The Chicago Auditorium Building

When the magnificent Auditorium Building opened on Chicago's Michigan Avenue in December 1889, American and European newspapers hailed the event as a defining moment for the city, the most important since the Great Fire of 1871. The Auditorium marked Chicago's emergence both as the leading city of the Midwest and as a metropolis of international stature. In this book, Joseph Mm. Siry explores not just the architectural history of the Auditorium Building, but also the crucial role it played in Chicago's social history. Housing a luxurious 400-room hotel, 136 offices and stores, and a theatre that could seat 4,200, the Auditorium Building was one of the earliest multipurpose civic centres in the United States, and its many technical and aesthetic innovations launched Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's national reputations as creators of highly innovative architecture for large public buildings. (Frank Lloyd Wright was apprenticed to Adler and Sullivan at the time, serving as Sullivan's draftsman). But the Auditorium's importance was not limited to architecture. Envisioned by its principal patron, Ferdinand W.
Peck, as a means to counter the violent socialist agitation of the Haymarket era, the Auditorium Theatre embodied Peck's capitalist ideal of a democratic variation on the European opera house that could provide wholesome, affordable, high-class entertainment for the city's skilled workers. Covering the Auditorium from the early design stage to its opening, its later renovations, its links to culture and politics in Chicago, and its influence on later Adler and Sullivan works (including the Schiller Building and the Chicago Stock Exchange Building), "The Chicago Auditorium Building" recounts the fascinating tale of a building that helped to define a city and an era.