A Cor-Ten Steel Landmark Hiding in Plain Sight

On a particularly hot Saturday afternoon in June, Iker Gil, Julie Michiels, and Dan Wheeler met in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood for a special visit. Two weeks earlier, Iker had inquired about the story behind a house located close to Dan’s residence. He learned that the two-story house, with its signature Cor-Ten steel façade, belongs to 93-year-old architect John “Jack” Bowman, who designed the house, and his 88-year-old wife Leah, a fashion designer and former chairman of SAIC’s Fashion Department. Wanting to know more about the house and knowing that the Bowmans still live in it, Dan arranged the visit. Jack welcomed us at the front door impeccably dressed and we spent the next two hours talking to him and touring the beautifully designed home that included textiles and artifacts from Leah’s extensive global travels.

During the visit, Jack Bowman talked about his education and career as well as the design of the Bowman Residence. The conversation continued in the following months after the interview. What follows is an edited and condensed version of what was discussed.

Architectural Education

My father, who had a close friend that was an engineer, urged me to become an engineer. Shortly after graduating from Lane Tech High School in 1948, an architectural engineer moved on to our block, and so, in the fall of that year, I began taking courses in that subject at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), which, at the time, was located at Navy Pier. Students studying architectural engineering took the same classes for the first two years as those studying straight architecture. Our first assignment in the architecture class was to design a simple house kitchen. The experience was so enjoyable that I decided to become an architect rather than an engineer, but I didn’t mention that to my father.

Soon after, while sitting on a stool in art class, a fellow student, Art Love, told me that Frank Lloyd Wright was coming to the school. When I asked him who Frank Lloyd Wright was, he gave me quite a look. When Wright arrived a couple of weeks later, he walked around the school, looking at the student’s work and talking with the faculty. Then, in the afternoon, the students and faculty assembled standing in a large lecture hall. After all were in place, we parted to make way for Wright who entered from the rear, walking slowly and unsteadily with a cane, while wearing a large black cape. When he reached the front of the room he spun around and faced the assembled with eyes blazing. He stood for a time before saying, “I’ve talked to your teachers, and they know nothing.” The student body exploded in applause and laughter while the faculty stood silent. Wright paused again and then said, “I have seen the student’s work and it is terrible.” Again, the students responded with applause, likely assuming Wright hadn’t seen their work, and the faculty joined in the applause. Thereafter, I couldn’t concentrate on what Wright was saying, wondering if all successful architects behaved as Wright did. As I came to learn, most don’t, but some do.

In those years UIC was just a two-year school and to obtain a full degree, a transfer to the Urbana-Champaign campus was required. When enrolling downstate I decided to go into the straight architecture curriculum but, after a year, I realized that I had made a mistake and switched back to architectural engineering. As intelligent and caring as the young design faculty was—since very few buildings had been constructed following the Great Depression of 1929 and during World War II—they had little experience designing actual buildings. Notable too, as gifted and talented as Frank Lloyd Wright was, many of the students were designing in his style.

We were fortunate to have Frank Kornacker, who had engineered many, if not most, of Mies van der Rohe’s buildings constructed in the United States, as our structural engineering professor. Having switched out of the engineering curriculum for a year, I needed another year to take the courses needed to graduate, but was able to work part time for a semester as an assistant instructor in a concrete engineering class and another doing engineering work for the University of Illinois Small Homes Council. My education was supplemented by three summers of work in a construction gang at the International Harvester Tractor Plant on the city’s South Side, followed by a summer working as an architectural draftsman for the General Services Administration in the old Federal Court House building downtown.

