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.

Richard Nickel: Dangerous Years

My friend Rich Cahan has done it again.  Along with Michael Williams he just compiled and published the third of (what his wife hopes to be) a trilogy on the life and work of the Chicago photographer Richard Nickel. Cahan's first Nickel book, They All Fall Down: Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America's Architecture, was a straight ahead biography which depicted his subject as a driven young man whose life's work began as a grad school project documenting the work of the architect Louis Sullivan. The project which Nickel made his own, to record and save everything he could of the architect's disappearing work, turned into an all consuming passion that ultimately cost him his life. In I972 Richard Nickel was crushed underneath the rubble of Sullivan's Stock Exchange Building while attempting to salvage artifacts of the building as it was being demolished.

The second book was called Richard Nickel's Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City, a book that allowed Nickel's camera speak for him. Beyond proof sheets, Nickel didn't make many publication or exhibition prints of his own work, so the lion's share of images in this exquisitely printed book had not been seen outside of a small circle. The book, not limited to the work of Louis Sullivan, or architecture for that matter, could be considered the definitive work on Richard Nickel the photographer, as it is to the best of my knowledge the most comprehensive collection of his photographic work to be found.

Richard Nickel was the Charles Marville of Chicago. Marville if you recall was the photographer who was commissioned to document the city of Paris as it existed before and during its mid-nineteenth century destruction and re-construction under the hand of Baron Haussmann in the reign of Napoleon III . Here is a link to a site describing a major exhibition of Marville's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York.

Unlike Marville, Nickel's work documenting the destruction of his city was for the most part, self-commissioned. Richard Nickel's Chicago shows us the ways and means of a soon to be post-industrial city, rooftops with their smokestacks and water tanks, steel rails reflecting the sun, automobiles in motion, and the incessant building up and tearing down of a restless city.

Early on, Nickel photographed people. Many of his early pictures show the influence of his school, the Institute of Design, especially the work of Harry Callahan with whom Nickel studied. The very first picture in the book proper in the chapter titled, The Passing Scene, is a provocative image of a woman standing alone in front of the Tunnel of Love at Riverview amusement park. Her expression suggests concern or maybe disappointment. Perhaps she is waiting for a lover who has stood her up, or one that never existed at all. One can't help but think of this image as a metaphor for Richard Nickel and his first love, the City of Chicago. a love that was unrequited.

As Callahan taught Nickel how to construct a photograph, it would be his other major influence at the ID, Aaron Siskind, who would teach him how to tell a story. Siskind initiated the Sullivan project and the two worked closely on the project during Nickel's remaining time at the Institute and beyond.

Eventually Nickel became a one man band with the Sullivan project which remained incomplete at the time of his death. Were it not for the steadfast work of Nickel's close friend and accomplice in salvaging Sullivan's work, architect John Vinci, Nickel's project would have died along with him in the rubble of the Stock Exchange Building. Forty years after Nickel's death, Vinci managed to complete Nickel's project with the publication of the massive tome The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan.

Cajan's third Nickel book, Richard Nickel: Dangerous Years, What He Saw and What He Wrote, puts the photographer/preservationist's life, work and times into context. This time along with Nickel's photographs, his words speak for him. Nickel was a compulsive letter writer who kept carbon copies of all the letters he sent out as well as copies of letters he never sent. The current book reproduces in full color, selections of Nickel's letters to friends, collaborators, newspaper columnists, architects, landmarks commissioners, Mayor Richard J. Daley, the residents of buildings about to be demolished, and the owners of those buildings whose help he enlisted in gaining access before and during demolition, even though he openly opposed their intentions to destroy them. The book also reproduces Nickel's personal notes, sketches and detailed itineraries for photographic road trips in minute by minute detail.

Two of Nickel's struggles to save Chicago Landmarks are covered in great detail in the book, the Garrick Theater and the Stock Exchange Building, two of Louis Sullivan's greatest works.

Another great loss, and perhaps a bigger personal blow to Nickel was the demolition of Holibard and Roche's Republic Building on State at Adams. A self-portrait of Nickel on the roof of the Republic graces the cover of They All Fall Down. The new book includes two Nickel photographs of the Republic that I've never seen. The first is a stunning cityscape from about 30 stories up looking southeast. The stepped pyramid atop the Metropolitan Tower with its famous beehive beacon, dominates the picture. Grant Park and Lake Michigan can seen in the background. Virtually every building in the photograph still exists, save for the Republic Building, smack dab in the middle of the frame. The Republic stands out from its neighbors with its classic Chicago School facade, gleaming, (despite its grimy surface), in the hazy late afternoon light.

