Tracing / Traces: Architecture and the Archive 2024

Five architects and designers selected items from the collection and discussed them in relationship to their practice, the discipline, and/or society. Nathaniel Parks, Tigerman McCurry Director of the Art Institute of Chicago Archives, provided a brief introduction to the archives.

Participants included:

Robert Becker and Sharon Xu – Studio Becker Xu
Sarah Blankenbaker – Architectural designer and educator
Akima Brackeen – Educator, designer, and researcher
Alexander Eisenschmidt – Designer, theorist, and educator
Antonio Torres - The Bittertang Farm

The Ryerson & Burnham Art and Architecture Archives’ collections are notably strong in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American architecture, with particular depth in midwestern architecture. Architects such as Edward Bennett, Daniel Burnham, Bruce Goff, Bertrand Goldberg, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright are represented in a broad range of papers. Major architectural events, such as the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, The Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933–1934 in Chicago, and the World’s Fair of 1939 in New York, are also represented in an individual archive.

Alexander Eisenschmidt

I want to show you a different side of Ludwig Hilberseimer; not the urbanist and planner, but Hilberseimer the interior designer. If you look at the book Metropolitan Architecture, published in 1927, you see drawings of Highrise City (Hochhausstadt) that everybody recognizes: a city where the architectural forms dictate the urbanism, one that is logistically organized, infrastructurally planned, clear, hardcore, and “masculine.” That’s what is expected of Hilberseimer and how his personality has been portrayed.

On the other hand, there are also other works that Hilberseimer designed that are much more difficult to place, like the wardrobe for his fiancé Otti Berger, for example. When I first saw this photograph, I was struck by the simple fact that he had designed a wardrobe. The person who apparently had built very little, who is known for his visionary projects, and who was predominantly concerned with the city, had also designed furniture. I wondered about Hilberseimer’s position on domestic space, and how it relates to his urbanism, and vice versa.

The first project that I want to talk about is the Growing House entry that he submitted for an initiative by Martin Wagner. In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, Wagner issued a call to architects to design a very small, inexpensive house that would include only essentials and that could potentially grow. Hilberseimer responded with a proposal that starts with a single-room house, where he already seemed to rethink the conventional nuclear family.

If you look in the middle, you see the individual cell from where he imagines the building to grow. It is a simple room with a table, a bed, and a lightweight dividing wall. Then, either linearly or as an L-shape, he imagines these very compact bedrooms to be added to that configuration. If another child or another friend arrives, they can sleep in these rooms, in single or double beds. He never gives an end to that linearity, so it almost becomes a linear city of bedrooms.

In contrast to the compactness of these rooms with beds, a table, and a chair, the living room is reimagined as a “collective space” (Gemeinschaftsraum). While the conventional German word Wohnzimmer connotates the private living space for the family, his use of the term Gemeinschaftsraum suggests a much more collective realm. I am showing you here two photographs where we see this collective space entirely reconfigured through different furniture placements, allowing us to imagine different social and communal scenarios to unfold.

This is also emphasized in the Villa Blumenthal from 1932, where Hilberseimer takes the bedrooms from the Growing House and puts them on top of the large living room. The question always seems to be how small one can make the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. The intention was to push them to the bare minimum in order to have living rooms as generous, expansive, and open-ended as possible.

Just like with all of his investigations, he works systematically on the problem of the compact kitchen. From 1928 to 1930 he embarked on a series of kitchen designs, which were, of course, influenced by the efficiency and ergonomics of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen (from 1926). Yet, Hilberseimer’s designs and mock-ups appear much smaller, and with each kitchen design arrives a more compact layout. While the single-family home would always require at least a small kitchen, he eliminated it for apartments entirely and proposed instead communal kitchens, not unlike hotels.

He is not only critical of the kitchen as a bourgeois construct but sees it as a gendered space for domestic labor. This becomes especially clear when he quotes the literary scholar and feminist activist Meta Corssen, who called for “a systematic dismantling of the total work required within a household and reassembling it anew.” Hilberseimer’s proposals for residential spaces seem to do exactly that.

Sarah Blankenbaker

The images I selected are almost all by the same architect, W.W. Boyington, who I was interested in as a prolific yet relatively unknown Chicago architect. There isn’t a lot of documentation of his work, partly because of the time in which he practiced, which was the mid- to late-nineteenth century. His office, along with many of the buildings he designed, was destroyed in the Chicago Fire, which is part of the reason why so little documentation exists. My interest is not so much in Boyington himself, but in his struggle with time and with his place in time. He lived during changes that were taking place on a grand, global scale, including standardization and modernization. His buildings were often in the thick of things, yet also a little out of sync.

I am going to start with this image, which is the first University of Chicago or Chicago University (it was called both things). The university was founded in 1856. The first building was built in 1858, and the main building by Boyington was completed in 1865. That was Douglas Hall, which you see here. This [pointing at another building in the photo] is the original small building that was built before. It was built at what is now 35th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, in what was then called the Cottage Grove neighborhood. The land was donated by Steven Douglas, the purpose of which was to increase the property value of his adjoining plot.