During the time Frank Kornacker was conducting structural engineering classes downstate, he took his students on field trips to steel fabrication plants and to construction sites in the Chicago vicinity. On one occasion, we went to observe the construction of a multistory reinforced concrete building on the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus, and, when the visit concluded, I walked across the campus to where the College of Architecture was located. Upon entering the central drafting room, I saw Mies van der Rohe sitting in front of an architectural model set on a turntable. It was a model of the yet to be constructed Crown Hall building, to which the college of architecture was to be relocated. Mies looked at the model of the glass enclosed building, twisting it around on the turntable to view the interior spaces from various angles. After about twenty minutes, he gave instructions to one of the students standing by and then went to his office. The students quickly dissembled the model, moved a low interior partition a small bit, and then reassembled the model just seconds before Mies to returned to take his place in front of the turntable. I stayed on for about two hours watching Mies refine his design. As I would come to learn, Mies van der Rohe was a far more restrained person than Frank Lloyd Wright.

Early Professional Experience

After my graduation in 1953, I realized that the country was in an economic recession that was seriously affecting the building industry, as well as the architectural profession. While going from office to office, I was well received, but there were no jobs in the offering, and some firms were laying off personnel. It occurred to me that the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architecture might have some leads, but finding they had none, I added my name to the list of those looking for work. A short time later, I received a call at home from Ray Stuermer, a practicing architect and my design instructor in classes I had taken at UIC at Navy Pier. Stuermer, who was then working in the Chicago office of the Raymond Loewy Industrial Design Firm as the design manager in charge of Architecture and Interior Design, offered me a position as a designer.

While spending the next year working as a furniture and interior designer, I had the good fortune of sitting at a drawing table next to John Macsai, a gifted architect who had left the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) architectural firm to join the Raymond Loewy firm. John was a remarkably good natured and friendly fellow, despite having spent his younger years in a Nazi concentration camp in Hungary. Thankfully, he was also quite willing to share architectural knowledge that he had gained while in the United States. After a year at the Loewy firm, I was called into the front office and asked if I would commit to staying with the firm in the coming years. Since I was committed to becoming an architect, I had to say no, and a week later, I was fired. Fortunately, John Macsai was willing and able to obtain a job for me in the design section at SOM. John later entered a series of partnerships, one of which was with Ray Stuermer, and in his practice, he went on to design a wide range of buildings that included high-rise apartment buildings constructed along North Lake Shore Drive.

During my first year at SOM, I worked under a number of the office’s experienced designers, and then in the second year I was assigned the design smaller buildings being overseen by the project manager Jim Hammond. The largest was a five-story parking garage in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was a valued experience to see buildings that I had designed being constructed, and I was not always satisfied with the results. Most interesting during my time at SOM was observing Bruce Graham working with assistants on the design of the Inland Steel Building in downtown Chicago. Graham would go on to design buildings all over the world, including the 110-story Willis (Sears) Tower in the Loop.

Travels in Europe

Near the end of my second year at SOM, I was approached by Howard Dutzi, who was then working in the firm’s structural engineering section, about the possibility of taking a five-month tour of Europe together. We both had degrees in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois, but Howard had stayed on to get his master’s in structural engineering. I agreed to accompany him on the journey, but while receiving a rather low salary, I had little savings to afford the trip. To solve that problem, in the spring, I got a job driving a taxi on weekends but, when Bruce Graham learned of it, he near doubled my salary and I quit the taxi job.

In July of 1956, Howard and I boarded an ocean liner bound for England, where we shared a cabin with six other fellows at the very bottom of the ship. Soon after arriving in London and touring the town, we purchased the bicycles that we used to cycle around sections of Europe. Having rather small travel budgets, our plan was to stay at youth hostels and take our bikes on boats, trains, and buses when traveling long distances. Howard and I were most interested in visiting the cathedrals, castles, and other significant buildings we had studied in our architectural history classes in college.

