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.

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Two points of view

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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.

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Chicago, c. 1955

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