One Fine Building and a Few Good Men

from “Chicago” March 1991 by Donald L. Miller

John Wellborn Root’s Monadnock Building, at 53 West Jackson Boulevard, is one of the
supreme achievements of modern commercial architecture. But this early Chicago
skyscraper, once the tallest office building in the fastest-growing city in the world, was
nearly ruined by decades of neglect and piecemeal remodeling. Now, however, thanks to
an inspired restoration by William Donnell, a 45-year-old Chicago real estate investor and
architecture buff, we are able to see how this extraordinary building looked and
functioned when it was first opened for business nearly a century ago.

Donnell’s is no conventional preservation project. It is a complete architectural

restoration, 12 years in the works, the most comprehensive skyscraper restoration ever
attempted. “We’re not building a modern office building inside an impressive old shell as
they did with Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building in St. Louis,” Donnell points out,
sitting behind the big oak desk in his handsomely appointed office in the Monadnock
Building. “When we complete our work in 1992, the 100th anniversary of the opening of
the building, the Monadnock will not only look as it originally did, outside and inside, but
it will also live as it used to.”

The revived Monadnock is already doing something in perfect character with its origins-
making solid profits for its business backers. This is the reason the Monadnock, along
with a number of other revolutionary office buildings, was constructed in 19-th century
Chicago’s thickly congested downtown; and this is also the aim of Donnell’s award-
winning restoration. “If ever there was a case of doing right while making money,” says
M.W. Newman, architecture critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, “Donnell’s story is it.”

The Massive Monadnock, 16 stories high with masonry walls six feet thick at its base, is
actually two interconnected structures, built with similar but subtly different designs and
with radically different construction techniques by two of Chicago’s legendary
architectural firms. The northern half of the building was designed by the partnership of
Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root, with Root as chief designer, while the southern
extension, completed in 1893, two years after Root’s death at the age of 41, is the work of
William Holabird and Martin Roche, architect of the Marquette Building, still one of the
finest office buildings in the Loop. Holabird and Roche’s addition is partially supported
by a steel frame, then an advanced engineering innovation, and it is a simply decorated
building whose somber brick walls and gently projecting window bays blend beautifully
with those of Root’s building. In Root’s building, however, the walls carry the weight of
the structure; they are not just a decorative shell. One of the world’s first skyscrapers,
and one of the first office buildings in Chicago equipped with electricity, Root’s
Monadnock is also the last of the tall buildings erected in the ancient style of wall-
bearing masonry construction. Yet while it’s masonry framing was considered
technically outmoded by structural engineers even as the building was on the drafting
board, the Monadnock is audaciously modern in its complete absence of external
ornamentation. A freestanding structure of great power and simplicity, it is as austere and
tightly adapted to its purposes as the streamlined lake steamers that serviced the port of
Chicago at the turn of the century. When it was completed, an Eastern critic pronounced
it “an achievement unsurpassed in the architectural history of our country,” and it
continues to inspire visitors to the city.

A few years ago the Chicago architects John Vinci and Helmut Jahn took Helmut
Schmidt, the former West German chancellor on an architecture tour of the Loop. “We
took him to Sullivan’s Auditorium Building, Burnham and Root’s Rookery, and several
other Chicago landmarks and got absolutely no reaction out of him,” says Vinci, who is
consulting preservation architect for the Monadnock. “But when he stood in front of the
Monadnock his eyes lit up, and he excitedly told Jahn, in German, that this building is
what America, what Chicago, means to Germany. ‘It is what your city and your country
are all about.” Solidly self-assured, constructed by businessmen for business purposes, it
is a building that, in the word of one of Root’s contemporaries, “tells its story in the
plainest, strongest words, and then stops talking.”

The Monadnock is a work of an American master, and William Donnell’s restoration will
surely lead to a reappraisal of John Root, a highly regarded but still underappreciated
architect. It is a prophetic and precedent-setting building, “the first building,” according
to the historian Carl W. Condit, “in which the architect turned his back on all traditional
systems of ornament, or decorating schemes,” and expressed his vision sheerly through
mass and structure, in the manner of later modernists like Le Corbusier and Ludwig van
der Rohe. And what is intriguing is that there is almost no hint of it in Root’s previous
buildings, most of which were richly ornamented. “It is as if Root invented modern
architecture in one great creative leap,”says architect Myron Goldsmith of Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill, whose Brunswick Building on Washington Street, a few blocks from
the Monadnock, is supported by concrete exterior walls that curve in ward above the base
like those of the Monadnock.

So how did Root, the inspired ornamentalist, come to design this elegantly understated
building? The long-accepted explanation was that of his adoring sister-in-law, the
Chicago poet Harriet Monroe, who published a biography of Root just four years after the
Monadnock was completed. Like a number of prominent Chicagoans in her circle,
Monroe did not care for the spare façade of the Monadnock and insisted that the design
was pressed on Root by his cost-conscious client, the Boston investor Peter Brooks, who
teamed up with his brother Shepherd to build several of Chicago’s now-historic office
buildings, including the Montauk, the Rookery, and the Marquette. Working through his
Chicago business agent, Owen F. Aldis, Peter Brooks instructed Root to submit a design
for an office building that would produce “the effect of solidity and strength” without the
use of ornament. But Root had considerable trouble doing this, Monroe argued, so while
he was away from the city on vacation in July 1889 the more practical-minded Daniel
Burnham, eager to please an important client, ordered a draftsman to draw “a straight-up-
and-down, uncompromising, unornamented façade.” When Root returned to Chicago he
was furious with the “brick box,” but gradually came to accept the idea and started
working on a design inspired by the fortresslike walls that flank the gateways to ancient
Egyptian temples.

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This story, which greatly reduces Root’s role in the design of the Monadnock, has been
discredited by the research of Donald Hoffmann, former architecture critic for the Kansas
City Star and author of the only comprehensive book on Root’s architecture. Drawing on
the correspondence between Owen Aldis and Peter Brooks, letters that have since been
destroyed, Hoffmann demonstrates beyond doubt that Root began struggling with the
design of the Monadnock as early as 1884, and that he spent more time on this building
than on any other in his brief career, trying to solve the problem of how to give proper
artistic expression to the tall office building, a type of structure that had no precedent in
the history of architecture. Keeping in close touch with Brooks through Aldis, Root
conceived a design wholly without ornament well before he left for the seashore in the
summer of 1889. A draftsman might have helped him refine the design, but the
Monadnock is the creation of an architect at the peak of his powers, not the work of an
office helper.

If we need further proof that this is indisputably Root’s building we have only to turn to
his own writings. Like his more celebrated contemporaries Louis Sullivan and Frank
Lloyd Wright, Root wrote with spirit and originality on architecture and the allied arts,
and there is a clear but largely unnoticed progression in his writings that leads directly to
the Monadnock. This building may be singularly different from his previous work, but it
is in near-perfect alignment with his architectural philosophy, which he was putting into
mature form as he struggled to give Peter Brooks the severely simple building he
requested. The purely business intentions of Brooks surely disciplined the artistic vision
of Root, a notoriously impetuous architect whose talents sometimes took him in a
thousand different directions, but Brooks, as it turns out, was asking Root to design the
type of office building that Root himself was calling for in his luminous essays on
American architecture.

Root was one of the first of his countrymen to call for a fresh and uniquely American
architecture, “a new spirit of beauty [that]… springs out of the past, but is not tied to it,
[that] studies the traditions, but is not enslaved by them.” The American architecture of
his time was heavily influenced by current European style, which went to the past for
inspiration, to the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, and Classical antiquity, a design
impulse that has recently come back into vogue in architecture’s retreat from the
geometric severity of the International Style. Root was a student of architectural history,
but he urged his fellow Chicago architects, young men searching for a new direction, to
develop an original style embodying the life and spirit of their city, their country, and
their culture. He himself was trained and made original contributions as an engineer, and
he wanted the architecture of the United States to express the emerging forces of
capitalism, urbanism, and industrial technology.

Root lived in a business-driven city and society and designed buildings as “enduring
monuments to the broad and beneficent commerce of the age.” He admired the boldness
and civic consciousness of the best of Chicago’s merchant princes, and in his finest office
buildings, and above all in the Monadnock, he carried into brick and stone what he
considered the ideal attributes of modern business: “simplicity, stability, breadth,
dignity”- but most of all stability.

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John Root’s Chicago was a city of titanic energy and violent class and labor discontent
the storm center of American political radicalism and unionism. We know little of Root’s
politics, but he was certainly a conservative, fearful that labor agitation would escalate in
to social revolution. While he was putting the finishing touches on the design of the
Monadnock he also was working on the First Regiment Armory, which was
commissioned by the city after the Haymarket Riot and was located, not coincidentally,
near the South Side homes of some of Chicago’s wealthiest families. Both buildings can
be seen as an effort to give public emphasis to the social values he believed Chicago
needed most at the time- order and civic discipline. Modern business buildings
“should…by their mass and proportion,” he wrote, “convey in some large elemental
sense an idea of the great, stable, conserving forces of modern civilization.” This
strongly stated sentiment might be the reason he took as a model for the for the façade of
the Monadnock the Egyptian pylon, a piece of stately public architecture embodying the
ideas of the permanence of kingly power and the unchanging nature of ritual.

This is not to suggest that Root was an apologist for the capitalist status quo. On the
contrary, he tried to humanize crude, tumultuous Chicago. Along with Daniel Burnham,
the supervising architect of the World’s Columbian Exposition and originator of
America’s City Beautiful Movement, and George Pullman, creator of what some of his
admirers considered “the most perfect city in the world,” John Root had a powerful faith
in the ability of architecture to restore a sense of beauty and repose to modern urban life.

This comes through clearly in the essays on architecture that he wrote while he worked
on the design of the Monadnock. To convey stability and permanence, Root felt it best,
his writings indicate, not to use ornament, and to use “a single material as against the
combination of many.” For large buildings especially, he favored “grave and simple
treatment.” As he told a gathering of his fellow Chicago architects in 1887, in words that
challenge Harriet Monroe’s interpretation of his role in the design of the Monadnock:
“The value of plain surfaces in every building is not to be overestimated. Strive for them,
and when the fates place at your disposal a good, generous sweep of masonry [as Peter
Brook’s commission did for him], accept it frankly and thank God.”

This “amazing cliff of brickwork,” as Louis Sullivan described the Monadnock, is a

brooding, even a forbidding building when seen from some distance, but as one draws
close it is no longer the imposing wall, the full length of a city block, that impresses; it is
the windows, hundreds of them, set in rounded bays that appear to grow right out of the
wall, giving the building a fluidity and openness that contrasts with, yet also
complements, its mass, power, and solidity. These vertically set bays of glass are the
skyscraper’s equivalent of the horizontal bays of glass in Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie
houses, and they open the offices on both sides of the narrow building to light and air and
provide splendid urban views. This is an architecture of humanism, a building designed
to serve the people who use it; and Root made it even more attractive and livable by
carrying the sunlight that pours into the offices out into the long central corridors by
means of feather-chipped glass hallway partitions trimmed with red oak.

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When William Donnell began restoring the building in 1979 there was no way of
appreciating this magical handling of light by the architect. The original glass partitions
had been either torn down or covered over with wallboard, making the hallways dark and
severe looking. Shortly after he purchased the building, Donnell put his own crew of
craftsmen to work on a modest restoration experiment on the 11th floor, dividing the large
office spaces into small suites, the kind that Root designed for the building, and
constructed corridor partitions modeled on the originals. “I didn’t have high hopes for
this project,” Donnell now admits, “but when it was finished it looked terrific, with the
soft light streaming through the chipped-glass partitions; and the prospective clients were
so impressed with the improvements that we rented all the spaces before we completed
the work.” This persuaded Donnell to restore the entire building, working piecemeal as
vacant offices became available. The Monadnock is currently 96 percent leased, and
Donnell became so engrossed in the restoration that he traveled to Italy twice to buy
marble for the interior finish from the same quarry that was Root’s supplier. He wants
“to do better by the Monadnock,” he says, “than anyone else has done by a landmark
structure.”

Donnell’s passion for this project is shared by John Vinci, and two men work together in
the spirit of the original collaboration between Owen Aldis, the building’s first manager,
and John Wellborn Root. When Vinci tracked down a small 100-year-old Chicago
millwork company that could manufacture solid oak doors exactly like the originals, and
discovered that it was about to go out of business, Donnell, with no persuading, bought
the company to ensure his supply. And he had Vinci reconstruct the lobby’s marble
mosaic floors, which had been jackhammered and replaced with terrazzo, and design
perfect replicas of the original glass light fixtures in the hallways. These aluminum light
fixtures are fitted with carbon filament bulbs that give off an amber glow, softly
accentuating the white marble-and-woodwork trim on the walls and ceilings.

John Vinci, who is now one of the country’s top preservation architects, has been
interested in restoring old buildings since his student days at the Illinois Institute of
Technology, but Donnell became a preservationist more recently, and almost entirely by
accident. In the mid-1970’s, he had coveted the Monadnock as an investment
opportunity, letting its owners know that if they wanted to sell he was prepared to enter a
bid. “I guess I am a contrarian,” he says “When everyone agrees an investment is bad,
you should make it; it’s obviously undervalued.” In 1979 most people were convinced
that old offices in the Loop were a risky investment. But his belief was that this historic
building, which was then in terrible shape, with gaudy commercial signs disfiguring the
façade, had terrific possibilities as a rental property, being located so close to the financial
district. Donnell, who studied architecture as a Harvard undergraduate before getting his
M.B.A. there, was also fascinated by the building itself. “It’s one of the few buildings in
the world that have had a great impact on architecture,” he says. “The idea of being
involved with it was like a chance to own the Grand Canyon.”

