The picture on the right shows the Fisher Building in Chicago, built by Daniel Burnham in 1895. More decorative than most buildings of the Chicago School, the Fisher Building shows element of that style-a clearly expressed regular frame, and bay window to catch the light in narrow city streets. By 1895, the metal framing technique had been mastered in Chicago: once out of the ground, the framing to the Fisher Building went up at the rate of a floor a day.
The Chicago School, which is an American architectural movement, based in late-19th-century Chicago, produced the skyscraper. It is actually the first work of modern architecture. In 1885 the architect-engineer William Le Baron Jenney built the ten-story Home Insurance Building (now demolished) in Chicago, employing for the first time an all-metal frame of cast iron columns and steel beams to support the masonry shell of floors and walls. This became the model for all skyscraper design. Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, and Martin Roche, all of whom worked in Jenney's Chicago office, became leaders of the Chicago School. The movement's principles of functional clarity and organic decoration were carried on by Sullivan's pupil Frank Lloyd Wright, who became one of the greatest architects of the 20th century.
This building on the left
is the Carson Pirie & Scott department store, Chicago, by Louis Sullivan
in 1899-1904. For Sullivan, even the relatively subtle expression of the
building's cellular structure was a bold gesture.
