Monadnock Building Architectural Model

This architectural object is inspired by the Monadnock Building at 53 West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago — a 16-storey cliff of unornamented brick that is simultaneously the tallest load-bearing masonry structure ever built and one of the founding works of modern architecture. Designed by Burnham & Root (north half, 1891) and Holabird & Roche (south half, 1893), and commissioned by Boston developers Peter and Shepherd Brooks with an explicit instruction to use no ornament whatsoever, the Monadnock is the building Louis Sullivan called "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."

The building is a Chicago Architectural Landmark, listed 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 today — its ground-floor shops housing, by deliberate policy, only businesses that could have existed in the 1890s.

Read the full Monadnock Building architecture guide

The last great wall of brick, distilled into form

 

Built for cost-conscious Boston developers who demanded no ornament and no projecting surfaces, the Monadnock forced its architect John Wellborn Root into a discipline of pure form. What he produced — reluctantly at first, then with increasing conviction — anticipated the concerns of European modernism by three decades. Mies van der Rohe made sketches of it when he arrived in Chicago. Louis Sullivan wrote about it. Early 20th-century architects across Europe found in it confirmation of ideas they thought they were inventing.

This architectural model focuses on the elements that define the northern facade's identity:

• the mass of purple-brown brick as a unified whole — no ornament, no applied decoration of any kind
• the projecting oriel windows rising the full height of the building, the only element that breaks the surface
• the subtle inward batter at the base and outward flare at the parapet — Root's Egyptian pylon, abstracted into brick

Reduced to object form, these elements allow the architectural logic of the Monadnock — a building that makes everything from mass, proportion, and the relationship of solid to void — to be understood with immediate, physical clarity.

Why the Monadnock works as an architectural model

 

The building translates exceptionally well into object form because its architecture is entirely about:

• proportion and mass rather than surface ornament — there is nothing to lose at reduced scale
• the rhythm of the oriel windows as the sole vertical device, carrying all the building's energy upward
• the compressed gravity of the whole — that quality Sullivan called "a direct singleness of purpose"
• transitions: base to shaft, shaft to parapet, the subtle curvature that gives six million bricks the quality of something organic

At model scale, the Monadnock reads as one of the most resolved architectural compositions of the 19th century. The quality that makes it extraordinary on Jackson Boulevard — the sense of a building that knows exactly what it is — translates entirely into the object.

Rather than functioning as a literal miniature, this object captures the architectural character of the Monadnock Building.

Craft, materials, and finish

 

Each Monadnock object is crafted with an emphasis on the northern facade's unbroken vertical mass and the subtle geometry of the wall. A raking light will reveal the projection of the oriel windows and the slight curvature of base and parapet in much the same way afternoon light strikes the building on Jackson Boulevard.

The result is an object that sits naturally within:

• architectural and design studios
• curated interiors
• bookshelves and workspaces

It appeals to architects, structural engineers, historians of the Chicago School — and anyone who has stood in front of this building and felt the peculiar force of a wall that has nothing to prove.

An object shaped by constraint and conviction

 

The Monadnock was born from an impossible brief. Peter Brooks wanted a sixteen-storey pile of bricks with no ornament, no projections, and everything flush. Root, whose earlier buildings were celebrated for their decorative richness, initially struggled with the constraint. His first sketches were rejected as too elaborate. His second sketches were rejected. Then, somewhere in the process of stripping everything away, Root found his building. He found it in the Egyptian pylon — in the idea that mass and proportion alone could carry the entire architectural weight that ornament usually bears.

What he produced is the building that, more than almost any other, proves that idea correct.

As an object, that conviction becomes tangible: a study in how much architecture can be made from how little.

Product details

 

• Subject: Monadnock Building (north half), 53 West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60604
• North half architects: Burnham & Root — John Wellborn Root (1850–1891) and Daniel H. Burnham (1846–1912)
• South half architects: Holabird & Roche
• Architectural style: Chicago School
• North half completed: 1891
• Designations: Chicago Architectural Landmark; National Register of Historic Places; National Historic Landmark District
• Designed and made by: Chisel & Mouse

Learn more about the Monadnock Building

 

For the full story of the building — Root's impossible brief, the six-foot walls, the two halves and two technologies, the near-demolitions, and the meticulous restoration that brought it back — see our in-depth architecture guide:

Monadnock Building Architecture: Burnham, Root, and the Last Great Wall of Brick