The building is in the Norman-Gothic Revival style, which was popular at the time. It is associated with eclecticism, which, at that time, was very much about literacy and taste. It called for the appropriation of earlier styles and their correct application to certain building types. Norman-Gothic, which is used here, was considered best for schools, for churches, and sometimes for prisons. For example, Boyington also used it for the Old Joliet prison, which was completed in 1858. This was considered a correct application. He also used it for the Chicago Water Tower, which you see in this image, and which is one of the few buildings by Boyington that still exists. It was finished in 1869 and was deemed by some to be an incorrect application, not appropriate to the building type. In fact, Oscar Wilde visited Chicago in 1882 to give a lecture on decorative arts and made a comment on this building. He was appalled and famously called it a “castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it.” The university was better received. A newspaper described it as “having a richness of design from its proportion, in combination of arrangement and strict conformity to the style of architecture, which seems to be admirably fit and appropriate for the location.”

From the beginning, the university struggled with its finances. Thus, when it learned of a lens for a telescope that had been commissioned for the University of Mississippi and abandoned due to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, some saw a ticket for solving the financial problems and purchased it. When completed, the lens was the largest in the world at eighteen-and-a-half inches. The university bought it with a donation from one of their trustees. After Boyington finished Douglas Hall, he added a tower to the campus, which is not seen in this image, called Dearborn Tower. It was built in the same style as Douglas Hall, so it would have blended in. The tower housed the lens and a telescope for the lens. The observatory drew students to a newly created astronomy program, so it helped with the school’s enrollment. It also enabled the university to generate revenue by selling time to the city. Previously, time had been kept by a local jeweler and wasn’t matched to anything. But, for $2,000 a year, a sum reached after some negotiation, Dearborn Tower sent time via wire to City Hall, which then transmitted it elsewhere.

There were complaints that the time coming from Dearborn Tower was no more accurate than before, and it was speculated that this was because the timekeeper there, a professor, was not in the tower, which was separate from the main university (depending on what you read, by a few yards or a hundred yards) around the clock, like a lightkeeper to a lighthouse. Instead, they were in another building most of the time. As a result, some chose to get their time from another place, another more distant observatory with a full-time timekeeper. In the end, time was not enough to keep the school afloat, and it went bankrupt in 1886 and was later torn down in 1890.

The selling of time by universities was common across the country at this specific moment. But here, the selling of time at the University of Chicago led to the later standardization of time for railroads in Chicago in 1883, in another building that was built by Boyington, not shown here, but in the collection: the Grand Pacific Hotel. Then, eventually time was standardized across the country in 1918.

The next image is the Chicago Board of Trade Building, adjacent to the hotel where the Conference for Standardization of Time was held. The Board of Trade building, also designed by Boyington, was a place that briefly benefited from the time arrangement with the university; it had a 303-foot-tall clock tower (although the tower in this photo is not 303 feet). Construction of the building began in 1882, was interrupted by a labor strike, and was later completed in 1885. The building is an example of a slightly later version of eclecticism, a sort espoused by Oscar Wilde. One for following the fashions, Boyington went from faithfully applying the correct style (and sometimes misapplying it), to adapting, modifying, and combining past styles. Nonetheless, like the Water Tower before it, the Board of Trade was the target of aesthetic criticism. Modern Gothic, which is the style that this was built in, was considered by many to be ugly. It was called the “original and ugly school.”

The building was targeted for having too great a diversity of styles and parts. The mansard roof, in particular, was a point of contention. New York critic Montgomery Schuyler said, “It is difficult to contemplate its bustling and uneasy façade without feeling a certain sympathy with the mob of anarchists that demonstrated under its windows on the night of its opening.” This is referring to the labor strike. “If they were really anarchists, it was very ungrateful of them, for one would go far to find a more perfect expression of anarchy in architecture.” This sentiment toward eclecticism was shared by many, who at the time wanted the US to find its own style of architecture rooted in nature and in native architecture rather than borrow endlessly from other places.

But style was not the only source of criticism for this building. The clock tower also caused controversy. The archive contains a letter to the editor of the Chicago Builder and Trader in 1892 that explains the situation. An architect in Minneapolis called Leroy Buffington had filed a patent for a load-bearing iron frame construction in 1887 and sought to collect fees from those who had constructed tall buildings using this method. Usually, this method is associated with William Le Baron Jenney and the Home Insurance Building here in Chicago, which was constructed in 1885. But Boyington sought to correct the record by explaining its use in his building, the Board of Trade building, for which construction had started in 1882. However, it doesn’t seem like anyone paid attention. No one credits Boyington with the invention. Nonetheless, there weren’t any fees collected for his use of it, nor for other’s later use, so he was successful at least in this. After some litigation, the patent ultimately applied in only a small number of cases, and not in Boyington’s. This means of construction, the iron or steel frame, eventually led to the Chicago Style, which is better represented by Jenney’s building, and then, some claim, to the International Style. The fact that no one paid attention to Boyington’s letter or to his claim on this type of construction may be due to the fact that his building was out of style or out of taste.

