The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan's Architecture and the City (Chicago Architecture and Urbanism Series)

Siry, Joseph M.

ISBN 10: 0226761339 / ISBN 13: 9780226761336

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2002

About this Item

Univ. of Chicago Pr., copyright 2002. Large, thick, heavy hardcover, 10-1/4 inches tall, xviii + 550 pp. including extensive notes and index. With dust jacket. Many photos, including a center section of color plates. This copy in overall very good or better condition. Text of book looks new. No marks or other flaws. High quality glossy paper--looks new. Firm binding. Dust jacket has a little edge wear (top front edge sl. curled/rough--not too pronounced). Book looks very little used. Because it's printed on glossy (heavy) paper, book will require extra postage for Priority or overseas shipment. Seller Inventory # ABE-1628817167910

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and ...

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Publication Date: 2002

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Good

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

When the magnificent Auditorium Building opened on Chicago's Michigan Avenue in December 1889, American and European newspapers hailed the event as a defining moment for the city, the most important since the Great Fire of 1871. The Auditorium marked Chicago's emergence both as the leading city of the Midwest and as a metropolis of international stature. In this book, Joseph Mm. Siry explores not just the architectural history of the Auditorium Building, but also the crucial role it played in Chicago's social history. Housing a luxurious 400-room hotel, 136 offices and stores, and a theatre that could seat 4,200, the Auditorium Building was one of the earliest multipurpose civic centres in the United States, and its many technical and aesthetic innovations launched Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's national reputations as creators of highly innovative architecture for large public buildings. (Frank Lloyd Wright was apprenticed to Adler and Sullivan at the time, serving as Sullivan's draftsman). But the Auditorium's importance was not limited to architecture. Envisioned by its principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, as a means to counter the violent socialist agitation of the Haymarket era, the Auditorium Theatre embodied Peck's capitalist ideal of a democratic variation on the European opera house that could provide wholesome, affordable, high-class entertainment for the city's skilled workers. Covering the Auditorium from the early design stage to its opening, its later renovations, its links to culture and politics in Chicago, and its influence on later Adler and Sullivan works (including the Schiller Building and the Chicago Stock Exchange Building), "The Chicago Auditorium Building" recounts the fascinating tale of a building that helped to define a city and an era.

Review:

"The Chicago Auditorium Building is a tour de force. Scholars of architecture and American history will find it invaluable for studying this extraordinary period in the development of urban centers in the United States, and lovers of art and architecture, and all lovers of an engrossing story, will enjoy reading it." - Sally A. Kitt Chappell, author of Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos