The Auditorium Building in Chicago, Illinois is one of the best-known designs of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. It originally housed a large opera house, a hotel, and numerous offices. Today it is the home of Roosevelt University .

The building is located at 430 S. Michigan Ave.

Origin and purpose

The Auditorium Building was the project of Ferdinand Peck, a Chicago businessman. Peck, a civic-minded man and a devotee of opera, wanted Chicago to have an opera house that would rival such institutions as the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. He was also concerned that this high culture be accessible to the working classes of Chicago.

Design

Adler and Sullivan designed a tall structure with load-bearing outer walls, and based the exterior appearance partly on the design of the Marshall Field Building , another Chicago landmark. The Auditorium is a heavy, impressive structure externally, and was more strking in its day when buildings of its scale were less common. When completed, it was the tallest building in the city.

One of the most innovative features of the building was its massive raft foundation, designed by Adler in conjunction with engineer Paul Mueller. The soil beneath the Auditorium consists of soft blue clay to a depth of over 100 feet, which made conventional foundations impossible. Adler and Mueller designed a floating mat of crisscrossed railroad ties, topped with a double layer of steel rails embedded in concrete, the whole assemblage coated with pitch.

The resulting raft allowed the weight of the massive outer walls to be distributed over a large area. However, the weight of the masonry outer walls in relation to the relatively lightweight interior deformed the raft over the course of a century, and today portions of the building have settled as much as 29 inches. This deflection is clearly visible in the theater lobby, where the mosaic floor takes on a distict slope as it nears the outer walls .

In the center of the building was a 4,300 seat auditorium, originally intended primarily for production of grand opera. In keeping with Peck's democratic ideals, the auditorium was designed so that all seats would have good vision and acoustics. The original plans had no box seats at all, and when these were added to the plans they did not get the prime locations.

Housed in the building around this central space were 136 offices and a 400-room hotel, whose purpose was to generate much of the revenue to support the opera. While the Auditorium Building was not intended as a commercial building, Peck wanted it to be self-sufficient. Revenue from the offices and hotel was meant to allow ticket prices to remain reasonable. In reality, both hotel and office block became unprofitable within a few years.

History

The theater opened in 1889, and remained in operation until 1929 when the opera moved to a new building, the Civic Opera House , in 1929. The theater closed for some time, but was reopened as a center for the US military in World War II.

In 1946 the Auditorium Building was purchased by Roosevelt University and became the University's downtown campus. It was declared a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1975. The theater is still in use today.

External links

• http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/chisull/chisull.html - images and a little commentary.
• http://www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/A/Auditorium.html - landmark page from the Chicago city government website.
• http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Auditorium_Building.html - basic info, an image, and a bibligraphy.
• http://www.roosevelt.edu/campuses/downtown.htm - Roosevelt University page about the Auditorium Building.

Reference

"Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism" Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57:2, June 1998.