For all the attention that glass and steel garners, it’s brick that captures the soul of Chicago’s architecture. Since the conflagration of 1871, brick has been the workaday material of choice throughout the city’s neighborhoods. Worker’s cottages, bungalows, three- and six-flats, and courtyard apartments have been largely constructed of brick. Even Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — our high god of modern glass and steel — clad his first high-rise in 1949, the Promontory Apartments in Hyde Park, in brick. 

Brick is one of the most fundamental materials in architecture. Each piece is a little bit of the earth itself, molded to a shape that fits easily in the hand, baked to achieve permanence and then stacked, one atop another, to form a wall that can enclose, shelter and delight us. Brick’s diminutive size helps ground a building — regardless of scale — in the human hand that was integral to its construction. 

And brick is an essential element in many classic Chicago buildings including The Rookery, the Monadnock and the Marquette Building. Frank Lloyd Wright favored Roman brick — an elongated version that mimics the architect’s horizontal structures in each unit, with Hyde Park’s Robie House as a particularly good example. 

The Rookery at LaSalle and Adams streets in Chicago in 2020. (Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune)

The Monadnock Building, 53 W. Jackson Blvd., on July 11, 2017. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

Holabird & Roche's Marquette Building, 140 S. Dearborn St., on July 11, 2017. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House in Chicago's Hyde Park on March 26, 2019. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune)

The Promontory Apartments, the first skyscraper designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, on Sept. 19, 2019. (José M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)

But brick is no guarantee of design........

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