It is time to stop regarding Stanley Tigerman as little more than the clown prince of Chicago architecture.
Yes, he is still a garrulous, wisecracking, intellectually witty, often profane fellow who enjoys giving the Don Rickles treatment to phonies, pompous dogmatists and the designers of banal and ugly buildings.
Certainly, he loves to gossip about his colleagues, and only recently described himself as the Rona Barrett of the drawing board. This is the same man who once showed up at a black-tie gala wearing a bowling shirt and who has designed houses with shapes frankly suggestive of genitalia.
But even if Stanley Tigerman has chosen not to abandon his calculatedly cocky and sometimes kooky ways (and buildings), that takes nothing away from the fact that in the last decade he has become one of Chicago`s most important architects. As such, he almost automatically enjoys high national and even international ranking as well.
How did Tigerman, 54, rise to his present status with such relative swiftness in a town loaded with so many other brilliant, big-league competitors? The answer is interwoven with a series of events and trends that have drastically changed the workings of Chicago`s architectural community and the course of design itself.
Tigerman`s career began promisingly enough, although not spectacularly so. A native of Chicago, he attended Senn High School and earned degrees in architecture at Yale. He worked for architects George Fred Keck, Paul Rudolph and Harry Weese–masters, all–and for the huge firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill before founding his own shop in 1962.
The iconoclast-to-be made his first memorable mark in Chicago with Woodlawn Gardens, a 1960s low-income, low-rise dwelling complex. The Gardens were prosaic in appearance, but sound and well thought out. They reflected Tigerman`s lifelong concern for housing the underclass, and his skill at working within limited construction budgets.
In those same boom years of urban renewal, Tigerman also talked city officials into setting up an architectural review board to pass on renewal designs and recommend improvements. One project that benefited by such a critique was the 1,400-unit South Commons development along Prairie Avenue south of 26th Street.
The socially conscious Tigerman underwent a still tougher test of his skills and stamina when he went to Bangladesh in the 1960s to help design several polytechnic institutes. That adventure found him coping with everything from dysentery to a revolution that eventually brought down the government. Many years later, Tigerman looked back at his Bangladesh designs and found them seriously flawed. They failed to provide architectural alternatives to existing cultural conditions, he decided. American-style Modernism was not a cure-all for everything.
Tigerman also caught the rather silly megastructural fever that was afflicting architects all over the world at about the same time. Taking cues from the likes of architects Kenzo Tange and Buckminster Fuller, Tigerman came up with theoretical designs for things like instant linear cities built over expressways, floating airports and a V-shaped hotel straddling a football stadium.
The outspoken Chicago architect`s profound (and still continuing) respect for Mies van der Rohe manifested itself directly and totally in his Chicago work only once. That was when Tigerman designed the handsome Boardwalk apartment highrise on Clarendon Avenue near Montrose. The Boardwalk presents a crisp International Style grid and belies the notion that its creator never did anything conventional.
Later in the 1970s, Tigerman designed another apartment slab just west of the Boardwalk. It is called Pensacola Place and is a Janus-like performance perhaps unique in contemporary architecture. The east side of the building is another Miesian grid, symbolically on axis with Graceland Cemetery, where Mies is buried. The west side of the structure resembles a classical Ionic temple with a flat roof, an effect achieved partly by arranging tiers of semicircular balconies to look like huge columns.
Among Tigerman`s other best known (and best) buildings of the 1970s are the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at 1055 W. Roosevelt Rd. and the Anti-Cruelty Society headquarters at La Salle Street and Grand Avenue. The library is a brightly colored, strikingly configured and squiggly windowed structure whose exterior wildness draws attention away from an interior that is meticulously designed to ease the special problems of its users. The doggy-in-the-window building on La Salle is unabashedly whimsical, and appropriately so. Practically everybody seems to like it.
Other Tigerman buildings of high visibility include the Arby`s fast-food restaurant on Chicago Avenue just west of Michigan and the Piper`s Alley shopping complex flanking North Avenue at Wells Street. The little Arby`s outlet probably got more critical attention than it deserved at the time it opened, although it is esthetically superior to much of the ugly, gag-down-your-french-fries architecture common to franchise operations. Tigerman never talks much about the Piper`s Alley buildings, possibly because the client rejected a miniature crystal palace once envisioned for the site. Still, the brick buildings finally constructed there are more than respectable.
Tigerman`s realized designs outside the metropolitan Chicago area are not extensive, but neither are they undistinguished. One of the most admired is the elegant Knoll International showroom building in Houston, where Tigerman created an oasis of beauty on an ugly and difficult site.
