Dating Buildings by Stylistic Analysis

One of the quickest ways to understand any area of the metropolis is by visual analysis. To the close observer walking, driving or taking public transportation through any part of the city, an enormous amount of information about the history and present situation of a neighborhood can be deduced quickly and easily. In fact there is a good deal of information that visual inspection can yield that might not be available through other kinds of research, no matter how laborious. One of the most important pieces of information that can be gleaned from this kind of analysis is the approximate date of construction and sequence of subsequent building alterations. Most people do a little of this as a matter of course. They can see at a glance that some neighborhoods were primarily built in the late 19th century, for example, and others in the mid 20th. A systematic study of stylistic traits can allow an observer to date buildings within a much more narrow time frame. One place to start is with the “style guides” that have been published over the years, for example Marcus Whiffen’s American Architecture Since 1870: A Guide to the Styles or a National Trust for Historic Preservation publication entitled What Style is It? Unfortunately, these style guides are more useful for large-scale monumental buildings than they are for most of the small residential buildings that make up the bulk of buildings in any city, and the date ranges given are quite wide since they have to cover buildings built in Boston, where a style may originate or Phoenix where the style may arrive several decades after it has gone out of fashion in the East. We badly need a guidebook to the architectural chronology of Chicago and for specific neighborhoods within the city. This will involve an enormous amount of research. In the meantime what follows is an example of a portion of what such a guide might look like for one area of the city, the near West Side neighborhood located between the two sides of the University of Illinois campus. The following series of images concentrates on residential buildings constructed in the late 19th and early 20th century, the era in which most of the buildings in the neighborhood were constructed, can be used as a template against which specific buildings in the area can be compared.

Residential Houses of the West Side: A Sample


  • 1256 Lexington, 1873

  • 1420 Flournoy, 1875

  • 923 Bishop, 1886

  • 1438 Polk, 1887

  • 1418 Polk, 1889

  • 1246 Lexington, 1891

  • 809 Bishop, 1892

  • 909 Bishop, 1897