Because the clock tower of the Board of Trade building was constructed using a method similar to Buffington’s and Jenney’s, it settled faster than the rest of the building it was attached to, which did not use the same method. Within ten years of completion, cracks appeared between the tower and the rest of the building. In order to deal with this, the tower was removed. Previously, there was a larger part on top of the short tower you see here, and shortening it brought the clock down. This happened in 1894, and then the building was torn down entirely in 1928, to be replaced by a building by Holabird & Root.

The last Boyington building we’ll look at is the 1873 Interstate Exposition Building. Even as time became constant for Chicago, and then for the world, Boyington’s buildings—with some exceptions—had another relationship to time, which was short lifespans (with the exception of the Water Tower, which still exists). Many of them were torn down before the end of their useful life (or burned down in other cases), largely for financial, political, or structural reasons, but the Interstate Expedition Building somehow went in the opposite direction. It was designed to be a temporary building and to last for only two years, but ultimately it lasted twenty. It was built after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 to replace the places of assembly that had been destroyed. It was just to temporarily serve that function, and it was meant to exhibit goods and art. It also hosted an annual Interstate Exposition, as the name of the building would suggest. It was constructed out of glass, iron, and limestone and designed after the great halls built elsewhere, such as the Crystal Palace in London and the Crystal Palace in New York. At the time, the Exposition Building was the largest structure built in the United States. Given its longevity, it ended up holding a number of events other than what it was intended for, such as political conventions and pedestrian races. It had a steam elevator as an attraction, for getting a good view, and also a telescope.

The Exposition Building was remodeled by Adler & Sullivan in 1885 for the Chicago Opera Festival, then was finally deconstructed in 1892. Although only meant to last for two years, the building wasn’t disassembled until its plot was needed for the World’s Fair, a much larger and grander version of what took place there. The site of the Interstate Exposition Building was used for the World’s Congress Auxiliary Building of the 1893 World’s Fair, which was one of many of Beaux Arts buildings designed for it, a brief reassertion of academic eclectic styles in Chicago. After the Fair, it became the Art Institute of Chicago, which is where we are now standing.

Antonio Torres

Thank you all for joining us today. Thank you, Iker and MAS Context, for the invitation and the opportunity to engage with the Ryerson and Burnham Library Archives, and of course, the team here, Nathaniel, Jessica, and Dave. I truly enjoyed this opportunity. My Tracing / Traces research focused on Chicago’s clay deposits and the city’s rich history of building with clay. I explored the Louis Sullivan collections and Richard Nickel’s archives to uncover how clay became fundamental in Chicago’s architecture. While I didn’t find or wasn’t expecting to find much about the geological clay deposits—I think there is a museum nearby that I probably need to go for that—I did dig up fascinating information on terracotta and clay bricks.

These materials have been used extensively to construct residences, streets, high-rises, parks, and intricate ornaments. Today, I’ll try to unpack the matter, materials, and materiality of Chicago’s architectural identity and history through these selected items. But before we explore this buffet here, I’d like to provide some context to frame my interest in them. To begin, let me just offer a quick quote from Raymond Wiggers’s book, Chicago in Stone and Clay, which actually was a starting point for this, where he writes, “Chicago’s architecture is an element of time, with its success measured in hundreds of years, but its natural matter, rock and clay, in thousands, millions, and even billions of years.” I find these deep dives in Chicago’s geologic and material history super fascinating.

The distinct geological periods and materials that now shape the city’s architectural landscape offer a profound lens through which we can view architecture, design, technology, and urban growth. The blend of natural history with urban history offers a compelling approach for understanding architecture—say in this conversation, perhaps—at the intersection of culture, history, and geology. It also provides a layer of perspective to highlight the environmental and cultural impacts of geological materials. For example, the shift from locally quarried stone, over here with the provided examples potentially, to brick, a move influenced by industrial growth and resource availability.

By the nineteenth century, northeastern Illinois became a center for brick production using clay from local riverbanks, lakebeds, and glacial deposits. Early US cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis were major brick hubs with smaller towns establishing their own brick industries. Brick’s practicality made it a versatile choice in its ability to be mass-produced, and that allowed it to be cemented in its role in construction.

As we know in the architecture here, bricks vary widely in quality, size, shape, and texture to suit different applications, from utilitarian common brick to ornamental facing brick. Notable types include Chicago common brick; Chicago Anderson Pressed, a high-quality, colorful facing brick; Tiffany brick, which is enameled and comes in various colors; and Cream City brick, which is a blend of clays from Milwaukee and Lake Calumet on Chicago’s South Side.

With regards to another clay-based material, Chicago stands out as a global showcase for terra cotta, which is widely used in architecture. Terra cotta, meaning “uncooked earth,” shares its base material, clay, with bricks, and can range in scales and properties from unglazed items like flowerpots to ordinate building cladding and ornamentation. From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Chicago became a major center for terra cotta production, with companies like the Chicago Terracotta Company, Northwest Terracotta Company, and American Terracotta Company employing immigrants, artisans from Europe.

