The Unknown Architecture of Chicago

Chicago Architects was intended as a counter to the exhibition 100 Years of Chicago Architecture, an exhibit devoted to the work of the First and Second Schools of Chicago Architecture and the work of Mies Van der Rohe. Chicago Architects was intended to show the diversity of work being done in Chicago during this same period. Chicago Architects was reviewed in the New York Times by their architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable who wrote, “What we are dealing with is revisionist history. [...] The aim of the sponsoring Chicago architects—Laurence Booth, Stuart E. Cohen, Stanley Tigerman and Benjamin Weese—reinforced by Stuart Cohen's knowledgeable catalogue, is to explode and expand the doctrinaire view of the Chicago contribution.”

In the usual discussion of American architecture, only the so-called "skyscraper" is mentioned. No one seems to pay any attention to anything else.... However, there is an American architecture of great value, quite apart from ... skyscrapers.

—H.P. Berlage, 1912

The frame has become the catalyst of an architecture, but . .. it has also become architecture.

—Colin Rowe, 1956

When histories are written to prove theories, that which fits neither the theory nor the historical narrative will be discarded. The histories which now shape our perception of twentieth-century architecture were written, at least in part, to prove that the structural-functional architecture of Chicago-Dessau derivation was the “genuine and legitimate” architecture of our time. These histories have merrily tidied up reality by rejecting not only avant-garde works but actual mainstreams of architectural practice when they occurred at either the “wrong” time or “wrong” place.

Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement, first published in 1936 and uniformly regarded as a classic, is responsible for many of our accepted notions of early twentieth-century architecture. These notions now form the prejudices of a collective architectural unconscious.

Pioneers of the Modern Movement was presented as a history but it was really a polemic. The didactic intent is in no way hidden. In the first chapter, Pevsner proclaims that his “chief aim is in fact to prove that the new style, the genuine and legitimate style of our century, was achieved by 1914” and that “this new style ... because it is a genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion is universal.”

For Pevsner, Chicago’s significance was the development of the skyscraper, and his Chicago pioneers were Jenney, Holabird & Roche, Burnham & Root, Wright (whose “outstanding importance lies in the fact that nobody else had by 1904 come so near to the style of today in his actual buildings”) and Sullivan. “It was left to Sullivan to pay attention to the voice of steel.”

It was this Chicago development that Pevsner connects to European and particularly to German work that was to follow. He writes, “Germany alone ... responds so appreciatively to the adventurous achievements of the first pioneers that the recognized style of our age could emerge from their individual experiments.“ While Pevsner’s book doesn’t deal with work done after 1914, he invents the continuity between Chicago and Germany. This continuity was established and amplified by Sigfried Giedion.

Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, of 1941, has been accepted as the definitive history and explanation of the new tradition in architecture. His discussion of Chicago’s architecture added Iittle to Pevsner’s historical thesis. What Giedion did was to divert attention away from Chicago architecture between the turn of the century and the arrival of Mies van der Rohe, thirty-eight years later, with the exception of Wright.

Giedion writes, “At the very moment when the Chicago School gained a mastery of the new means which it had created, its further development and influence were abruptly choked off ...“ The abrupt end and the hiatus that followed, according to Giedion, lasted just slightly less than Sullivan predicted when he wrote, “The damage wrought to this country by the Chicago World’s Fair will last half a century.“

Giedion writes, “Mies van der Rohe’s skyscraper apartments, now growing in the most prominent parts of Chicago, revive-after a dismal interval-the tradition of the Chicago School of the 1880s.“ For Giedion the one exception to this 45-year hiatus was the Gropius and Meyer entry to the Tribune Tower competition of 1922. Describing their design, Giedion writes, “The whole plan seems an outgrowth of the Chicago School, but actually Chicago windows and the Chicago skyscrapers were unknown in Europe. The coincidence... shows that the Chicago School really was permeated by the spirit of the age.“ In this way Giedion secures the connection between Chicago building and German rationalism suggested by Pevsner.

