Burnham
Mills Building
MIlls Building
220 Montgomery Street
Architect: Burnham & Root
Designed by the famous Chicago firm of Burnham & Root and erected in 1891-92. This ten-story, foursquare brick structure picks up the Richardson Romanesque style in its massive, intricately-carved, arched entrance, in the arches crowning the modified Corinthian pilasters that delineate the vertical line of the building, in the repetition of the Romanesque arches in the ninth-floor frieze, and in the squat columns between the windows of the top story. Yet the building as a whole is a powerful expression of the style that was developing in Chicago in the heyday of Burnham and Sullivan and the young Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Mills Building was built by Darius Ogden Mills, a Forty-niner who parlayed a Sacramento shop into a partnership in William C. Ralston’s Bank of California, and went on to become one of the authentic financial moguls of late-nineteenth-century America.
Willis Polk supervised the reconstruction of the Mills Building after the fire of 1906, and was also in charge of the additions of the rear of the building, which he executed in the same style as the original. In 1931 the adjacent twenty-two-story Mills Tower was completed to the design of Lewis Hobart.
Click Here> for the official website of the Mills Building
220 Montgomery Street
Architect: Burnham & Root
Designed by the famous Chicago firm of Burnham & Root and erected in 1891-92. This ten-story, foursquare brick structure picks up the Richardson Romanesque style in its massive, intricately-carved, arched entrance, in the arches crowning the modified Corinthian pilasters that delineate the vertical line of the building, in the repetition of the Romanesque arches in the ninth-floor frieze, and in the squat columns between the windows of the top story. Yet the building as a whole is a powerful expression of the style that was developing in Chicago in the heyday of Burnham and Sullivan and the young Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Mills Building was built by Darius Ogden Mills, a Forty-niner who parlayed a Sacramento shop into a partnership in William C. Ralston’s Bank of California, and went on to become one of the authentic financial moguls of late-nineteenth-century America.
Willis Polk supervised the reconstruction of the Mills Building after the fire of 1906, and was also in charge of the additions of the rear of the building, which he executed in the same style as the original. In 1931 the adjacent twenty-two-story Mills Tower was completed to the design of Lewis Hobart.
Click Here> for the official website of the Mills Building
The Chronicle Building
The Chronicle Building (1890)
343 Market Street
Architect: Burnham & Root
The four-story clock story, ballyhooed by the Chronicle newspaper as "the only bronze one in the United States", lasted only to 1905, when it was set ablaze by skyrockets set off by supporters celebrating the re-election of Mayor Eugene Schmitz, who the Chronicle had opposed, as they paraded past its offices. The next year was even worse. The building survived the Great San Francisco earthquake, but a fire broke out in the top floor, sending the heavy typesetting equipment plunging all the way through to the basement.
In the 1960's, long after the Chronicle moved to a new location in 1924, the old building underwent a disfiguring "modernization" that saw Root's original facades covered over in aluminum and glass.
You can see what that atrocity looked like, and the re-unveiling of Root's original Richardsonian entrance arch, in Curbed/SF's sequence of photos.