By Joe Frey

It’s perfectly ironic and poetically Warholian that the building which today houses one of the oldest urban arts communities in the country was originally constructed as a factory. (Also ironic, at least as it pertains to the preservation of significant Chicago architecture, is the building’s motto, painted inside its entrances: “All passes—art alone endures.” Pity the poor contractor who gets to knock down those walls.) Designed by Pullman architect and planner Solon S. Beman, and completed in 1885 as a showroom and assembly plant for the South Bend, Indiana-based Studebaker Carriage Company, the Fine Arts Building has now served its function in adaptive reuse almost ten times longer than it served the intended purpose for which it was originally built. What’s more, it’s one of the few landmark buildings in Chicago possessing greater notoriety for its tenants and historic significance than for the architectural merit of the structure itself.

Though hardly inconsequential, architecturally the Fine Arts Building was built in a slightly fussier-than-usual, multicolored Romanesque style, with a rusticated limestone and granite, load-bearing wall on the Michigan Avenue frontage. The most prominent features are two large columns that frame the center bay on the first floor, which are then reprised—twice as tall—on the third and fourth stories, after being interrupted on the second. The first few floors of the building were originally showrooms for carriages—with the manufacturing functions on the floors above—and the large windows provided ample stage for display, despite the use of masonry construction rather than a skeletal frame utilized in later Chicago School skyscrapers.

But by the mid-1890s, the building no longer met Studebaker’s needs, despite the construction of an annex to the north (still existent but altered). Studebaker then commissioned another building—south down Wabash Avenue—also designed by Beman. Now part of Columbia College’s campus, this structure is notable for its almost-modern glass-dominated façade, framed in Gothic iron filigree.

Studebaker maintained ownership of its Michigan Avenue building well into the 20th century, but its use changed dramatically after the company vacated it. Music publisher and real estate developer (and also the son of a former mayor, this being Chicago after all) Charles C. Curtiss then became the driving force who transformed the factory and showroom into a prototypical arts center. Originally eight stories tall and topped by arabesques domes over the corner bays and peaked roofs over the bays between, when the building was remodeled in 1898 from yet another Beman design, the original top floor was replaced and three more added. The domes and peaked roofs were also removed, displaced by an ornate cornice that topped the entire Michigan Avenue elevation. Inside, manufacturing, sales and display spaces were adapted for use as artist’s and musician’s studios, galleries, offices, shops and theaters.

A center for the arts was born, though the rechristened Fine Arts Building was not the first building in the neighborhood with such a high-minded purpose. The Art Institute of Chicago, designed in a similar though more subdued Romanesque style by Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root, opened in 1885 just to the north at the corner of Van Buren Street on a site now occupied by the Chicago Club. Yet in its early 20th Century heyday, the Fine Arts Building was a center of artistic and civic activity for the city, the occupants of which had national and international impact on the arts and society as a whole. The Fine Arts Building housed music schools, art and literary clubs, even women’s suffrage organizations, in addition to the studios of such prominent Chicago artists as sculptor Lorado Taft, portraitist Richard Clarkson and magazine illustrators Frank X. Leyendecker and J.C. Leyendecker, whose works were seen on covers of The Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Collier's.

Blending art and architecture, the still-existent tenth floor murals were executed by Frederic Clay Bartlett, whose work also adorns Fourth Presbyterian Church on North Michigan Avenue. Frank Lloyd Wright’s, who once had an office on that same tenth floor, designed a first-floor bookshop and a gallery in the annex (both demolished). Eclecticist Andrew Rebori, architect of the Fisher Apartments in the Gold Coast and the Madonna della Strada Chapel on Loyola’s Lake Shore campus, designed the Studebaker Theater in 1917, in addition to another annex on Wabash Avenue, built to house the mother building’s heating plant. The fourth-floor Fine Art Building Gallery opens onto the Venetian Courtyard, which occupies the central light- and airshaft and into which interior facing offices face.

Literature also found a home in the Fine Arts Building. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and e.e. cummings were first published in Poetry magazine, the offices for which founder and editor Harriet Monroe maintained in the building. The office for Dial magazine were also housed there and those of The Little Review, which published Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters.

And while Chicago will never be mistaken for the Emerald City, L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, also kept an office at the Fine Arts Building.