MONADNOCK BUILDING ARCHITECTURE: BURNHAM, ROOT, AND THE LAST GREAT WALL OF BRICK

The Monadnock Building at 53 West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago's South Loop is one of the most important buildings in the history of architecture — and one of the most quietly astonishing things you can stand in front of in any city. A 16-storey cliff of purple-brown brick, entirely devoid of ornament, it rises from the sidewalk with the self-possessed gravity of something ancient: an Egyptian pylon, a cliff face, a mass of earth that happens to have windows. Louis Sullivan called it "an amazing cliff of brickwork, rising sheer and stark, with a subtlety of line and surface, a direct singleness of purpose, that gave one the thrill of romance." Many believe it was the building he had in mind when he wrote, in 1892, that "a building, quite devoid of ornament, may convey a noble and dignified sentiment by virtue of mass and proportion."

The Monadnock is not one building but two, by two different architectural firms, built two years apart, and it tells two stories simultaneously. The north half, completed in 1891, was designed by Burnham & Root — specifically by John Wellborn Root, who died at 41 while it was under construction, making it his last and most radical work. It is the tallest load-bearing masonry structure ever built: its walls are six feet thick at the base, tapering to 18 inches at the top. There is no steel frame holding it up. The brick is the building.

The south half, completed in 1893, was designed by Holabird & Roche — and is structurally its opposite. Behind a brick-and-terracotta façade that reads as a continuation of the north half, there is a steel skeleton carrying all the load. The curtain wall is purely decorative. What looks like one building is in fact an architectural time capsule: the precise moment when one technology replaced another, frozen in masonry and steel on a single city block.

When the south half was completed in 1893, the Monadnock was the largest office building in the world. It is a Chicago Architectural Landmark, on the National Register of Historic Places, and part of the National Historic Landmark Printing House Row District. Meticulously restored between 1979 and 1992, it remains fully occupied as a working office building today, its ground-floor shops housing — by deliberate policy — only businesses that could have existed in the 1890s.

  • Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse based in West Sussex, England.
  • Last updated: 24-Mar-2026.

Photograph by David K. Staub, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

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What is the Monadnock Building?

The Monadnock was commissioned by Peter and Shepherd Brooks, Boston real estate developers who had amassed their fortune in the shipping insurance business and had been investing in Chicago since 1863. The Brooks brothers had already commissioned Burnham & Root to build for them twice before — the Montauk Building (1882, demolished 1902) and the Rookery (1886), two of the defining buildings of the early Chicago School. For the Monadnock, they chose a site at the southern edge of the Loop that the Chicago building community considered a folly: nothing but "cheap one-story shacks, mere hovels" on the south side of the street, according to one architect of the day, who concluded that the developer's agent "was insane to build way out there on the ragged edge of the city."

The Brooks brothers' property manager in Chicago was Owen Aldis, one of the men Louis Sullivan credited with being "responsible for the modern office building." It was Aldis who managed the design process, and it was Aldis who delivered the client's brief to Root: no ornament. Peter Brooks wrote to Aldis in 1884 that his notion was "to have no projecting surfaces or indentations, but to have everything flush." The building should convey "the effect of solidity and strength, or a design that will produce that effect, rather than ornament for a notable appearance." Projections, Brooks argued, "mean dirt, nor do they add strength to the building."

Root, who was celebrated for his ornamental designs — the Rookery is one of the most richly decorated commercial buildings of the 19th century — initially resisted. Early sketches show Egyptian Revival ornament and lotus-blossom motifs. Aldis rejected them as too elaborate. Root tried again. Aldis rejected that too. Slowly, reluctantly, and then with increasing conviction, Root embraced the discipline of pure form. He found his inspiration in the Egyptian pylon — a form that conveyed mass and permanence without a single applied ornament. The Monadnock's gentle inward batter at the base and outward flare at the parapet are, as historian Donald Hoffman observed, very close to the bell-shaped column the ancient Egyptians had derived from the papyrus plant. Root called the building, with fond exasperation, his "Jumbo."

Facts panel

Sixteen-storey office building at 53 West Jackson Boulevard, South Loop, Chicago, Illinois. Built in two phases: north half 1889–91; south half 1892–93.

  • North half architects: Burnham & Root (Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root)
  • South half architects: Holabird & Roche (William Holabird and Martin Roche)
  • Builder: George A. Fuller Company (both phases)
  • Client: Peter and Shepherd Brooks; property managed by Owen F. Aldis
  • North half completed: 1891
  • South half completed: 1893
  • Address: 53 West Jackson Boulevard, South Loop, Chicago, IL 60604
  • Height: 215 feet (66 metres)
  • Floors: 16
  • Original section names: Monadnock and Kearsarge (north); Katahdin and Wachusett (south) — all named after New England mountains
  • North half structure: Load-bearing masonry; brick walls 6 feet thick at base, 18 inches at top; the tallest load-bearing masonry building ever constructed
  • South half structure: Steel skeleton frame; brick-and-terracotta curtain wall
  • Key architectural features: Plain unornamented north façade; projecting oriel windows; slight inward batter at base flaring to parapet; first portal system of wind bracing in the United States; first structural use of aluminium in a building (ornamental staircases)
  • Total cost: $2.5 million (1893)
  • Combined original occupancy: 1,200 rooms; over 6,000 occupants
  • Designations: Chicago Architectural Landmark (one of the first, 1958); National Register of Historic Places (1970); National Historic Landmark — Printing House Row District (1976)
  • Restoration: 1979–92 by William S. Donnell; National Trust for Historic Preservation Award (1987)
  • Current use: Fully occupied office building; approximately 300 suites; ground-floor retail and dining
  • Current status (March 2026): Active; fully operational; ground-floor shops include Optimo Hats, Intelligentsia Coffee, and other businesses in the tradition of 19th-century occupants

