood succeeded in developing almost to its ultimate refinement the modern dematerialized curtain wall and thus made the building a direct forerunner of the work of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in the 1920’s,” so that architecture, once again, was what he believed it was intended to be: a structural art. (TCS, 110, 2). Condit sought a “true standard in architecture—that is, a basic norm or type exactly developed to fit a particular set of conditions and repeated wherever those conditions exist. Radical deviations for a formula that represents an adequate generalization would be mere caprice or illogicality.” He supported this idea by citing Alfred North Whitehead: “Imagination and individual expression are vital to a living culture, but we should remember with Whitehead that ‘civilization [also] advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.’”{14}

Architects John Wellborn Root and Louis Henri Sullivan did not fit so easily into Condit’s “school.” Condit wrote: “For Sullivan, the potential aesthetic quality of the tall building lay in its unusual height, and it was this that he seized on to provide the expression of his intense personal feeling” (TCS, 128). The same might be said of Condit in the sense that tall buildings for him, too, provided a “technical-aesthetic synthesis that makes it possible for the world of technology to enter into the domain of feeling and morality” (TCS, 4). Of Sullivan writing about the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Condit exhorted:

On a deeper level . . . one is compelled to reflect on the fact that Sullivan identified the Field building with the man who created it [Henry Hobson Richardson in 1887], or transformed it into a man. The imagery is entirely associated with masculine energy and potency, sheer creative vitality in its basic physical sense. When one considers this along with the ascription of a Dionysiac quality to the tall building, the essential meaning becomes inescapable. For Sullivan the creation of a building is equivalent to the biological act of man recreating himself, as he does when he begets a child, the emphasis, however, being exclusively masculine (TCS, 167–68).

While I believe that this analysis contradicts Condit’s commitment to architecture as (solely) a structural art, Condit’s prose is surely a “proud and soaring thing,” to use Sullivan’s phrase.{15}

Despite myself, I admire the certainty and seamlessness of this book. Condit started right out with the claim that “the architectural and technical achievement of the Chicago school marked the establishment of a new style of architecture” that was also “the culmination of structural evolution that extended over” the nineteenth century. “Style in architecture,” he stated,

represents or stands for those essential characteristics of construction, form, ornament and detail that are common to all the important structures of any definable period in history. But it also stands for those technical and aesthetic qualities of the artistic product that grow directly and organically out of the conditions of human existence and out of the aspirations and powers of human beings. We rightly feel that the buildings of a certain style—if it is a genuine style—symbolize in their form the realities of man’s experience and the attempt to master and give adequate emotional expression to those realities. These buildings are constituent facts of man’s history, and their revelation is a part of truth itself (TCS, 1).

Man. Master. Truth. These words sound dated and quaint, I hope, in their self-assurance and use of gendered possessives. But Condit continued: “Within a few years the exploitation of these technical factors [iron framing, fireproofing, vertical transportation] brought about the revolution in form and construction that became the basis of a fully modern architecture, emancipated from the last vestige of dependence on the past” (TCS, 25). Here he seems to contradict his strategy of giving modernism a past; instead he rejects its sources. Condit brought together construction technologies with the forms that they helped make possible, both in the late-nineteenth-century commercial buildings and the postwar modernist structures. By conflating these, he scripted a history that discouraged inquiry into the forms and techniques as independent variables operating in a complex urban environment over time.

