Discover how the cornice of Chicago's Marquette Building was restored
Learn about restoring the crowning glory of Holabird & Roche's Marquette Building (1895), a long-neglected exemplar of Chicago School architecture.
© Chicago Architecture Foundation (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
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© Chicago Architecture Foundation (A Britannica Publishing Partner)How postwar demolition of Chicago's architectural legacy galvanized the historical preservation movement that saved the Marquette Building (Holabird & Roche, 1895).
Transcript
MARK KUBERSKI: What a lot of people don't realize, and particularly, even some people here in Chicago, is that it is an outdoor museum. And the artwork is not just the Calder pieces and the Picasso pieces, it's its high rises.
And if you walk the city streets of Chicago and you look up and you see a plain, brick wall or parapet wall at the top of the building, chances are there was a beautiful cornice that once sat upon it. And this was the top of the building. And to take off the cornice from the top of the building takes away from the whole architectural concept that the original designer had.
It's assumed that most of these cornices, which we believe were removed in the early '50s, were removed because it was more economical to take them down than to fix them or restore them.
As part of the Marquette Restoration Project, we were tasked with installing a GFRC replica of the original cornice. The cornice was about 400 feet long from start to beginning. Each piece was practically 10 feet long, 7 or 8 feet high, 6 feet deep, and weighed over 3,000 pounds. It was a tremendous challenge to install these units around the building and start at one point and finish at the other end at a previously established point without having big gaps, holes, coming up short, et cetera.
We were lifting them above the public way during rush hour, during lunch hour, during the normal business hours. It was nerve-wracking for me. In other words, we were nearly completed before I could actually have faith that all was well and all was going to be OK.
It's our civic duty, I think, to maintain these pieces and restore these pieces. And to have installed something that was taken down 50 years ago in such a fashion that when you look up, you never knew that it was missing, gives me great pride and tremendous satisfaction to be a part of that.
And if you walk the city streets of Chicago and you look up and you see a plain, brick wall or parapet wall at the top of the building, chances are there was a beautiful cornice that once sat upon it. And this was the top of the building. And to take off the cornice from the top of the building takes away from the whole architectural concept that the original designer had.
It's assumed that most of these cornices, which we believe were removed in the early '50s, were removed because it was more economical to take them down than to fix them or restore them.
As part of the Marquette Restoration Project, we were tasked with installing a GFRC replica of the original cornice. The cornice was about 400 feet long from start to beginning. Each piece was practically 10 feet long, 7 or 8 feet high, 6 feet deep, and weighed over 3,000 pounds. It was a tremendous challenge to install these units around the building and start at one point and finish at the other end at a previously established point without having big gaps, holes, coming up short, et cetera.
We were lifting them above the public way during rush hour, during lunch hour, during the normal business hours. It was nerve-wracking for me. In other words, we were nearly completed before I could actually have faith that all was well and all was going to be OK.
It's our civic duty, I think, to maintain these pieces and restore these pieces. And to have installed something that was taken down 50 years ago in such a fashion that when you look up, you never knew that it was missing, gives me great pride and tremendous satisfaction to be a part of that.