The other photograph, taken from the NW corner of State and Adams, shows the building toward the end of its demolition, with only the first two floors remaining. (the caption mistakenly identifies the picture taken at the start of the construction of the building that would replace it). Signs on the scaffolding proudly announce the coming of the new building, the Home Federal Savings Savings and Loan Building. Even the architects of the new building, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, shamelessly display their stylized logo, despite the fact that part of the ornament of the doomed building was still visible through the scaffolding. Talk about a lack of respect! In the photograph, passersby go about their business, causing me to wonder what must have been going through their minds as one of the best buildings to have ever graced this city turns to dust before their eyes, about to be replaced by a second rate building, despite the first class pedigree of its designers. My guess is that most of them, as was the popular opinion of the day, thought that new necessarily meant better.

Richard Nickel begged to differ. In one letter reprinted in Cahan's book addressed to a Chicago Daily News reporter he wrote:

I had a good look recently at that Home Federal S&L building which replaced the Republic several years ago. That looms in my mind now as one of the great tragedies... or rather as one of the most willful unnecessary destructive acts to Chicago School heritage. I'll  never forgive Hartmann (Bill Hartmann, then senior partner of Skidmore Owings and Merrill) and SOM for that. The Republic was a work of art, and the new building is nothing... maybe some tinsel!

Nickel wrote a much more scathing letter to the editor of a publication called The American City, responding to an article they wrote in praise of the Garrick Parking Garage which replaced the Garrick Theater, The article pointed out the design of an ornamental panel which consisted of 233 slabs of concrete that were cast from a molding of a detail from the Sullivan building, plus one of the original details, all stuck together. in a large mass. Nickel scoffed at the caption of a photograph of the garage that said: "Chicago's new Civic Center Parking Garage represents a growing awareness of Chicago's architectural heritage." In response Nickel wrote:

...what about the lines, "the building pays graceful tribute to the memory of "Louis Sullivan"? They wreck one of his masterpieces, and you conclude it is a tribute. How? Why? Would  you say that if someone wrecked St. Peter's Cathedral [sic] in Rome and erected a garage on the site,  using some statues and whatever, that that was a tribute to St. Peter???

Whoever wrote that article is soft in the head...

Nickel was one of the leading advocates for saving the Garrick Theater. It turns out that he was successful in convincing none other than Mayor Richard J. Daley that the building was worth saving. The city of Chicago filed an injunction in an attempt to halt the demolition of the Sullivan building, but were over-ruled by the courts.

Daley was not so moved to save the old Stock Exchange Building. In a letter to CBS News, praising their coverage of the fate of the building, Nickel wrote:

it doesn't surprise me at all that hizzoner Daley is the dumbhead who lacked the imagination to save this unquestionable work of art. ... 

The question now is, well, it obviously isn't even a question... why do we have a landmark commission (headed at the time by the aforementioned William Hartmann), which gets $100,000 a year (?) funding, and is getting nothing done, is working at odds with the City Council and the blankety-blank mayor?

Nickel goes on in the letter to lambaste the cultural elite of Chicago who turned a blind eye to the fate of the city's architecture, by failing to show up for demonstrations to save the building:

Where was the cultural leadership of Chicago?? The architects, the curators, the professors and historians, etc. So perhaps it boils down to our getting what we deserve... 

Cahan follows that letter with another, a bitter attack of the city fathers, perhaps written under the influence, a double scotch to be exact, to William Hartmann himself. What does the letter say? Well you'll just have to buy the book to find out.

What follows these two letters are a series of heartbreaking photographs of the construction of the scaffolding around the Old Stock Exchange Building, symbolizing the demise of both the building and the photographer. This time, passersby stop and look in dismay at the sight of impending doom for a marvelous building.

The book is a fascinating look into the psyche of Richard Nickel, into what drove him, and the conflicts he faced as the life's work of the artist he chose to devote a good portion of his life to, was crumbling all around him.

It's easy to imagine Nickel as a bitter, tragic figure, pursuing a quixotic mission, doomed to failure, much the way Cahan portrays him in his biography. But the correspondence in this book show another side to the man: funny, engaging, awkward and perhaps like any good artist, just a bit off.

