Chicago Then and Now...

I was looking through some of my old photographs last month and came up with this one . It was made in 1985 of the old Florsheim shoe factory in the west Loop across the street from Union Station. I've admired this building ever since I began paying attention to architecture back in the seventies. It embodied the very essence of Modernism, and looked as if it could have been an early work of the great International style architect, Walter Gropius. In fact, down to the Helvetica font that proclaims its occupants, it bears a resemblance to the 1925 building Gropius built for the famous school of art, architecture and design, the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany.

That building was a ground breaking work of architecture. Stripped to it bare essentials, the Dessau Bauhaus is an unadorned box of brick and glass. Gropius's tremendous glass curtain wall served two functions: to provide the interior with as much natural light as possible, and to reveal the building's structural elements, Gropius's response to the axiom promoted by the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, form following function in the purest sense.

Until now, I never did much research on the Florsheim building, and it has for the most part been overlooked as an important work of Chicago architecture. But I knew for certain that it could not have been a contemporary of the Bauhaus building, as we simply did not build buildings in Chicago that looked like that back in the twenties.

Nevertheless it is a significant Chicago building as it is, as far as I can tell, the first International Style building to have been built in downtown Chicago. Its architect was Alfred P. Shaw, one of the most prolific, if not well known of Chicago architects, whose career spanned six decades in this city. Like his contemporary and one time partner, Charles Foster Murphy, Shaw had a chameleon-like career.  Both architects' buildings, while not showing a strong personal style, nevertheless represent the eras in which they were built to a tee, some of them enough in fact to be icons of those very different eras.

Would you believe me for example if I told you that the architect of the Florsheim building is the same man who gave us the Merchandise Mart and Pittsfield Building? In the twenties, Shaw became junior partner in the firm of Graham Anderson Probst & White, (successor firm to D. H. Burnham and Company), and in that capacity nudged that firm which specialized in eclectic, neo Classical and Renaissance styles (like the Field Museum and Wrigley Building), to the more up-to-date Art Deco. Perhaps his finest work from that era is the LaSalle Building, the signature of which is classic setback exterior, and one of the greatest interiors of the city, a walkway that transverses the building providing an indoor passage between LaSalle and Clark Streets. If you use your imagination, you can almost imagine Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing across the two bridges that cross over the walkway.

The LaSalle Building was completed in 1931 during the height of the Depression. Commissions were sparse that decade and continued to be during World War II. Shaw left GAP&W in 1936 and founded his own firm with C.F. Murphy, Shaw, Naess & Murphy. In 1939 that firm designed the Telenews Theater, which would later become the Loop Theater, just south of the Chicago Theater. The two movie houses could not have been more different, the palacious, baroque Chicago, and the very modest Loop, which in its efficient, clean line simplicity, may very well have been the paradigm for what was to come after the war.

In the intervening years Shaw left Naess and Murphy which became one of the prominent firms in Chicago in the fifties designing buildings inspired by the jet age with their boxy shapes and arriculated aluminum facades, exemplified by the Prudential Building, the one building of the firm still standing and not remodeled beyond recognition.

The Prudential is credited as the first major building in downtown Chicago in over thirty years, but the 1949 Florsheim factory predates it by five years. Shaw, now partnered with architect Carl Metz and mechanical engineer John Dolio, created a building that was groundbreaking in its own right. Its rugged, stripped down simplicity set the standard for Chicago architecture for years to come. The building's most distinct feature is its continuous band of cantilevered windows which wrapped around three sides of the structure, emphasizing the horizontal sweep of the building. It was a factory after all and its design, like Gropius's Dessau Bauhaus, is the pinnacle of form following function. The Florsheim building exemplified the principles of the Bauhaus which placed a high value on the merging of art and technology. To them there should be no distinction between a shoe factory, an apartment building or an art museum. This principle would be most boldly displayed on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, planned and designed by one of the most famous exponents of the Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. On that campus, save for his masterpiece, Crown Hall, there is little or no architectural distinction between the buildings in fact, sometimes the significance of a building is in inverse relation to its design. Case in point: Mies's tiny shoebox chapel has been compared to a garage, while his massive boiler plant at the south end of the campus has been likened to a contemporary cathedral, complete with clerestory windows, and a spire (the smokestack).

