The Jenney Myth: How the Home Insurance Building Was Declared the “World’s First Skyscraper”

Abstract

It is now well established among architectural and engineering historians that William Le Baron Jenney did not invent the skyscraper and that the Home Insurance Building (HIB), completed in 1885 in Chicago, was not the first one. Nonetheless, the idea of the HIB being the first skyscraper remains deeply lodged in the public consciousness. This paper traces the historiography of how Jenney won the public debate. Based on archival research and historical documents, the evidence shows that starting in the early 1890s, Jenney and his Chicago colleagues, including Daniel Burnham, initiated a public relations campaign to anoint Jenney as the inventor of the skyscraper. The campaign was so successful that by 1907, when Jenney died, the popular press propagated the “Jenney Myth” in their obituaries. In the mid-20th century, the myth was further perpetuated by architectural critics who sought to make the “Chicago School” the pivotal architectural movement in Modern Architecture. The widespread and deeply rooted success of these boosters and polemicists has meant that recent scholarship disproving Jenney’s pivotal role in skyscraper history has been downplayed or ignored.