After cycling around southern England, we crossed over to France, and moved on through other countries in northern Europe, including the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway among others. We then went on to Germany, where we visited Howard’s relatives, both in Berlin and in the small town of Zeutern, just north of Stuttgart. Following that, we traveled around southern Germany, but after selling our bikes in Munich, we parted ways. Howard headed back west to explore southern Europe, and I went east with hopes of making it down to Greece. I hitchhiked to Innsbruck in Austria and then took the train on to Vienna, where I met some sophisticated and friendly fellow travelers in the hostel, two of which had just escaped from Hungary during the Revolution. With hope of getting to Greece, I traveled by train, down to what was then the country of Yugoslavia, and on to the city of Zagreb in Croatia. Having spent considerable time in that fine city, I came to the realization that I didn’t have the time or money to go down to Greece. With that in mind, I traveled by train south to Sarajevo, west to the coastal city of Split, then up the Adriatic Sea coast, mostly by boat, to Trieste in Italy. Soon after, I met up with Howard on our ocean liner back to the US where we traded stories about our travels alone.

Studying with and Working for Mies van der Rohe

A few months after returning to Chicago, I joined the office of George Fred Keck and his brother William to work on the design of residential buildings. George Fred was best known for his design of the “House of Tomorrow” exhibited at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Over time, I had become Increasingly interested in the work of Mies van der Rohe and, in the fall of 1957, I was able to get part time off from the Keck office to enroll in the graduate program at IIT, where Mies was the director of the College of Architecture and teaching the first year of the master’s program. Some of my fellow students were from the Chicago area, but most were from Northern Europe: Germany, England, and Ireland. Mies’s first assignment to students was to design a house for ourselves, and we were given about two months to finish the work. After our drawings were submitted, Mies reviewed them all in class without making comment until he had completed his review. Following that he said, “I just wanted to get to know you.” Though Mies was a man of few words, the words spoke were of significance. The remainder of the academic year was spent designing a courthouse residence, building a precise model of the design, and then studying the arrangement of the interior elements, all of which was subject to Mies’s close review. He considered the articulation of the spaces within a building’s structure to be of great significance architecturally.

In the fall of 1958, after the first year at IIT, I applied for a job in Mies’s office and was accepted. During my early years there, I worked on various commissions with Gene Summers, who had assisted Mies on the design of the Seagram’s Building in New York City. One of our projects was the design of the exterior of the Dirksen Courthouse on the east side of the Chicago Federal Center. I also worked directly with Mies on the design of the building’s ground floor interior and exterior. During this period, I also spent time on Saturdays meeting with my thesis advisor, Myron Goldsmith, in order to complete work on my master’s degree. Myron, who had studied with and worked for Mies, went on to design a great number of significant projects for SOM, including the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

At the time I was working for Mies, it was late in his life, and when a commission came into his office, it was assigned to a small group who developed a building design and then built a model for Mies’s review. After spending considerable time reviewing the model, Mies would either say “why don’t you try something else?” or “why don’t you try this?” and would then recommend various refinements. After going through this process many times, when Mies was satisfied, he would say, “Ja, we can do that,” which was cause for celebration. Mies’s attention would then go on to addressing all the building’s significant architectural details.

Every few months, Mies invited the office staff to an evening at his apartment on the Near North Side, where his refrigerator would be packed full of bottles of Heineken beer, which we drank while he slowly sipped his dry martinis. Given that Mies would sit in silence in his large sofa chair, unless asked questions, I spent time in the afternoon putting together a list. Whether asked about his army service as a low-grade officer in World War I or his resistance to the Nazis’ and Hitler’s constraints on modernism in art and architecture, Mies was always forthcoming. When questioned about the work of other architects, unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, he had nothing negative to say. Mies had low deep voice and spoke with a deep German accent and many of his responses were of a philosophical nature. On one occasion, he talked of having studied over a hundred philosophy books in his younger years and had, over time, narrowed them down to just ten books. When one of my colleagues asked for the titles of the ten books, Mies refused and said that you had to read the full hundred to fully understand the ten.

