In his Sticks and Stones published in 1924 and The Brown Decades in 1931, Lewis Mumford re-evaluated the Chicago school of architecture and also placed it at the beginning of modern architecture. In 1933, “Early Modern Architecture: Chicago 1870-1910” exhibition at MoMA added a formalist overview to the re-evaluation of the school. Furthermore, in his Space, Time and Architecture, “written in stimulating association with young Americans” and first published in the United States in 1941, Sigfried Giedion re-evaluated and reinforced an almost similar perspective. On the contrary, Colin Rowe made a criticism of Chicago frame or of Chicago Construction in his 1956 article “Chicago frame.” Rowe`s critique, however, was made from the same formalist view in a broader sense.

 Since the Venice school`s 1973 magnum opus, The American Cities, the analysis of capitalism as methodology has been gradually introduced into architectural criticism about the built environment in America.

 This paper reconsiders the characteristics of the Chicago construction from the interlacing perspective of the formalist analysis and the analysis of capitalism in order not to overlook the social and historical context nor to downplay the formal analysis.

 The façade of the Leiter I by William le Baron Jenney consisted of masonry and metal networks. The client of the building was a local merchant, Levi. Z. Leiter, who was once a business partner of Marshall Field whose business was rooted in a barter economy. In a barter economy, or a barter exchange, as Marx analyzed in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, objects/commodities were still strongly associated with “use-value” which is “quality,” while “exchange-value,” which is “quantity,” had not attained free form. In other words, the façade of the building was built in an era in which “objects” were easily associated with their “qualities,” so that the façade of the buildings had the characteristics of this era.

 After the tipping point of 1880, the Home Insurance Building whose client, Home Insurance Company, a financial capital in New York, was designed by the same architect and constructed. Financial capital is a capital that erases the traces of things and established the business by planning and calculating it on the numerical basis. The façade of the building was made of metal frame, or the Chicago construction which made it easy to calculate the structure numerically, therefore it was possible to increase the size of the building as well as the façade size according to the capital scale. That is to say, it was a product of the same era as the way the business was.

 In spite of these differences, the two buildings’ facades shared the same orientation of letting in as much natural light as possible. This “lighting,” however, went well beyond the level of mere functional “illumination” and could be said to achieve an aesthetic level as a “castles in the air (Jenney).” This treatment of light seems to have a sense of floating and a sense of making the façade look like a skin. In short, these feelings could be seen as giving a “commodity fetishism (Marx)” to the buildings.

 On the other hand, this sense was in line with the “discovery of a constantly changing phenomenal outdoor world” which Meyer Schapiro pointed out in 1937. Namely, it was not only correlated with changes in business and capital, and changes in the characteristics of products, but also with the emergence of a new sense of mentality due to the urbanization and of market liquidity of the time.