MARK TWAIN was dazzled by the Windy City. “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago,” he wrote in1883. “She outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them.” From mail-order to the remote control, the Ferris wheel to the drive-in bank—Chicago was the birthplace of them all. And while the term “skyscraper” has come to connote New York landmarks such as the Flatiron, Woolworth and Empire State buildings, it was first used to describe towers that rose on the shores of Lake Michigan. Dan Cruickshank’s “Skyscraper” takes a single Chicago building as the apotheosis of the form. Mr Cruickshank, a British architectural historian, calls the Reliance Building “the most architecturally consistent, functionally excellent, visually restrained, structurally rational and technologically innovative high-rise then built” and “the key prototype for high-rise architecture of the coming century.” When the 200-foot-tall building opened in the spring of 1895, The Economist hailed it as “the most elegant yet erected in Chicago for business purposes”. Construction began in 1890 as part of the great renewal of the city after the devastatingfire of1871.The project had an unusual start. Tenants in the five-storey building that occupied the site on North State Street refused to give up their leases; work started on the lower floors of the new building while the upper storeys of the old one— and their recalcitrant occupants—were raised on jackscrews until those pesky leases expired.
The first architect was John Wellborn Root, who as a boy had fled Sherman’s march on Atlanta during the civil war. After his untimely death in 1891 at the age of 41, his colleague Daniel Burnham (who would design the Flatiron Building) enlisted Charles Atwood to help. Later Atwood further distinguished himself with his work for Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of1893—the “White City” built to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christophe rColumbus’s arrival inAmerica. “Skyscraper” is not a tale of architects’ egos and the trials of grand construction projects, which is a shame. A little more detail about the characters involved, and the scents and sounds of a great city at the dawn of the 20th century, would have enlivened its pages. But Mr Cruickshank does develop a convincing case for the Reliance Building—which today looks almost wholly unexceptional—as the forerunner of groundbreaking work by later architects such as Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Mr Cruickshank shows the debt owed to the Reliance’s elegant lines by successors such as the Seagram Building in New York and Chicago’s own Sears Tower (now called the Willis Tower). The radical became quotidian; such is the history of modern design. In the same way, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower and the Lloyds Building were unprecedented achievements which now blend into their landscapes, while the risks taken to build them, and the rows over whether they should be built at all, vanish into the past. A structure is most successful when it almost seems to disappear. Mr Cruickshank does a valuable service in making the nearly invisible visible once again.
Source： The Economist