The mechanization of cladding: The Chicago skyscraper and the constructions of architectural modernity (Daniel Burnham, John Root, Charles Atwood, Illinois)

Heralding a new relationship between design and technology, structure and surface, the Chicago skyscraper has acted as a privileged signifier in the definition of modern architecture. Built in a city that historically celebrates its own lack of history, it has been instrumental in debates over the nature of architecture in a capitalist and industrial age. This dissertation focuses on attempts to reconcile different views of the role of technology in modernity, through the figure of the Chicago skyscraper, specifically in reference to Daniel Burnham and John Root's Reliance Building (1889–95), Monadnock (1885–91), and the Masonic Temple (1890–92). It recovers alternative readings of these three buildings by the architects who built them (particularly Root), by contemporary American critics, and by the general public. Rather than examining the specifics of biography and building process, it focuses on the mythical aspect of these celebrated buildings. As both an extension and a critique of recent reassessments of the place of Chicago in the construction of modern architecture, it investigates these buildings as tropes within a series of mythological narratives rather than as autonomous constructions. Written not only by architects, but also by social critics, journalists, doctors and reformers, various narratives of modernity have been constructed around them, centered principally on the “naturalness” of the new type and its manifestation in the relationship between structure and cladding. The Monadnock and the Reliance are continually described, either metaphorically or literally, as designed not by individual authors in collaboration with their clients, but as natural outgrowths of their site, program and technologies. They are seen, for better or worse, as the results of the natural “forces” shaping the American environment. Through them the artificialities of modern industrialization were crystallized as natural currents, lending an organic character not only to the American metropolis, but also to more fundamental questions of nationhood and identity. Through an investigation of these often conflicting narratives, this study demonstrates that ambivalence over the impact of technology was present in the reception of the most technologically advanced building type—the steel-framed skyscraper.