Chicago school (architecture)

The Chicago School refers to two architectural styles derived from the architecture of Chicago. In the history of architecture, the first Chicago School was a school of architects active in Chicago in the late 19th, and at the turn of the 20th century. They were among the first to promote the new technologies of steel-frame construction in commercial buildings, and developed a spatial esthetic which co-evolved with, and then came to influence, parallel developments in European Modernism. Much of its early work influenced the subsequent Commercial Style.

A "Second Chicago School" with a modernist esthetic emerged in the 1940s through 1970s, which pioneered new building technologies and structural systems, such as the tube-frame structure.

First Chicago School

While the term "Chicago School" is widely used to describe buildings constructed in the city during the 1880s and 1890s, this term has been disputed by scholars, in particular in reaction to Carl Condit's 1952 book The Chicago School of Architecture. Historians such as H. Allen Brooks, Winston Weisman and Daniel Bluestone have pointed out that the phrase suggests a unified set of esthetic or conceptual precepts, when, in fact, Chicago buildings of the era displayed a wide variety of styles and techniques. Erroneously, critics of the Chicago School iterated that publications before 1900 used the phrase "Commercial Style" to describe the innovative tall buildings of the era, rather than proposing any sort of unified "school". However, research completed in 2016 demonstrates that the term “Chicago school” was used in the public media and known by the general public since the 1880s. In 1900, the term was used in the first American-published textbook of architecture and it referred to skyscrapers, as pointed out by Dan C. Baciu in an article in the Journal of Architecture.