1893 - Architecture, Real Estate

Architecture, Real Estate

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright loses his job as draftsman for the Chicago firm Adler and Sullivan, whose partner Louis H. Sullivan, now 36, has designed the Columbian Exposition's Transportation Building (the economic recession this year brings office-building construction almost to a stop, Adler and Sullivan will be dissolved in 1895, and Dankmar Adler will become a salesman for an elevator company). Now 26, Wright has been designing private houses in violation of his contract with the firm, notably a house in suburban River Forest for one William Winslow, whose firm supplies ornamental iron and bronze work for architects all over America. Inspired by the Turkish pavilion at the fair, the Winslow house has a hip roof that extends beyond its walls, and Wright's neighbors in suburban Oak Park have asked him to design basement-less, attic-less "prairie" houses for them with similar gently sloping roofs, single chimneys (for real fireplaces), low ceilings (to create a feeling of intimacy and comfort); waxed oak floors, oak window frames and furniture, casement windows, and broad terraces.

Chicago adopts an ordinance limiting the heights of buildings to 130 feet (about 11 stories). Real estate interests have persuaded the city's aldermen to support the measure, it will remain in effect for decades, and New York will now take the lead in skyscraper construction.

Architect Daniel H. Burnham, now 46, is the organizing force behind the Columbian Exposition, having designed classical buildings sheathed in plaster of paris to create a dazzling "white city."

The five-story Bradbury Building is completed at Los Angeles to designs by draftsman George Wyman, 32, for mining millionaire-turned-developer Lewis Bradbury, who has died a few months earlier. Built at a cost of about $500,000, the structure at 304 South Broadway, near Third Street (and close to Bradbury's mansion on Bunker Hill) has a central court of glazed brick surmounted by a huge skylight and will survive into the 21st century as a city landmark, but Wyman has had no architectural or engineering education and his only architectural commission will be his last.

Salt Lake City's Latter Day Saints Temple is completed for sacred rites. Designed in a combination of Romanesque and Gothic styles by architect Truan O. Angell and his assistant William Ward after a sketch by Brigham Young, it has been built on the site ordained for its construction by Young in 1847, using granite from a nearby canyon with walls eight feet thick that taper to six feet at the top, and its six-spire configuration gives it a distinctive look that complements the Tabernacle opened in 1867. It is open only to church members deemed worthy.

"The New York Tenement House Evil and Its Cure" by Brooklyn-born architect Ernest Flagg, 36, is published in Scribner's magazine and says that the city's tenement apartments are dark and airless because their buildings were put up on such small lots (see 1879). Strung end to end like railroad cars, the old six-story tenements have only tiny air shafts to provide light and air between their 90-foot ends, they crowd 10 families into 25- by 100-foot lots, and their minimal communal plumbing is indoors only because outhouses would consume land used for building. Flagg urges that lots be combined in future to allow for buildings at least 100 feet square (see 1850; tenement law, 1901).

London's Piccadilly Circus is graced with a new fountain erected as a memorial to the late Lord Shaftesbury, whose puritanical attitudes are belied by the fountain's sculptured Eros, made of aluminum.

New York's Waldorf Hotel opens March 14 on Fifth Avenue at 33rd Street, where the residence of William B. Astor has been torn down to make room for the 13-story hotel designed by architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh with 530 rooms and 350 private baths (see Astor House, 1836; Waldorf-Astoria, 1897).

Chicago's Congress Hotel opens on Michigan Avenue. It is an annex to the Auditorium Hotel built in connection with the Auditorium Theater Building completed by Louis H. Sullivan in 1890.

Quebec City's Château Frontenac Hotel opens December 18 after 19 months of construction. Modeled on a Loire Valley château by New York architect Bruce Price and built by a group of Canadians headed by Canadian Pacific Railway president William Van Horne, the 170-bedroom horseshoe-shaped hotel has an exterior of Glenboig bricks imported from Scotland. A tower will be added in 1924.