flatiron building offices flatiron building inside

Flatiron building offices flatiron building inside series#

Besides the famous Burnham plan for Chicago of 1909 (a urban renewal plain for reconstructing sections of Chicago’s older districts), he also designed notable plans for the cities of Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, and San Francisco and was commissioned to do plans for Manila and other cities in the Philippines. In addition to the Flatiron Building, Burnham was also a member of the commission to enhance Washington D.C. They also helped to plan the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, but Root died before the project was completed. Their many commissions in Chicago included the Masonic Temple (1890), which was then the tallest building in the world. The Chicago School’s tenets of functional clarity and organic decoration were carried on by Sullivan’s pupil Frank Loyd Wright, who became one of the greatest architects of the 20th century.ĭaniel Hudson Burnham was born in Henderson New York in 1846 Along with his partner John Wellborn Root they became the leaders of the Chicago School, with Burnham acting as administrator while Root was the designer.

Flatiron building offices flatiron building inside series#

On his own Sullivan created the Schlesinger and Meyer Store (1899-1904), with unadorned glass and steel walls set off by a series of richly foliate metal panels adorning the street-floor facade. Sullivan, however, eventually became acknowledged as the genius of the group, joining with the architect Dankmar Adler to build such masterpieces as the Auditorium Building (1890), combining a hotel, an office tower, and an acoustically perfect theater, and the Wainwright Building (1891) in Saint Louis, the epitome of the style in combination of cleanly functional structure and graceful terra-cotta and metal embellishment. But it would be Daniel Burnham who would achieve fame by designing New York City’s famed triangular skyscraper, the Flatiron (originally Fuller) Building in 1902. As partners, Holabird and Roche created such significant steel-framed structures as the Tacoma Building (1889, demolished 1925), while Burnham and John Wellborn Root formed a brilliant architectural firm that built such landmark office buildings as the Rookery (1886), the Monadnock Building (1891), and the Reliance Building (1895).

In 1855 the architect-engineer William Le Baron Jenney built the ten story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, employing for the first time an all metal skeleton of cast iron columns and steel beams to support the masonry shell of floors and walls, thus creating the prototype of all skyscraper design.įour young architects, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, and Martin Roche, who worked in Jenney’s Chicago office, became leaders of the movement. Scheiner) Despite the far taller buildings that were later built, having survived the wrecking ball and modernization of the Broadway/Fifth Avenue section of the city, the Flatiron Building remains one of the few surviving examples of early 20th century technology, and the perfect example of early 1900’s architectural composition.Īn American architectural movement, based in the late 19th-century Chicago and identified with that city as The Chicago School, was the adherents of which produced the skyscraper, the first true manifestation of modern architecture. A rusticated limestone facade build on a steel frame, the building, when viewed from the north, “resembled a ship sailing up the Avenue.” (From Architectural Record # 12 (1902) 128-36 Seth M. At twenty stories tall the building quickly became a symbol of the skyscraper era and is considered the nations first true skyscraper. Burnham, the Flatiron Building conforms to the triangular plot of land which marks the intersection of East 23rd Street. Built at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue by Daniel H. While most Americans look upon the Sears Tower, World Trade Center or Empire State Building as the ultimate achievement of modern skyscraper design, it is a modest twenty story building, built in a section of the city which, at the turn of the century was considered “uptown”, that holds the distinction of having starting it all The Flatiron Building. Their towering spires and intricate shapes, the word itself brings to mind the steel and glass towers which climb thousands of feet into the sky. The Skyscraper, modern American cities are defined by them.