The Monadnock Building

Burnham and Root, CNS 2010

53 W. Jackson Blvd.

Sitting on a vast prairie, Chicago is thought of as a uniformly flat city void of any canyons, hills or mountains. With a little imagination though, Chicago is home to one of the world’s greatest mountain ranges. It doesn’t have an official name like the Rockies, but it inspires awe like the best of them. Chicago’s highest peak may be the Willis Tower, but its greatest cliff is the Monadnock.

The Monadnock was built as four buildings in two parts by two teams of architects. Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root designed the first and more famous northern half of the building completed in 1891. Owen Aldis, the Chicago manager for the building’s developers, Peter and Shepard Brooks, charged Burnham and Root with designing a simple un-ornamented box of a building. Aldis rejected the first couple of designs Root put before him as being too ornate. Initially frustrated, Root slowly began to embrace the idea of simplicity and eventually found his inspiration in ancient Egyptian pylons. Like an Egyptian pyramid, the building rises simply, elegantly, and entirely free of ornament. Louis Sullivan, a typically critical contemporary of Burnham and Root, praised Root’s design, calling it “an amazing cliff of brick work, rising sheer and stark, with a subtlety of line and surface, a direct singleness of purpose, that gave one the thrill of romance.”

Holabird and Roche, CNS 2010

Root had died prematurely by the time the Brooks brothers (not the popular fashion designers) embarked on planning a southern addition to the building, and Burnham was busy planning the World’s Columbian Exposition. Aldis instead turned to William Holabird and Martin Roche to design the second half of the building, which was completed only two years later in 1893. The two halves share the same height, bricks and color, but they have many hidden differences – the most important being how they were constructed. Burnham and Root’s half is a masonry load bearing structure, meaning the exterior walls are supporting the load of the building. It would be difficult, and likely impossible, to build a taller building than the Monadnock using this method. The walls at the building’s base are, by necessity, six feet thick while at the top they are only 18 inches. The Monadnock is the tallest and heaviest masonry load bearing building in Chicago, and tallest such commercial building in the world. Holabird and Roche’s approach to their half of the building was entirely different. They designed a steel skeletal framed building. An innovation first applied to an entire building in 1885, the frame allowed for larger windows, more rentable office space, and facilitated a speedier construction. More so than any other building, the Monadnock demonstrated the value of this new construction method. All modern skyscrapers are built using a skeletal frame.

CNS 2010

The Monadnock building looks only slightly different today. Originally the two halves of the building were divided between four different parts. Each quadrant had its own separate heating plant, elevator bank, stairs and plumbing. The quadrants were aptly named after mountains in the Brooks brothers’ native New England: the Monadnock, Kearsage, Katahdin, and Wachusett. Today the whole complex is referred to as the Monadnock – a mountain’s name for a mountain of a building.

MAP IT

The current owners of the building maintain a nice website with building plans, amenities, photographs and details on the building’s history. Visit it by clicking here.