In contrast, the Florsheim factory because of its no frills design, looks like a factory, albeit a very elegant one, which could be one reason it never got much attention. It wasn't until the next decade when apartment buildings, office buildings and art museums began to look like factories, that people began paying attention to the International Style in this country.

Here's an artist's rendering of the building, sans the cantilevered windows, from the time of its construction:

As the Art Deco buildings that Shaw designed for Graham Anderson Probst & White in the twenties and thirties personified that era, the buildings he deigned with his own firm, Shaw Metz & Dalio personified the bold, International Style influence of the fifties, and the less than inspired post International Style gargantuanism that dominated Chicago architecture in the sixties. In that vein, SM&D is responsible for some of the worst architecture this city has ever seen including the original McCormick Place exhibition hall along the lakefront, and the enormously flawed Robert Taylor Homes housing project. 

SM&D's McCormick Place was destroyed by a massive fire in 1967 and the Taylor Homes vanished in the first decade of this century along with most of the high rise housing projects in this city. Most people would argue that the city is better off without both.

Shaw's Florsheim Building lives on today, however in a much altered state. As much of the Loop and its environs have become converted to residential properties, the Florsheim, whose original occupants sold the building in the nineties, went condo. The firm of Pappageorge Haymes Ltd., itself a hugely successful enterprise if not a household name is responsible for the conversion. 

As you can see, the building has been altered nearly beyond recognition, but you do sort of get the feeling of the strong horizontal components that defined the original building. But no one would ever confuse the current iteration of the building with Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus or the International Style which for better and worse, defined so much of twentieth century architecture.

Which in my book, is a bit of a shame.

Progress, 1963 Style

Courtesy of my Facebook friend Gregory Jenkins, a Chicago based architect, here is a link to a 2013 post on the blog "Historic Indianapolis.com"  that describes along with a heart rendering photo, the demolition of the French Second Empire Style Marion County Courthouse building in 1963. Behind the doomed building in the photo is the MCC's successor, the Indianapolis City County Building, The newer building is a typical example of the International Style or Mid-Century Modern, the style of design that would dominate commercial architecture all over the world for a generation.

The post doesn't tip the hand of its author's opinion over which building is better, or whether it was wrong to demolish the older building. Instead, it invites readers to decide in the comment section. In stark contrast to a couple social media groups on Chicago history I belong to, I was mildly surprised at the measured tone of the comments, which seem exclusively written by Indianapolites, (or whatever the proper term is for people from Indianapolis). For the most part, while regretting the loss of the old building, the comments were favorable to the newer building, One writer, a long time resident of the city wrote this:

I will preface this by saying that I, too regret that the old courthouse couldn’t have somehow been saved or adapted. In the late 1950s, my dad taught night school in another now long-demolished building across from the courthouse. His memories of the courthouse are not very nostalgic. He remembers it as a grimy, run-down building in a dangerous neighborhood. I don’t consider it’s demolition necessarily a crime or that the city planners were short-sighted as such. The new city-county building was simply a part of what was happening across the country at that time as cities expanded and modernized. My mom worked in the city-county building when I was a kid and I used to love going down there with dad to visit at lunch. Especially remember the great view from the observation deck. Like some of the other posters have mentioned, I have a spot in my heart for mid-century modern. It was part of the fabric of my background growing up. Much as I am sure people growing up in Indianapolis in the late 19th Century had a spot for the old courthouse in their hearts.

The writer has a very good point, being able to look at the situation from a 1963 rather than a 2016 perspective. My guess is that he and I are roughly the same age as both of us can remember a time when the general attitude toward architecture in this country was simple: the newer the better. That opinion changed drastically in the past half-century, but why?