The Glasgow-based architect and educator Thomas A. Markus remarked recently on the “fragmentation of architectural discourse.” “There are no inherent connections between form, function and space,” Markus wrote.{16} Again and again in scholarship from the mid-twentieth century—primarily in scholarship of and about modernism—there was a tendency to deduce social and political meanings from form, to posit inherent connections between function (in a broad sense) and form. When Condit wrote that these “buildings of a certain style . . . symbolize in their form the realities of man’s experience,” he assumed too much, reducing history to a single strand. By the 1980s, scholars like Alan Colquhoun were arguing for a conception of “the city as historically as well as spatially continuous—capable of being read as a palimpsest. In the early-twentieth century avant-garde, the city was seen diachronically, as a linear development over time, each period canceling the ones before in the name of the unity of the Zeitgeist.”{17}

In drawing a line, however crooked, between structures that resembled each other stylistically and technically, Condit created an illustrated narrative that ignored the simultaneous existence in the same territory of other layers and other priorities. Assuredly, his interest was the “contradiction in the United States between the aims of commercial enterprise and the values of aesthetic achievement” and in constructing The Chicago School, he attempted to bring these opposites into alignment (TCS, 134). In the final section of this essay, I want to gesture toward some different scholarly goals.

Palimpsest, Performance, and Power

Synchronicity, then (along with the overused “palimpsest”), to an extent has supplanted the “linear development over time” in history-writing that Colquhoun described. Already in 1964, architect Bernard Rudofsky noted that “the discriminative approach of the historian is mostly due to his parochialism. . . . [A]rchitectural history as we know it is equally biased on the social plane. It amounts to little more than a who’s who of architects who commemorated power and wealth; an anthology of buildings of, by, and for the privileged.”{18} Once the boundaries of what should be appreciated and preserved expanded to include the ordinary and the vernacular, historians brought many more players onto the playing field, including contractors, engineers, and real estate agents.

At the same time that Condit attempted to preserve commercial structures, he recognized that his own methods of study—discussing vernacular building, real estate, engineering, and infrastructure along with the architecture—were undermining the priority previously given by historians to Masters and Monuments. “The union of architecture and engineering demanded by the philosophy of the modern movement has achieved the ironic result of contracting the architect’s role to a minority status in the creation of a finished building” (TCS, 51, n. 31). Almost as a way of compensating for the diminished role of the architect and, to some extent, undermining his own argument, Condit elevated Louis Sullivan and John Wellborn Root to masterly status. By examining the works of these men in more depth, he inadvertently suggested new directions for research—precisely those aspects of architecture and urbanism that “the Chicago School” did not adequately accommodate but at which Sullivan and Root excelled—ornament and variation, for example.

In an essay titled “The Politics of Successful Technologies,” John Staudenmaier argued for a “contextual approach to the history of technology . . . [that situates] technical design decisions within the public fabric of societal decision making.”{19} Condit provided a context for the buildings he considered by examining real estate, construction, and infrastructure issues along with the individual architectural works. The context of history has broadened since the mid-1960s, however, along with what is “public.” Staudenmaier noted that “context is under construction every bit as much as the artifact in question.”{20} Thus the historian is challenged to focus on an ever-shifting set of considerations. In Technology’s Storytellers, Staudenmaier elucidated a constituency model that helps analyze technological history: design, maintenance, and impact constituencies are groups affected differently by changes in technology.{21} In brief, the design constituencies are “[t]he people and institutions with access to the venture capital that new technologies always require [and] ordinarily hold cultural hegemony in their society.”{22} Maintenance constituencies include those who “had all come to benefit from and depend upon” a certain new technology, such as automobiles. Finally, there are two segments of the impact constituency: “people and institutions who lose because of the design of the new technology” and “those who share the costs of a technology without receiving its benefits.”{23} Condit primarily examined design constituencies in the history of tall buildings, but he also considered maintenance constituencies, including steelworkers, tenants, and legislators. He minimally recognized impact constituencies.{24} While a focus on impact constituencies is crucial for a fuller understanding of historical change, taking into account impact constituencies also has added new dimensions to our knowledge of design and maintenance constituencies by underscoring the societal costs and the relationships among constituencies.

A few pages back, I wrote that I would turn to the idea of performance toward the end of this essay. Imagine now Carl Condit making a show of opening a door, as he surely did for me and other women when we entered a building together. Metaphorically, Condit’s certainty, I think, opened the door for others to examine his assumptions. How could he be so sure of himself? His polemical stance prodded me (at least) to skepticism. Others, too, have shifted away from Condit’s surefooted storytelling. While some scholars like Bruegmann have been quite polemical themselves, other writers have stressed the communicative aspects of technological activities.

