Marshall Field Whole Sale Store
The Chicago School marks the beginning of a new development in architecture. Based on the earlier Victorian models, from about 1885 great commercial structures are built with new designs and new construction techniques. During these later years Richardson produced the buildings upon which his reputation principally rests. He designed houses, community libraries, suburban railroad stations, educational buildings, and commercial and civic structures. Instead of the splintered massing, narrow vertical proportions, and disparate Gothic features used by his contemporaries, he favoured horizontal lines, simple silhouettes, and uniform, large-scale details of Romanesque or Byzantine inspiration . Since his best commercial structure, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago (1885-87), were demolished long ago (1930).
Constructed between 1885 and 1887, seven storeys high, covering an entire city block, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, is just that. The store was not the tallest masonry structure in Chicago. Moreover, the design featured many soon-to-be anachronistic elements common to the design philosophy taught at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris , the premier architectural school of the day. Indeed, Richardson had trained in Paris.
The building's importance was not Richardson's adherence to convention; rather it was his departure from convention. Grandeur, strength, and distinction, he demonstrated, could be achieved without ornamentation. The versatility of concrete, steel and glass had not yet developed. Richardson's work did, however, maximize the utility of masonry while demonstrating the reduction of design to function rather than have it merely anchor an elaboration of form. This approach was a precursor to the techniques, which would find fullest expression with the new building materials.
Moreover, Richardson demonstrated that a structure worked best if it reflected the environment in which it was situated. The Chicago of the day was raw, vigorous, and forceful; the Chicago of the poet Carl Sandberg was symbolically manifest in Richardson's design of the Marshall Field store .
Richardson's work was a powerful influence. This is notably so in the work of Stanford White and C.F. McKim, two of the designers responsible for the Great Hall of Penn Station, one of the last hurrahs of the old Beaux Arts style. Also certainly influenced by Richardson was Louis H. Sullivan, a giant of American architecture and a key link in the chain, which brought architecture forward to set the stage for the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Richardson's thematic elimination of ornament in the Marshall Field store design inspired Sullivan to expand the principle in his design of the Auditorium Building in Chicago in 1888, one of the last grand masonry buildings in America .
The primary problem would be the structure of the organization. This is due to the fact that there are thirteen departments in total which would lead to the failure of the ability to concentrate on long term viability of the business.
In the capital of financial services, two insurance buildings dominate Boston’s skyline. The Hancock Tower and the Prudential Center are structures that display the uneven change and the urban development that has occurred in this city over the course 19th century. Located in back bay these edifices work with the directionalities of their adjacent streets and the cultural history of the structures that surround them. Boston’s foundation was composed in a manner that designated and organized space. This creates the tension and contrast present in that between the two structures. The iconography that these structures have over the city is important. It represents a sense of the past as well as the purpose that the built environment has with a changing society. Even though these structures dominate so much of the skyline, they interact differently with the public. There is a physical boundary that separates the functionalities and interaction in which society can actively have with them. This essay will focus on the structural purpose in regard to the form following function of these skyscrapers and how they each demonstrate a design aspect that characterizes Boston through a visual perspective.
The “White City” was a vast collection of architecture and arts that were put on display in the year 1893. The Chicago World Fair, also called the “White City”, was a major event in American history that impacted America’s culture, economic, and industry. The Chicago World Fair was held to honor Columbus’ discovery of the New World. The real reason why it was made was to proudly have back their wealth and power. Larson said, “the tower not only assured the eternal fame of its designer, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel but also offered graphic proof that France had edged out the United States for dominance in the realm of iron and steel…”(15). To accomplish this, architects led by Daniel Burnham and John Root made numerous buildings and beautiful scenery
Dell Upton is a historian and renowned professor of architecture and Urbanism at the University of California. He has published several books on architecture; one of them is “Architecture in the United States”, published in 1998. In this book, Upton analyzes the architecture of the United States in different aspects, such as nature, money and art, thus depicting the great variety in architectural forms, and how throughout the decades, different interests have lead communities to different ways of building, different purposes and materials, thus reflecting their way of thinking and their relationship with the environment. By exploring so many different architectural styles, Upton reveals the great diversity and richness that has always, and continues to characterize American architecture.
It is the new decade after the end of world war two and modernism is a well-established practice. Its pioneers and spearheads are prevalent figures looming over the new architects and designers who are trying to make their mark in the shadows of such historically influential people. With new technologies and materials emerging from the world wars the next era of modernism had started to evolved, bringing with it philosophies and ideas which seemed far removed from those of the pioneers of modernism “What emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s was an expanding synthesis of questions utterly removed from the confident statements of the pioneers.”(Spade 1971,10) Two significant buildings were designed in the 50's, both of them for educational institutes and to house students of architecture, there were both designed in completely different styles and methods. The first is Ludwig Mies van der Rohes' Crown Hall, finished in 1956 and designed as a part of a campus master plan for the Illinois Institute of technology in Chicago. Mies' design for Crown Hall is one of his most realised expressio...
