Monadnock Building - Critical Reception and Historical Significance

Critical Reception and Historical Significance

Contemporary Chicago critics considered the building too radical a departure from Burnham & Root's previous designs and too extreme in its stark simplicity and disregard for prevailing aesthetic norms, calling it an "engineer's house" and a "thoroughly puritanical" example of commercial style. European critics were even less approving. In the words of French architect Jacques Hermant, "The Monadnock was no longer the result of an artist responding to particular needs with intelligence and drawing from them all of the possible consequences. It is the work of a laborer who, without the slightest study, super-imposes 15 strictly identical stories to make a block then stops when he finds the block high enough."

Other critics saw this lack of style as "natural" and what made the Monadnock truly modern. New York critic Barr Feree wrote in 1892 that "There are no attempts at facades ... no ornamental appendages, nothing but a succession of windows, frankly stating that the structure is an office building, devoted to business, needing and using every available surface." Other critics praised the truthfulness of the building to the ideals of business, which, while "not necessarily the highest to which we might aspire to in art ... are the only ideals the business building ought to express". Montgomery Schuyler, one of the Monadnock's most enthusiastic defenders, argued that the Monadnock's lack of ornament was not a lack of art, but rather "radiated the gravity of modern business life".

The Monadnock was widely praised by early twentieth-century German architects, including Mies, who on his arrival in Chicago in 1938 declared that "The Monadnock block is of such vigor and force that I am at once proud and happy to make my home here." These European architects found the building's attention to purpose and functional expression inspiring. Bauhaus architect Ludwig Hilberseimer wrote that "The false solution—unfortunately too common—of applying meaningless and misplaced adornment is here instinctively avoided. An innate feeling for proportion gives this great building inner consistency and logical purity."

Modern critics have praised the Monadnock as one of the most important exemplars of the Chicago school, along with Louis Sullivan's Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building. It has been called "a triumph of unified design" comparable to Henry Hobson Richardson's Marshall Field's Wholesale Store, and "one of the most exciting aesthetic experiences our commercial architecture has ever produced".

The building was one of the first five selected by the Chicago Commission on Architectural Landmarks in 1958, "in recognition of its original design and its historical interest as the highest wall-bearing structure in Chicago". The commission went on to note that the "restrained use of brick, soaring massive walls, omission of ornamental forms, unite in a building simple yet majestic." In 1973, the Chicago City Council voted unanimously to designate the Monadnock a Chicago Landmark, stating that "The two halves of this building provide a unique perspective for examining the history and development of modern architecture.... Together, they mark the end of one building tradition and the beginning of another." Critics of the Monadnock's landmark status objected that it would prevent the necessary demolition of the building, which was "an excellent example of a building that is ... no longer fulfilling the functions it was designed to fulfill" and "a wasting asset" that underperformed the market and was far less valuable than the land on which it stood would be.

The National Register of Historic Places, to which the Monadnock was added in 1970, noted that "the sheer, unadorned walls of this building forming a powerful mass became, prophetically, a forerunner of the 'slab skyscraper'—a style not popular until the late 1920s" and that "the two sections ... make, as an ensemble, one of the strongest, yet refined architectural statements in the development of twentieth century architecture." Its nomination as a National Historic Landmark in 1976, as part of the South Dearborn Street-Printing House Row Historic District, included the comment that it was "one of the most classical statements ever made in the skyscraper idiom."