The empty Consumers and Century Buildings at 202 and 220 S. State Street in Chicago on March 9, 2022. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)
Should a wrecking ball strike the Century Building at 202 S. State St., there will be a bittersweet moment when modern architecture’s debt to Chicago is starkly revealed.
The falling bricks will expose the underlying structure of the 16-story, Holabird and Roche-designed building: a lacework of steel beams and columns. The masonry was only tasked with screening the occupants from summer’s heat and rain, winter’s cold and snow.
That combination of a metal framework and curtain walls has produced myriad skyscrapers worldwide — after being developed and elaborated upon in Chicago’s drafting rooms. Nineteenth-century Chicagoans were fiercely proud of that.
“Chicago is a city of ‘skyscrapers,’” reported the 1891 “Morris Dictionary of Chicago.” “While other towns may boast of isolated specimens of grand architectural creation, no other city can claim the general high average of elegant and massive buildings.”
The Loop was then an outdoor museum of Chicago’s pioneering architecture. But the opening chapter vanished when William Le Baron Jenney’s 1885 Home Insurance Building was demolished in 1931.
A similar fate would appear to await not only the 1915 Century Building but also the 1913 Consumers Building at 220 S. State St., which was designed by Jenney’s firm, Jenney, Mundie & Jensen, after his death and marked the sunset of the skyscraper’s formative period.
An engraving shows architect William Le Baron Jenney. (Chicago History Museum )
A $52 million bill is moving through Congress that would level both skyscrapers. The government acquired the buildings in 2007 as a security buffer and potential expansion of federal office space behind the adjacent Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
“These are two of the last buildings representing the Chicago School of Architecture and those early skyscrapers in Chicago,” lamented Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago.
While the written word can’t replace direct experience, the motivation of the skyscraper’s pioneers can be glimpsed in the story under an 1888 Tribune headline, “The Sacrifice of Space For Light. ”
“Dark rooms will not rent and it therefore does not pay to construct them. The question is how to get the maximum amount of rentable space with the smallest cubic contents, and each lot presents its own peculiar problem.”
Chicago’s architects worked then, as architects still do, at the intersection of economic opportunity and design. The city had been speedily rebuilt after the 1871 fire, and just as speedily the demand for office space and storefronts outran supply. Outward expansion would encounter rising land values, so downtown’s moguls opted for replacing existing buildings with taller ones
But building by the age-old method of piling up layers of blocks presented another problem. Brick walls must be thicker for taller buildings, as can be seen in the 16-story Monadnock Building at 53 W. Jackson Blvd., built in 1891.
The Century Building at 202 S. State St. in September 1940. (William Loewe / Chicago Tribune)
Upon entering, a visitor might sense time standing still. The doorway is set in a wall 6 feet thick at ground level. The windows of the north section are narrow, as cutting into masonry reduces its load-bearing capacity.
The windows of the south section are larger. That part of the building was added in 1893 and constructed according to Jenney’s formula of a metal framework and curtain walls.
Jenney studied civil engineering in Paris and during his Civil War service dismantled bridges. That gave him a familiarity with metal construction that he brought to bear on a problem that came with his commission to design the Home Insurance Building
“The order further called for a maximum number of well lighted small offices above the second story which, Mr. Jenney knew would necessitate small piers — smaller probably than admissible if of ordinary masonry construction,” the Tribune recalled in Jenney’s 1907 obituary.
“With this dilemma to be met it was necessary to find some material capable of supporting a greater load per unit of section. Architects had before then obliged to enclose an iron column within a masonry pier, and the greater use of this idea, together with another — making each story a unit in its self — marked the solution of the problem. ”
Jenney subsequently employed structural steel. He has long been known as the father of the skyscraper and subject to attempts to deny him of that title for just as long. Louis Sullivan, the most celebrated architect of the Chicago School, began as a draftsman in Jenney’s office. He said Jenney was “not an architect except by courtesy of terms. His true profession was that of an engineer. ”
The Consumer Building, circa April 1960. (Chicago Architectural Photography Company)
That didn’t deter Sullivan from appropriating Jenney’s method, which was inherited by subsequent Chicago architects. Holabird and Roche employed it when designing the Century Building. Its ground-level floor-to ceiling windows welcomed visitors with a shower of sunlight.
Pronouncing it “an unusually attractive structure,” the Tribune greeted the news of its construction with an architect’s rendering. It showed the office floors enjoying the benefits of classic Chicago windows: large glass planes flanked by small windows.
Among its tenants was Local 66 of the Elevator Operators Union and the Audit Bureau of Circulations that told advertisers how periodicals were doing. A huge electric sign announced the building’s Romas Restaurant.
But shortly, architectural fashions shifted. The Century Building’s spare simplicity was followed by the curlicues of art moderne skyscrapers. Others anachronistically mimicked historic styles.
“The steel skeletons of the office buildings need be no more expressed than the bones of critics rash enough to father that statement,” the Tribune held. Its 1925 headquarters sported the flying buttresses of a medieval cathedral.
But a younger generation of European architects was still mesmerized by the Chicago School. Among them was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a German with no formal training who studied the work of Sullivan and others from afar.
In 1937, he was appointed director of the architecture program of the Armour Institute, shortly to become the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mies would bring the Chicago School to its logical conclusion: glass skyscrapers framed with exposed structural steel.
“I believe that architecture has little or nothing to do with invention of interesting forms or with personal whims,” Mies taught. “I believe architecture belongs to the epoch, not the individual; and that, at its best, it touches and expresses the very innermost structure of the civilization from which it springs.”
A scaffold for a repair crew hangs from the Century Building at 202 S. State St. where emergency work is underway on May 24, 1984, after a terra cotta column fell 150 feet. (George Thompson / Chicago Tribune)
Architects near and far said, “Amen,” and thus Chicago was reestablished as the architectural capital of the world. One of Mies’ projects was the Dirksen Federal Building on Dearborn Street. Fronting it was the Century Building and Mies, who was fastidious about his buildings’ environs, took that into consideration in his 1959 site planning.
But the Century Building didn’t fare well in subsequent years. It lost tenants and had severely deteriorated by the time the General Services Administration took control of the building. One of this federal agency’s responsibilities is ensuring the survival of historic buildings.
A developer proposed renovating the Century Building into artists’ studios and living quarters. But judges at the nearby Dirksen building raised security concerns, scuttling the plan.
Preservation Chicago is working on an alternative — offering archival storage to organizations without their own facilities to store historic records. Archived papers fare better without sunlight, so bricking up the buildings’ rear windows would facilitate that use while also possibly alleviating the concerns over the Dirksen building.
As Miller of Preservation Chicago puts it, “de-accessing a painting just means it’s going to another museum, where it can still be seen.
“But de-accessing a building means losing the opportunity to experience it. It’s being reduced to a pile of rubble.”
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