After the Great Fire of 1871, terra cotta’s popularity soared due to its advantages. Lighter than stone, resistant to high temperatures, and fireproof, it became an ideal for cladding and protecting steel structures. It not only served practical purposes, but it also added spatial qualities to Chicago’s architectural landscape. The first item that I want to bring into this conversation is Common Clay, which was a publication by the American Terracotta and Ceramic Company in the early twentieth century. It played a significant role in promoting terra cotta as a premier building material, influencing architectural trends and recognizing skilled artisans and architects.

The publication advocated for terra cotta’s aesthetics and practical advantages, educating architects, builders, and the public about its durability and versatility. It also helped dispel misconceptions about terra cotta, positioning it as a unique material with a natural evolution. Common Clay provided in-depth technical articles on terra cotta manufacturing, from clay selection to kiln firing, offering valuable insight into best practices and innovative techniques. It also showcased significant buildings using terra cotta. To that end, it influenced architectural trends and encouraged its adoption in various styles and applications. Louis Sullivan extensively used terra cotta for ornamental purposes, so of course, Common Clay highlighted his intricate designs and the company’s ability to realize his vision.

Kristian Schneider, pictured here in an article that the publication put out, ends up being Louis Sullivan’s sculptor, is a master modeler celebrated for his artistry and skill, particularly in the Sullivan-esque style. His work emphasized the importance of skilled craftsmen in producing high-quality terra cotta. Common Clay was more than a company newsletter. It was a crucial medium for promoting terra cotta, sharing technical knowledge, and celebrating architectural achievements. It remains a valuable resource for understanding American architecture and the terra cotta industry’s role in it.

The next item is actually a group of images of these full-scale models for Louis Sullivan, made from clay. As we know, a distinctive aspect of Louis Sullivan’s work is the use of intricate designs and elaborate ornamentation, made possible through the use of terra cotta. It is very impressive to see images of these full-scale, three-dimensional models and physical renditions of the detailed drawings from which Sullivan channeled the natural world. Terra cotta’s plasticity and malleability allow Sullivan and his artisans to mold elaborate shapes and patterns difficult to achieve with other materials. The flexibility enabled the crafting of detailed ornamental elements that added depth and excitement to the buildings.

Terra cotta also was very cost-effective compared to carved stone, especially for repetitive elements, allowing mass production without sacrificing quality. These models are, I think most of them, for the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building here in Chicago. They were sculpted, as mentioned before, by Kristian Schneider who paid a very pivotal role in translating Sullivan’s complex design into architectural elements. Many of Sullivan’s buildings are preserved as historic landmarks. The terra cotta façades are enduring examples of Sullivan’s interest in emerging material and design, illustrating how the right material can produce unique spatial materialities at various scales.

Then, the last item that I focused on is an essay by Sullivan himself, which he wrote to try to reposition brick, called “Artistic Brick.” It is a rather technical essay with some florid parts, where he channels nature and harmony. But overall, it sounds more like an appreciation for an industry that has worked together with architects to innovate and improve building materials at the highest levels. He begins by exploring the evolution and significance of brick and terra cotta in modern architecture, emphasizing how advancements in these materials opened new avenues for expression and design. He really relishes in mechanically pressed brick, which is clean cut and perfectly suitable for large office buildings requiring precise surfaces and lines.

He sounds content that rough-faced brick finally evolved from the paver but retains its ability to not be uniform in color and shape, providing textual and visual properties. It is also a brick that started to help architects think about buildings in the round. Not just to have these brick used for these short façades, (or I think it was called something like that). Then, in the concluding sentences, he writes, “We never know how important anything may become, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant its initial appearance. So small a thing as a brick has brought a significant modification in architectural art, and this has reacted upon the sensibilities of the social body through the subtle influence of its mere presence.”

In exploring these items, I really enjoyed learning how clay in the form of brick and terra cotta has been instrumental in shaping Chicago’s spatial materiality, but also how clay has been more than just the material, it’s been a medium for innovation, collaboration, and cultural reflection. Then, lastly, these natural materials rooted in ancient geological processes that shaped the land over millions of years carry with them the essence of deep time, something that I am particularly interested in. It points to how architecture is not just about our human-centric present, but it is connected to the vast history of the earth itself. The link between the natural world and the human-made world is a layered point of view of architecture’s ongoing dialogue between nature, culture, time, and human ingenuity.

The materials that we choose to world-build as architects, derived from the earth and molded by our hands or our technologies, can hold the stories that bridge geological epochs in our envisioned futures. Thank you.

Robert Becker and Sharon Xu

Robert: Thank you so much for inviting us to participate in this. We had so much fun digging through the archives. Thank you again to the Art Institute for helping us with that.

The archive is really massive. There is tons of history in Chicago, there is tons of history just here in the Art Institute as well so it was a bit overwhelming for us to know where to begin. We ended up starting by reflecting on one of our favorite exhibits here at the Art Institute. Directly below where we are standing is a singular room in the museum that displays sixty-eight interior worlds that span over 400 years. The Thorne Rooms, for those who might not be familiar with them, are a series of immaculately crafted diorama models, mostly of domestic interior living spaces.

