Blair Kamin’s Sunday column reviews the book Great Houses of Chicago, 1871-1921 by Susan Benjamin and Stuart Cohen. Both H. H. Richardson and Frank Lloyd Wright homes made the book, along with 31 other, slightly more traditional homes.
Billed as the first authoritative study of Chicago’s mansions, the book sheds new light on a spectacular cache of often-ignored traditional houses that fall outside the modernist canon headed by Henry Hobson Richardson’s Glessner House and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. Yet those radically innovative houses, which also appear in the book, pop out with fresh relevance when seen against the backdrop of their traditional counterparts.The authors — Benjamin, owner of a Chicago-area consulting firm that specializes in historic preservation; and Cohen, a practicing architect and member of the “Chicago Seven” architects who in the 1970s challenged Miesian orthodoxy — have written anything but a dry architectural history. They tell the story of ambitious men — Marshall Field, George Pullman, Potter Palmer and others — who made stupendous fortunes and expressed them by hiring top-drawer architects, from Wright to New York’s McKim, Mead & White.
Leavening the tale are snippets of social history, such as the recounting of the Field family’s 1886 Mikado Ball, attended by more than 500 guests who arrived in horse-drawn carriages at the Beaux-Arts mansion on Prairie Avenue and were fed by a New York caterer who brought in food, linen and silver on private railroad cars.
Along Prairie Avenue, majestic Lake Shore Drive, and Astor Street, the Armours, McCormicks, Pullmans, and Ryersons immortalized their place among Chicago’s elite with lavish palaces designed by David Adler, Daniel Burnham, Howard Van Doren Shaw, and Frank Lloyd Wright, in styles that ranged from detailed Beaux-Arts eclectic to International Modern.
Great Houses of Chicago, 1871-1921 is the first authoritative study of Chicago’s grand city houses. Thirty four in-depth profiles, illustrated with restored archival photographs and floor plans, portray a private world of Midwestern splendor. This masterful volume includes biographical sketches of leading Chicago architects, a comprehensive bibliography, and a portfolio of 40 additional, rarely-seen residences.