The (so-called) Lost Years

                            Chrysler Motors Building, Holabird + Root, 1933    photo (c) Hedrich Blessing
1918 marked the end of an era in Chicago architecture and design. It was the year that Louis Sullivan closed his offices in the Auditorium Building. It was also the year that Elmslie & Purcell completed the Woodbury County Courthouse in Sioux City, Iowa, regarded as the last great work of the Prairie School.

1918 witnessed changing times and changing tastes that brought an end to the First Chicago School of architecture.

Thirty years later, in 1948, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe completed his first major commercial building in Chicago, the Promontory Apartments. Designs for his more famous 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments were still in development. The success of these two high-rise residential projects—coupled with Mies’ influential design courses and work at the Illinois Institute of Technology—laid the foundations for the Second Chicago School of architecture.

But what was happening in Chicago architecture and design between the First and Second Chicago Schools? (1918 through 1948) Conventional histories often regard this period as a kind of hiatus in which little of architectural significance was produced in Chicago. Adding to this perception is Sullivan’s often cited prediction that “The damage wrought by the World’s Fair will last from a half a century from its date, if not longer,” lending authority to a “step backwards” in Chicago architecture until the arrival of Mies and his brand of European Modernism.

A closer examination of the historical record, however, reveals that the period between the First and Second Chicago Schools was actually one of great creativity, innovation, and even modernization of more traditional approaches to design. Modern architecture in Chicago was not dead between 1918 and 1948. On the contrary, architects and designers experimented with multiple interpretations of “modern” during this time.

Contemporary writers, reviewers, and critics used the term “modernistic” to describe different expressions of modern architecture in the 1920s and 1930s. Modern Before Mies aims to document these Chicago projects that prepared the way for Mies and laid the foundations for the city we know today.