First and foremost are the architectural elements. These encompass the structural components that Chareau uses to emphasize the current site’s condition, the regularity of the grid used, the characteristics of the materials, the spatial alignment of the program, and so forth. The Maison de Verre would not have been designed the same way if it had been erected elsewhere. The same design principles would have been apparent, but there were extenuating circumstances that the client and the architect encountered at the site. The clients, Dr. and Mrs. Dalsace, inherited the building and the surrounding property from her father, and had the sole intention of tearing down the existing building and resurrecting a new, modern structure that would showcase Chareau’s furniture designs. (Vellay 63). The only thing stopping them was an elderly woman who lived on the second floor of the existing building who refused to leave her apartment (Frampto...
(Image taken from Tranchtenberg, Marvin, Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: From Prehistory to Postmodernity. Second Edition. Prentice Hall, Inc. New Jersey: 2002.)
Soon after the fire, legislature decided to tear down the remains of the damaged structure and replace it with a larger and more stylish design. Chicago architect, Henry Ives Cobb, was selected to design and build the second capitol. The government gave him a budget of only $550,000, which was not nearly enough to reproduce the size and design that the legislature had envisioned. Due to limited funds, Cobb was unable to finish his intended design. Legislature was embarrassed and unimpres...
Heinz, Thomas A., Frank Lloyd Wright: Architectural Monographs No 18, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1992.
What competitive pressures must Oliver’s Market be prepared to deal with? What do we learn about the nature and strength of the competitive pressures Oliver’s faces from doing five-forces analysis of competition? Which of the five competitive forces is the strongest?
But these contrived differences give rise to esthetic difficulties too. Because inherent differences—those that come from genuinely differing uses—are lacking among the buildings and their settings, the contrivances repre...
Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect, who was a pioneer in the modern style, is considered one of the greatest figures in 20th-century architecture. Wright was born June 8, 1867, in Richland Center, Wisconsin. When he entered the University of Wisconsin in 1884 his interest in architecture had already acknowledged itself. The university offered no courses in his chosen field; however, he enrolled in civil engineering and gained some practical experience by working part time on a construction project at the university. In 1887 he left school and went to Chicago where he became a designer for the firm of Adler and Sullivan with a pay of twenty-five dollars a week. Soon Wright became Louis Sullivan’s chief assistant. Louis Sullivan, Chicago based architect, one of America’s advanced designers. Louis had a profound influence on Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was assigned most of the firm’s home projects, but to pay his many debts he designed ‘Bootlegged Houses’ for private clients in his spare time. Sullivan disapproved, resulting in Wright leaving the firm in 1893 to establish his own office in Chicago.
Frank Lloyd Wright has been called “one of the greatest American architect as well as an Art dealer that produced a numerous buildings, including houses, resorts, gardens, office buildings, churches, banks and museums. Wright was the first architect that pursues a philosophy of truly organic architecture that responds to the symphonies and harmonies in human habitats to their natural world. He was the apprentice of “father of Modernism” Louis Sullivan, and he was also one of the most influential architects on 20th century in America, Wright is idealist with the use of elemental theme and nature materials (stone, wood, and water), the use of sky and prairie, as well as the use of geometrical lines in his buildings planning. He also defined a building as ‘being appropriate to place’ if it is in harmony with its natural environment, with the landscape (Larkin and Brooks, 1993).
Architecture is the concept of bringing structure, materiality, form and space together as a whole, provide people with enclosed atmosphere to experience. Considering this, it is important to identify that materiality and the purpose of details has been a key methodology to bringing architectural intentions into the design in an affective manner, more over producing an architectural expression. However, this position is rather declining in architecture, reducing tectonics and materiality to being secondary to form and space. With the start of modernism, the attempt to achieve minimalistic style has caused detailing to increasingly develop into a decorative aspect of a building, neglecting its individual contribution to architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier are two very prominent names in the field of architecture. Both architects had different ideas concerning the relationship between humans and the environment. Their architectural styles were a reflection of how each could facilitate the person and the physical environment. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, is considered one of the most important buildings in the history of American architecture and Le Corbusier s Villa Savoye helped define the progression that modern architecture was to take in the 20th Century. Both men are very fascinating and have strongly influenced my personal taste for modern architecture. Although Wright and Corbusier each had different views on how to design a house, they also had similar beliefs. This paper is a comparison of Frank Lloyd Wright‘s and Le Corbusier ‘s viewpoints exhibited through their two prominent houses, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.