A "Chicago in Stone and Clay" Companion, Part RI-A: Built to Last | George E. Rickcords House (1889)
This series complements my award-winning guidebook, Chicago in Stone and Clay: A Guide to the Windy City's Architectural Geology. Henceforth I'll just call it CSC.
The CSC section and page reference for the building featured here: 15.8; pp. 246-249.
Looking northwestward at the eastern and southern elevations.
Of the many fine late-nineteenth-century residences still on view in the Windy City, the Richardsonian Romanesque Rickcords House in the Gold Coast neighborhood holds the distinction of being a rare surviving example of the use of that hardest of architectural stones, the Montello Granite.
The Montello, quarried in the central-Wisconsin town of that name, formed from a body of magma associated with a violent eruptive event in the Paleoproterozoic era, about 1.76 Ga ago. This cataclysmic episode in the complex geologic history of the Badger State blanketed its region with rhyolite and welded tuff (fused volcanic ash). Apparently it was triggered not by the usual process of plate convergence, but by crustal thinning—possibly caused by a process known as slab rollback.
While the particular mass of molten rock that became the granite did not reach the surface before it cooled, its geochemistry is essentally the same as that of the extrusive material that did. What makes the Montello Granite both so hard to work and so durable is its abnormally high quartz content. It was also favored—and much more frequently used—for monuments and cemetery headstones.
For considerably more on this site, get and read Chicago in Stone and Clay, described at its Cornell University Press webpage.
The other photos and discussions in this series can be found in my "Chicago in Stone and Clay" Companion album. In addition, you'll find other relevant images and descriptions in my Architectural Geology: Chicago album.
A "Chicago in Stone and Clay" Companion, Part RI-A: Built to Last | George E. Rickcords House (1889)
This series complements my award-winning guidebook, Chicago in Stone and Clay: A Guide to the Windy City's Architectural Geology. Henceforth I'll just call it CSC.
The CSC section and page reference for the building featured here: 15.8; pp. 246-249.
Looking northwestward at the eastern and southern elevations.
Of the many fine late-nineteenth-century residences still on view in the Windy City, the Richardsonian Romanesque Rickcords House in the Gold Coast neighborhood holds the distinction of being a rare surviving example of the use of that hardest of architectural stones, the Montello Granite.
The Montello, quarried in the central-Wisconsin town of that name, formed from a body of magma associated with a violent eruptive event in the Paleoproterozoic era, about 1.76 Ga ago. This cataclysmic episode in the complex geologic history of the Badger State blanketed its region with rhyolite and welded tuff (fused volcanic ash). Apparently it was triggered not by the usual process of plate convergence, but by crustal thinning—possibly caused by a process known as slab rollback.
While the particular mass of molten rock that became the granite did not reach the surface before it cooled, its geochemistry is essentally the same as that of the extrusive material that did. What makes the Montello Granite both so hard to work and so durable is its abnormally high quartz content. It was also favored—and much more frequently used—for monuments and cemetery headstones.
For considerably more on this site, get and read Chicago in Stone and Clay, described at its Cornell University Press webpage.
The other photos and discussions in this series can be found in my "Chicago in Stone and Clay" Companion album. In addition, you'll find other relevant images and descriptions in my Architectural Geology: Chicago album.