The Chicago Wheel

Becket, March 3, 2013

The Industrial Revolution brought with it all sorts of new programs.  Among them a rather peculiar one: the world's fair.  Beginning with the 1844 French Industrial Exposition in Paris, the phenomenon caught fire: Bern and Madrid in 1845, Brussels in 1847, Saint Petersburg in 1848, Lisbon in 1849.  And of course, the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, with Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace.  But the fair that raised the bar, literally, was the 1889 Exposition Universelle, again in Paris, with its celebrated Eiffel Tower.

When the directors of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair began to work on the plans for the Columbian Exposition, the challenge of the Eiffel Tower was fresh in their minds.  Although they had agreed on the Beaux-Arts for the architecture of the exhibition, the design of an heroic landmark required a completely different approach.  For that, they selected an obscure bridge builder from Galesburg, Illinois, that proposed a gigantic rotating wheel with pivoting passenger cars.  His name: George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr.

Yes, the centerpiece of the Columbian Exhibition was the original Ferris Wheel.  I don't know if Ferris could rival Eiffel as an engineer, but the rotating wheel created all sorts of original design problems resulting in a unique iconic structure, with a series of double rings connected to its central axle by a web of slender spokes.  Add to that the supports for the axle, the cars with their pin connections and, of course, the slow rotational movement itself, and you had a new, unprecedented monument.

Then it was the experience itself, of 2,000 visitors going around, slowly turning all the way up, more than 250 feet up in the sky, to the views of the fairgrounds and the city below.

Burnham's World, more

Becket, March 2, 2013

Do you know who George B. Post was?  I didn't.

He was the architect of the Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building at the Chicago Columbian Exposition.  Certainly not a household name, like Daniel Burnham, Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, or even Sophia Hayden, some of the other architects in the fair.  But Post's building was not just another building.  It was, by far, the largest building in the fair (actually, with a footprint of almost 1.5 million square feet, it still ranks as one of the largest buildings ever build.)

At least since Paxton's 1851 Crystal Palace, these gigantic structures were a staple of 19th century world exhibitions.  But unlike, let's say, the unapologetically industrial Galerie des Machines at the 1889 Paris Fair, the great hall in Chicago had to balance its engineering demands with the Neoclassical ambitions of Burnham and his colleagues.  In Post, Burnham found the perfect man for the job: a civil engineer educated at Richard Morris Hunt's Ten Street Studio (the architecture school Hunt established when he came back from Paris.)

Still, you had to deal with such a large structure on the plan.  You know, like finding a place for a rhinoceros in a dog show.

Here is where the site plan plays a particularly difficult hand brilliantly.  One of the short sides of the building faces the basin, matching the proportions of Charles McKim's Agriculture Building (yes, of course, it's the long side of McKim's building.)  Then, one of its long sides faces the shoreline: you do need that kind of dimensions when you're dealing with the scale of Lake Michigan!  Finally, the other two sides are conveniently broken up by smaller (still rather large) buildings in the foreground.

Burnham's World

Cambridge, March 1st, 2013

Have you ever looked with a little care at the plan of the 1893 Chicago Exposition?  If I ever had (I must have, in Neil Levine's course,) I didn't remember.  If you asked me, all I could describe was the long classical axis of the Great Basin with Daniel Chester French's tall figure of the Republic at one end, Richard Morris Hunt's Administration Building at the other, and several Beaux Art colonnaded and pedimented white façades on the sides.

But that's only a small portion of the plan.  The whole fair spread on both sides of the Basin, a great deal to the north.

One of the underappreciated qualities of Beaux Arts composition is its nimble ability to take on particular demands of site and program.  In the case of the Exposition, the plan resolves the two alignments of the site--the grid of the city to the west and the edge of the lake to the east--with surprising ease.  The solution is deceptively simple: the north half of follows the grid and the south half follows the shoreline (this last one is the area of the Basin, that runs perpendicular to the shore.)  That generates a rather awkward wedge-shaped area in the middle, taken by the irregular perimeter of a lagoon (Olmsted to the rescue.)

The other major adjustment happens with the rail lines, that come from the south along the edge of the property line, splay, and make a tight turn to deadend in line with the  axis of the basin.

All of these plan maneuvers create a host of "topical" problems that the individual buildings not only resolve but take advantage of (more about that to come.)