Keep in mind that the folks running the show during the fifties and sixties lived through the hard times of the Great Depression and World War II. The mood of the general public of the time was to move forward rather than look backward. Furthermore, like all big cities in the US, here in Chicago, there were no sizable commercial building projects between 1934 and the construction of the Prudential Building, completed in 1955. The highly influential Mies van der Rohe 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings were built in 1951. Not only did the construction boom of the fifties and sixties stimulate the economy and create new jobs, but new architecture, which at the time meant steel and glass boxes built in the style that Mies and others pioneered, symbolized forward thinking and embodied that virtue that drove architects, planners and politicians alike, progress. The general public bought into the idea that progress in whatever form it took, was a good thing.

From a 1963 perspective, the photograph in the Indianapolis blog post would have symbolized welcome progress. I can guess that only a handful of people in Indy mourned the loss of the MCC at the time, just as few in Chicago mourned the loss of Louis Sullivan's Garrick Theater and Old Stock Exchange buildings.

Of course progress is a double edged sword. As Nelson Algren wrote in his book, Chicago, City on the Make:

Chicago lives like a drunken El-rider who cannot remember where he got on nor at what station he wants to get off. The sound of the wheels moving below satisfies him that he is making great progress.

It would take years of tearing down historic old buildings, and replacing them with mostly second rate, character-less, knock off Mies, Mid Century Modern piles of crap, before most people began to realize the mistake we were making. It took true visionaries like Richard Nickel and Jane Jacobs who were willing to swim upstream against the current of popular opinion to show us the folly of our ways. By the time folks were ready to listen to them, it was too late, and much of the charm, character and history of our cities was lost.

But not entirely. Jacobs fought, and won against New York's ultimate mover and shaker, Robert Moses, by stopping the construction of an expressway that would have cut Manhattan in half. Her books, most notably The Death and Life of Great American Cities, were the inspiration for the renaissance of the American central city. Nickel through his intrepid work documenting vanishing Chicago, and his untimely death in the wreckage of Louis Sullivan's Stock Exchange Building, inspired the architectural preservation movement in this city that lives today.

On the right is an image of a cross section of Chicago architectural history. Here, Mid-Century Modern, represented by Mies van der Rohe's 1964 Everett Dircksen U.S. Courthouse, happily coexists with the 1890's in the form of the Italianate facade of the building that houses Chicago's venerable Berghoff restaurant. Like the Indianapolis City County Building, the complex the Dirksen Building is part of, replaced another glorious old building, Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago Federal Building.  It was one of those rare occasions in this city where a great building was replaced by arguably a greater one, in this case, three of them.

If you look closely, in the background, you'll see the eclectic Post-Modern, Harold Washington Library built in 1991, and behind that, a 2009, mixed use commercial, residential building called Library Tower. While this crazy quilt of styles might not be everybody's cup of tea, to me it represents a thriving city of infinite variety with a surprise around every corner. Wonderful as his work is, I couldn't bear living in a city filled with nothing but Mies van der Rohe buildings, or for that matter, nothing but any one of these particular styles.

It is not without a little irony that some of the mid-century works that supplanted earlier buildings, today themselves are threatened with defacement and destruction. Once again, the general public has little regard for these buildings; to many, steel and glass boxes have as much charm as a visit to the dentist's office. They are in that middle territory, too old to be up to date, and not old enough to be charming. And who should come to their defense but the preservation community who sees their rightful place in history, and yes, even their beauty.

The circle goes round and round; alas, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Two points of view

Yesterday I stumbled upon two iconoclastic articles about Chicago architecture, both a little surprising and refreshing in their candor. The tone of each piece is crystal clear from the first sentence.

The first began like this:

"Much modern architecture has grown tiresome to me."

Wow. Chicago architecture boosters love to boast about this city being the birthplace of modern architecture. One hundred fifty years of innovation and struggle only to be summed up in those seven words.

And this is how the second article began:

"No doubt Louis Sullivan made a beautiful building or two in his lifetime."

Ouch. My contrarian personality has to admire the chutzpah of a Chicago writer lavishing such faint praise on Louis Sullivan. It would be like an Italian writing: "Verdi no doubt wrote a few catchy tunes."