More Travels in Europe

By 1965, the urge to travel had returned, and it was a desire shared by my wife Leah, who had obtained her degree in Fashion Design at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and was working as a fashion designer. In May of that year we, together with our daughter Michelle, boarded an ocean liner to England, where we picked up a previously ordered Volkswagen Bug in London. Not having driven a car for some time, it was difficult finding one’s way while driving on the left side of London’s angled streets with a map on your lap. We headed north through England to Scotland, crossed over to Northern Ireland, and on down to Dublin, where we spent time with Cathal O’Neill and his engaging young family. Cathal, who was with me in the class with with Mies and later worked in his office, was then practicing architecture and teaching at the University College of Dublin School of Architecture. Cathal, who continued his teaching and became the head of the school between 1973 and 1996, went on to inspire a generation of young architects, some of whom went on to international acclaim.

After leaving Dublin, we headed back to southwest England and visited various architectural sites on our way to the Strait of Dover, where we crossed over to northern France. Every morning, in addition to country maps and a stack of travel guides, I consulted Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture to plan out the day’s travel route. Given that the Volkswagen had quite a small trunk in the front of the car, we used a roof-rack with a waterproof canvas cover to carry our luggage. While traveling, Michelle sat in the back seat next to a stack of her Puffin Books.

Having spent considerable time in the north during my first trip to Europe, I was most interested in exploring the south. After spending enjoyable days in Paris and then traveling down through France to Spain, we spent four days in Madrid before heading further south along the Costa del Sol, and up the east coast to the truly great city of Barcelona. Most memorable were the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia and the apartment buildings designed by the architect Antoni Gaudi (1852–1926). It was a zig-zag tour from there: across southern France, up though Switzerland, on to the Netherlands, then over to northern Germany, where we passed through East Germany to Berlin. There, we met up with a couple of my colleagues from Mies’s office, and then headed south to meet another in Munich. Our goal was to get down to Greece and even on to Egypt. After time in Austria, in August we went south through Yugoslavia, and two days later were driving past Mount Olympus on our way to Athens. What a wonderful city! We spent near to ten days in the city, up on the Acropolis viewing the Parthenon and other nearby buildings, visiting the National Archaeological Museum, and dining in the splendid outdoor cafes in the Plaka. Then, we headed west, touring various archaeological sites along the way.

The destination was the coastal city of Patras where Leah’s father, John Murges, had lived before immigrating to Chicago, and our intention was to visit with relatives still in the city. We were shocked to learn that John had come over to greet us, then fallen ill, and was in the hospital in Athens. With that, we drove straight back to the city and found him seriously ill in a private room under doctor’s care in Athens top hospital. As Leah spent the daytime hours with her father, Michelle and I began exploring the city, the surrounding areas, and the nearby islands. When Leah’s father began to improve, our mission was to fly him back to Chicago, but there was problem. The doctors caring for John Murges would not permit his release unless he would be accompanied on the plane by a doctor from Athens. We were concerned. Where would we find such a doctor? But we were fortunate to have a friend in the city: Emmanuel Glynadokis came to Chicago to study architecture at IIT and, after receiving his degree, he joined Mies’s office. He was a serious young architect and, during his time in Chicago, Leah and I formed a close friendship with him. We were able to locate him in Athens, and he in turn found a recent graduate from medical school who was willing to travel with Leah’s father to Chicago. In the years following, Emmanuel stayed on in Athens, where he developed a strong architectural practice and became a lead professor in the architecture school at the National Technical University.

Soon after, John Murges was safely on his way and Leah, Michelle, and I made a short, but pleasant tour of some of the Greek Islands, with the island of Mykonos as one of the most engaging. Remarkably, while there sitting in a sidewalk café, I looked up and saw John Macsai and his wife walking down the avenue with a group from a tour boat that had docked a while before. After talking with John, we learned that he had just spent a few months contributing his talents to an archaeological dig on the Greek mainland.