Growing up around Chicago, my parents would always bring me to the Art Institute. They are frequent visitors of the Art Institute, and the Thorne Rooms might have been the only draw in convincing myself and my sister to tag along. The rooms were just a treat and had a special way of holding our attention as children. I can certainly attribute those dozens of visits to the Thorne Rooms to my current fascination and interest in architecture, design, and craft.

Sharon: I did not frequent the Thorne Rooms growing up, but the few times that I did visit with my family, when we would come here from St. Louis, they were a hallmark of the Chicago experience and very unique to the city. We decided in our selections to do a deep dive into just this one topic and curate a set of items that examine the context into why they were made, how they were made, and their impact.

Robert: Narcissa Niblack Thorne is the woman and the name behind the Thorne Rooms. She collected miniatures as a child. One of her first memories was that of playing with one of her own dollhouses. Her uncle, who was in the Navy, would send her miniatures from abroad. Then, throughout her life, she continued to collect these little objects. What she collected weren’t just toy miniatures but what were actually known as salesman samples. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, before photography, cabinet makers would travel around Europe carrying samples, which were essentially small-scale replicas that exhibited the same level of craft that was required to assemble the full-scale piece.

We had assumed that the rooms maybe began as a study of architectural styles in hopes of preserving them. But instead, it was really these tiny little objects that reflected how people lived that inspired the creation of these intricate spaces around them. We think this really speaks to the value of the model as a form of representation, which is becoming more and more obsolete today in the digital world. Beyond just simulating the look of a space, physical models can literally represent a proof of a concept. This is partially how we think of models in our own practice, but models aren’t just a didactic tool for us; they can also instill the viewer with a sense of wonder in a way that maybe a drawing can’t do. In a model, you can physically put yourself into this space.

Something really magical happens when you begin to mess with scale. Typically, when something is scaled down, you also lose a bit of the resolution. But in this case, in the Thorne Rooms, their technical mastery has a way of concealing their mode of production, where itis almost impossible to understand how something so small could be fabricated with such detail, and which just adds to their sense of wonder. As architects, we are always curious about how something was made, the behind-the-scenes process. Some of the first items that we selected show these moments in the making. One of the images here shows Narcissa at her Oak Street studio and workshop in Chicago, working on the upholstery of a small chair. When she was really young, she started a hat making business, so she became a really skilled sewer. Narcissa started making the rooms way before the time of digital tools and manufacturing technologies. These rooms required the expertise of some of the country’s most skilled craftspeople, from architects to jewelers to cabinetmakers to muralists. This was at the height of the Great Depression. A lot of these artisans were really struggling to find work, but her personal studio space and workshop provided a lot of jobs for these artisans, at least locally.

One of these artisans was Eugene Kupjack. Many of the articles we found from the time the rooms were made featured Kupjack. He had a workshop based out of Park Ridge, outside Chicago. On an early visit to the Thorne Rooms, he had noticed that one of the rooms was missing a cane chair, so he developed a process of softening and cutting cane into miniscule strips. Then, he also developed and designed a miniature tool to be able to fabricate and weave together the cane of that chair. He later gifted that tool to Narcissa when he became one of the first permanent employees in her workshop. For some of the artwork in the rooms, like the California Hallway, which if you go downstairs, is almost directly on your left, she commissioned very prominent established artists like Fernand Léger to paint miniature paintings for her rooms. We had even read somewhere that Picasso was asked by her to do a piece, but he, I guess, declined.

Behind the Lions was a journal for the Art Institute staff that was meant basically to keep all of the staff up to date with what everyone was doing in the museum. This particular issue was from the ’80s, when the Thorne Rooms were closed for public restoration, and it describes some of the maintenance processes behind-the-scenes. Again, they often had to custom make little tools, even for the cleaning of the rooms. For instance, they designed a fully functioning vacuum made out of an eyedropper tool to suck up dust from the chairs and carpets.

Similar to real buildings, the construction of rooms required extensive documentation and planning. The Department of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute has over 200 blueprints for the design and the construction of the rooms and the furniture. The drawings for these shoebox size rooms are virtually indistinguishable from that of a construction set for full-scale building, which was amazing to see. We unfortunately couldn’t pull any of those drawings, but we did find this in Narcissa’s scrapbook. It outlines all the light bulbs and their locations within the rooms, and the wattages. Narcissa herself said that the most important aspect in creating the illusion of realism in these rooms is in the precise simulation of natural light. In some ways, this might be considered one of the most critical forms of documentation for the rooms.

Sharon: There are ninety-seven rooms that were made in three phases over a period of fifteen years; sixty-eight of those are at the Art Institute. A few others are spread at museums around the country. The original twelve rooms were exhibited at the Century of Progress International Exposition that was held in 1933 in Chicago, which is where they first garnered international attention. But it was after the Exposition that they gained a wider public following. Fifteen rooms were made the year after the Exposition.

