The building at this date was to be only six stories plus a basement: Instead, Jenney recalled later in life that Ducat had given him the chance to design his first tall office building: “In 1883, when the Home Insurance Company proposed to erect a building in Chicago, Ducat (who was the leading agent in the West) kindly recommended me to be their architect.” The first report of the competition was in late February 1884, that correlates with the first mention of the Home Insurance Building in Jenney’s personal notes, dated February 19. Had Jenney not been a good friend of Ducat, it is reasonable to assume that Jenney’s career would have faded into obscurity. William Le Baron Jenney, Portland Block, Chicago, 1872. ![]() Brooks’ decision, who owned Jenney’s Portland Block, to hire Burnham & Root, and not Jenney, to design the Montauk Block, Chicago’s first skyscraper. The true measure of the professional stature of Jenney’s office in the early 1880s was best exemplified in Peter C. While these pursuits were respectable, they were hardly in the same league with the contemporary trail-blazing activities of the big building designers Boyington, Beman, and Burnham & Root. Instead, Jenney had become a man of letters: teaching architecture briefly at the University of Michigan in 1876 during the depth of the Depression, handling correspondence for the A.I.A., and lecturing on architectural history at the Art Institute. His practice had fallen from its heyday during the post-fire reconstruction, to the point where he had not designed a major building (the miniscule five-story First Leiter Building notwithstanding) in the intervening ten-year period since the Portland Block and the Lakeside Building of 1873, that, coincidentally, was located diagonally to the east across Adams Street from the site. General in charge of the Illinois National Guard.īy the time of this competition, Jenney had fallen into the role of the elder statesman among Chicago’s architects. After the end of the War, Ducat returned to Chicago becoming the agent for the Home Insurance Company, and also a Maj. He had then gone on to serve as the Inspector General in the West, when he more than likely made the acquaintance of Maj. Colonel before his service had ended in late Oct. He had fought in the Civil War, raising to the rank of Lt. Ducat was an Irish immigrant who at the age of 21 had settled in Chicago during 1851, finding employment in engineering and as insurance agent, developing a keen interest in finding better methods of fire protection for buildings. Managing the competition was the company’s Chicago agent, Arthur C.
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