One letter (presumably never sent), which Nickel put huge crosses through, is a comical, rambling, stream of consciousness rant to a potential collaborator, referencing everything from sailing, to the author's car troubles, to his frustration about the apparent sexual advances from a male art historian. As if it were necessary to point out which side of the fence he was on, Nickel writes: "I often do a lot of things I don't want to do just to accommodate people and then I get impossible and bitchy. And art history is so full of old ladies...and whilst I'm not married, that doesn't mean I like to travel with men, or associate with men much at all." then at the bottom of the typed page he writes out by hand: "I'm beginning to appreciate women more and more! Backlash?" There he closes the letter with "Regards, Dick", but he wasn't finished. On the flip side of the page he typed another half page explaining the tone of the letter by saying he was sitting listening to (the composer) Janacek while downing some Johnny Walker Black, a "real luxury." Once again he closes the letter, this time with "Drunken Dick."

Nickel did have one release valve and that was a sailboat which he kept moored in Burnham Harbor. He delighted in inviting friends to sail with him. One post card printed in the book was an invitation written to the daughter of the ID professor and photographer, Arthur Siegel. "Oh I love to have pretty girls aboard the boat..." he writes, "wear your bikini (or whatever the girls are not wearing nowadays)." At a recent lecture at the Art Institute promoting his book, Cahan flashed on the screen that postcard, not commenting on its content, when who should turn up but the recipient of that letter, Julie Siegel. Being perhaps the one person in the room who actually knew Nickel, she tried to assure the audience that while tragedy befell Richard Nickel, he was quite a lovely, engaging character, not at all the sullen, miserable wretch as he is often portrayed.

Having written three books on Richard Nickel, Richard Cahan must now be considered the world authority on the subject. His quest to document the man rates up there in tenacity with Nickel's pursuit of Louis Sullivan. Cahan said at his talk at the Art Institute that when you think about it, Richard Nickel was a failure in everything he did. He lived much of his life with his parents in Park Ridge, Illinois. He wasn't successful in preserving any of the Sullivan buildings he worked diligently to save. He never came close to finishing the Sullivan project. And he never finished the house he bought for himself in Bucktown.

This time I beg to differ. Cahan is certainly right in asserting that Nickel left this world with an unfinished legacy. But his work to save the most important Sullivan buildings did make a difference. The group that Nickel led, protesting the raising of the Garrick Theater in the early sixties was a ragtag bunch that managed to get the mayor's attention and his tacit support. By the time the Stock Exchange Building was about to turn to dust, there was a more significant presence of protesters opposed to the demolition. The ultimate loss of the building and the tragic death of Nickel inside it, galvanized the preservation movement in Chicago. It would be premature to say battle lost but war won, as the struggle to save Chicago's architectural heritage continues. Yet I'm convinced that Nickel both in life and in death was and is the driving force of the preservation movement in this town and for that we have much to be thankful, as well for the efforts of Messers Vinci and Cahan who have worked so diligently to care for and preserve the legacy and the work of Richard Nickel.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you.

The Coolest Place on Earth

I have a recurring dream where I find myself in a city that is at once familiar and completely foreign. The city is an industrial metropolis set in post-industrial time, well past its prime (not unlike my own city of Chicago), while artifacts of a bygone era, magnificent commercial and industrial buildings proudly adorned with terracotta ornament, and equally magnificent but long-obsolete machinery sit idle, waiting patiently for someone to come along and make them come back to life. In another dream, I find myself inside a theater which is a building with many rooms. Inside each room is performed a different, interactive play. In this theater, the visitor is encouraged to wander from one room to the next at will, so no two experiences of the theater is exactly the same.

It seems likely that St. Louis artist Bob Cassilly must have had similar dreams at some point in his life. But Cassilly was not first and foremost a dreamer. A man of vision and boundless energy, Cassilly the doer, was able to not only realize those dreams, but take the dream a step farther and bring those artifacts of the city's past back to a glorious new life.

The dream became realized in what has become one of St. Louis's most popular attractions, The City Museum. City Museum is part art installation, part amusement park, and yes in a small way, part museum. Wandering through Cassilly's creation is a little like wandering through an Escher painting. Tubes made of Rebar lead to who knows where, it's entirely up to the visitor to climb into them to discover for himself. That point is made clear as one buys a ticket and learns that there are (intentionally) no maps to be found in or of the joint.