The twenty-seven rooms at the time became part of an exhibition that traveled the country and toured major art institutions across the United States. This newspaper article documents the elaborate ritual behind unpacking, cataloging, and staging the rooms in each of their locations, which took weeks, sometimes up to a month, in each place. Their arrival in each city became this highly anticipated spectacle. The Minneapolis Tribune reported that it was the biggest art museum attraction at the time in the US in terms of public interest and attendance. The majority of the twenty-six boxes we looked through from the archives were from that period in the 1930s and ’40s of local newspaper clippings cataloging that explosion of attention. Among all the press, there were two nationally acclaimed publications that stood out to us. The first is the American Girl magazine from 1944. This was the official magazine of the Girl Scouts that started in the early 1900s, and they ran the publication through the ’70s. At the time, it was this empowering publication that was made by women for women, and it had the largest circulation out of any magazine aimed at young women.

Before Narcissa came up with the idea for the rooms, she was actively involved in an organization called the Women’s Exchange, which was an organization that held workshops for women in the applied arts and gave women a place to sell their work to help subsidize their household income. Through this, she got to know a collective of craftswomen, working with seamstresses, embroiderers, and needle pointers, and that spirit of collaboration transferred to the making of the rooms. Many of the tapestries and rugs in the rooms took the same amount of time it would take to mirror the full-scale process. Some of the miniature rugs in the rooms took over 120 hours to craft.

We also found it noteworthy when looking through the collection that many of the newspaper photos depicted women, not just in the making of the rooms, but also in the caretaking—“housekeeping” they called it—and curation of the rooms. Women were the ones that traveled with the rooms to the exhibits across the country and managed the installation and logistics. Women’s clubs and socials planned events around these traveling exhibitions. That was, of course, no doubt of reflection of the times in the ’30s where the woman’s role was in the domestic realm. In taking that domesticity and putting it on display, the rooms were a platform that celebrated women and the achievements of their craft in this period. That was not long after the women’s suffrage movement.

At the same time, the rooms attracted people of all demographics. They were equally visited by children, men, artists, collectors, and famous contemporaries at the time. Walt Disney visited the rooms and supposedly was inspired to start collecting his own miniatures. Architects sometimes even brought clients to the rooms as mini showrooms for design inspiration. They became a pop culture phenomenon. These photos that Robert referenced earlier are from a 1937 issue of Life magazine, one of the most popular publications in the country at the time. The fact that the room was featured in these two very iconic publications speaks to their incredible universal appeal, something that had the power to bring together all types of people a century ago now, and still to this day. That timelessness is something we admire as designers and makes us reflect on our own work today, in thinking about how we can make design accessible to the public, to architects and non-architects, through creative and meaningful forms of representation. The way that Narcissa was able to share her experiences traveling abroad with those who may not necessarily have had access to those experiences was inspiring to us.

In addition to our practice, we both teach architecture studios and the pedagogy that is often taught in schools is on thinking about the design of a building from the outside in. First, considering a building’s relationship to its site and surroundings before zooming in to the detailed scale of the interior. In the rooms, although there is an exterior that is alluded to through the light filtering in through the windows, it is never fully revealed, and we were really curious about what the exterior form and architecture of these buildings look like that house the rooms. We found a couple photos of houses from the archives, taken from the Historic American Building Survey that the American rooms were based on. We did some detective work and matched them up with the corresponding interiors. These were two that stood out to us and surprised us. One is of a Shaker community house and another is a Virginia plantation that was owned by one of the wealthiest families in the state at the time. Even though the interiors depict two very different ways of life, the exteriors are virtually indistinguishable from their public façade. In the context of the Thorne Rooms, it is intriguing to think about the architecture of a house as this expressionless exterior or a resonant chamber in service of the interior, where the interior is really the true agent of design. The interior is what allows for that personal projection of our domestic sensibilities. What is compelling to us about the collection as a whole is how they start to spatially index different forms of domesticity. Though, of course, they are very biased towards Western forms of domesticity; there are only two rooms that feature Eastern cultures, a Japanese room and a Chinese room, and those were added in 1939 for an exhibition at the San Francisco International Exposition.

As you can see in the photos of the models—and those are interesting too because they crop out the frame, really exaggerating the ambiguity of the scale of the image—the interior isn’t a static tableau but is saturated with traces of inhabitation that make tangible the life that it contains. If you study the rooms downstairs closely, they too contain narratives that are arrested not only in space, but also in time. There are half played board games, there are open books, there are toys left out on the floor, there is a slice of pie somewhere waiting to be eaten.

These remnants not only leave room for viewer engagement and participation and anticipation of the scene, but also bring a dimension of empathy to the rooms, humanizing what would otherwise be a hollow space. In a way, the interiors also represent a very early effort in historic preservation. This was a time right after World War I had eradicated a lot of the building stock in Europe. Until the architectural preservation movement gained steam in later decades, in the ’60s, when the National Historic Preservation Act was passed, these miniatures were a way of honoring that memory. Besides just being engaging to look at, they were really a serious means of documenting buildings that were in danger of destruction at that time.

