Richardson, whose work had great influence on Louis Sullivan at this point in his career. Massive, exterior load-bearing masonry walls, of granite below and limestone above, incorporate the arches popularized by H.H. The Auditorium’s innovative engineering and design brought international recognition to the firm. It was not only an enormous civic achievement but also a symbol of the city’s success and emergence as a cultural center. When completed, the Auditorium was the largest, tallest, priciest and heaviest building of its time. Adler carried its load on giant iron trusses above the vaulted roof of the theater. A banquet hall was also added late in the construction. The additional two stories caused excessive settlement under the tower, proving Adler's original calculations correct. However, after the foundation was in place, Peck requested two extra floors on the tower and the architects complied. He developed a foundation substantial enough to support the 16-story tower originally planned for the building. His acoustical design for the theater-in an era before scientific acoustical calculations-is a masterpiece of sound. Meanwhile, the theater and hotel interiors provided an outlet for his genius organic ornamentation.Īdler addressed several engineering challenges. Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Sullivan included the use of monochromatic rusticated stone. The building had separate entrances for theater, office building and hotel. On the exterior, Sullivan emphasized both massing and the rhythm of repetitive window patterns, using load-bearing stone walls on the perimeter of various textures and colors. A young Frank Lloyd Wright was hired as an office draftsman and in the process of working on the massive project, he learned a great deal from Sullivan about the use of organic ornamentation. He planned for profits from the hotel and offices to help keep ticket prices low.ĭankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan were commissioned to bring this lofty project to life. The idea of a mixed-use structure was still a fairly new idea. In order to subsidize the cost of a theater, he decided to include an income-generating luxury hotel and business offices. But after organizing a successful opera festival, Peck realized there was an appetite for the arts in the city and he was intent on making them more accessible. That was tricky business in a time of high tensions after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and not long after the Haymarket Affair. The developer, Ferdinand Wythe Peck, was committed to bolstering the state of the arts in Chicago. The Auditorium Building is an example of what can happen when business leaders and the artistic community work together to create functional, aesthetic mixed-use architecture. Such bulbs had been seen publicly for the first time in 1879. The theater featured many technological advancements for its time, including the display of 3,500 bare carbon filament light bulbs. The entrance was “compressed” by low ceilings such that when patrons emerged, the impact of “expanding” into the towering six-story auditorium, with its grand gilded arches and glittering ceiling, would be all the more dramatic. Did You KnowĮach patron who arrived for a performance was led through the small, dark entranceway into the theater. Box seats were relocated to the sides, with an expansive main floor and generous balconies that offered optimal sightlines to the general public. Peck’s vision for the theater was to create a space that was democratic, where the best seats were not reserved for the wealthiest patrons.
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