Perhaps the most memorable feature of City Museum is the massive sculpture on the exterior of the ten story former shoe factory that Cassilly purchased in 1983. It's called Monstro and it is constructed out of building materials, machine parts, and abandoned vehicles including an old fire engine and two jet airplanes. All of it is connected by the ubiquitous tubes and slides that visitors are encouraged to climb through or slide down, sometimes at heart stopping heights. Oh yes then there's the school bus placed precariously over the edge of the roof that you can see at the top left edge of the photograph below. In case you're wondering, yes of course you can climb into the bus and sit behind the wheel suspended ten stories above the ground.

The man pictured above did exactly what I did, crawling head-first on all fours while looking straight down the shaky tube to the ground five stories below. What you don't see in the photograph is where the wire tube is leading. Just beyond the left frame of the picture, the tube takes a sudden bend straight down meaning the visitor has to turn himself completely around, lest he be forced to crawl spider-like, upside-down to the end of the tube. Given the diameter of the tube was only about three feet, turning one's self around to go feet first, especially for an adult who is anything but a contortionist, was no easy task. But I did it, as did this guy, making us both the better for it.

There were several things I told myself I wasn't going to do like ride the ferris wheel mounted on the building's roof, or ride down the "ten story slide" which was originally built as a chute to send boxes of shoes quickly from the building's upper stories to the warehouses down below. Well with a little encouragement from my wife, I did both those things and lived to tell about it. Incidentally, that slide lets you off in the guts of the building where Cassilly and his staff built a recreation of a cave complete with stalactites and stalagmites. One nifty addition to the cave is a working theater pipe-organ with an automatic player-console which plays intermittently throughout the day, its baffles, bellows, pipes, cymbals, drums and horns only feet from you. Imagine "Lady of Spain" reverberating through the closed space at sound levels approaching that of a rock concert or jet airplane at takeoff, and you kind of get the idea.

The museum part of City Museum includes a working shoe lace factory and salvaged bits and pieces of lost cities, St. Louis of course but also Chicago and others. Didactic info is kept to a minimum. Instead, unlike a typical museum, the visitor is encouraged to touch and interact with the objects, just as one would of, had the objects been in their original settings. In Bob Cassilly's words found on City Museum's web site:

The point is not to learn every fact, but to say, "Wow, that's wonderful." And if it's wonderful, it's worth preserving.

One exception to objects that could be interacted with in their natural settings are the massive safe doors on display, whose original owners certainly would not have encouraged interaction with the public. These things were intended to been seen but not touched, silent guardians of the fortunes enclosed within the vaults behind them. The mere sight of these doors instilled security in the minds of bank customers who figured their life's savings were safe behind these magnificent objects. Their magnificence is not diminished one bit by being able to examine the workings of these safe doors whose multiple locks and dials are activated by hundreds of tiny gears on the inside of the door. These objects are perfect symbols of our long lost industrial age where workmanship and attention to detail speak of a time when craftsmen and artisans truly took pride in their work. City Museum is filled with many such objects.

When I first visited City Museum with my family ten years ago, I assumed that something like this could never have been built in Chicago because of liability issues in a litigious city, however I now realize it goes much deeper than that. Putting it simply, something like this could not have been built here because we don't have a Bob Cassilly. Sadly, Cassilly died in an accident in 2011 as he was behind the controls of a bulldozer which toppled over while he was working on an even more ambitions project. It was to be called Cementland, a massive earthworks piece built on the site of a former cement plant across the river form St. Louis. That quixotic,  half-finished project seemed to die along with Bob Cassilly.

Here is an in depth portrait of Cassilly from St. Louis Magazine, published shortly after his death.

Reading the article I could not help be reminded of a kindred spirit of sorts who lived and died a similar death in pursuit of his passion. His name was Richard Nickel and you can read about him here, here and here.

Nickel's passion was saving the legacy of the architect Louis Sullivan, much of whose work vanished right before Nickel's eyes. A great artist in his own right, Nickel had the opportunity to photograph much of the architect's work before it vanished. He also salvaged many bits and pieces of Sullivan buildings, the pursuit of which cost him his life as the walls of Sullivan's masterpiece, The Chicago Stock Exchange Building while under demolition, collapsed on top of him in 1971.

