Marquette Building
[Marquette Building (1895) Holabird & Roche, architects /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
Peter and Shepherd Brooks were two brothers from Boston who had made a fortune in shipping by the late 1870s and were looking for places to invest their money. They found an opportunity in Chicago real estate. The city was growing by leaps and bounds in the years following the 1871 fire, and the Brooks' believed that the city would one day be the largest in the nation. They assembled a team of agents, builders and architects who would go on to construct some of Chicago's most famous buildings, including Holabird & Roche's Marquette.
[Marquette Building, 140 S. Dearborn Street, Chicago /Image & Artwork: designslinger]
The Marquette was not the first project Brooks and company had put together, but William Holabird and Martin Roche were relatively new team players. The brothers and their Chicago agent Owen Aldis, had been using the powerhouse architectural firm of Burnham & Root, but had switched to H&R in 1892 for an addition to the Monadnock Building, built in 1891. Apparently pleased with their new design team, Aldis had them move on to the next project in the Brooks' portfolio, the Marquette, in 1893.
[Marquette Building, Dearborn & Adams Streets, Chicago /Image & Artwork: designslinger]
At the time, the architects, like many of their Chicago-based peers, were experimenting with new building technologies and design innovations which transformed the city and the world of architecture. One of the firm's first experiments, the Tacoma completed in 1889, helped to propel architecture into the 20th century. In the Marquette, they moved farther into the future by supporting the entire building with a steel frame covered in a masonry fire-proofed skin, which became one of the benchmark's of modern construction and design. It also provided the pair with a system of construction that kept the office flush with commissions for the next decade-and-a- half.
Using the components of a classical column and applying them to the building facade, the Marquette sits on a base articulated by the heavy, guilloche patterned terra-cotta. Representing the shaft of the column are the thin brick piers which encase structural steel. Then at the top, the capital is turned into a heavy cornice which provides a visual cap to the soaring building facade. The Marquette won accolades of praise and was heralded as a landmark by journals and newspapers of the time and became one of the buildings that defined what later critics and architects came to call, the Chicago School.
Tomorrow we'll take a peek at the interior.
See more at: Marquette Building, Chicago and Marquette Building, 140 S. Dearborn Street, Chicago.
Posted by designslinger at 1/31/2011 4:12 AM 
Categories: Architecture, History, Architects, Preservation
Tags: Holabird and Roche Owen Aldis Brooks brothers commercial architecture Chicago School
Categories: Architecture, History, Architects, Preservation
Tags: Holabird and Roche Owen Aldis Brooks brothers commercial architecture Chicago School
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