Marshall Field Wholesale Store

Richardson's best com­mer­cial struc­ture, the Mar­shall Field Who­le­sale Store in Chi­cago, was de­molis­hed in 1930. The buil­ding was con­struc­ted bet­ween 1885 and 1887, seven storeys high, co­ver­ing an ent­ire city block. The store was not the tal­lest ma­sonry struc­ture in Chi­cago. Mo­re­o­ver, the de­sign fea­tured many soon-to-be ana­chro­nis­tic ele­ments com­mon to the de­sign phi­lo­so­phy taught at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris , the pre­mier ar­chi­tec­tu­ral school of the day. In­deed, Ri­chard­son had trai­ned in Paris. The building's im­port­ance was not Richardson's ad­he­rence to con­ven­tion; ra­ther it was his de­par­ture from con­ven­tion. Gran­deur, strength, and dis­tinc­tion, he de­mons­tra­ted, could be achie­ved wi­thout or­na­men­ta­tion. The ver­sa­ti­lity of con­crete, steel and glass had not yet de­ve­l­o­ped. Richardson's work did, howe­ver, ma­xi­mize the uti­lity of ma­sonry while de­mons­tra­ting the re­duc­tion of de­sign to func­tion ra­ther than have it me­rely an­chor an ela­bo­ra­tion of form. This ap­proach was a pre­cur­sor to the tech­ni­ques, which would find fullest ex­pres­sion with the new buil­ding ma­te­ri­als. Mo­re­o­ver, Ri­chard­son de­mons­tra­ted that a struc­ture worked best if it re­flec­ted the en­vi­ron­ment in which it was si­tua­ted. The Chi­cago of the day was raw, vi­go­rous, and force­ful; the Chi­cago of the poet Carl Sand­berg was sym­bo­li­cally ma­ni­fest in Richardson's de­sign of the Mar­shall Field store. Richardson's work was a power­ful in­flu­ence. This is no­ta­bly so in the work of Stan­ford White and C.F. McKim, two of the de­si­gners re­s­pon­si­ble for the Great Hall of Penn Sta­tion, one of the last hur­rahs of the old Beaux Arts style. Also cer­tainly in­flu­en­ced by Ri­chard­son was Louis H. Sul­li­van, a giant of Ame­ri­can ar­chi­tec­ture and a key link in the chain, which brought ar­chi­tec­ture for­ward to set the stage for the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Richardson's the­ma­tic eli­mi­na­tion of or­na­ment in the Mar­shall Field store de­sign in­spi­red Sul­li­van to ex­pand the prin­ciple in his de­sign of the Au­di­to­rium Buil­ding in Chi­cago in 1888, one of the last grand ma­sonry buil­dings in Ame­rica.