Chicago [antikvár]

i i'. I"' - ' ."1, ! TTih ! I ,1 11 i ' ' ^ , I ' , I : ' ' I ft"' ' 'VMi^ r I'i'ii; .1' I I ! I I : I'l ¦ I ; ¦, ' , i( 'ill- I , f I , i' ' ¦ . : • i I I ! 11 I'. .-I Chicago's history as observed (simplistically, yet importantly) by its cabbies, has alternately benefited from and been burdened by; the Native American origin of its name ("Chicagou" means "smelly onion"); the infamous—made famous by Upton Sinclair—Stock Yards; Al "Scarface" Capone; a substantial middle-European blue-collar working class {not particularly noted for its tolerance of othei^s); unpredictable (but almost always marginal) professional sports teams; and lastly, modem architecture (with a Capital "A!"). At some level, the etymology of the final category can be largely attributed to the 1871 inferno that virtually destroyed the city's Central Business District. Consequently, Chicago had to rebuild instantaneously so as to keep the city both commercially viable and compefitive with other emerging American "power places." Two conditions came about as a result of the heroic struggle to raise our modem iWidwest metropolis. The first big change was that modem technology was for the first time exploited as much as it could be, from the use of cast iron stmctural framing to the electric elevator. Less tangible was the phoenix that emerged from this latter-nineteenth centuiy confiagi'afion: The now-famous Chicago "1 will!" spirit kicked into overdrive. only (much) later did architectural historians and the general public come to underetand—and then to belatedly elevate—what at first seemed to be building expediently to the level of architecture-as-art. Then, and only then, did Chicago come to be known as the most modem city on earth. Imagine, if you will, a man-made oasis situated on the seam separating an inland sea from an endless prairie. Now imagine the Jeffersonian one hundred x one hundred meter gi'idiron plan tilted up into space apres le deluge as a three-dimensional constmctional matrix: Voila, you now understand the stmctural—and more importantly, the visual—authority that the "First Chicago School of Architecture" superposed upon Chicago! Ten of Chicago's nineteenth-century architectural foremnners were particularly legendary, even in their own time: Daniel