Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root

Burnham and Root were innovators in the design and construction of the skyscraper. After the Phoenix Building was demolished in 1959, the Rookery and Monadnock buildings became the only surviving Burnham and Root commercial buildings in Chicago (Slaton, 80). Both buildings are National Historic Landmarks.

There is a wide variety in the materials used in the Rookery and Monadnock buildings. The list consists of glazing, granite, brick, and terra cotta in the exterior of the Rookery Building (Slaton, 83). On the interior, decorative materials included Italian marble, dark oak, maple, glass block, and mosaic tile. The Monadnock Building, too, was done in darker tones, using brown brick on the exterior (Hoffmann, 273).

The Brooks brothers once again commissioned the firm of Burnham and Root to construct a building on a narrow site on the southwest corner of Dearborn and Jackson streets. The Brookses’ instructions were clear: because the space was somewhat limited, the building was to be an enormously tall 16 stories. At the insistence of Shepard Brooks, too, the outer walls were to be of solid brick; and ornament was to be mostly severely restrained (Roth, 749). Root began drawing sketches as early as the spring of 1884, but construction was put off until economic conditions improved. Construction for the Monadnock Building began in 1889. Because of the Brookses’ reluctance for the use of new steel skeletal technology, Root erected the building as a row of tall brick cells, open on the interior (Zanten, 138). The result of these design limitations was a slim design adopted from an Egyptian pylon (Hoffmann, 276). The plain exterior, ornamented only by the elegant batter of its walls and an outwards flare at the cornice, is made of specially molded bricks with a series of projecting window bays from the third to the fifteenth floor (Zanten, 138). Because of the Brookses’ conditions, at the base where rental shop space was at a premium the brick walls had to be made six feet thick (figure 7), a load which could have easily been held on fireproofed metal columns of significantly less square footage (Robison, 927). Burnham and Root tried to visually reduce this bulk by creating an appealing alternation of bays and windows, and by keeping a basic simplicity. The Monadnock Building is a lesson in unified design. As the tallest building with exterior load-bearing walls in the world, it features chamfered corners that widen toward the building’s outward-flaring cove cornice, an inwardly sloping wall and undulating oriel windows, and a magnificently plastic effect achieved by unusually narrow mortar joints and compound curves.

8. Previous Architectural Critiques of the Buildings

Some topics in this essay:
Monadnock Building, Burnham Root, Rookery Building, Egypt Chicago, Montgomery Schuyler, Building” Robison, La Salle, Lloyd Wright, Salle Adams, Monadnock Building’s, burnham root, monadnock building, rookery building, slaton 83, hines “burnham chicago”, hines “burnham, “burnham chicago”, zanten “root”, glassman 135, robison 927, slaton 79, zanten “root” 138, hines “daniel” 353, rookery building burnham, 8 hoffmann 276,