Prairie Style Influences

In style, the exterior represents a sophisticated blend of Classical Revival features mixed with Prairie Style elements observed in progressive Chicago architecture of the period. The building's symmetry, rational, segmented elevation, colossal columns in antis, projecting cornice line and symmetry derive from ingrained classical precedents. Hill's densely-blocked brick form, stripped of most ornamentation, recall works by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Tall, thin window bands, located above the marquees on each side façade, exhibit the most overt Prairie Style character, and can be seen in many commissions by Wright, as at his Unity Temple (Oak Park, IL 1910). The use of colorful or highly detailed decorative bands to emphasize an entrance can be observed in several works by Louis Sullivan. As Hildebrand observed of Hill, "The bold major opening punched into vault-like mass and the handling of the ornament recall Sullivan's Getty Tomb or the Midwestern banks (of which only that of Owatonna, Minnesota, had been completed at the time; the Owatonna Bank was published in detail in the Architectural Record of October 1908)." [3] (See Illustration 3) Kahn and his collaborators utilized this Sullivanian idea to concentrate decorative bands around main doorways and to provide vivid counterpoint to the austerity of the rest of the entrance façade .

3. Ibid., p. 73. Kahn produced a variation of Sullivan's Wainwright Tomb at his Detroit Savings Bank branch (ca. 1915) illustrated in the Architectural Record, v. XLII no. 1, January 1918, p. 84.