Giedion’s perception of architectural significance became an outline fleshed out in scholarly detail by Carl Condit in The Chicago School of Architecture (1964). Like Giedion, Condit states that, first engineers, then the Chicago School architects, “developed structural forms that pointed toward organic architecture appropriate to a mechanized industrial culture.“

Condit, who is primarily documenting the history of a technological development, writes, “The most thorough treatment of the School in its full historical setting appeared in Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture.“ Condit, like Giedion, sees the years between the wars as being essentially empty of significant Chicago architecture, with the exception of the Prairie School and the Gropius and Meyer Tribune Tower design. Of this Condit writes, “The brief contact that grew out of the Tribune competition proved to be abortive at the time, but twenty-five years later the principles of the Chicago School were unconsciously revived on such a scale as to constitute the essential character of most of the commercial and public building of our time.“

This point of view was appended years later in Condit’s two volume study Chicago 1910–29 and Chicago 1930–70: Building, Planning, and Urban Technology, published in 1973-74. However, the orthodox view of Chicago architecture was so canonized that the impact of other points of view which began to appear in the mid-1960s have yet to revise history.

Architect Oswald Grube in the 1973 exhibition catalogue 100 Jahre Architektur in Chicago, Kontinuitat von Struktur und Form (100 years of Chicago Architecture; Continuity of Structure and Form) states, “There were few meaningful architectural events in Chicago in the long years between the depressing development which was introduced by the World's Fair of 1893 and the beginning of the work of Mies van der Rohe at IIT in 1938.“

What may be true is that the architecture of this period does not primarily concern the technology of frame construction or its aesthetic expression. But the implied myopia of suggesting firstly, that that is the sole dimension for the historical and aesthetic judgment of architecture, and secondly that architecture that begins from other ideas either did not occur in Chicago or was not influential, must finally be seen for what it is.

The result of this point of view was to systematically excise ideas and work that did not fit the notion of a tradition that passed from Chicago in the 1880s to Germany in the 1920s to Chicago in 1938, with the arrival of Mies van der Rohe.

This notion of lineage and tradition would in part explain the exclusion of George Fred Keck’s 1934 Crystal House from histories of the Chicago School. Keck’s glass house at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition was one of the few buildings of its time, unlike Mies van der Rohe’s purely formalist work in the 1930s, where progressive structural and material technology, their resultant form and symbolic content—the evocation of life in a “machine age“—coexist at the same extraordinary level of intention and realization.

That the Crystal House should be totally neglected historically suggests the difficulties of Giedion’s thesis. Keck was not an obscure figure at the time. Not only was he the first head of the architecture department of the New Bauhaus when it began in Chicago in 1937 under Moholy-Nagy, but he knew Giedion personally.

Yet, while the Crystal House would have been acceptable to Giedion’s history as an avant-garde European occurrence of 1934, its construction in Chicago before 1938 makes it impossible to present it as part of the European reestablishment of Chicago’s architectural traditions.

Ultimately it has become impossible to talk about or to think of Chicago architecture apart from its canonic interpretation; impossible to see a Chicago architecture other than the one continually enunciated; impossible to believe that there might have been “meaningful architectural events“ in Chicago between 1893 and 1938.

The importance of Giedion’s Chicago architects is unquestioned, indeed unchallenged. That Chicago was more, was a place of broader ideas, in no way detracts from the achievements of these architects. It puts them in a broader perspective.

It is not really the purpose here to reassess the work of the two Chicago Schools, but to present work by Chicago architects that is mostly unknown today because it represents a diversity of formal, spatial, symbolic, and technological ideas which cannot be discussed as the work of a school.

This is work that does not relate either in ideology or chronological sequence to the cleansed history of Chicago architecture. This diversity of excellent, often hybridized and often original work, hidden from view by opinion and neglect, is an important part of Chicago’s architectural history.

The invisibility of Chicago architecture that does not begin from engineering considerations suggests not only the editing of history but the existence of an ideological separation along the lines of structural vs. formal, spatial and consciously symbolic issues. This separation is well known but little understood, and because it is a difficult critical issue, it is almost never addressed.

“Why,“ asks Colin Rowe in his seminal but long overlooked article “Chicago Frame,“ “has Chicago’s greatest architect (Wright) remained so unbeguiled by Chicago’s first great architectural discovery?“ Rowe suggests that this is partially because steel-frame construction began as a fact imposed by external conditions and was accepted by Chicago architects as a commercial necessity rather than cultivated as an idea about architecture—a universal ordering principle and generalized solution applicable to all types of buildings. The structural frame as a fact was the solution to the particular problem of the commercial building and these buildings were “the logical instruments of investment“ and “for the taste of the time ... equipment rather than architecture.“

