Chicago School

The Chicago School produced the first generation of tall office buildings, mostly in Chicago between the mid-1880s and about 1910. Most use an iron or steel frame that carries the floors and walls, so the outer wall is a thin covering of brick or terracotta (glazed fired clay) rather than load-bearing masonry. Facades show the frame as a grid of vertical piers and horizontal floor bands filled with Chicago windows: a large fixed central pane flanked by two narrow windows that open. Ornament is usually limited to the base and the top.

In Chicago, Burnham & Root's Rookery (1885-1888) has a two-story light court under a glass skylight. The Monadnock Building (1891-1893) has a north half with brick walls 6 feet thick at the base and a steel-framed south half. The Reliance Building (1890-1895) is clad in white glazed terracotta and mostly glass. Louis Sullivan designed the Wainwright Building in St. Louis (1891), the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (1896) and the Carson Pirie Scott store in Chicago (begun 1899).

Chicago's downtown was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871, and its architects developed the tall office building there in the following decades. William Le Baron Jenney's Home Insurance Building (1884-1885), ten stories on a fireproof metal frame, is often cited as the first skyscraper, though earlier buildings had used iron framing. The leading firms were Jenney's office, Burnham & Root, Holabird & Roche, and Adler & Sullivan.

In his 1896 essay "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Sullivan argued that a tall building should have a distinct base, a stack of identical office floors and a top, and wrote that "form ever follows function." After the classical buildings of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Beaux-Arts classicism became the preferred style for major American buildings, and Chicago School design faded by about 1910. The Home Insurance Building was demolished in 1931. The steel and glass towers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and others in Chicago from the 1940s to the 1970s are called the Second Chicago School.