“Review of *The Rise of the Skyscraper*, by Carl W. Condit”

AboutHenry-Russell Hitchcock offers a detailed, critical review of Carl W. Condit's 1952 book The Rise of the Skyscraper, praising its illustrations and documentary detail on Chicago commercial architecture of the 1880s-1890s while faulting its scholarly thoroughness and geographic myopia. Hitchcock argues Condit's exclusive focus on Chicago wrongly slights parallel skyscraper work in St. Louis, Buffalo, New York, and Minneapolis, and criticizes Condit's uncritical adoption of Sigfried Giedion's "constituent facts" thesis and his neglect of earlier English and American cast-iron and fireproof-construction precedents. He faults gaps in Condit's bibliography (Mariana Van Rensselaer, Turpin Bannister, Baumann and Birkmire) and disputes several specific attributions and datings, including the true completion date of Burnham and Root's Reliance Building and the relative credit due engineers versus architects for English railway sheds. Hitchcock revisits the historiographic debate over whether Louis Sullivan's design genius derived chiefly from partner Dankmar Adler or from Sullivan's own architectural consciousness, and traces Sullivan's stylistic debts to H. H. Richardson through the Central Music Hall and Marshall Field Wholesale Store. He closes by placing Condit's achievement between the "philosophical" historicism of Giedion and the antiquarianism of Thomas Tallmadge, judging it an indispensable but incomplete account of the Chicago School's true national and international context.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28195224%294%3A4%3C351%3ATROTS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U