George A. Fuller - George A. Fuller Company

George A. Fuller Company

Fuller moved to Chicago, the locus of much of the skyscraper construction in the United States at the time, where he formed a partnership with C. Everett Clark, another architect from Massachusetts, which lasted only two years. He then raised $50,000 and set up the George A. Fuller Company in 1882. Fuller's new firm was different from the many architecture firms of the time, in that it intended to handle all aspects of building construction except for the design of the building, which would come from outside architects. In this way, Fuller created the modern concept of the general contractor.

One of the new firm's first jobs was the Chicago Opera House, designed by Henry Ives Cobb and Charles S. Frost. In this building, Fuller, who was a proponent of using steel in building construction, utilized it for the floor beams, a decision which subjected him to criticism from the architectural community, which was wary of using steel and unsure of its long-term properties.

Very little is really known today of the properties of steel ... and though events point strongly to becoming the metal of the future, there exists among many reasonable conservative men, a wide and well-grounded distrust of its use in the higher engineer or architectural structures, on account of its mysterious behavior, and frequent erratic and inexplicable failures.

Fuller's firm built the Tacoma Building in Chicago designed by Holabird & Roche and completed in 1889, which was the first skyscraper with non load bearing curtain walls. By using Bessemer steel beams, Fuller created steel cages that supported all the building's weight.

Fuller's firm also built the Rookery Building (1888, Burnham and Root), the Rand McNally Building (1890, Burnham & Root), the Pontiac Building (1891, Holabird & Roche) and the Monadnock Building (1891, Burnham & Root; 1893, Holabird & Roche) in Chicago, and the New York Times Building (1889, George B. Post) in New York City. The Fuller Company was also intensely involved in the building of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, the Columbian Exposition, in which a temporary "White City on the Lake" was constructed under the supervision of Daniel Burnham.

With the success of his firm, Fuller became a multimillionaire, and his wife and daughters entered Chicago society. He commissioned Charles P. Post to design a home on Drexel Boulevard on the South Side of Chicago, and Post created a Queen Anne style mansion. His daughter, Allon, married Harry S. Black in 1894, and Fuller took him into the company as vice president, despite the fact that Black was neither an architect nor an engineer.

In 1892, New York City altered its building regulations to allow skeleton construction and curtain walls, in which the load created by the building was carried by the internal skeleton and not by the exterior wall, a construction method which had been allowed under the Chicago building code for years. This change prompted Fuller to open an office in New York in 1896, and soon the company had contracts in Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Baltimore, as well as in Chicago and New York.