Not all of the rooms were modeled after real buildings, like those American rooms, though they were all informed by a large body of research. Some were original creations that collage together different spatial features from different spaces that were just loosely based on architectural styles. We discovered in our research that the Thorne Rooms weren’t Narcissa’s only creative endeavors. She also made ahistorical shadow box dioramas where she cut up eighteenth-century engravings and assembled them into bas-relief style 2.5D collages. The Department of Prints and Drawings has a few of these. They are fascinating to consider along with the Throne Rooms. Learning about her body of work made us see the rooms with fresh eyes, on the one hand, as this important in-depth documentation of historical spaces, and on the other, as these creative compositional acts. You can start to see how these two processes of research and making mutually informed each other in the work.

Robert: The next item that we picked is an image of a more traditional dollhouse, which is from a catalog that includes a collection of really beautifully crafted dollhouses. The precursor to the Thorne Rooms were dollhouses that Narcissa made for her own nieces, but also to send as gifts to children’s hospitals. The 1:12 scale commonly used for dollhouses happened to also be the perfect scale for putting on a bed tray for bed-ridden patients in hospitals, which is what inspired the scale of the Thorne Rooms themselves.

The practice of collecting miniatures and making dollhouses dates back hundreds of years to when they were passed as precious gifts between European nobility. Before the twentieth century, it was really a very expensive hobby limited only to those who could afford it. Narcissa was the first to make the world of high design more accessible, at least more public, by displaying them in slightly more public spaces like museums.

The Thorne Rooms then gave dollhouses a more cross-generational appeal and contributed to the growing hobby of miniatures. After the rooms were created, Hobbies Magazine, which was a publication for collectors that was based here in Chicago, added a miniatures column. In 1966, Chicago was the very first city to host a dollhouse convention.

Around the end of World War II, toy companies began to mass-produce dollhouses, making them a more accessible medium for children and more attainable to the middle class. Dollhouses were also marketed to families as toys that allowed children to play while easily learning how to maintain a properly functioning household, which we think is a funny juxtaposition, a kind of serious play: the intensity/intention of serious, in contrast to the youthfulness and freedom that play offers.

As architects, we are required to address practical challenges, but we also believe it is important to embrace a childlike way of seeing the world, of unlearning conventional ideas about space so that we can dream up new ways of living.

Then, finally, the campaign packet that we found in the archives extends that idea of serious play. This was made and distributed by the Art Institute for a special campaign where you could support the conservation efforts by dedicating one of the sixty-eight rooms. The format is a cut-and-fold diorama model, welcoming museumgoers into the process of making. We didn’t really have a choice but to print one out and make one ourselves. We spent last night putting this together, we didn’t quite finish it. There is still a handful of furniture we didn’t get to, just a testament to how long these things really take, but it was really fun for us to do. Actually, one of my first jobs outside of undergrad was working for a model-making company, Presentation Studios International in the West Loop. This model-making company, PSI, is still making extremely detailed physical models for top architecture firms around the world, who still see model-making as a valuable form of representation, and also, as a marketing tool for engaging the general public.

Sharon: If it is not obvious by now, we love models and making, and we find it to be a very useful tool for our own internal design process and visualizing space, but also a valuable form of communication to show how architecture can impact the scale of the individual. In the architecture and design gallery upstairs, you will find a twenty-first century analog to the Thorne Rooms. There are models made by Michael Maltzan’s office (where I previously worked in LA), and they were made for the 2018 Venice Biennale, and they are at the same 1:12 dollhouse scale as the Thorne Rooms. They depict interiors of apartment units from a permanent supportive housing project in downtown LA called Star Apartments.

In those models, rather than focusing on the architecture, the dioramas represent a free space that reflects the agency of the inhabitant and how they choose to occupy the space. Clearly, the spirit of the Thorne Rooms lives on, and we believe is still very relevant today. Prior to doing this research, we were already in awe of the miniature scale of the rooms. But now, after the research, we are also in awe of the massive scale of operation and collaboration that really made these objects visible, and the way in which they weave together rich historical and personal narratives that illustrate an ecology of design that is not solely about the architecture or the furnishings, but rather how they come together to serve the people who use them.

Akima Brackeen

First, I want to thank Iker for this opportunity and Dave, Nathaniel, and Jessica for their help curating this selection. The experience of working with the archive can be vast and intimidating, and I found probably one of the smallest sections in there. I am hoping to shed light on something that I think you might be really familiar with but perhaps provide a different way of thinking about it. Hopefully, it changes the experience that you have when you go back.

I am really interested in the Clarence Buckingham Memorial Fountain for several reasons. My work and research deals with water infrastructure; I mostly look at access to water and I have been trying to make visible the things that we don’t see. Water infrastructure speaks to access; It speaks to public health; It speaks to the advantages that we have to just be able to turn on the faucet and get water. What I was really interested in was thinking about how an infrastructure tied to water can serve as memorials in public space.

