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Thuringia
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The Free State of Thuringia is a federal state in central Germany. It has an area of 16,171 square kilometres and 2.29 million inhabitants, making it the sixth smallest by area, most of Thuringia is within the watershed of the Saale, a left tributary of the Elbe. Thuringia has been known as the heart of Germany from the late 19th century. It is home to the Rennsteig, Germanys most well-known hiking trail, half of Germanys 136 Winter Olympic gold medals have been won by Thuringian athletes. Johann Sebastian Bach spent the first part of his life and important further stages of his career in Thuringia, goethe and Schiller lived in Weimar and both worked at the University of Jena, which today hosts Thuringias most important science centre. Other Universities in this state are the Ilmenau University of Technology, the University of Erfurt. The name Thuringia or Thüringen derives from the Germanic tribe Thuringii, an older theory claims that they were successors of the Hermunduri, but later research rejected the idea. Other historians argue that the Thuringians were allies of the Huns, came to central Europe together with them, publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus first mentioned the Thuringii around 400, during that period, the Thuringii were famous for their excellent horses. The Thuringian Realm existed until after 531, the Landgraviate of Thuringia was the largest state in the region, after the Treaty of Leipzig, Thuringia had its own dynasty again, the Ernestine Wettins. Their various lands formed the Free State of Thuringia, founded in 1920, the Prussian territories around Erfurt, Mühlhausen and Nordhausen joined Thuringia in 1945. The coat of arms of Thuringia shows the lion of the Ludowingian Landgraves of 12th-century origin, the eight stars around it represent the eight former states which formed Thuringia. The flag of Thuringia is a bicolor, derived from the white. The coat of arms and flag of Hesse are quite similar to the Thuringian ones, symbols of Thuringia in popular culture are the Bratwurst and the Forest, because a large amount of the territory is forested. Named after the Thuringii tribe who occupied it around AD300, Thuringia became a landgraviate in 1130 AD. Most of the remaining Thuringia came under the rule of the Wettin dynasty of the nearby Margraviate of Meissen, in Mühlhausen and elsewhere, the Anabaptists found many adherents. Thomas Müntzer, a leader of some groups of this sect, was active in this city. Some reordering of the Thuringian states occurred during the German Mediatisation from 1795 to 1814, in 1920, after World War I, these small states merged into one state, called Thuringia, only Saxe-Coburg voted to join Bavaria instead. Weimar became the new capital of Thuringia, the coat of arms of this new state was simpler than those of its predecessors
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Chicago
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Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is the third-most populous city in the United States. With over 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the state of Illinois, and it is the county seat of Cook County. In 2012, Chicago was listed as a global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Chicago has the third-largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—about $640 billion according to 2015 estimates, the city has one of the worlds largest and most diversified economies with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce. In 2016, Chicago hosted over 54 million domestic and international visitors, landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Museum of Science and Industry, and Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicagos culture includes the arts, novels, film, theater, especially improvisational comedy. Chicago also has sports teams in each of the major professional leagues. The city has many nicknames, the best-known being the Windy City, the name Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as Checagou was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir, henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called chicagoua, grew abundantly in the area. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African and French descent and arrived in the 1780s and he is commonly known as the Founder of Chicago. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, on August 12,1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people, on June 15,1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4,1837, as the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicagos first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois, the canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad, manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade listed the first ever standardized exchange traded forward contracts and these issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage
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German Americans
