Auditorium Building

Introduction

Designed by Chicago School giants Adler and Sullivan in 1889, the Auditorium Building is a pinnacle of nineteenth-century American architecture and an emblem of the Chicago School. It employs the then-revolutionary steel-frame structure with Romanesque arched windows, and its interior theater seats over 4,000 with acoustics still praised today. Sullivan's modernist credo that form follows function finds full expression here, where intricate organic ornament complements clean structural logic. The building has served as hotel, theater, and university, now housing Roosevelt University. Wandering its gilded lobby and theater hall, one feels the ambition of Gilded Age Chicago as America's second metropolis.

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