By Joe Frey

The Auditorium Building was proposed by Ferdinand Peck to provide a permanent home for the opera and symphony in Chicago at a time when the city was still considered a cow-town by the Eastern establishment. To dissuade them of this idea, the city's movers and shakers — Peck among them — wanted the best theater in the country. And in the Auditorium Building, that's pretty much what Chicago got. The building also put both the city, and the building’s architects, on the cultural map.

To design it, Peck and his backers commissioned Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan: the former a proven acoustical engineer, the latter an avid opera fan and emerging talent in architectural design and theory. Ground was broken early in 1887, and the theater opened, to much fanfare, late in 1889. It was hailed as the greatest music hall in the world and is still considered one of the best. Yet the first impression of the Auditorium Building is that it looks big, which it is, for a couple of reasons.

First, it's a multi-use building. One of the first in the country. The backers knew that a theater such as the one they wanted couldn't support itself financially — just like today — so they built a theater wrapped inside an office building and a hotel. And, in fact, you can see along the Congress Parkway elevation how the building is divided into three parts. To the east is the office section, its entrance marked by the arches on Wabash. (Note: the Auditorium Building predates construction of the "L.") In the center, below the asymmetrically-placed tower, is the theater entrance, again through arches. And to the east is the hotel, its entrance arch on Michigan Avenue. Another reason the building seems so big is the massive, rusticated stone of the first three stories. Built with load-bearing walls, it's as if Sullivan wanted to make sure that fact was obvious. To support such a heavy building in Chicago's soggy soil, and to ensure that the building’s unevenly distributed weight settled at the same rate, Adler devised a continuous floating raft foundation (crisscrossed metal rails encased in concrete) and a system to preload the shorter, and therefore lighter, parts of the building. In fact, the Auditorium did settle evenly, all of 18 inches.

Despite its bulk, we still see the vertical parts of the Auditorium Building, unified in base, shaft and capital. To soften the transition from the base to the shaft, the dark rusticated granite of the first two stories gives way on the third story to rusticated limestone, which is then cut smooth above that. There's very little applied ornamentation, and that can be attributed to the influence of H. H. Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Building, since torn down. As in H. H. Richardson’s design, the ornament of the Auditorium is limited mostly to repetition of the arches and the rhythm of the varied fenestration, which Warren Clinton of Holabird and Roche echoed when he designed the 1892 Congress Hotel across the street.

The austerity of the exterior, however, is contrasted by the light and exuberant ornamentation in the hotel lobby. Evident here is the hand of Frank Lloyd Wright, the draftsman who executed Sullivan's designs for the interior ornament. Like the exterior, the arch is the dominant element. The lobby’s asymmetry contrasts with that of Beaux-Arts design, which would dominate the World's Columbian Exposition less than a decade later. The colonnades of the tower and the top story of the bulk of the building are echoed in the hotel lobby, in short colonnades flanking the grand stairway. The theater itself, a series of richly ornamented concentric arches, is a space best experienced rather than explained.