Nickel's ultimate goal was to publish an exhaustive study of the complete works of Sullivan which was nowhere near completion at the time of his death. It took his friend, colleague and protege, the architect John Vinci to painstakingly complete Nickel's project a few short years ago.

As Cassilly has many proteges who continue his vision by building and working at City Museum, perhaps Cementland will be blessed with a similar fate.

One can only hope.

Here are some more pictures of the coolest place on earth:

Adults and children are inexorably drawn to the ladders and chutes of MonstroCity, the centerpiece of the City Museum.

MonstroCity from ground level

Tile floors exemplify Bob Cassilly's playful artistic style.

Terracotta architectural artifacts justify the museum part of City Museum

Bits and pieces of our industrial past ornament City Museum.

Boy about to enter a slide, destination unknown.

The chutes and ladders of City Museum, St. Louis

Perspective

To put Richard Nickel's work into deeper perspective, according to Richard Cahan's biography of the photographer, between the years 1950 and 1972, roughly the span of his career, 39 buildings of Louis Sullivan, one third of the Master's major works, were destroyed. Nickel photographed as well as salvaged artifacts from practically all of them.

The two greatest losses of these were the Stock Exchange Building at 30 North La Salle Street, (where Nickel lost his life), and the Schiller (later the Garrick) Building at 64 West Randolph Street. The Old Stock Exchange was replaced by a thoroughly undistinguished skyscraper while the Garrick Theater was replaced by a parking lot. Ironically, that parking lot was subsequently leveled to make way for the Goodman Theater complex which leads to the lament, if only...

Many more important Chicago buildings were lost during that particularly dark period of the city's architectural history. The Republic and Cable Buildings by Holabird & Roche, the Pullman Building and Grand Central Station by Solon S. Beman, the concourse of Union Station by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White and the lovely Edison Building by Purcell, Frick and Elmslie were all replaced by vastly inferior buildings, if anything at all.

In his eulogy for Richard Nickel, his longtime friend and mentor, the photographer Frederick Sommer wrote:

When the single masterpiece is struck down, the act is attributed to the madman, but when the coherence of an entire society is vandalized, the destruction is viewed with proud arrogance as evidence of progress.

1810 W. Cortland

So here it stands today, the center of a landmarks controversy of sorts, the former home of the photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel. I decided to make the pilgrimage after I picked up my wife from work about a mile away. Last week I wrote a post about an article in "Time Out Chicago" which balked at the idea that the building was worthy of landmark status.

I've been thinking a lot about Nickel lately as we've recently installed an exhibition at the Art Institute of his photographs along with those Aaron Siskind and John Szarkowski, all dealing with the architecture of Louis Sullivan.

Of the three photographers it was Nickel who devoted his life to the single minded pursuit of documenting Sullivan buildings as they disappeared at a horrifying rate during his twenty plus year career. In 1972 while he was in the process of recovering fragments from the Old Stock Exchange Building during its demolition, he was killed as the building collapsed around him.

His life is chronicled in Richard Cahan's excellent book; "They All Fall Down; Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America's Architecture".

According to Cahan, Nickel was a difficult, irascible perfectionist. His character on the one hand enabled him to set his focus narrowly on the subject of Sullivan, but his perfectionism prevented him from following through on his most ambitious project, a book that was to be a compendium of the complete work of the Master. The book was begun while Nickel was under the tutelage of Siskind at the Institute of Design in 1953, and remained unfinished at the time of his death.

His character also resulted in a tumultuous life, never financially secure, couldn't hold down a job or a relationship, he was constantly reckless and depressed. Nickel's depression no doubt was exacerbated by the fact that the subject of his work was literally turned to dust before his eyes. This is the stuff of the quintessential artist melodrama and it would have made for a good movie. An alternate title for Cahan's book could have been: "The Agony and the Agony."

That said, Nickel's work was sublime. In his endless passion for the work of Sullivan, he developed such a comprehensive understanding of the Master, it was almost as if the two had become one. Nickel documented Sullivan's works not only with a camera, he also drew up scrupulously detailed plans of doomed buildings and removed whatever he could of Sullivan's magnificent ornament. The fruits of his work are virtually all that remains today of the bulk of Louis Sullivan's work.

Nickel was more of an advocate for Sullivan's buildings than Sullivan himself.