Buckingham Fountain is a Chicago landmark. People take field trips to come to the fountain; it is a Chicago thing. There are a lot of things about this fountain that only having access to this archive you are able to see, and so I hope that these selections shed light on that.

I also teach a course on infrastructure in Chicago, and my students have drawn, modeled, and researched extensively different scales of water infrastructure, from pipes and filtration systems to water treatment plants, dams, and reservoirs. One of my students was really fascinated by this fountain, and I am actually just doing it in honor for her because she had trouble finding some of the drawings and had to get scrappy with what she represented in the drawings. These are all the reasons why we are here looking at these selected images.

Again, this is a memorial fountain, and what I found really fascinating was that this was dedicated by Kate Buckingham, who was a philanthropist and an art collector. She donated some of her collection to the Art Institute of Chicago and commissioned this fountain to honor her late brother Clarence. It was a gift to the city, but it was also to honor his life and the contributions that he made to the city of Chicago. As you know, it is located in Grant Park, which is not far from here, at the Art Institute.

The fountain was designed and conceptualized by the architect Edward Bennett who has a collection, a really small collection, in this archive. It was a collaboration with the engineer Jacques Lambert, and the French sculptor Marcel Loyau. I am really interested in looking at it in terms of the material properties—they used both pink Georgia marble and granite. There are four bronze seahorse sculptures that honor the four neighboring states of Illinois, and it is also inspired by the Latona Fountain in Versailles.

Now, let’s get into the fountain and the things that I wanted to show you all. When we think about memory and we think about place, we can start to think about its conception the time in the 1920s (the fountain was completed in 1927) and the desire to tell people that this was a landmark, encourage people to want to come here, and want to see it. I found it very interesting that there were a series of postcards that have been collected in this archive, and that people were sending these to people that they knew and they were cherishing these images.

One thing that I am also really interested in (as the group before, Sharon and Robert, talked about) is model making and how we start to use models as a tool to show space and time and the experiences that one may have. What I found fascinating about this image was that they depicted the flow of water. We know water is fluid. We know it is fast and that it is not stationary, but it was really important for them to show the height and the depth of the water in the fountain to capture the essence of the design and experience. Being able to capture that and convey that space and time is something that I find is really important. Creating that model was important to conveying the design to Kate, who commissioned the project and was very heavily involved in the design process. There are many accounts of her working overnight with the engineers to make sure that the height that the water projected from the pipes was correct. There is a high level of detail in the technology, design, and ornamentation, with little design decisions shaping something of this large scale. I think it is really fascinating to think about a fountain and how it can be a public amenity, but also something that draws attention to other issues with water throughout the city.

Another image that I wanted to show was the section drawing. This is mostly inspired by my former student Christina who had trouble finding it and had to draw it from found photos. These sections were all hand drawn, and actually, the original drawings are in a restricted archive, but we have scans that we are able to see here. You can see every detail of every faucet, the hydraulic pumps, and all the piping, and you are able to see how the fountain steps down. That is one thing that you don’t necessarily see when you are out there, how deep it goes down into the ground. There are also three layered pools that contain 1.5 million gallons of water. Just to scale it, that is about 1.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Then, there are three layers of pipes that shoot up water at a rate of about 14,000 gallons of water a minute. I want you to have this perception of what water means, how we use it, and how we experience it. You can see that level of detail in this section, this layering. Again, so many accounts have said that Kate Buckingham was sitting there with the engineers and being involved in the process; I like to think this is a labor of love to honor her brother.

In the images on the other side, which are together, one thing that is really important to me is sharing photos of things that we don’t often see. We just know that things work. We turn on the light, we turn on the faucet, we go to the fountain, and don’t have to think much beyond that. I am constantly asking: What are the inner workings and the things that you wouldn’t normally see? I really appreciated the images that we have here. You can see that there are around 193 jets, 820 wires. There is a two-level control panel room that had all the mechanical and electrical systems that was manually controlled, all underground. One thing I like about this photo is that if you look closely, you can actually see people standing on the outside; that wasn’t something I noticed while visiting the fountain. There are actually engineers that would sit in this room for two 12-hour shifts. There would always be someone down there making sure that everything was functioning properly. This happened manually until 1968, which I think is fairly recent. We know at certain times of year that the fountain is going but never think about the people who work down there, so I appreciated seeing that.

Another aspect that was really interesting was to think about the lighting shows. They worked very closely with the theatrical lighting designer to create those lighting performances. It has been said to be a very involved process, with a lot of mechanisms that had to be constantly checked, constantly be in use in order for visitors to be able to experience the elaborate shows.

I appreciate Dave and Nathaniel for providing access to the restricted boxes. I think it is really important to see these images.

I am very interested in understanding how things work, how we use them, and how things shape our experiences. I hope that after seeing these images that you see this fountain in a new light, and that the next time you go out there and create memories of these spaces, that you have a different perception of how this and other water fountains work. Thank you.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you very much to Nathaniel Parks, JT de la Torre, Dave Hofer, and Jessica Smith from the Art Institute of Chicago for their support ahead of and during this event.