The Chicago Architectural Club busy social calendar included the annual Christmas banquet – pictured here in 1906.

The Fine Arts Building was designed by Charles Atwood for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. It was later restored and rededicated as the Museum of Science and Industry.

book review

Chicago’s First Moderns

The Chicago Architectural Club: Prelude to the Modern
by Wilbert R. Hasbrouck
The Monacelli Press, New York, NY
640 pp; hardcover; 600 b&w images; $75
ISBN 1-58093-144-8

Reviewed by Lynne Lavelle

Between the Great Fire of 1871 and the early 1940s, Chicago produced some of this country’s most innovative buildings – the Montauk Building (1883), the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building (1899), and the Brooks Building (1910), to name but a few. Among the names behind these structures were Daniel Hudson Burnham, John Wellborn Root, Dankmar Adler, Louis H. Sullivan, William LeBaron Jenne, followed by a “second wave” that included Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin. All achieved fame, particularly Burnham, whose work on the Chicago World’s Fair elevated him to an early form of “starchitect.”

These architects, however, were but several in a cast of thousands – people who realized the architects’ visions but remained largely anonymous. In his hefty new book, The Chicago Architectural Club: Prelude to the Modern, Chicago architect and preservationist Wilbert R. Hasbrouck, FAIA, seeks to amend this oversight. He asks, “But who remembers delineator Paul Lautrup, who served as Burnam and Root’s chief draftsman? Or H.R. Wilson, who helped found the Western Association of Architects, or Peter B. Wight, who fought side by side with Montgomery Ward to keep Chicago’s lakefront ‘open, clear and free’…?” It is to these and other forgotten draftsmen who made up the Chicago Architectural Club that Hasbrouck turns his attention.

The club was by founded in 1885 as the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club by James H. Carpenter, a 42-year-old, English-born draftsman who was working in the city. At the time, architecture was an emerging profession, and formal architecture education was in its infancy. Realizing that the need for trained men to finalize designs and produce working drawings had reached a critical stage, Carpenter – under the pseudonym T. Square – placed an ad in the pages of Inland Architect magazine encouraging his colleagues to organize.

The club began to meet regularly, and the members educated themselves and others in the history, styles and functions of architecture. In the absence of formal training, the club’s lectures, meetings, sketching evenings, competitions, excellent library and interchanges with other organizations, including the Architectural League of America and the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects, became an instrument of learning. And together, its members reached a level that allowed them to translate the specifications of their employers, and later their own clients, into buildings.

The Chicago Architectural Club existed for little over half a century, and during this time more than 1,600 people passed through its roster of members. This book documents their activities through drawings and photographs, plus material from the club itself – menus, posters, exhibition catalogs and rare portraits. Hasbrouck has even managed to track down the club’s annual events calendars and constitution.

Among Chicago’s architectural achievements during this period, the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 – or Chicago’s World Fair – was the most extraordinary. It was a huge undertaking, with more than 100 buildings designed and built in just over three years on a 600-acre site (Jackson Park) that had been little more that a bog. During the summer of that year, some members of the club had an opportunity to see their own work, and that of their peers from elsewhere, exhibited in the form of presentation drawings and models at the fair’s Fine Arts Building, and in official catalogs. The interest in the drawings was far greater than fair managers had anticipated, and it encouraged the club to find new ways to make its work more accessible to the public, in the form of exhibitions, competitions and magazine editorials.

Following the closure of the Chicago World’s Fair, Daniel Burnham indicated his respect for the club by delivering a paper to its members on January 7, 1895. Unfortunately, no copy of the paper has been found, but a report of that meeting stated: “Mr. Burnham’s paper was a remarkable condensation of facts and was illustrated by the large number of original plats, drawings, etc., which were used in the frequent consultations of the architectural commission. These with the bits of inside history connected with those conferences made the paper of exceeding interest to Mr. Burnham’s auditors. It is, probably, also the most accurate condensation of the history of the fair that could be written.” The club repaid the favor by prominently displaying a bust of Burnham’s deceased partner, John Wellborn Root, at its offices on the ninth floor of Burnham and Root’s Masonic Temple, and presenting the architect with a loving cup held at a dinner in his honor in New York City.

With the onset of formal education in the early 20th century, the club struggled to maintain its place in the world of architecture. By 1916, nearly 20 schools were offering formal training, and virtually all followed the system developed by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In addition, many senior club members had become active in the American Institute of Architects and other organizations, and could no longer devote their energies to the club. The Chicago Architectural Club effectively ceased to exist by the Second World War. As Hasbrouck says, “The Chicago Architectural Club had come into being at a unique time in the history of architecture. In 1884, Chicago – and the rest of the world – was ready for a new architecture. A new kind of architect was needed, and the club provided a forum for the development of those architects. For half a century, the club members had observed, and indeed influenced, a revolution in design and building. By 1939, another revolution was at hand. It was time to move on.”

The Chicago Architectural Club was outlasted by its ideas – particularly that of the architect as a respected professional – which left the door open for its return, co-ed this time, in 1979. Today, it continues to serve and benefit the architects of Chicago (as well as its landscape architects, historians, interior designers, structural engineers, photographers, and as of 2003, one real-estate developer) much as it did almost a century earlier. Since 2005, the Chicago Architectural Journal has been published biennially, and the Chicago Prize competition has joined the Burnham Prize as a biennial event.

The Chicago Architectural Club owes its considerable size to the depth of Hasbrouck’s research. Every personality, event and technological advance that influenced the club, and architecture-at-large, is covered in detail. While the results could easily have been dry reportage, Hasbrouck quickens the pace with quotes, illustrations and clippings and a style that is not overly-technical. The result is a fitting tribute to the club, its members and what they began. TB