Architect: Burnham & Root, and Holabird & Roche

Daniel H. Burnham (1846–1912) and John Wellborn Root (1850–1891) met as young draftsmen in the Chicago firm of Carter, Drake, and Wight in 1872 and established Burnham & Root the following year. Their partnership was complementary in the most precise sense: Burnham ran the business, managed clients, and organised the office; Root designed. Root had formal architectural training — he had studied in England before the Civil War and worked in New York after it — and combined extraordinary facility as a draughtsman with a restless, inventive architectural intelligence that made him the most creative designer of the early Chicago School. His death from pneumonia in January 1891, aged 41, while the north half of the Monadnock was just coming out of the ground, was one of the great losses in American architectural history.

For Burnham's full career — the World's Columbian Exposition, the Plan of Chicago, the Reliance Building, and the Flatiron — see our Daniel Burnham architect guide.

Holabird & Roche — William Holabird (1854–1923) and Martin Roche (1853–1927) — had trained together in the office of William LeBaron Jenney, the engineer-architect who had introduced the iron-framed construction technique that would become the steel-frame skyscraper. They formed their own firm in 1881, and by 1893 were the acknowledged leaders of the Chicago School in commercial practice. Their south half of the Monadnock demonstrates precisely what steel-frame construction made possible: thinner walls, more glass, lower cost, and more rentable space — 15 percent cheaper, 15 percent lighter, and 15 percent more commercially efficient than the north half that preceded it.

Architectural character: the north half

The north half of the Monadnock is the building that matters in architectural history, and it repays very close looking.

The façade is purple-brown brick — a warm, reddish-dark tone Root chose for its depth and its ability to read as a unified mass from a distance. There is no applied ornament of any kind. The surface is unbroken except by the projecting oriel windows — continuous vertical bays that rise the full height of the building, catching and modulating light as they go — and by the subtle geometry of the wall itself: the slight inward batter at the base, the outward flare at the parapet, the smooth transition between them. These curves are so gentle that most people do not consciously register them; they simply feel the building as more alive, more organic, than its apparent simplicity would suggest.

The walls at the base are six feet thick — a fact that becomes physically present when you step through one of the Dearborn Street entrances, passing through a depth of masonry that feels more like a gatehouse than a doorway. The massive granite surrounds of the entrances, cleared to their original appearance in the restoration, frame this threshold with appropriate gravity. Inside, the long corridor — skylit from above, lined with mosaic floors and marble wainscoting — runs the length of the building, with the aluminium staircases (the first structural use of the metal in any building) rising at intervals.

The oriel windows were a concession by Peter Brooks to his property manager Aldis, who argued correctly that they would increase rentable space. Brooks had wanted everything flush. Root used them brilliantly: by making them continuous and unadorned, he turned them from a commercial necessity into the building's primary formal device — the element that gives the vast brick wall its vertical emphasis and its rhythmic life.

Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, no known restrictions on publication via the Library of Congres..

Architectural character: the south half

The south half, by Holabird & Roche, is both a continuation and a refutation of the north. The same height, the same brick colour, the same floor levels, the same projecting bay windows — but the walls are thin, hung on a steel frame, and articulated with a more conventional base-shaft-cap division, a string course over the second storey, and a large ornamental copper cornice at the roofline. There is ornament: not lavishly, but enough to signal a different architectural sensibility and, more importantly, a different structural system.

The contrast between the two halves is the building's most instructive lesson. Walk south along Dearborn Street and watch the north half give way to the south: the shift from compressed solidity to articulated frame, from pure mass to organised layers, from the end of one technology to the beginning of the next. The Monadnock is a hinge in history, and you can see the hinge.

The brief that changed architecture

The story of Peter Brooks's client brief — no ornament, no projections, everything flush — is one of the most consequential instructions ever given to an architect, though nobody involved could have known it at the time. Root, forced to abandon the decorative vocabulary that had defined his earlier work, was compelled to make a building from mass alone. What he produced anticipated, by two or three decades, the concerns that would drive European modernism after the First World War.

The connection was not lost on those who came after. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, arriving in Chicago in the 1930s, was captivated by the Monadnock and made numerous sketches of it. Early 20th-century European architects found in it confirmation of ideas they thought they were inventing. It was, in the Chicago Architecture Center's apt summary, "an architectural time capsule that bridges building styles" — one that "harkens back to the classicists while previewing the modernists."