Adapting some of Staudenmaier’s ideas, Bryan Pfaffenberger wrote about “a full range of technological activities, such as user appropriation, user modifications, sabotage, and revolutionary alterations . . . as a process of technological communication.”{25} This communication was “reciprocal and recursive,” with interactions among technological artifacts, people, and value systems producing outcomes.{26} Architectural historian Diane Ghirardo sought to “uncover spaces, spatial practices and histories that concern women above all, with the argument, following from the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, that through social practice, spaces are both configured and acquire meaning.” Further, she argued that this analysis “represents resistance to totalizing interpretations, or metanarratives, and, more specifically, allows us to recover the histories not only of some exceptional buildings, but also, insofar as possible, structures and histories that have not been preserved precisely because of their associations with women.”{27} Historians are investigating reciprocal relationships of space and social relations, since their (our) own contexts have changed.{28}

“The artifact embodies political intentions,” Pfaffenberger wrote, “but these intentions do not come to life in the absence of ritual.” The example he used to explain this activation of an artifact was the Victorian hallway bench and its varied meanings to different constituencies. “[T]he ornate mirror and the hard, plain bench both represented and constructed the Victorian class system” by providing an uncomfortable place for the servant to sit and an elaborate mirror to literally reflect the opulence of the upper-class visitor.{29} I have tried to push my own work in the direction of examining both formalized rituals and performances (broadly construed) of social interactions in and around buildings. By focusing on “in-between conditions”—what happens between bodies and artifacts or buildings—I hope to shed light on some of the reciprocal and recursive ways that people and building technologies produce urban environments.{30} Staudenmaier’s concept of “impact constituencies” has helped frame my considerations of those who have been harmed by (say) skyscraper development. Also crucial to my way of thinking has been feminist theorization of “intersectionality”—the ways in which gender, class, and race intersect.{31}

“Palimpsest,” the word used by Colquhoun to describe “the city as historically as well as spatially continuous,” fails to describe power relationships in the various layers of a city; intersectionality stresses multiple oppressions as well as the varied strategies to resist those oppressions. According to the editors of the book Embodied Utopias, “Spatial boundaries become psychologically coded barriers: walls, gates, one-way and dead-end streets, decaying buildings, parts of the city where ‘you’ (normative subject) ‘don’t go.’”{32} In his essay for Embodied Utopias, Thomas Markus stressed that “[a]ll built space inevitably structures social relationships, by creating ‘insides’ and ‘outsides,’ categories of ‘inhabitants,’ ‘visitors,’ and ‘strangers,’ and it separates those with power from those who lack power.”{33} But in an essay on Hull House in that same volume, Sharon Haar blurred some of these distinctions about urban spaces. In introducing Haar’s article, philosopher Peg Birmingham noted that Hull House reformers “grasp[ed] the public space of the city as a set of myriad, material lived practices with a life of its own, beyond the attempts at rational organization in which everything has its proper place and function.”{34}

Condit’s powerful prose and compelling polemics in The Chicago School have carried effectively across the decades, shaping the history of tall buildings into a myth that has its own shifting history.

In order to capture these “material lived practices” I have used the concept of performance, in all its senses. People’s actions—embodied performances—are constantly shifting and thus affecting the processes of spatial and technological creation as they are also affected by them. The implicit motion—moving toward or away from—animates physical spaces as well as any institutional structures that (attempt to) organize people. New media consultant Jon McKenzie divided performance into three categories: cultural, organizational, and technological. In his words, his book “Perform or Else initiates a challenge, one that links the performances of artists and activists with those of workers and executives, as well as computers and missile systems.”{35} His tripartite definition of performance dovetails with Pfaffenberger’s “technological dramas” that

emphasize the performative nature of technological “statements” and “counterstatements,” which involved the creation of scenes (contexts) in which actors (designers, artifacts, and users) play out their fabricated roles with regard to a set of envisioned purposes (and before an audience), and it is also to emphasize that discourse involved is not the argumentative and academic discourse of a text but the symbolic media of myth (in which skepticism is suspended) and ritual (in which human actions are mythically patterned in controlled social spaces).{36}