Here is a quote from Sullivan's "Kindergarten Chats" that Rich Cahan reproduced in his biography of Nickel:

And decay proceeds as inevitably as growth, function is declined, structures, disintegrate, differentiation is blurred, the fabric dissolves, life disappears, time engulfed. The eternal life falls.

Out of oblivion into oblivion, so go the drama of creative things.

Those exact words were read as testimony in favor of destroying the Stock Exchange Building in a 1970 hearing before the Landmarks Commission.

Nickel bought the Cortland St. building that housed a bakery, remembered fondly by long time residents of the neighborhood as the "Punchki Bakery", in its storefront in 1969 for $7,500 after an exhaustive search. The building is in Bucktown, only a few miles from Nickel's childhood home in Logan Square. Moving into the midst of an old Polish neighborhood, catty-cornered from the magnificent Polish Cathedral style St. Mary of the Angels Church, Nickel was returning to his own heritage and he called the house his "Polish Palazzo."

It is an attractive Italianate Style building, built the same year as the Auditorium Building. It's a vernacular building that proudly announces its place in the world with its original name, Grims Building, prominently spelled out in abbreviated form on the frieze. Nickel loved the little touches of detail which grace the storefront.

Nickel spent an enormous amount of time reconfiguring the house to suit his needs. He and his friend and some-time collaborator, the architect John Vinci, drew up plans and executed the rear wall of the building to replace the bakery section of the building. Again, Nickel's perfectionism got in the way, he never completely moved into it, living for the most part with his parents in suburban Park Ridge. His work on the building also remained unfinished at the time of his death.

For many years the building served as the studio for the portrait photographer Mark Houser.

In 2009 when the owner of the adjacent property to the east purchased the property, Preservation Chicago, a citizen's advocacy group, included the building on its list of the seven most endangered buildings in Chicago. The owner then made a deal with the Chicago Landmarks Commission agreeing not to challenge landmarks status for the facade in exchange for a construction permit to alter the rest of the building.

The house has been gutted down to the beams and joists, the back wall that Nickel and Vinci built is gone, and as you can see from this snapshot taken from the alley, even the honey locust tree that Nickel planted in the backyard has disappeared. All that's left of the structure are the outside walls and the facade.

This begs the valid question, is this house worthy of landmark status as virtually nothing is left of Nickel's work?

There are seven requirements for landmark status in Chicago, and at least two of need to apply in order for a building to become a landmark. The seven are listed in this post on Lynn Becker's blog.

Preservation Chicago claims that three necessary criteria for landmark status apply to the Nickel house, although they don't say which three in their web site.

Here are three requirements that I believe the house fulfills:

1) Identification with a significant person: Richard Nickel's life and work was devoted to the preservation and documentation of the work of not only Sullivan, but to the rest of the significant architects of Chicago. He created a body of work that not only showed the city as it once was, but created a unique and cohesive vision. Nickel is in his own right, one of our city's most significant artists.

2) Critical part of the city's heritage: Nickel's life and death brought public attention to the importance of this city's architectural heritage. While he in no way constituted the entire preservation movement, he became the public face of it. In addition, without Nickel's steadfast devotion to the documentation of the work of Sullivan and others, much of the heritage of the Chicago School of Architecture would be lost forever.

I would say that last sentence speaks for itself. But to convince those who see architecture only as a disposable commodity, let us consider the unquestionable fact that Chicago's architectural legacy brings business to this city. Look at every tourist brochure, every ad, every enticement to come here, and you will see, hear or read some reference to the city's great architecture. People come to Chicago from all over the world to see the work of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. At best this is practical thinking, at worst cynical, but it is a fact worth noting that our great buildings are our golden goose that we would be terribly foolish to squander. And Richard Nickel is at least partly responsible for that phenomenon.

Every city worth its salt takes pains to address its history. One can't walk a few dozen steps through London, Paris or Berlin without stumbling upon some reminder of what happened on a particular site decades or even centuries ago. In our own country, New York City has landmarks ordinances that put ours to shame.

3) The home in question is a terrific example of late 19th Century storefront architecture, a style that is typically not protected and is disappearing throughout the city. This would probably fall under the Unique visual feature category. In a neighborhood that has seen a great deal of development over the years with a mish-mash of styles being employed, the house I believe is worth saving for this reason alone. Contrary to opinions expressed by the author of the "Time Out Chicago" piece, the building is not "drab" at all, as are many of its neighbors. Even in a state of reconstruction, with its orange face brick and the splendid detail work on the cornice and around the windows, the house is a gem.