Upon returning to Athens, we called Leah’s family in Chicago and asked them to welcome Michelle home at O’Hare Airport and then gave them the date of travel together with the flight number. Her school semester had begun and she was looking forward to returning. With Michelle safely on her way, we took a plane to and from the island of Crete and, after returning, headed west through the cities of Corinth and Messini to Patras where we then boarded a boat that took us, and our VW, over to Brindisi in Italy.

After visiting the ruins of Pompeii and the City of Rome in mid-November, we spent days in Florence and in Venice, before heading north though Germany, and over to the city of Ijmuiden on the west coast of the Netherlands. It was there where we put ourselves and the VW on a freighter bound for the United States. After docking on the East Coast, our VW Bug brought us back to Chicago and went on to transport us around reliably in the years following. However, one evening, near to fifteen years after returning to the city, I heard a rumbling sound coming from behind the car and found the bottom of the car had rusted and rotted out, and the battery was being dragged along the street by the electric cables. That VW Bug served us well.

Designing and Building Our Home

Upon returning to Chicago, I rejoined Mies’s office and, not long after, Leah began teaching fashion design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she later become the Department Chairperson. My first intention was to buy an older house and remodel it to meet our needs, but Leah convinced me to design and build a new house. Since we had spent nearly all our money on the tour of Europe, the first objective was to save enough to buy a vacant lot on which to build the home. Lincoln Park, in the 1960s and 1970s, was not what it is today: Dutch elm disease had taken down many, if not most, of the street trees, and many of the neighborhood homes were in poor condition.

After accumulating some savings, I began scouting around for vacant land and found a small lot on Dickens Avenue. The center unit of three rowhouses, which had been built three-stories high above English basements near the end of the nineteenth century, had gone vacant and had been demolished in the 1950s. I offered the owner $10,000 for the property, but he wanted $11,000, which is what we paid. During the 1970s, while saving money to build a house, I became a member of the Lincoln Central Neighbor Association, which was then concerned with the planning of Oz Park, to be built a short block west of our lot on a site of about 15 acres, which was then covered with dilapidated housing that was being demolished. The General Superintendent of the Park District, Ed Kelly, wanted to fill the park with baseball fields to increase the number of his patronage workers, but a large part of the Neighborhood Association wanted trees, plants, and a playground. I joined them and a group of us went to the Park District to confront Kelly and we came away with a fairly good compromise.

Before beginning the house design, I made an assessment of the site conditions, which was mainly the foundations of the two 12-inch-thick brick party walls at each side of the lot. After digging down, I found the party walls to be supported on rough stone foundation walls, extending down about 6 feet to stone footings. With a two-story house over a 5-foot crawl space being all we could afford, the two floors and roof were structured with steel beams spanning between the party walls and with wood joists spanning between the steel beams.

Much of my time in Mies’s office was spent working on steel framed buildings with steel and glass façades, and I wanted to use those same materials in our front and back facades. During that time, while working on the house design, the Chicago Civic Center Building was being constructed with glass and Cor-Ten steel façades and, soon after its completion, Pablo Picasso’s Cor-Ten steel sculpture was put in place on the Civic Center Plaza. A major property of that type of steel is that it eliminates the need for painting after it forms a stable external layer of rust. After about six months of oxidation, the Cor-Ten steel façades of the house developed a rich dark rusty variegated color. Years later, I installed curbs of Cor-Ten steel plate around the front yard garden areas. The front and rear façades were constructed using three Cor-Ten steel sections that spanned between, and were supported by, the party walls. While working on some of Mies’s projects, I consulted with a steel fabricator on the city’s South Side and used that contact to check out the steel construction details for our house.

The basic house plan, which was established early on, places the living/dining area at the north end of the ground floor, facing the rear garden court, with the kitchen and entrance vestibule at the south end. The spiral stairway rises to a skylighted central room on the second floor containing bookshelves and a line of closets. The primary bedroom is to the north end and an office/bedroom is on the south. With an entrance vestibule on the ground floor set just 6 inches above grade, the crawl space below, with less than 5 feet of headroom, is devoted to storage space.