In other words, Pfaffenberger tried to dramatize technological change by providing contexts for the varied constituencies that individually and collectively animated the settings and the artifacts under consideration. This “animation” takes place on several levels, including myth and ritual, but also in less formalized ways.

It is clear that Carl Condit recognized and described aspects of urban drama. For example, he imbued some of the buildings he analyzed with multisensory qualities. About Sullivan’s design for the Carson, Pirie, Scott store, Condit noted that its “thrust and counterthrust, tension and compression, give rise to powerful kinesthetic images in the observer” (TCS, 165).{37} But Condit was unable to reconcile this embodied response with his then-modernist predilections. Instead he belittled it, feminized it, and dismissed it. That he did so made him a man of a particular social and historic location. It is hardly a crime to be of one’s time and place, and Condit did it so well and so seamlessly that his midcentury interpretations have been frustratingly long-lived. The myth of the Chicago School continues, most recently in the two-volume work The Skyscraper and the City, where William Le Baron Jenney is still referred to as the “father of the skyscraper.”{38} Condit’s powerful prose and compelling polemics in The Chicago School have carried effectively across the decades, shaping the history of tall buildings into a myth that has its own shifting history.

Roberta Moudry’s edited volume and the forthcoming book by Joanna Merwood-Salisbury are excellent contributions to the history of tall buildings, promising new frameworks.{39} The essays compiled by Moudry explore “the engagement of the skyscraper with the experience and meaning of city life.”{40} Both Moudry and Merwood-Salisbury honor historians like Condit who have gone before by moving beyond them, asking different questions—putting issues of racialization and gender at the center of their inquiries, for example. Condit’s hesitant and tepid investigations into kinesthetics and emotions have been invigorated by this recent scholarship. The sooner we recognize “that we [must] constantly shift the center of analysis to multiple perspectives to ensure that we are developing a holistic strategy,” writes Andrea Smith, the sooner we will write histories that include more people’s lives.{41} Staudenmaier’s “impact constituencies” need to tell their own stories, and to add their histories to those of the design and maintenance constituencies. I think Condit would agree: in addition to being an influential scholar, he was a generous man.

{1} Carl W. Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area, 1875–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). The 1975 paperback edition cost $5.95 when I bought it at the start of graduate school. The Chicago School is hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as TCS. In 1979, the book was published as La scuola di Chicago, translated by Anna Maria Porciatti and published in Florence by Libreria Editrice Fiorentina. See Debra N. Mancoff, “Carl W. Condit’s Publications—a Chronological Bibliography, 1946–1988,” Technology and Culture 30 (April 1989): 258–65.{2} Art in America 36 (January 1948): 19–36.

{3} American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century (New York, 1960); American Building Art: The Twentieth Century (New York, 1961); “Sullivan’s Skyscrapers as the Expression of Nineteenth Century Technology,” Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 78–83. Condit was one of the founders of the Society for the History of Technology, serving on the Executive Council from 1959 to 1963. Between 1962 and 1970, he served as coeditor with Eugene Ferguson of Technology and Culture. In 1968 he was awarded the Abbott Payson Usher Prize, and in 1973 the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. Between 1966 and 1972 he was professor of art and history of science at Northwestern, and then, after that, professor of history, art history, and urban affairs. On Condit’s role in SHOT, see Robert C. Post, “Missionary: An Interview with Melvin Kranzberg,” Invention and Technology 4 (Winter 1989): 34–39, and “Looking Back: Primary Sources” at http://shotnews.net/fiftieth (accessed 26 October 2007). In the index to Technology and Culture’s first twenty-five volumes, Condit’s entries take up nearly four entire columns, the longest by far of anybody who ever published in the journal. Robert Post has been indefatigable in documenting the early history of SHOT and Technology and Culture; thanks to him for adding many of the details here.

