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If Chicago deserves its appellation of "America's most architectural city" then this firm deserves a large amount of the credit, for during the last 100years it has designed a surprisingly large percentage of the city.
I WOULD HAVE LIKED to start with some staggering statistic which would give an indication of the sheer quantity of building clone by the architectural firm of H ola bird & Roche and its successor, Holabird fc Root. It would be interesting to know, for example, how high the pile would be if you stacked all of their buildings one on top of another; or how many bricks there are in all of the hotels they built across the Midwest; or how many feet of steel beam there are in their office buildings in the Loop. Unfortunately none of these figures was readily available. This is not surprising if you consider thai between the early 1880s and 1915, the first two generations of H&R together completed more than 7,500 commissions.
Consider just Chicago's Loop, with its more than sixty existing buildings designed by the firm: a do/en on State Street, an equal number on Michigan Avenue, five along Madison Street, and five along Randolph. Three of the four corners of the intersection of State and Madison contain H&R buildings. The variety of types intitules public buildings like the City Hall-County Building; department store buildings like the Mandel Brothers (now Wieboldt's) and Rothschild's (now Coldblatt's); hotels like the Palmer House and the Stevens Hotel (now the Conrad Hilton); at least twenty high-rise office buildings over 15 stories in height; a dozen or more loft structures; and almost all of the electric and phone company buildings. There are buildings in Gothic style like the University Club and Chicago Temple Building, and in the classical like the Apollo Theater or Sherman Hotel. Others, like the Rand McNally or the Board of Trade buildings, resist any kind of precise period labeling.
Besides the firm's buildings in the Loop, H&R has been responsible for a large number of buildings elsewhere in Chicago, ranging in size from the Graceland Cemetery chapel to the Grant Park (Soldier Field) Stadium. Since the turn of the century the firm has also been active outside the state, producing,...