“Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism”

AboutSiry situates Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building (1886–1890) within the social and political conflicts of 1880s Chicago, arguing that its design was an ideologically calculated response to class tensions between the city's capitalist elite and a working-class socialist and anarchist political movement. He contrasts the Auditorium's civic, subscription-based patronage model — championed by patron Ferdinand W. Peck as a democratic alternative to elite private ownership — with New York's Metropolitan Opera House, designed by Josiah Cady around a hierarchy of privately owned boxes for the "wealthy, fashionable classes." Siry analyzes Dankmar Adler's acoustical and sightline engineering, the theater's seating and box arrangement as a built expression of Peck's more egalitarian social vision, and Sullivan's ornamental and iconographic program, including the murals, allegorical relief portraits of Wagner, Haydn, Shakespeare, and Demosthenes, and Sullivan's poem "Inspiration" (originally titled "Growth and Decadence"), delivered at the building's dedication. The article offers this analysis as an alternative, patronage-centered perspective on Chicago School historiography, which typically emphasizes only technical and stylistic innovation in the city's commercial buildings.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199806%2957%3A2%3C128%3ACABOOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z