Bay seasons

Bay windows and bay extensions were a popular feature on buildings in Chicago. I see them often on my wanderings around Chicago so it's worth understanding their types, use and history. (The distinction between oriel windows and bay windows isn't important here.) They are decorative themselves, and they became widely used on in the later half of the 19th century in Chicago. History books tell me that bay extensions can be found as far back as the middle ages. Bay windows were a feature of Oriel Chambers of Liverpool, England, a structure built in the 1860s and still standing. Oriel Chambers is sometime credited with the first use of a metal skeleton and a curtain wall. (Note that the curtain wall is supported by masonry.) The Wikipedia article on Oriel Chambers notes that since the Chicago architect John Welborn Root had been sent to Liverpool by his family during the U.S. Civil War, he must have seen and studied Oriel Chambers, since his work in the U.S (mostly in Chicago) seems to include many features of that building.

On residential buildings, the history is relatively straightforward. They were fashionable for a while, then they dropped out of fashion. Here's an example on a (formerly) residential building from the 1870s on West Washington in Chicago and a multi unit residential building on South Racine.

 

Here's another example from an apartment block on South Racine. .Bays generally are trapezoidal extensions of a room with windows, but sometimes, as in this example from Lexington Avenue, they could be triangular in plan.

I can imagine that in a domestic setting, bay extensions can provide a particularly cozy nook; indeed, almost a room within a room, or at least a focal point for a room. By providing a contrast, the bay extensions made the central place seem bigger and more spacious. Possibly bay windows and bay extensions speaks about the way people of the late 19th and early 20th century lived their lives and used their living spaces, in a way that we do not. 

This moreover points to the inefficiency of bay extensions: if a extension can be added on to a room, why not increase the depth of the whole room. An angled extension would be more expensive than a flat wall, so the cost of a 12 by 20 foot room with a five foot bay extension is going to be more than a 12 by 25 foot room. One of the innovations of Frank Lloyd Wright is to de-emphasize the importance of rooms and increase the importance of how that space is used and how one space flows into another. because of this inefficiency, I guess, bay extensions fell out of favor in the 20th century for least in residential buildings. 

So you rarely see them in contemporary residential designs, except where they are supposed to echo an historic style, and in the occasional living room bay window, so that they are an active rejection of modernism. (An incomplete review of modern house designs suggests that bay windows are unfashionable.) 

But to the degree bay extensions speak of old-fashioned authenticity, they have some niche presence. Perhaps they provide a sense of uniqueness versus an undifferentiated flat wall, or a whiff of individuality versus the regularity of modernism. But the appeal of bays is narrow. A quick informal review of contemporary house designs failed to find any examples of bay windows.

Bay extensions have not disappeared completely in residential low rise buildings: here's a recent rehab in the Noble Square area, and some late 20th century townhouses on Lexington Avenue.

(Interestingly, the Lexington Avenue building above, with triangular bay extensions, is across the street from the earlier mentioned building on Lexington Avenue.  I present Noble Square instance with some hesitation, since I don't like it.  The bay extensions seem prefabricated and pasted on, their asymmetrical placement seems crass and their modernistic design seems anachronistic on the late 19th century building.) 

Bay windows are a feature of an early 1960's building, the Michigan Terrace Condominiums, at 535 N. Michigan Avenue. It was built when that stretch of Michigan Avenue still had some of its residential character, but modernist high-rises were unusual. So it (I'm interpreting here) had to simultaneously demonstrate its modernism as well as its residential character, and it did that by covering its facades with bays.

Bays windows in commercial buildings are another matter altogether. Bays initially were extensively used in commercial building. One of the earliest "skyscrapers" still in existence is Chicago's Manhattan Building, designed by William LeBaron Jenney and constructed in 1891  I understand is the earliest tall building with a freestanding metal skeleton. While the Manhattan Building is now residential, it was built for commercial offices.Jenney had no precedents to follow when he designed the Manhattan Building, so he was free to explore a variety of approaches, and used multiple geometries: both round bay windows and trapezoidal ones. 

 

In commercial buildings bay windows can be thought of as part of a cat-and-mouse game between building developers and code developers. Real estate investors would like to build buildings with maximum rental area. (Certainly bay windows provide for improved light and ventilation, but these goals can be achieved in other ways.) Building codes, on the other hand, require that structures be set back from the street. These two goals are in conflict. Codes allow only certain building features to extend into the set back, and these are tightly regulated, usually result in added taxes and fees, and are encumbered with bureaucracy.The cat-and-mouse part comes starts when the the developer attempts to interpret (i.e. work around) the code to find ways of increasing the amount of space. Then the code is then rewritten to narrow that work around. Then new loopholes are found, new technologies are developed, or pressure is applied to rewrite the code to allow the expansion of space. 

One can see this game playing out in several important historical structures in downtown Chicago. Consider the Monadnock Building, which was built in two sections: the northern section, designed by Burnham and Root and built by 1891, and the southern section, designed by Holabird and Roche and built by 1893. The bays of the northern section, on the right in the photo below, were designed to increase the rentable square footage of the offices. Probably the bays on the southern section had the same goal, but I imagine that by the time of the construction of the southern section, codes now required that bay windows could not extend into the setback below the third floor.

The Fisher Building was constructed also in two sections, the southern section was designed by D. H. Burnham & Co. and built in 1896, and the northern designed by architect Peter J. Weber and engineers E. C. & R. M. Shankland in 1906. The two two parts can be thought of in terms of this cat-and-mouse game: the original building has bay windows as did most commercial buildings of the time, but the later building did not. I suspect that the addition doesn't have bay windows for code reasons. 

 

Note on Jenney's Manhattan Building the window bays are consecutive. In many buildings built afterwards, there is a code-mandated separation between them.This separation has the justification that a fire can spread from one office to another unless the windows are separated, but some see the work of the construction unions.

Thanks to Postmodernism's appropriation of historic styles, Bay Windows have re-appeared on some commercial structures. For example, One Financial Place, designed by Lucien Lagrange when he was at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and finished in 1985.

 

 

The building at 10 S. Lasalle Street has a bay extension that begins at the 19th floor an extends up to the 37th floor. This is a highly distinctive building for downtown Chicago: its lowest four floors incorporate the facade of the historic Otis Building. The Otis Building was a 16 story building designed by the firm of Holabird and Roche and built in 1912. The new building was designed by the Toronto firm of Moriyama and Teshima with the Chicago firm of Holabird and Root (the successor firm of Holabird and Roche) as associate architects, and built between 1984 and 1986.  It is striking for many reasons, including its dark blue color and the bright green stripes running up the corners.

 

There are bay extensions and all sorts of irregular massing at Three First National Plaza, a 57 storey building at 70 West Madison Street. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and built between 1979 and 1981.

But the inefficiencies of bay extensions probably limited their application to PostModern appropriation of historical styles, since bay windows have not been often seen in recent construction.