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The German American ethnic group consists of Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 46 million in 2014, German Americans are the largest of the groups reported by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey. The group accounts for about 1⁄3 of the total ethnic German population in the world, none of the German states had American colonies. In the 1670s the first significant groups of German immigrants arrived in the British colonies, settling primarily in New York, immigration continued in very large numbers during the 19th century, with eight million arrivals from Germany. Between 1820 and 1870 over seven and a half million German immigrants came to the United States — more than doubling the population of the country. By 2010, their population grew to 49.8 million immigrants, there is a German belt that extends all the way across the United States, from eastern Pennsylvania to the Oregon coast. The state of Pennsylvania has 3.5 million people of German ancestry and they were pulled by the attractions of land and religious freedom, and pushed out of Europe by shortages of land and religious or political oppression. Many arrived seeking religious or political freedom, others for economic opportunities greater than those in Europe, the arrivals before 1850 were mostly farmers who sought out the most productive land, where their intensive farming techniques would pay off. After 1840, many came to cities, where Germania—German-speaking districts—soon emerged, German Americans established the first kindergartens in the United States, introduced the Christmas tree tradition, and introduced popular foods such as hot dogs and hamburgers to America. The great majority of people with some German ancestry have become Americanized and hardly can be distinguished, traditional Oktoberfest celebrations and the German-American Day are popular festivities. There are major events in cities with German heritage including Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, San Antonio. The Germans included many quite distinct subgroups with differing religious and cultural values and they generally opposed womens suffrage but this was used as argument in favor of suffrage when German Americans became pariahs during World War I. The first English settlers arrived at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 and he was followed in 1608 by five glassmakers and three carpenters or house builders. The first permanent German settlement in what became the United States was Germantown, Pennsylvania, large numbers of Germans migrated from the 1680s to 1760s, with Pennsylvania the favored destination. They migrated to America for a variety of reasons, often immigrants paid for their passage by selling their labor for a period of years as indentured servants. Large sections of Pennsylvania and upstate New York attracted Germans, most were Lutheran or German Reformed, many belonged to small religious sects such as the Moravians and Mennonites. German Catholics did not arrive in number until after the War of 1812, in 1709, Protestant Germans from the Pfalz or Palatine region of Germany escaped conditions of hardship, traveling first to Rotterdam and then to London. Anne, Queen of Great Britain, helped them get to her colonies in America, the trip was long and difficult to survive because of the poor quality of food and water aboard ships and the infectious disease typhus
4.
Louis Sullivan
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Louis Henry Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the father of skyscrapers and father of modernism. Along with Wright and Henry Hobson Richardson, Sullivan is one of the trinity of American architecture. Form follows function is attributed to him although he credited the origin of the concept to an ancient Roman architect, in 1944, he was the second architect in history to posthumously receive the AIA Gold Medal. Louis Henry Sullivan was born to a Swiss-born mother, née Andrienne List, and he learned that he could both graduate from high school a year early and bypass the first two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by passing a series of examinations. Entering MIT at the age of sixteen, he studied architecture there briefly, after one year of study, he moved to Philadelphia and took a job with architect Frank Furness. The Depression of 1873 dried up much of Furnesss work, at that point Sullivan moved on to Chicago in 1873 to take part in the building boom following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He worked for William LeBaron Jenney, the architect credited with erecting the first steel frame building. After less than a year with Jenney, Sullivan moved to Paris and he returned to Chicago and began work for the firm of Joseph S. Johnston & John Edelman as a draftsman. Johnston & Edleman were commissioned for the design of the Moody Tabernacle, in 1879 Dankmar Adler hired Sullivan. A year later, Sullivan became a partner in the firm and this marked the beginning of Sullivans most productive years. Adler and Sullivan initially achieved fame as theater architects, while most of their theaters were in Chicago, their fame won commissions as far west as Pueblo, Colorado, and Seattle, Washington. After 1889 the firm known for their office buildings, particularly the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis. Prior to the century, the weight of a multistory building had to be supported principally by the strength of its walls. The development of cheap, versatile steel in the half of the nineteenth century changed those rules. America was in the midst of social and economic growth that made for great opportunities in architectural design. A much more urbanized society was forming and the society called out for new, the mass production of steel was the main driving force behind the ability to build skyscrapers during the mid-1880s. By assembling a framework of steel girders, architects and builders suddenly could create tall, slender buildings with a strong, the rest of the building elements—walls, floors, ceilings, and windows—were suspended from the skeleton, which carried the weight. This new way of constructing buildings, so-called column-frame construction, pushed them up rather than out, the steel weight-bearing frame allowed not just taller buildings, but permitted much larger windows, which meant more daylight reaching interior spaces
5.