The year Donnell’s partnership bought the building they commissioned Myron Goldsmith
to prepare a plan for its rehabilitation. Goldsmith’s scheme called for closing the
building, gutting it, and building a modern office and retail space inside the historic shell.

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But when the plan was completed the mortgage market went sour, and Donnell was
unable to raise the $30 million he needed for financing the remodeling. It was at this
point that he decided to experiment with a modest restoration of the 11th floor.

A soft-spoken but tough-minded building manager, Donnell had to force out some of the
old tenants whose businesses didn’t fit the image he had for his building and to persuade
many of his tenants to go along with his exhaustingly exact restoration plans, which in
some cases, like his plans to widen corridors at the expense of office space, seemed to run
counter to strictly business considerations. But he made the restoration attractive to
tenants by having his own staff of architects, carpenters, marble masons, and artisans do
the work at no charge. His most spectacular results are in the main lobby, the
centerpiece of the restoration effort.

Working from the building’s original plans, unearthed at the Art Institute, and from a
faded powder-flash photograph, the only surviving evidence of how Root’s lobby looked
before it was disfigured by a succession of modernizations, Donnell and Vinci
transformed a dark, tunnellike corridor into a light-filled and inviting urban arcade, as
splendid a public space as the central light court that Burnham and Root had designed for
the Rookery. The lobby – a spinal corridor that runs the length of the building- is now
flanked by attractively restored shops and eateries that open on both sides, to the street
and to the lobby, itself, through clear glass windows and doors. “When you walk through
the Monadnock’s lobby,” says Studs Terkel, Chicago’s most famous street-walker,
“you’re in the building, but you’re also in the street, in the city. It’s an example of great
street architecture.” The arcade also gives the building a friendly, welcoming presence.
There is nothing quite like it in all of Chicago, and it can serve as a model for architects
who want to give gracious ground-floor treatment to their office towers.

Donnell’s restoration is not only adding luster to Root’s reputation as a designer of

interior spaces but is also forcing a reconsideration of Peter Brook’s vision as a builder.
The conventional view, almost orthodoxy by now, is that Brooks and a number of other
Chicago real-estate speculators at the turn of the century preferred plain office buildings
merely because they were cheaper to build, and that this cost-consciousness dictated the
austere form and style of the best of the city’s skyscrapers. But all the evidence indicates
that Root, the architect, had a far stronger role than Brooks, the speculator, in the final
design of the Monadnock; and Donnell’s restoration is confirming convincingly that
Brooks was hardly a parsimonious builder. “In our restoration work,” Donnell is quick to
point out, “we are finding that Peter Brooks approved of the use of expensive materials
throughout the building”- exquisitely molded brick for the window bays; solid blocks of
red granite, six feet thick, around the entranceways; hand-carved marble mosaic floor
tiles and white Carrara marble trim in the lobby; and aluminum castings on the stairways,
at a time when aluminum was an exotic and expensive material, the product of the new
phenomenon of electricity. Its use in the Monadnock is its first appearance as a
construction material.

“We have found that everything in the building is quality-oriented, based on practicality
and durability,” Donnell says, “and much of it is elegant.” And Donnell likes to remind

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people that one of the main reasons the façade is plain is because Brooks felt that
protruding decorations would collect dirt and attract pigeons, making the building
difficult to maintain.

Brooks was also willing to pay more to get the architectural look he wanted- a building
with the enduring strength of a mountain, the New Hampshire mountain he named it
after. Had he simply wanted to save money he would have gone with a steel frame,
which was cheaper than wall-bearing construction; but he and his brother Shepherd
questioned steel’s reliability and durability as a building material and wanted the building
to have the look and feel of permanency, a quality sadly lacking in many of the city’s new
commercial towers.

“The Monadnock is true organic architecture,” in the opinion of John Vinci, “where
quality is built from the decorated sheds being thrown up in the Loop by celebrity
architects like Philip Johnson, developer’s boxes with some historic effects added on, in a
polite bow to a Root or a Sullivan, and with miles of characterless hallways and
oversized, pompous lobbies.” William Donnell has saved and enlivened a near-perfect
urban building, whose various parts come together to create a union of beauty and utility,
street-level intimacy and skyscraper monumentality. We would not want to copy it;
Root’s own writings warn against historic duplication. But as architects struggle to give
form to designs appropriate to our age they can take inspiration from John Wellborn
Root’s staggering achievement.