{4} Melvin Kranzberg, “A Tribute to Carl W. Condit,” Technology and Culture 30 (April 1989): 256.

{5} Sharon Irish, “Essays in Honor of Carl W. Condit,” Technology and Culture 30 (April 1989): 249–54; and Irish, “Memorial: Carl W. Condit (1914–1997),” Technology and Culture 38 (October 1997): 1026–30.

{6} These buildings discussed by Condit were demolished in the following years: the Bailey and Born buildings (1952–53); Walker Warehouse (1953); the Lakota (1959); Phoenix Building (1959); Cable Building (1960–61); Unitarian Church of Evanston (1960); Dexter Building (1961); Great Northern Theater (1961); Majestic Hotel (1961); Republic Building (1961); Garrick Theater/Schiller Building (1961); Victoria Hotel (1961); Bauer and Black Building (1962); Hyde Park Hotel (1963); Lind Block (1963). Hull House was threatened with demolition in 1961; after extensive protests, the house itself was preserved, but nine other buildings in the complex were torn down. See The Chicago School, 206–07.

{7} Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th edition, revised and enlarged (Cambridge, Mass., 1967 [1941]). See Arthur P. Molella, “Classics Revisited—Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command,” Technology and Culture 43 (April 2002): 374–89 (thanks to Robert Post for alerting me to Molella’s essay).

{8} All these are discussed in Robert Bruegmann’s article, “Myth of the Chicago School,” first published in 1991, but recently reprinted in Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, ed. Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray (Chicago, 2005), 15–29. According to Bruegmann, William Dean Howells used the phrase “Chicago school” in 1903 to describe certain writers. The Chicago school of sociology centered around Robert Park and Ernest Burgess at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century, and architect Thomas Tallmadge applied the term in 1908 to residential designs by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and George Maher. Another source for the historiography of the term is H. Allen Brooks, “Chicago School: Metamorphosis of a Term,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 25 (May 1966): 115–18.

{9} Giedion previously had made the same Reliance/Miesian glass tower comparison in Space, Time, and Architecture, 386–87.

{10} Bruegmann, “Myth of the Chicago School,” 16.

{11} In The Chicago School (p. 95), Condit wrote that: “The last decade of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary flowering of the civic and cultural spirit in Chicago. It was marked by creative public enterprise on the highest and most effective level, and it led to an intellectual and civic renaissance unparalleled in the history of American municipalities.”

{12} Giedion pointed the way in this, referencing Viollet-le-Duc as a theoretical father of the skyscraper. See Space, Time, and Architecture, 206.

{13} In another example of this linkage, in The Chicago School (p. 139), Condit wrote of the Prudential Building (Adler and Sullivan, 1895): “The cylindrical column envelopes of the first story and the bay-wide windows of the second open the base to such an extent as to suggest an anticipation of Le Corbusier’s pilotis.”

{14} Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (New York, 1948), 42, quoted in The Chicago School, 126. On type, see an important essay by Georges Teyssot, “Norm and Type: Variations on a Theme,” in Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, eds. Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte (New York, 2003).

{15} Of the tall office building, Sullivan declared in 1896: “It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing.” Louis H. Sullivan, “The Tall Building Artistically Considered,” Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York, 1979), 206.

{16} Thomas A. Markus, “Is There a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?” in Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach (London and New York, 2002), 17.

{17} Alan Colquhoun, “Twentieth Century Concepts of Urban Space,” Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays, 1980–1987 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 232–33. This essay was originally published in 1985.

{18} Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (Garden City, N.Y., 1964), [n.p., but on first page of preface].

{19} John M. Staudenmaier, “The Politics of Successful Technologies,” in In Context: History and the History of Technology—Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg, ed. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 151.