Prudential (Guaranty) Building
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The Guaranty Building, now called the Prudential Building, is an early skyscraper in Buffalo, New York. It was completed in 1896 and was designed by Louis Sullivan, sullivans design for the building was based on his belief that form follows function. He and Adler divided the building into four zones, the basement was the mechanical and utility area. Since this level was below ground, it did not show on the face of the building, the next zone was the ground-floor zone which was the public areas for street-facing shops, public entrances and lobbies. The third zone was the floors with identical office cells clustered around the central elevator shafts. The final zone was the zone, consisting of elevator equipment, utilities. The supporting steel structure of the building was embellished with terra cotta blocks, different styles of block delineated the three visible zones of the building. The Guaranty was never meant to be the Guaranty Building. It was the brainchild of a Buffalonian businessman Hascal T. Taylor to construct an office building in the developing downtown district called “The Taylor Building. ”Although “The entrepreneur Hascal T. Taylor intended this building to be a monument to himself. The site Taylor chose for his office building was strategically located adjacent to the then County and City Municipal building as well as near a number of institutional structures. The intention was to high quality tenants such as lawyers through proximity, desirable amenities. The Guaranty Building was not alone among major private building projects in Buffalo at the time, two blocks away, the Ellicott Square Building was being built to be the largest retail building in the world. This structure, extant today exhibits an alternate exploration in the possibilities of new commercial urban architecture by Charles B, as Buffalo’s downtown rose above Lake Erie, further feats of engineering were securing the future of the city and the built environment. Buffalo’s rise to prominence in the environment was matched in the political. As the Guaranty building was being drafted, Grover Cleveland was re-elected 22nd president of the United States, a former Erie County Sheriff, Cleveland had risen meteorically to mayor of Buffalo, governor of New York and then the presidency within five years. His platform of reform against entrenched political machines, bossism, and patronage was desperately needed, especially in urban centers such as New York. Cleveland’s fiscal policies had resulted in his loss of the presidency in 1888, while the exterior skin of the Guaranty expresses a new form for the steel skyscraper, its plan indicates those hard realities of function necessary to construct such a building and to sell it. The building is essentially a U-shaped plan stacked upon a rectangular solid, the interstitial spaces between wings of the “U” create opportunities to introduce skylights to the lobby below, and to cover the ceilings with stained glass
6.
Buffalo, New York
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Buffalo is a city in western New York state and the county seat of Erie County, on the eastern shores of Lake Erie at the head of the Niagara River. As of 2014, Buffalo is New York states 2nd-most populous city after New York City, the metropolitan area has a population of 1.13 million. After an economic downturn in the half of the 20th century, Buffalos economy has transitioned to sectors that include financial services, technology, biomedical engineering. Residents of Buffalo are called Buffalonians, the citys nicknames include The Queen City, The Nickel City and The City of Good Neighbors. The city of Buffalo received its name from a creek called Buffalo Creek. British military engineer Captain John Montresor made reference to Buffalo Creek in his journal of 1764, there are several theories regarding how Buffalo Creek received its name. In 1804, as principal agent opening the area for the Holland Land Company, Joseph Ellicott, designed a radial street and grid system that branches out from downtown like bicycle spokes similar to the street system he used in the nations capital. Although Ellicott named the settlement New Amsterdam, the name did not catch on, during the War of 1812, on December 30,1813, Buffalo was burned by British forces. The George Coit House 1818 and Samuel Schenck House 1823 are currently the oldest houses within the limits of the City of Buffalo, on October 26,1825, the Erie Canal was completed with Buffalo a port-of-call for settlers heading westward. At the time, the population was about 2,400, the Erie Canal brought about a surge in population and commerce, which led Buffalo to incorporate as a city in 1832. In 1845, construction began on the Macedonia Baptist Church, an important meeting place for the abolitionist movement, Buffalo was a terminus point of the Underground Railroad with many fugitive slaves crossing the Niagara River to Fort Erie, Ontario in search of freedom. During the 1840s, Buffalos port continued to develop, both passenger and commercial traffic expanded with some 93,000 passengers heading west from the port of Buffalo. Grain and commercial goods shipments led to repeated expansion of the harbor, in 1843, the worlds first steam-powered grain elevator was constructed by local merchant Joseph Dart and engineer Robert Dunbar. Darts Elevator enabled faster unloading of lake freighters along with the transshipment of grain in bulk from barges, canal boats, by 1850, the citys population was 81,000. At the dawn of the 20th century, local mills were among the first to benefit from hydroelectric power generated by the Niagara River, the city got the nickname City of Light at this time due to the widespread electric lighting. It was also part of the revolution, hosting the brass era car builders Pierce Arrow. President William McKinley was shot and mortally wounded by an anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6,1901, McKinley died in the city eight days later and Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in at the Wilcox Mansion as the 26th President of the United States. The Great Depression of 1929–39 saw severe unemployment, especially working class men
7.