Construction drawings were developed over a period of years, during which time we were saving the money to build the house. By 1979 the amount of money we saved, plus the amount we could borrow, totaled a little over $80,000, whereas the estimated building cost was near to $100,000. Anxious to get construction underway, I deleted portions of the construction work from the contract, with the intention of undertaking it myself in the evenings and on weekends. That included building the kitchen, fabricating and installing the hardwood grills below the ceiling at the north and south sides of the circular stairway, finishing out the up and downstairs closets, and doing all the interior painting. Some of that work was done before the basic house was fully constructed. When first entering Mies’s office, from time to time, I worked in the model shop and gained experience in the use of both hand and power tools. As soon as the drywall was installed on the wall studs in the north bedroom, I purchased a power saw and other such tools to turn the space into a workshop.

Exterior work that I was undertaking included the installation of the brick paved front walk, the paving area in the rear courtyard, as well as the eight-foot-wide wood gate that opened on to a diagonal alley. Most challenging was the landscaping work in the front yard and rear court. After visiting landscape nurseries in the vicinity, I came up with a plan for tree placement that included three honey locusts in the front yard, together with rear court planting of three green ash on the east side, two white oaks on the west, and a sugar maple at the north end. Having found a tree nursery that would deliver the trees on a Monday morning, I began digging holes till midnight on the previous Friday and Saturday evenings, then through the night on Sunday, although I took a short nap in one of the holes early on Monday morning. Trees with trunks, which were of 3 to 4 inches in caliper, required holes of at least 4 to 5 feet in diameter and roughly 3 feet deep. After the nursery delivered the trees on Monday, placed the tree balls in the holes, and put soil around the tree balls, I went home to sleep.

In the weeks that followed, I added high shrubs under the honey locusts in the front yard, as well as understory trees and Japanese maples in the rear court. Clearly, the grounds were overplanted, but it worked out in the years that followed. When branches of two of the honey locusts in the front yard began banging against the windows of the neighbor houses, they had to be removed. In the rear court, two of the green ash trees were killed by the emerald ash borer insects, and after the third green ash grew far over the property line to reach sunlight, it had to be removed to make way for construction of a larger apartment building to the east. After one of the white oak trees died, the rear garden looked fairly well balanced.

BOWMAN RESIDENCE DRAWING SET

PROFESSIONAL RESUME OF JACK BOWMAN, ARCHITECT

Education

1962–1964
Completion of graduate studies leading to a Master of Architecture Degree with Myron Goldsmith as thesis advisor

1957–1958
Graduate studies in architecture under Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology

1948–1953
Studies at the University of Illinois leading to a Bachelor of Science Degree in Architectural Engineering

Professional Experience

2005–Present
Research and Writing

1995–2002
Design consultant to Lohan Associates

1982–1995
Lohan Associates
Principal and Vice President for Design

1969–1982
Fujikawa, Conterato, Lohan & Associates
Associate Principal

1958–1969
Office of Mies van der Rohe
Associate

Mies van der Rohe
Assistant to Mies van der Rohe

1957–1958
Keck & Keck
Architectural Designer

1954–1956
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Project Designer

1953–1954
Raymond Loewy Associates
Product, Furniture, and Interior Designer

Teaching Experience

1995–2005
Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture
Thesis Professor, Graduate School

1989–1994
Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture
Thesis Advisor, Graduate School

1980–1982
Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture
Studio Professor, 5^th Year Architecture

1978–1980
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Visiting Designer

Professional Registration

2002–2014
National Council of Registration Boards

1955–2014
State of Illinois

Professional Organization

2006–Present
Member, Society of Architectural Historians

2002–Present
Emeritus Member, American Institute of Architects

1985–2004
Member, Chicago Architecture Club

1970–2002
Member, American Institute of Architects

Convocation Address

1996
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, School of Architecture

Awards

2002
American Institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter
2002 Distinguished Service Award