The Fireproof Building: Technology and Public Safety in the Nineteenth-Century American City

The Fireproof Building: Technology and Public Safety in the Nineteenth-Century American City. By Sara E. Wermiel. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. x, 301 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-6311-2.)

Burnham and Root's Monadnock Building (1889) in Chicago is one of the great early skyscrapers. The architectural historian Montgomery Schuyler celebrated it at the time as "the thing itself." An unornamented, sixteenstory office tower of granite, dark brick, and terra cotta, the Monadnock is a revealing choice for an architectural critic partial to the new "elevator" buildings going up in New York and Chicago. Sara E. Wermiel's history of fireproof construction sheds some light on the significance of a canonical work of American architecture without her ever mentioning it.

Wermiel's scrupulous scholarship of the history of fireproofing in America never ventures out into the collateral history of architecture, but the impressive evidence she compiles provides a...