Wainwright Building
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The Wainwright Building is a 10-story red brick office building at 709 Chestnut Street in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. The Wainwright Building is among the first skyscrapers in the world and it was designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan in the Palazzo style and built between 1890 and 1891. It was named for local brewer, building contractor, and financier Ellis Wainwright, the building, listed as a landmark both locally and nationally, is described as a highly influential prototype of the modern office building by the National Register of Historic Places. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright called the Wainwright Building the very first human expression of a tall steel office-building as Architecture, the building is currently owned by the State of Missouri and houses state offices. The Wainwright building was commissioned by Ellis Wainwright, a St. Louis brewer, Wainwright needed office space to manage the St Louis Brewers Association. As designed, the first floor of the Wainwright Building was intended for street-accessible shops, the higher floors were for honeycomb offices, while the top floor was for water tanks and building machinery. He wrote, must be tall, every inch of it tall, the force and power of altitude must be in it the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line and his 1896 article cited his Wainwright Building as an example. Despite the classical column concept, the design was deliberately modern. Historian Carl W. Condit described the Wainwright as a building with a strong, the base contained retail stores that required wide glazed openings, Sullivans ornament made the supporting piers read as pillars. Above it the nature of offices up a single flight of stairs are expressed as broad windows in the curtain wall. A cornice separates the second floor from the grid of windows of the screen wall. The buildings windows and horizontals were inset slightly behind columns and piers, as part of a “vertical aesthetic” to create what Sullivan called “a proud and soaring thing. ”This perception has since been criticized as the skyscraper were designed to make money, not to serve as a symbol. Apart from the brick piers, the only solids of the wall surface are the spandrel panels between the windows. They have rich patterns in low relief, varying in design. The frieze is pierced by unobtrusive bulls-eye windows that light the floor, originally containing water tanks. The building includes embellishments of terra cotta, a material that was gaining popularity at the time of construction. One of Sullivans primary concerns was the development of an architectural symbolism consisting of geometric, structural forms
8.
St. Louis
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St. Louis is an independent city and major U. S. port in the state of Missouri, built along the western bank of the Mississippi River, on the border with Illinois. Prior to European settlement, the area was a regional center of Native American Mississippian culture. The city of St. Louis was founded in 1764 by French fur traders Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, in 1764, following Frances defeat in the Seven Years War, the area was ceded to Spain and retroceded back to France in 1800. In 1803, the United States acquired the territory as part of the Louisiana Purchase, during the 19th century, St. Louis developed as a major port on the Mississippi River. In the 1870 Census, St. Louis was ranked as the 4th-largest city in the United States and it separated from St. Louis County in 1877, becoming an independent city and limiting its own political boundaries. In 1904, it hosted the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and the Summer Olympics, the economy of metro St. Louis relies on service, manufacturing, trade, transportation of goods, and tourism. This city has become known for its growing medical, pharmaceutical. St. Louis has 2 professional sports teams, the St. Louis Cardinals of Major League Baseball, the city is commonly identified with the 630-foot tall Gateway Arch in Downtown St. Louis. The area that would become St. Louis was a center of the Native American Mississippian culture and their major regional center was at Cahokia Mounds, active from 900 AD to 1500 AD. Due to numerous major earthworks within St. Louis boundaries, the city was nicknamed as the Mound City and these mounds were mostly demolished during the citys development. Historic Native American tribes in the area included the Siouan-speaking Osage people, whose territory extended west, European exploration of the area was first recorded in 1673, when French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette traveled through the Mississippi River valley. Five years later, La Salle claimed the region for France as part of La Louisiane. The earliest European settlements in the area were built in Illinois Country on the east side of the Mississippi River during the 1690s and early 1700s at Cahokia, Kaskaskia, migrants from the French villages on the opposite side of the Mississippi River founded Ste. In early 1764, after France lost the 7 Years War, Pierre Laclède, the early French families built the citys economy on the fur trade with the Osage, as well as with more distant tribes along the Missouri River. The Chouteau brothers gained a monopoly from Spain on the fur trade with Santa Fe, French colonists used African slaves as domestic servants and workers in the city. In 1780 during the American Revolutionary War, St. Louis was attacked by British forces, mostly Native American allies, the founding of St. Louis began in 1763. Pierre Laclede led an expedition to set up a fur-trading post farther up the Mississippi River, before then, Laclede had been a very successful merchant. For this reason, he and his trading partner Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent were offered monopolies for six years of the fur trading in that area
9.