{20} John M. Staudenmaier, “Problematic Stimulation: Historians and Sociologists Constructing Technology Studies,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 15 (1995), 97. John Staudenmaier has been a generous correspondent over the years, sending me copies of the invaluable article cited here as well as the one in note 19, among others.

{21} John M. Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 192–201.

{22} Staudenmaier, “Politics of Successful Technologies,” 154.

{23} Ibid., 156.

{24} In The Chicago School, labor is mentioned, but race is invisible, and women nearly so. Condit does mention child care (p. 151), department store shopping (p. 164), and the architect Marion Mahony (pp. 203, 210), as well as Jane Addams (p. 206).

{25} Bryan Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 17 (Summer 1992): 285. I am grateful to Rayvon Fouché for alerting me to this article, as well as another one that considers the “performance of technoscience”: Warwick Anderson, “Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 5/6 (2002): 644.

{26} Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas,” 288 and 290.

{27} Diane Ghirardo, “Cherchez la Femme: Where Are the Women in Architectural Studies?” in Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender, and the Interdisciplinary, ed. Katerina Rüedi, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Duncan McCorquodale (London, 1996), 159.

{28} Certainly I have been influenced by the work of Henri Lefebvre, especially The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, Mass., 1991 [1974, 1984]), and Edward W. Soja’s publications, such as Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, Mass., 1996). About the time that I first read Carl Condit’s work (1978), I also read Michel Foucault for the first time: Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” trans. Mark Seem, Semiotext(e) 3:2 (1978), 6–19.

{29} Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas,” 294.

{30} My book manuscript, Spaces Between: The Art of Suzanne Lacy, is currently under consideration. Articles that explore aspects of this performative approach include Nicholas Brown, Ryan Griffis, Kevin Hamilton, Sharon Irish, and Sarah Kanouse, “What Makes Justice Spatial? What Makes Spaces Just? Three Interviews on the Concept of Spatial Justice,” Critical Planning 14 (Summer 2007), 6–28; and Sharon Irish, “Shadows in the Garden: ‘The Dark Madonna’ Project by Suzanne Lacy,” Landscape Journal 26 (Spring 2007): 98–115.

{31} Joan Kelly, “The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” Women, History, Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), 1–18. Foundational texts about intersectionality include: “The Combahee River Collective: A Black Feminist Statement,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York, 1978), 362–72; and Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Radical Teacher 7 (March 1978), 20–27. Another more recent work by María Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, Md., 2003), is a vital contribution on intersectionality.

{32} Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach, “Embodied Utopia: Introduction,” Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach (London and New York, 2002), 4.

{33} Markus, “Is There a Built Form?” (n. 16 above).

{34} Peg Birmingham, “At Home in Public,” in Embodied Utopias, 95.

{35} Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London, 2001), 3.

{36} Pfaffenberger, “Technological Dramas” (n. 25 above), 286.

{37} David Van Zanten examined several facets of Louis Sullivan—architectural, biographical, and poetic—in his book Sullivan’s City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan (New York, 2000), and suggested “a parallel conception of ornament evolved as an honest emancipation of the material and structure of the surfaces it articulated” (p. 9). According to Van Zanten, the “three cities” of Sullivan were, first, “the Chicago of 1890”; second, “the city in which Sullivan around 1900 documented his presence, when his ornament left the building surfaces and proclaimed itself as the reflection of a separate, powerful personality. . . . The third, secret city of his last years appeared when ornament and plan combined” (p. 153).

{38} Lynn S. Beedle, Mir Ali, and Paul Armstrong, The Skyscraper and the City: Design, Technology, and Innovation (Lewiston, N.Y., 2007), 118.

{39} Roberta Moudry, ed., The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (New York, 2005); Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper as Urban Solution (Chicago, 2009).

{40} Moudry, 3.

{41} Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 153.

Dr. Irish is research scholar in the School of Architecture, and project coordinator for the Community Informatics Initiative, School of Library and Information Science, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.