How the Fire Made Chicago : AMERICAN APOCALYPSE The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago <i> by Ross Miller (University of Chicago Press: $24.95; 287 pp.; illustrated; 0-226-52599-6) </i>

Chicago is not the only city to have survived a holocaust: London, Lisbon, San Francisco, Hiroshima, Dresden, Managua . . . the list is long of cities ravaged and resurrected.

Why do these great urban disasters exert an undeniable fascination? Is it just for the lurid thrill of catastrophe that people in Los Angeles pay to experience a simulation of The Big One at Universal Studios? Surely, our attraction must also be due to the mythology of apocalypse. Indeed, much of our history has been made by those who imagine themselves failing, only to triumph later; by those for whom disaster means a chance to start over.

In his book “American Apocalypse,” Ross Miller, professor of English at the University of Connecticut, demonstrates that among disaster cities, Chicago especially finds its modern identity in catastrophe. Miller’s Chicago grows to greatness in the trial and redemption of the fire that consumed it on Oct. 8, 1871.

That evening, Mrs. O’Leary’s infamous cow kicked over the lantern she’d left in the barn on DeKoven Street. By morning, the Great Fire had burned 2,000 acres, destroyed 18,000 buildings, and left 90,000 of Chicago’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless. It was an apocalyptic devastation: The masses huddled on the shores of Lake Michigan saw their wooden buildings vanish into rubble and their so-called fireproof masonry melt. The fire’s 3,000-degree heat reduced limestone facades to “thin white paste” and turned the exposed cast-iron skeletons to molten fluid that ignited whatever the flames could not reach.

Yet, from this biblical damnation, the phoenix of a new Chicago arose almost immediately. In Carl Condit’s indispensable “The Chicago School of Architecture,” we learn that during the next seven years, 10,200 permits for construction were issued, averaging 1,275 per year. During this unprecedented reconstruction, architects, developers and laborers invented a new city of revolutionary forms and technologies.

Miller discloses how Chicago’s Great Fire fits into a larger mythology of apocalypse. He explains that we consider Chicago the Great American City precisely because it captured for its own identity the American dream of renewal, “exploiting its own tragedy as an archetype of the modern struggle against adversity.” By investigating their expression in architecture and literature, he elucidates how Chicagoans went about “self-consciously legendizing” disaster and reinvention.

Miller’s book traces conflicting interpretations of Chicago’s rebirth. Some wanted to accomplish it by means of the raw modernity of an industrial city, others through the fantasy of “a classless world within a society of surplus.” This conflict is neatly embodied in William Le Baron Jenney’s two proposals for a monument to the Great Fire, commissioned in 1872.

The architect’s first scheme was for a tower of litter salvaged from the ruins themselves: He stacked deformed parts of buildings into a monument of twisted columns and half-melted objects reminiscent of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles. When the city rejected the plan for lack of “sufficient dignity,” Jenney transformed his design into a universalizing image of resurrection: a Gothic tower crowned with a maiden holding a torch.

In literature, a similar conflict can be found between what Miller calls works of boosterism and others centering on the urban jungle. Unfortunately, he gives scant attention to Chicago’s gritty realists--Sandburg, Sinclair and Dreiser--and only superficial discussion of the city’s historic labor movements.

Miller is convincing when he analyzes the pulp fiction published after the fire to illustrate how disaster was “controlled by language.” He quotes from forgotten best sellers, like E. P. Roe’s novel “Barriers Burned Away,” to show they adulterated lived experience with pat reconciliation, and offered Chicagoans a romance of classlessness, unity and progress, of “happy workers in partnership with their bosses.” The poor who had been burned out of their homes were written out of the account as a class. Miller effectively demonstrates that the creation of collective memory entailed the loss of historical experience.

It was in subsequent architecture that Chicago’s fire had its greatest legacy. Reconstruction generated some of America’s best design and established the careers of such leading architects as John Root, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright. For the new generation of architects drawn to Chicago, the fire provided an exemplary education. The ruins themselves testified to architecture’s complicity in the disaster: shoddy construction, wooden ornamentation, faulty fireproofing and a general lack of professional standards contributed heavily. Yet the fire also had burned away the past, leaving architects freer to re-imagine the city.

The result was technological, professional and, above all, conceptual innovation focused on the development of a new building type: the city-center commercial skyscraper. The desire for both height and safety eventually brought about a mode of building in which a steel frame on floating foundations supported its own fireproofing of masonry. In the process, the American Institute of Architects consolidated the professional status of its members, establishing a new public role for architects in partnership with the business community. Freed of preconception, the Chicago architects pioneered a functional facade expressing not only the frame within but also a new aesthetic of height, power, and speed. Out of a grid of individual windows in a continuous frame, for example, Sullivan created buildings of tremendous sculptural unity that swelled upward with the muscular force of American capitalism.

Yet, there were also deep anxieties among some leaders about the architect’s public role, as well as conflicting interpretations about the nature of the modern city. The latter is embodied in Burnham’s designs for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Its modern structures were hidden under white plaster, neoclassical ornament and Beaux-Arts planning, creating a conflict between skin and structure, as one critic noted. Many saw this genteel “White City” as a denial of the industrial “Black City” beyond the fairgrounds. Today’s postmodern historicism reiterates, perhaps, a similar obliviousness.

Of the alliance between art and business in architecture, Sullivan and Wright especially were troubled, even contemptuous. The author suggests that their aim to make architecture a vehicle of social criticism of democracy and art eventually got them exiled from Chicago. I would add that the critical questions they raised about architecture and society continue submerged. I would also argue that the profession has so consolidated its control over criticism, making it essentially an internal affair, that the public has grown practically illiterate and therefore incompetent in judging both buildings and master planning.

By looking at architecture as myth-making, Miller undertakes to break with such internal readings. Yet I should note some problems in his treatment. There is little if any theoretical discussion to illuminate the archival materials. Miller questions few received concepts and takes no positions. Tellingly, his book lacks a conclusion, and its introduction never states what he wants to do and why.

As an analysis of architecture, his study is uninformed by the sense of urban design with which these great Chicago buildings define the street and its public space. Moreover, the uninitiated reader may become lost, for although there are more than 100 illustrations, dutifully numbered, not one is specified in the text.

More regrettably, what is suggested is not finally delivered: a way (call it social history or cultural anthropology) to evaluate architecture and literature as both social and aesthetic practices in the context of the class, race and ethnic experience of the modern city. This kind of analysis cannot be done simply by looking at buildings and reading novels.