Having learned this much about the fairly substantial scope of Tigerman`s work (which has also ranged into such areas as industrial and religious architecture and won many awards), one might wonder why his houses seem to have received such an inordinately high amount of attention. The answer, of course, is that house design sometimes offers special opportunities to be daring, and Tigerman enjoys shocking people.
His most outrageous creation is the Daisy House, a 1976 residence perched atop a sand dune overlooking Lake Michigan. Viewed from above, it offers several deliberately phallic images. Tigerman used the frank metaphors to cheer up his client, who was suffering a terminal illness but enjoyed earthy humor and loved Tigerman`s joke. At about the same time, Tigerman designed the Animal Crackers House in Highland Park, which variously alludes to a box of cookies, a calliope and a Volkswagen.
In his 1982 book, ”Versus,” Tigerman explained that the two residential commissions came into his office at about the time he was going through a midlife crisis common to many people in their 40s or thereabout. Tigerman`s crisis sharpened his sense of mortality and led him to think about the way in which he wished to live the rest of his life. He says he became fascinated with the idea that humor and irony could be one way of responding to the acknowledgment of death.
Humor marked other of Tigerman`s endeavors in those years. In 1976, for example, he was 1 of 11 United States architects selected to create exhibits on suburban problems for the Venice Biennale. One offshoot of his entry in the Italian show was a set of 22 ”dirty” postcards commenting on the vulgar vacuity of suburban life. The cards sold fairly briskly around Chicago at $5 a set.
But while Tigerman was hardly a little-known figure in those years, the project that really began moving him into a position of broad influence was the ”Chicago Architects” exhibition of 1976. Indeed, that show and its scholarly catalogue also marked a major turning point in the course of Chicago architecture. It is worth recalling exactly how the exhibition came to be.
In 1973, a show titled ”100 Years of Architecture in Chicago” was organized in Munich, where it opened before making an enthusiastically received swing around other major European cities. It was to be brought to Chicago three years later to run at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of America`s bicentennial celebration.
Despite its name, ”100 Years” was mostly a biased paean to Mies van der Rohe (who had died in 1969) and followers of the International Style. It ignored many Chicago architects who had risen to importance since the 1920s. This irritated Tigerman, who decided to mount a counter show that would demonstrate the important pluralistic influences of Andrew Rebori, David Adler, George Fred Keck and other brilliant Chicago architects neglected by historians and Mies fanatics.
With considerable help from architects Laurence Booth, Stuart Cohen and Benjamin Weese, Tigerman put together just such a revisionist exhibition and mounted it in lobby space of the Time-Life Building provided by Harry Weese. The competing shows opened simultaneously in May of 1976, drew big crowds and won national attention. Tigerman and his confreres (who quickly became known as the ”Chicago Four”) had proved their point about Chicago eclecticism. They had also taken the first exploratory step toward forming a coalition between Miesian mainliners and mavericks like themselves.
The Four soon became the Chicago Seven with the addition of Thomas H. Beeby, James Ingo Freed and James Nagle. They expanded to 8 when Helmut Jahn joined the informal alliance, then 11 when Gerald Horn, Kenneth Schroeder and Cynthia Weese came aboard. It was an impressive collection of talented people, and the momentum of their endeavors sent tremors to the very foundations of Chicago`s design establishment.
After the exhibition at Time-Life, Tigerman and his colleagues continued their assault on Chicago design dogma with a series of gallery events, symposia and even a national competition to redesign Tribune Tower. In 1979, they further triumphed by reviving the Chicago Architectural Club, which had been defunct since 1940.
While this was going on, Tigerman began infusing the previously insular Chicago design scene with visits by architects from the East and West Coasts. Tigerman had long been professionally and socially wired into the most elite New York and California architecture enclaves. It was no trick for him to help bring in somebody such as Robert Stern, John Hejduk or Frank Gehry to give a lecture, serve on a design jury or argue at a seminar. Those people were his friends, after all.
Not that Chicago had never welcomed outside architectural voices, nor was Tigerman the only Chicagoan capable of attracting mavericks to the city`s lecterns. Still, most of the nation`s architectural ferment, cerebration and cross pollination was taking place on the coasts. In Chicago, many architects still followed the old Mies dictum: ”Don`t talk–build!” Tigerman did much to dispel that attitude.
It was high time that Chicago designers opened themselves to fresh ideas, since the new shapes and forms of Postmodernism had begun to shake American architecture. And in 1978, events large and small helped signal the magnitude of that upheaval.
In New York, Philip Johnson unveiled his iconoclastic design for a Chippendale-topped AT&T skyscraper. In Chicago, Tigerman created a photo collage showing one of Mies` most famous buildings, Crown Hall, sinking into the ocean. Tigerman called it ”The Titanic” and sent copies of the now famous picture to every dogmatist he could think of. The symbolism of the photo was as accurate as the AT&T building was shocking. The seemingly unsinkable International Style had collided with the iceberg of Postmodernism, and nothing would ever be the same again.