Albert Kahn (architect)
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Albert Kahn was the foremost American industrial architect of his day. He is sometimes called the architect of Detroit, in 1943, the Franklin Institute awarded him the Frank P. Brown Medal posthumously. Kahn was born to a Jewish family on March 21,1869 in Rhaunen, Kahn came to Detroit in 1880, at the age of 11. His father Joseph was trained as a rabbi, his mother Rosalie had a talent for the visual arts, as a teenager, he got a job at the architectural firm of Mason and Rice. Kahn won a scholarship to study abroad in Europe, where he toured with another young architecture student, Henry Bacon. In 1895, he founded the architectural firm Albert Kahn Associates, together with his younger brother Julius, he developed a new style of construction where reinforced concrete replaced wood in factory walls, roofs, and supports. This gave better protection and allowed large volumes of unobstructed interior. Packard Motor Car Companys factory, designed in 1903, was the first development of this principle, the success of the Packard plant interested Henry Ford in Kahns designs. Kahn designed Ford Motor Companys Highland Park plant, begun in 1909, Kahn later designed, in 1917, the massive half-mile-long Ford River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Michigan. The Rouge grew into the largest manufacturing complex in the U. S. with a force that peaked at 120,000 workers, Kahn was responsible for many of the buildings and houses built under direction of the Hiram Walker family in Walkerville, Ontario, including Willistead Manor. Kahn also designed the landmark 28-story Art Deco Fisher Building in Detroit, in 1928, the Fisher building was honored by the Architectural League of New York as the years most beautiful commercial structure. Between 1917 and 1929, he designed the headquarters for all three daily newspapers in Detroit. On January 9,1930, a contract with Kahn was signed for his firm to become consulting architects for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union. Kahn also designed many of the buildings at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. These include the Burton Memorial Tower, Hill Auditorium, Hatcher Graduate Library, Kahn said later in life that out of all the buildings he designed, he wanted most to be remembered for his work on the William L. Clements Library. A frequent collaborator with Kahn was architectural sculptor Corrado Parducci, in all, Parducci worked on about 50 Kahn commissions including banks, office buildings, newspaper buildings, mausoleums, hospitals and private residences. Kahns firm designed a number of the army airfield and naval bases for the United States government during World War I. By World War II, Kahns 600-person office was involved in making Detroit an important element of Americas Arsenal of Democracy, in 1937, Albert Kahn Associates was responsible for 19 percent of all architect-designed factories in the U. S
10.
Minoru Yamasaki
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Minoru Yamasaki was an American architect, best known for designing the original World Trade Center in New York City and several other large-scale projects. Yamasaki was one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century and he and fellow architect Edward Durell Stone are generally considered to be the two master practitioners of New Formalism. Yamasaki was born in Seattle, Washington, a second-generation Japanese American, son of John Tsunejiro Yamasaki and he grew up in the slums of that city and was bullied for his ethnicity. The family moved to Auburn, Washington and he graduated from Garfield Senior High School in Seattle and he enrolled in the University of Washington program in architecture in 1929, and graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture in 1934. During his college years, he was encouraged by faculty member Lionel Pries. He earned money to pay for his tuition by working at an Alaskan salmon cannery, in 1945, Yamasaki moved to Detroit, where he was hired by Smith, Hinchman & Grylls. The firm helped Yamasaki avoid internment as a Japanese-American during World War II, Yamasaki left the firm in 1949, and started his own partnership. One of the first projects he designed at his own firm was Ruhls Bakery at 7 Mile Road, in 1964, Yamasaki received a D. F. A. from Bates College. His firm, Yamasaki & Associates, closed on December 31,2009 and his first internationally recognized design, the Pacific Science Center with its iconic arches, was constructed by the City of Seattle for the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair. His first significant project was the Pruitt–Igoe housing project in St. Louis, despite his love of Japanese traditional design, this was a stark, modernist concrete structure. The housing project experienced so many problems that it was demolished in 1972 and its destruction is considered by some to be the beginning of postmodern architecture. In 1955, he designed the sleek terminal at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport which led to his 1959 commission to design the Dhahran International Airport in Saudi Arabia. During this period, he created a number of buildings which led to his innovative design of the 1,360 ft towers of the World Trade Center in 1964. The first of the towers was finished in 1970, many of his buildings feature superficial details inspired by the pointed arches of Gothic architecture, and make use of extremely narrow vertical windows. This narrow-windowed style arose from his own fear of heights. One particular design challenge of the World Trade Centers design related to the efficacy of the elevator system, Yamasaki integrated the fastest elevators at the time, running at 1,700 feet per minute. Instead of placing a traditional elevator shaft in the core of each tower
11.