I think that were he alive today Richard Nickel, would find delicious irony in the fact that people were willing to fight tooth and nail over his modest little home, when in his day he witnessed the destruction of some of the greatest buildings ever built.

As for singling out only the facade for landmark status, I would say that it makes sense in this case. Richard Nickel significantly altered the building when he converted it from a bakery to exclusively a residence. The facade remains the only historically significant part of the building. True it would have been nice to leave the building preserved as Nickel left it, but one can only assume that subsequent owners changed it as well in the last 38 years. Short of the city buying the property and converting the house into a Richard Nickel museum, a highly unlikely scenario indeed, I think it's a good thing that the current owner and the Landmarks Commission worked out an arrangement that benefitted all parties. It was a compromise to be sure but given the fact that this building was admittedly not a slam dunk candidate for landmark status, I think everyone came out ahead in the end.

The preservation of our history doesn't impede progress in the least. In front of the Landmarks Commission, testifying against the demolition of the Stock Exchange Building, preservation activist Thomas Stauffer said:

Progress does not consist of starting over at every sunrise. Progress consists of the accumulation of achievements.

That, in a nutshell is what great cities are all about.

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.

Chicago, c. 1955

Shortly after the brief Golden Age of post war Chicago, the city along with most comparable American cities, experienced a slow decline that arguably began in the middle 1950's.

The period saw a boom in suburban development spurred by the construction of the Interstate Highway System during the Eisenhower administration. The scorched earth policy of construction of urban expressways decimated neighborhoods and created no-man's lands in the form of crime infested underpasses throughout the city. Urban public transportation systems were dismantled. The car was king and cities that were not designed from the outset for four wheel traffic suffered. Racial tension increased as neighborhoods shifted population rapidly because of fear of the different and unknown. The American Dream at the time was a house in the suburbs. If you could afford to get out, the city was no longer the place to live.

This was also a time that a new architecture took hold. After twenty years of no major commissions, architects, designers, and the public alike were thinking to the future and who could blame them? The past saw depression and war of unimaginable magnitude. This new architecture cast aside "old fashioned" ornament of stone and terra cotta. Steel and glass were the media of the future. New buildings would have none of the stuff to remind us of the past.

From 1949 to 1951, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built his first project in Chicago, the twin apartment towers at 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive. In 1955 Skidmore Owings and Merrill built the estimable Inland Steel Building in the Loop. These buildings created a tidal wave in the design community and the city would would never look the same. Whatever you called it, International Style or Modernism, this new architecture would become the paradigm of the bulk of construction for the next thirty years.

With all these gleaming new buildings around, those that survived the turn of a century, the Roaring Twenties, The Great Depression and two World Wars, were looking tired, grimy, and just plain old. There was little attention paid to them and when they started disappearing, few seemed to care.

We just assembled a show at the Art Institute that centers on three photographers who bucked the trend and did care, specifically about the work of the architect Louis Sullivan. The show is called "Looking After Louis Sullivan" and it features along with Sullivan drawings and fragments, photographs of Aaron Siskind, John Szarkowski and Richard Nickel that document and celebrate the Master's work.

Blair Kamin's review of the exhibit can be found here.

Sullivan's legacy has done nothing but gain momentum in the last fifty years. Unfortunately, fate has not been so kind to his work which continues to disappear at an alarming rate. Only three major works remain in the Loop, the Gage Building, the Auditorium Building (a detail of which is pictured on the masthead of this blog) on Michigan Avenue, and the former Carson Pirie Scott store on State Street. The demolition of two masterpieces, the Garrick Theater in 1961 and the Stock Exchange Building in 1972 were tremendous blows to preservation efforts in the city but the enormity their loss was a call to action and ultimately strengthened, for a while anyway, landmarks laws in Chicago. What the wrecking ball could not accomplish, fire has, recently claiming two important Sullivan works, the Wirt Dexter Building in the South Loop, and the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Bronzeville, a landmark not only for its architecture but for its pivotal role in the history of Gospel music.

Over the years historians have debated Sullivan's impact on Modern Architecture. Sullivan wrote that his interest was to create a new American architecture born out of nature and the ideals of Democracy. It was he who coined the term "form ever follows function", the axiom behind Modern architecture. Sullivan despised Daniel Burnham's penchant for Neo-classicism. He eschewed the use of columns, pediments and all the trappings of any style that harkened to the past. "I am going to insist that the banker wear a toga..." Sullivan facetiously commented on the trend of building banks that looked like Roman temples.