Rowe writes, “For Chicago where the frame possessed a more specific and practical function, there was no reason to deduce for it a general and ideal one“ and therefore, he concludes, no way to see the attendant possibilities of the independence of space and structure as realized in the free plan. He continues, “For these reasons it was around the alternative program for the residence, conceived as a unique problem, that idealist sentiment was able to effect a coherent expression.“ It was left to Mies to build in Chicago the true symbolic counterpoint to Wright’s work in Oak Park, for as Rowe observes, “the significance of both is now heightened by the contrast ... the irreconcilable opposites are juxtaposed. Architecture as private experience and architecture as public order, architecture as radical dissent and architecture as equally radical orthodoxy.“

While the characteristics that Rowe sees juxtaposed in Chicago are “private experience“ and “public order,“ they might also be taken to be the characteristics of romanticism and classicism. Where classicism imposes abstract perfection, “romanticism is an inclusive kind of realism, lyric in form and dramatic in content...“ Surely America’s democracy was the greatest of all romantic experiments, for an essential part of romanticism is “the worth of the individual and of his testimony.“

The architectural corollary of American democracy was not only the sheltering, individualistic forms of Wright’s architecture, but also the embracement of pluralism, the embracement of an architecture that adopts or generates diverse forms based on their functional as well as symbolic and emotional content.

Chicago’s unknown architecture, with a few exceptions, could be characterized as romantic-setting it apart from the pragmatism of the first Chicago School and the classicism of the second. Significantly, this architecture is almost entirely small structures, “architecture of private experience,“ mostly houses, schools, and churches, rather than larger corporate or government commissions.

The object here is to act as a catalyst to the growing opinion that revisionist histories of Chicago’s place in twentieth century architecture are long overdue and to present work that represents sensibilities and intellectual ideas not usually associated with Chicago.

While the buildings selected are intended to indicate the range and variety of Chicago’s unknown architecture, the selection is narrow and chosen primarily for idea and aesthetic merit, formal rather than just technological significance. Clearly more has been omitted than has been included. The focus is largely historical, for it should be left to others, at a later date, to finally evaluate the work of architects practicing in Chicago today.

The selection of buildings to represent Chicago’s other traditions was and will continue to be a source of discussion and disagreement, for the criteria by which these works merit attention is far from unified.

That this is perhaps symptomatic of the visual ideals this work represents is suggested by Jacques Barzun, author of Classic Romantic and Modern, who writes, “As E.M. Forster has said, history is a series of messes. From these, temporary and local achievements stand out like isolated peaks ... In classicism, the peak is the establishment of fixed order for a small class by the exclusion of real but disturbing facts. In romanticism the peaks are individual achievements, serviceable to others not by enforced imitation but by free choice. Consequently romanticism is rich in successes and proportionately rich in failures. Who tries for much stands to gain or lose much. No concealment in mediocrity is possible even if desire for concealment were present.“

FEATURED ARCHITECTS IN THE CHICAGO ARCHITECTS EXHIBITION

David Adler, Charles B. Atwood, Thomas Hall Beeby, Richard M. Bennett, Gilmer Vardiman Black, Lawrence O. Booth, Irving H. Bowman, Monroe Bowman, Francis Barry Byrne, Henry Ives Cobb, Stuart E. Cohen, Edward Dupaquier Dart, Henry Dubin, Howard T. Fisher, R. Buckminster Fuller, Hugh Mackie Gordon Garden, Michael Gelick, Bertrand Goldberg, Bruce J. Graham, Emery Stanford Hall, John Augur Holabird, William Holabird, George Fred Keck, William Keck, Philip Brooks Maher, James L. Nagle, Walter A. Jr. Netsch, William C. Pereira, Dwight H. Perkins, Lawrence Bradford Perkins, Allen B. Pond, Irving K. Pond, Andrew N. Rebori, Martin Roche, John Wellborn Root, Kenneth A. Schroeder, Paul Schweikher, Alfred Phillips Shaw, Howard Van Doren Shaw, Robert Bruce Tague, Stanley Tigerman, Mies Ludwig Van Der Rohe, Benjamin Weese, Harry M. Weese, Philip Jr. Will, Frank Llyd Wright, and Ralph Park Youngren.

Exhibition Schedule

The Cooper Union
New York City, New York
February 27–March 22, 1976

Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
March 26–April 23, 1976

The Time-Life Building
Chicago, Illinois
May 1–June 20, 1976

Illinois Arts Center
State of Illinois
July and August, 1976

The Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, Illinois
September, 1976

The University of California
Berkeley, California
October, 1976

The exhibition was designed by the Center For Advances Research in Design, with art direction by John Massey. Designers were Robert and William Kaulfuss, Suzanne Zoric, and Randall Holfield.