And then there was Fazlur Khan`s funeral. As Tigerman tells it, an emotional scene that followed Khan`s death marked the beginning of an almost startling new alliance among Chicago`s architects.
At the time of his death in 1982, Khan was the nation`s most brilliant structural engineer and one of the giants in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. More to the point, he was a close associate and friend of SOM senior partner Bruce Graham. Together, the two men had designed Sears Tower, John Hancock Center and other world-class skyscrapers.
Also to the point is the fact that Graham and Tigerman had long disliked one another rather ferociously and seemed to share not an inch of
philosophical turf. But then came the Khan funeral.
Tigerman recalls that at the funeral parlor, crowded with famous architects, Graham suddenly walked up to him and embraced him in a kind of macho bear hug. Kind words were exchanged, and the hostility of old slid away. Tigerman and Graham had both loved the humane and gentle Khan, and it was the shared intensity of grief that changed their own relationship.
Perhaps that is an oversimplified account of the Tigerman-Graham detente that has since turned into an alliance. But it is incontestably true that today the two men share many identical civic and professional concerns and have worked closely together for what they perceive as the public good. Graham and his SOM colleagues have also broken away from by-the-numbers Miesianism of old, moving at least a little closer to the liveliness that has always marked the work of Tigerman and other freewheeling designers.
Graham is the most powerful architect in Chicago. He is the top man in the city`s biggest design firm and president of the Chicago Central Area Committee, funded by influential downtown businessmen. SOM drafted the committee`s elaborate 1983 downtown master plan and was in charge of physical planning for the recently torpedoed 1992 World`s Fair.
But at almost every major turn, Graham has in the last few years shared his civic power with Tigerman and the Chicago Eleven crowd. He assigned them major segments of the downtown planning job. When it was time to involve prominent architects from all over America in planning the fair, Graham called on Tigerman and his network of connections. The same alliance has made the Chicago Architectural Club a broad-based forum for the discussion of design issues and publication of a substantial journal. Our city is now a place for talking as well as building, and Tigerman deserves much of the credit.
Never a mere team player, Tigerman also continues to turn in solo performances with great zest and energy. He runs a 12-person architecture firm, is working on two new books and serves as director of the graduate school at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Architecture. He is in national demand as a lecturer and a design juror.
Work currently in progress on Tigerman`s drawing boards seems to indicate a shift toward a slightly more relaxed, rather more elegant approach to form by him and by his two partners–Robert Fugman and Tigerman`s wife, Margaret McCurry.
Yet generalizations like that are a little dangerous. Tigerman has certainly not lost his sense of humor, as you will see when workmen have finished building a new parking garage at 60 E. Lake St. It is shaped and detailed exactly like the front end of an enormous Rolls Royce.
Nor has Tigerman abandoned such old interests as moderately priced housing for the masses. He was one of a few architects from around the world recently selected to design a possibly paradigmatic urban villa in West Berlin.
Tigerman is enraged because the scuttling of the 1992 fair seemed to doom so many opportunities for improving the central area. But he hopes to act on some of the concepts that came out of the downtown master plan he helped shape. One of his most interesting design schemes calls for building a strip of rowhouses to mask the triple-decked highway structure east of Michigan Avenue running along the riverbank at the north edge of Illinois Center. Tigerman also has turned out some rather impressive plans for low-density housing in Dearborn Park.
The versatile architect`s work does not stop with buildings. He has been designing commercially successful china and furniture, and early next winter you can expect to see him get major national attention for his role in a slightly outrageous retailing stunt.
Tigerman fits his home town well, for this has always been a snug urban berth for impudent, arrogant and wittily flip men and women–so long as they had talent. It has also been a magnificent place to practice architecture for the last 100 years, and Tigerman views that characteristic of Chicago as undiminished.
Our city has become the destination of the brightest young graduates from architecture schools, Tigerman says. New York? ”Finito,” he declares. If any city threatens to become the prime design vineyard of the future, it is Los Angeles.
In any case, Tigerman sees a solid future for Postmodernism. He views it as a truly American architecture, in contrast to the European-rooted International Style. If Postmodernism is being trivialized by hack architects –well, what style has not been, he asks.
Listening to Tigerman and studying the successes of his many-faceted career, it should become clear that he has always been a great deal more than the clown prince. His often caustic sense of humor seems forever to have been part of his personality. And if he occasionally uses it as an attention-getter –well, why not?
Here is an architect who takes his profession and his city seriously. Irony and even belly laughs need hardly be antithetical to such mature concerns. And how many of us can say we have come to terms with our mortality?