His buildings and the work of his fellow Chicago School architects soared to new heights, and their design expressed the structure of the steel skeletons that supported them.

What separated Sullivan from the Moderns was his use of ornament. Ornament to Sullivan was not something to be tacked on for decoration but was a fundamental element of the design. Quoting the show's co-curator, Allison Fisher; "Each project followed an organic design process in which ornament emerged from the building materials and structure, just as flowers appear on a plant."

Interestingly, Mies, the Grand Pubah of Modern Architecture was roundly criticized for his use of ornament in the form of non-functional "I" beam mullions which seem to contradict to his dictum of "Less is more". He said of them: "To me structure is something like logic. It is the best way to do things and express them"

Sullivan said essentially the same thing only more eloquently.

Not surprisingly, Siskind, Szarkowski and Nickel all focus on Sullivan's ornament. Of the works represented in the exhibition, I lean toward Szarkowski's as his pictures fully embrace the buildings in the midst of life in the city, often with his wry sense of humor. One photograph shows a nature inspired detail from the Auditorium with a bit of real nature thrown in in the form of a bird's skeleton resting on the ledge.

My favorite photograph of the lot is Szarkowski's picture of an elevator operator guiding his vehicle behind one of Sullivan's elaborate elevator screens. An actual screen from the destroyed building is on display adjacent to the photograph.

Richard Nickel was an early student of Aaron Siskind's at Chicago's Institute of Design where the two together with other students and faculty worked on a project documenting the work of Louis Sullivan. From that point on, Nickel devoted his life to the preservation and documentation of the work of the Chicago School of Architecture.

A wonderful compendium of his work can be found in the book "Richard Nickel's Chicago, Photographs of a Lost City" by Michael Williams and my friend Rich Cahan. The book contains dozens of gloriously reproduced images of Nickel's, many of which had never been printed. Posthumously created work can be problematic as the intentions of the artist are often misrepresented. But in this case we have a splendid document of the Chicago that was ignored for so long by so many, clearly something very close to Richard Nickel's heart.

The most touching and heartbreaking two sections of the book are in depth studies documenting the demolition of the Garrick and the Stock Exchange Buildings, the latter of which cost Nickel his life. In a painful series of pictures, we see the magnificent proscenium arch of the Garrick as the rest of the building slips away. Even in the final picture with the wrecker's bulldozer planted squarely on what once was the stage, the arch retains its power and dignity. Another heartbreaking series shows the glorious facade of the Old Stock Exchange as it is slowly covered up by scaffolding, a magnificent structure in its own right, a glistening silver blanket ironically swaddling the building as it spells its doom.

Richard Nickel's work as portrayed in the book is an elegy for Chicago. In contrast to the 1948 travelogue "Chicago the Beautiful", the city Nickel photographed is barely recognizable today. His is a city of brick and mortar, of stone and terracotta, of ancient billboards, water tanks and smokestacks. What little steel there is to be seen, is found on buildings that are either in the state of construction or destruction. Sometimes it's difficult to tell which is which.

There is great trepidation in Nickel's photographs of the construction of the new towers encroaching on his beloved city. Here is a quote of Nickel's from the book:

"From one of the most distinguished cities architecturally we are rapidly moving toward anonymity, or, what is worse, a city of contrasts: the superficial glitter of the new mixed with the slum of the old."

Nearly forty years after Richard Nickel's death, it's worth re-examining his quote. The superficial glitter has worn off and the buildings that were new in Nickel's time, are now middle aged. Some of them today are considered masterpieces. It would be hard to imagine Chicago without Mies van der Rohe, without the Inland Steel Building, without the John Hancock Building.

Like them or not, and I think only time will be the judge, the same can be said for Millennium Park, the Aqua Building, Trump Tower and the Modern Wing of the Art Institute.

A city that stands still, resistant of change becomes a museum piece or worse, it dies.

As for the "slum of the old", I'd say that we have Richard Nickel and countless others to thank for tirelessly striving to not only preserve the legacy but preserve the great buildings of the Chicago School. They are our treasures, and as each one is restored and brought back to its original glory, we see them in a new, magnificent light.

Unfortunately as these things usually go, it took death and destruction to make us see the light.