Sullivan's 1892 essay "Ornament in Architecture" — which argued that "a building, quite devoid of ornament, may convey a noble and dignified sentiment by virtue of mass and proportion" — is widely believed to have been written with the recently completed Monadnock specifically in mind.

Photograph by John Chuckman, in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

A building that refused to die

The Monadnock's subsequent history is one of repeated near-misses. The building proved immediately successful as a commercial address — it rented quickly, filled Chicago's emerging south Loop business district, and generated the returns that convinced Shepherd Brooks to commission the south half. But by the mid-20th century it was fraying badly. A 1938 modernisation by Skidmore & Owings (an early commission for the firm that would later define mid-century corporate architecture) covered mosaic floors with rubber tile, enclosed the ornamental staircases, and replaced marble and oak with modern finishes. Individual offices were drably updated through the following decades. By 1979, when William S. Donnell purchased the building for approximately $2 million, the Dearborn Street entrances had been closed, the brick had been painted and was peeling, and half the sixteen elevators were manually operated.

Donnell, who had studied architecture at Harvard, undertook one of the most comprehensive skyscraper restorations ever attempted — thirteen years of meticulous work at an average cost of $1 million per floor. The Dearborn Street entrances were reopened. The granite surrounds were cleared of paint. Custom-moulded bricks were sourced to replace damaged curved corners. The marble wainscoting and oak doors were restored. The mosaic floors reappeared. The staircases were unclosed. Marble for the lobby's hand-carved trim came from the same Italian quarry Root had used in 1891.

The restoration won the National Trust for Historic Preservation Award in 1987 — the only private initiative recognised that year. Donnell's stated goal was that the Monadnock would "not only look as it originally did, it would also live as it used to" — and to that end he sought ground-floor tenants whose trades could have existed in the 1890s. The policy has been maintained: today the building's ground-floor shops include a custom hatter (Optimo Hats), a cobbler, a barber, a florist, a tobacconist, a tailor, and Intelligentsia Coffee alongside a sandwich shop. Walking through the retail corridor is, as anyone who has done it will tell you, genuinely like stepping through time.

Photograph by Jessica Sheridan, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The model-maker's lens

We modelled the northern facade of the Monadnock — the Burnham & Root section, the load-bearing cliff of brick — because it is the architectural statement that matters: the form Root arrived at through reluctance, discipline, and eventually conviction.

  • Focus — the mass of the north façade as a unified whole: the projecting oriel windows rising the full height, the subtle inward batter at the base and outward flare at the parapet
  • Detail — the geometry lives in the transitions: base to shaft, shaft to parapet; the oriel windows are the only projecting element and they carry the entire vertical emphasis of the building
  • How it reads at small scale — exceptionally well, because the architecture is entirely about proportion, mass, and the relationship of solid to void; there is no ornament to lose at reduced scale, and the building's essential character — that quality of compressed gravity — survives the translation completely
  • How to display — the model rewards a position where the slight curvature of the base and parapet can be read; a raking light from one side will reveal the projection of the oriel windows and the depth of the wall in a way that recalls the way afternoon light strikes the real building on Jackson Boulevard

Root was given an impossible brief — a pile of bricks sixteen storeys high, with no ornament — and produced something so far ahead of its time that a generation of European modernists thought they had invented it themselves. That quality of compressed, self-contained intelligence is what the model tries to hold.

Frequently asked questions about the Monadnock Building

Who designed the Monadnock Building?

The north half was designed by Burnham & Root — specifically John Wellborn Root, who died in January 1891 while it was under construction. The south half was designed by Holabird & Roche and completed in 1893.

Where is the Monadnock Building?

53 West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago's South Loop, between Dearborn Street and Federal Street, extending south to Van Buren Street.

Why are the two halves different?

The north half (1891) is load-bearing masonry — the brick walls carry the building's weight. The south half (1893) has a steel skeleton frame with a curtain wall of brick and terracotta. They look similar but are structurally opposites, representing the precise transition between two eras of building technology.

How thick are the walls?

The north half's walls are six feet thick at the base, tapering to 18 inches at the top — the maximum practical height for load-bearing masonry construction.

Why is there no ornament on the north half?

Because the client, Peter Brooks, specifically instructed the architects to produce "the effect of solidity and strength" rather than ornament for a notable appearance. Root was initially frustrated by this constraint but eventually found his inspiration in the form of an Egyptian pylon.

What are the shops in the building?

The Monadnock intentionally houses only ground-floor businesses that could have existed in the 1890s, including a custom hatter (Optimo Hats), a cobbler, a barber, a florist, a tailor, Intelligentsia Coffee, and a sandwich shop. The retail corridor is open to the public during business hours.

What are its landmark designations?

It was one of the first buildings named a Chicago Architectural Landmark (1958), added to the National Register of Historic Places (1970), and recognised as part of the National Historic Landmark Printing House Row District (1976).

What other buildings did Burnham design?

The Chisel & Mouse collection includes three Burnham buildings: the Monadnock (1891), the Reliance Building (1895), and the Flatiron Building (1902). See our Daniel Burnham architect guide for the full story.

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