The first piece was by Roger Ebert. I've always marveled at Ebert's keen sense of observation and this piece is no exception. He makes the point that to him one of the failures of Modern architecture is that it doesn't speak to history and to the time it was made. More than fifty years after Mies' first Chicago buildings were built, they continue to seem new to him, in Ebert's words, "they seem helplessly captive to the present."

This obviously is not a problem for Madeline Nusser, a staff writer for Time Out Chicago. Her article titled "Sullivan Sullied" asks the question: "is our obsession with the past ruining Chicago's cityscape?"

Obviously neither of these opinions will be heard on any Chicago Architecture Foundation tour.

Nusser's piece was written in response to the two major Louis Sullivan exhibitions in town, "Louis Sullivan's Idea" at the Cultural Center and "Looking after Louis Sullivan" at the Art Institute. She feels that after "the city celebrated Sullivan’s 150th birthday in 2006 with a deluge of activities," all this attention to the architect amounts to hagiography, the "sanctification of his work."

It is certainly true that Sullivan is revered in Chicago more now than ever, more even than during the zenith of his career. Nusser is probably correct in her assertion that the adulation may be a bit overblown. After all, Sullivan's influence on subsequent generations of architects was limited to say the least. She also correctly points out that in Sullivan's own words, he didn't cringe at the idea of his own buildings being destroyed. "Only the idea was the important thing" she quotes him as saying.

Roger Ebert also sites Sullivan's words in his piece and speculates what the architect might have thought of the work of Mies and his followers. He says: "Although Mies is believed by many to have followed in the direction indicated by Sullivan, I doubt Sullivan would have been pleased by many of his buildings."

This may or may not be true but what is certainly without a doubt is the fact that Sullivan reserved the bulk of his wrath for his contemporary Daniel Burnham, whose work and influence Ebert lavishly praises. After the death of his estimable partner John Root, Burnham and his firm in its various incarnations, became the chief exponents neo-Classisism, all that Sullivan stood against.

That said, Sullivan's legacy, like that of any other artist, should be his work, not what he said about it. While Sullivan was eminently quotable, he wasn't a great writer. He was a blow hard. His writing is filled with an unquestioning belief in his own correctness. Often times he is simply unreadable, he painted himself into such a tight corner that he could not find a way out. This uncompromising attitude is what ultimately destroyed his career and led to years of relative obscurity following his death.

It is the profound experience of the eloquence of Louis Sullivan's architecture, the buildings themselves, what little is left of them, and the photographs that document his work by John Szarkowski and Richard Nickel to name only two, that should speak for him. The buildings he made reached for the sky but remained bound to the earth with his glorious attention to detail in the form of ornament.

Of course his use of ornament is quite the matter of personal taste. "Their modern uselessness" is how Nusser describes Sullivan's elevator grilles from the Stock Exchange Building, as seen in Szarkowski's wonderful photograph at the Art Institute. Clearly she has been sucked into Modernist ideology ironically inspired but ultimately misunderstood by Sullivan's own "form follows function" dictum.

Ebert on the other hand provocatively follows no particular ideology, he just knows what he likes.

Like him, my heart soars whenever I cross Edward Bennett's Michigan Avenue Bridge walking north toward the magnificent ensemble of buildings surrounding it, specifically the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building. These two buildings may not be at the top of the list of Chicago's greatest buildings as compiled by most ideologically driven architecture critics. Sullivan had he lived to see them to completion would have despised them. Yet they are crowd pleasers along with the bridge, itself a result of the Burnham Plan. Crossing that bridge day or night is an unmistakably unique Chicago experience, one of the truly great urban experiences of the world.

Yet unlike Mr. Ebert, I am also moved to this day by particular works of Modern architecture. Their bold lines clearly expressing two materials, steel and glass, surfaces that reflect sunlight creating beautiful plays of light and shadow, gravity defying structures that appear weightless, are also thrilling to me, dare I say even beautiful. The problem as I see it lies not with Mies and his contemporaries, but with their followers who slavishly held to the dictum "less is more" (which Mies himself never did) to the point of stripping all life out of their buildings. As one of the commentators to Ebert's online article aptly remarked, "less isn't more, it's simply less."

