Marquette Building

“Surfaced in seal brown brick and terra cotta, the Marquette follows Louis Sullivan's base-shaft-capital organization. At the base, the first two stories are enlivened by terra cotta ornament sympathetic to the Marquette-Indian decorative device found inside.”

“Leading American and European experts readily admit that the Marquette is characteristic of the celebrated Chicago School, a distinctive masterpiece of world architecture. In his monumental book Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion enthusiastically refers to the Marquette as an outstanding example of the Chicago office building of the 1890s.”

“The Marquette was sponsored by Peter Brooks with Owen Aldis acting as his representative. These same gentlemen commissioned several other famous Chicago buildings, including the Montauk, the Rookery and the Monadnock Block.”

“The powerful face of the Marquette, grid-like and glassy, remains contemporary even when judged by today's severe standards. (Barbara Crane, photographer) the architects William Holabird, born in New York state in September of 1854, and Martin Roche, born in Cleveland in August of 1855, began their earliest architectural training in the Chicago office of William LeBaron Jenney.”

“The steel frame is fully proclaimed in the gridlike design." Earlier commissions by Holabird and Roche made considerable use of projecting bay windows. But in the Marquette, the architects dropped the vocabulary of the bay in favor of a flat, deceptively simple articulation of the interior steel frame.”

“Prior to the late 19th century, commercial buildings were of masonry wall-bearing construction. Since the walls themselves carried a great portion of the building's weight, the surface displayed a tremendous amount of brick and little glass area.”