Auditorium Building (Chicago)
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The Auditorium Building in Chicago is one of the best-known designs of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler. Completed in 1889, the building is located at the northwest corner of South Michigan Avenue and Congress Street. The building, which when constructed was the largest in the United States and the tallest in Chicago, was designed to be a complex, including offices, a theater. As a young apprentice, Frank Lloyd Wright worked on some of the interior design, the Auditorium Theatre is part of the Auditorium Building and is located at 50 East Congress Parkway. The theater was the first home of the Chicago Civic Opera and it currently hosts the season performances of the Joffrey Ballet. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 17,1970 and it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1975, and was designated a Chicago Landmark on September 15,1976. In addition, it is a historic district contributing property for the Chicago Landmark Historic Michigan Boulevard District, since 1947, the Auditorium Building has been part of Roosevelt University. He was said to have wanted to make culture accessible to the working classes of Chicago. The building was to include a block and a first class hotel. Peck persuaded many Chicago business tycoons to go on board with him, including Marshall Field, Edson Keith, Martin A. Ryerson, Charles L. Hutchinson, the association hired the renowned architectural firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan to design the building. At the time, a young Frank Lloyd Wright was employed at the firm as draftsman, and he may have contributed to the design. The Auditorium was built for a syndicate of businessmen to house a large opera house, to provide an economic base it was decided to wrap the auditorium with a hotel. Hence Adler & Sullivan had to plan a complex multiple-use building, fronting on Michigan Avenue, overlooking the lake, was the hotel while the offices were placed to the west on Wabash Avenue. The entrance to the auditorium is on the south side beneath the tall blocky eighteen-story tower, the rest of the building is a uniform ten stories, organized in the same way as Richardsons Marshall Field Wholesale Store. The Auditorium is a heavy, impressive structure externally, and was striking in its day when buildings of its scale were less common. When completed, it was the tallest building in the city, one of the most innovative features of the building was its massive raft foundation, designed by Adler in conjunction with engineer Paul Mueller. The soil beneath the Auditorium consists of blue clay to a depth of over 100 feet. Adler and Mueller designed a floating mat of crisscrossed railroad ties, topped with a layer of steel rails embedded in concrete
12.
Great Chicago Fire
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The Great Chicago Fire was a conflagration that burned from Sunday, October 8, to early Tuesday, October 10,1871. The fire killed up to 300 people, destroyed roughly 3.3 square miles of Chicago, Illinois, and left more than 100,000 residents homeless. The fire started at about 9,00 p. m. on October 8, the shed next to the barn was the first building to be consumed by the fire, but city officials never determined the exact cause of the blaze. There has, however, been much speculation over the years, the most popular tale blames Mrs. OLearys cow, who allegedly knocked over a lantern, others state that a group of men were gambling inside the barn and knocked over a lantern. Still other speculation suggests that the blaze was related to fires in the Midwest that day. The fires spread was aided by the use of wood as the predominant building material in a style called balloon frame. More than two thirds of the structures in Chicago at the time of the fire were made entirely of wood, with most of the houses, all of the citys sidewalks and many roads were also made of wood. In 1871, the Chicago Fire Department had 185 firefighters with just 17 horse-drawn steam engines to protect the entire city. The initial response by the department was quick, but due to an error by the watchman, Matthias Schaffer. These factors combined to turn a small barn fire into a conflagration, when firefighters finally arrived at DeKoven Street, the fire had grown and spread to neighboring buildings and was progressing towards the central business district. Firefighters had hoped that the South Branch of the Chicago River, all along the river, however, were lumber yards, warehouses, and coal yards, and barges and numerous bridges across the river. As the fire grew, the southwest wind intensified and became superheated, causing structures to catch fire from the heat, around 11,30 p. m. flaming debris blew across the river and landed on roofs and the South Side Gas Works. With the fire across the river and moving rapidly towards the heart of the city, about this time, Mayor Roswell B. Mason sent messages to nearby towns asking for help. When the courthouse caught fire, he ordered the building to be evacuated, at 2,30 a. m. on the 9th, the cupola of the courthouse collapsed, sending the great bell crashing down. Some witnesses reported hearing the sound from a mile away, as more buildings succumbed to the flames, a major contributing factor to the fire’s spread was a meteorological phenomenon known as a fire whirl. As overheated air rises, it comes into contact with cooler air and these fire whirls are likely what drove flaming debris so high and so far. Such debris was blown across the branch of the Chicago River to a railroad car carrying kerosene. The fire had jumped the river a second time and was now raging across the north side