Unfortunately Nusser doesn't make a good case for her assertion that we are bound to the past at the expense of the city. Chicago's cityscape today is a splendid amalgam of architectural styles ranging from those of the 1860s to yesterday. Preservation of historical buildings in fact has always been a struggle, it has been stymied by developers and politicians for well over a century, and continues to be to this day.

She does however tip her hand to reveal a specific ax to grind. It turns out that a couple of her friends tried to build themselves a Modern style home in a neighborhood filled with "Victorian" structures. The residents of the community objected to the proposal and it died. But this isolated case in no way represents the majority of residential neighborhoods throughout the city who for the most part have even fewer landmarks restrictions than commercial districts. Evidence of this can be found here from Robert Powers' wonderfully peripatetic blog, A Chicago Sojourn.

The most appalling part of Nusser's piece is her mindless quibble with Preservation Chicago's placement of Richard Nickel's house on Cortland Avenue on its list of the seven most endangered buildings in Chicago.

For starters, Preservation Chicago is a citizen's advocacy group, not to be confused with the Chicago Landmarks Commission, and is not tied to city government in any way. It has no power other than suggestion. In an era when all but a handful of Chicago's most significant buildings are threatened, Preservation Chicago serves an important purpose in bringing the city's history to the public's attention.

Then this remark: "You might be asking Richard who?", as Nusser snickers at the suggestion that the house of the man whose personal struggle to bring justice to our architectural legacy which ultimately led to his tragic death, is worthy of preservation.

"Actually, Nickel was neither architect nor artisan." she adds. "He was a photography student turned preservationist." The omissions from this statement are cruel and stupid. Richard Nickel was an artist of the highest caliber. He and his work may not have the same cache as artists in Nusser's own limited sphere of knowledge, but are important just the same. As I wrote in this space a few weeks ago, were it not for Richard Nickel, (and may I add, his collaborators, namely John Vinci and Tim Samuelson), and for a handful of other people who were voices crying out in the desert in the days when nobody else cared, Chicago might have completely lost all traces to its past, and today might be just another big American city, undistinguishable from Houston or Denver.

These past two weeks I brought my son to art camp at the School of the Art Institute. He has just developed an interest in architecture and every day we would take a different route to point out some of my favorite buildings. And every day we would pass the entrance of Sullivan's Old Stock Exchange Building which was saved from destruction during the building's demolition through the efforts of Messrs Nickel, Vinci and Samuelson. It now stands isolated, completely out of context in the midst of Renzo Pianomania. Instead of being the backdrop for yellow cabs and fedora wearing gents smoking cigars, it now serves as the backdrop for a garden of native flowers, with Millennium Park visible through the arch.

Although its power is diminished in its new setting, it is still a grand monument, and a great reminder that the work of preservation of our city's treasures is an important, never ending task that we must pass on to our children.

Chicago is indeed a very special place.

Saving Mies

Having spent four years at The Illinois Institute of Technology, I must say that I have very mixed feelings about the work of Mies van der Rohe and specifically the IIT campus. I was originally drawn there by the dreams of Modernism and the radical design of the campus. But honestly, like choosing a good friend as a roommate, living with Mies is not the same as visiting him every once in a while.

Sometimes in my cynical, philistine moments I find myself saying: "tear down the whole campus", Crown Hall (where I spent most of my time) included.

But to hate Mies is really to hate all the inferior architecture that his work inspired. Go to the Federal Building complex down town and look at Mies' care and attention to proportion and detail, then walk a block east to the Modernist tower (currently occupied by Bank of America) at the south-east corner of State and Adams. This building is an obvious send-up to Mies, but only in the most superficial of ways.

In his proper context, Mies van der Rohe deserves his place in the pantheon of architects.

Edward Lifson continues to make a powerful and impassioned case for the preservation of a little corner of the IIT campus, a tiny building that would garner little attention save for its esteemed author.

Together with Lynn Becker's series of articles opposing the imminent demise of the Michael Reese Hospital campus, the case for historic preservation of less than easily lovable buildings is brought to the forefront.

Unfortunately at this moment anyway, both seem to be lost causes.