By Jordan Marsh
The peculiarly Chicago story of the Reliance Building begins in the aftermath of the great fire of 1871. Bounded by water on three sides and railyards on the fourth, downtown Chicago rebuilt upward instead of outward. “Tall” buildings of four and five stories were constructed, to the amazement of locals and visitors alike. Twenty years later, most of those awe-inspiring buildings were demolished. Chicago’s unrelenting growth and development (the city’s population more than doubled in the 1880s) had rendered them obsolete.
The designing architect for the Reliance was the sensitive, enormously talented John Root, who’d already designed the landmark Rookery, completed in 1888. If Burnham and Root had entered the movie business, Burnham would have been the executive producer, lining up the talent and financing. Root would have directed the movies.
The terra-cotta covered little more than the building’s frame. Virtually everything else was glass. Clusters of thin columns at the corners of the Reliance contributed to its sense of refinement and delicacy. Atwood placed Gothic-inspired detailing on the terra-cotta. Looking like four-leaf clovers, these quatrefoils–four arcs surrounding a rosette center–were derived from French cathedrals, the closest thing to a glass tower that Atwood could find. The cornice, a slender flat slab, sat atop the Reliance like a graduation cap.
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The design and construction of the Reliance Building was sandwiched between the deaths of two of this country’s greatest architects. Root had died after designing the base. After the Reliance was completed, Charles Atwood stopped coming to work regularly. In December of 1895 Burnham fired him. Nine days later he was dead at the age of 46. “Only then,” the Tribune’s late architecture critic, Paul Gapp, would write, “did a horrified Burnham discover that Atwood had long been a mentally savaged drug addict.” Thomas Hines wrote that with Root’s death, Burnham “lost his aesthetic gyroscope.” He retreated from the “Chicago idiom that was basically Root’s and Sullivan’s” to the neoclassicism Sullivan abhorred.
Unlike many on the outside, Kling never believed the building would be demolished. “It’s too important,” he says. “It was a first in too many cases, so I didn’t believe that at all. I didn’t worry about that at all.” He acknowledges that the situation got a little scary in the early 1990s. “Well there was a point where they were, kind of — ” he pauses, choosing his words carefully — “contemplating what to do with it. But I still had faith in this thing, I just did. I never wavered.” Kling pauses again. “I had too much invested in it,” he finally says with a laugh. “I could picture this thing when it was clean. And then when the [new] cornice came up I said, “Oh, it’s going to be beautiful,’ and it sure is.”
Carl Condit, in his famous 1964 text, The Chicago School of Architecture, observed, “One short step further in the design of the Reliance and [Atwood] would have produced the transparent tower that Mies van der Rohe imagined in his Berlin project of 1919.”
