Harry Weese is one of Chicago`s most respected elder statesmen of architecture. He is also a planner, a visionary and the conscience of a city that has a lot to feel guilty about when it comes to despoiling the built environment.
In an age when respect for traditional urban values has been largely superseded by franchised chic and suburbanization, Weese is still the quintessential city man. Moreover, he is almost anachronistic in his civilized bearing and manner. Yet for all his softspokeness, Weese is capable of skewering those he disdains with rapier-sharp criticism.
One never needs an excuse to write about an architect as extraordinary as Weese, although a couple of special occurrences make such an exercise particularly appropriate this month. On Oct. 29, the Metropolitan Planning Council will honor him at a dinner in the Empire Room of the Palmer House. Coincidentally, a book about Weese-designed houses has just been published.
It is impossible to live in Chicago and not be visually exposed to a lot of work by Weese-or, more properly, Harry Weese & Associates. He designed the muscular Time-Life building at 541 N. Fairbanks Ct. in the Miesian mold, and the federal prison at Clark and Van Buren streets, a slit-windowed triangle that has no discernible precedents. His diverse and frequently honored work in the United States and abroad includes the subway system in Washington, D.C., the first in America planned entirely by an architect and by far the most handsome.
To encapsule some of Weese`s thoughts about the condition of the city, his own work and architecture in general, we recently spent a morning with him at his 10 W. Hubbard St. offices, cleverly carved out of an old timbered loft building.
The white-haired, 72-year-old architect was his usual self in conversation, which must be a nerve-frazzling experience for an unsuspecting journalist interviewing him for the first time. Weese uses words the way a jazz musician uses notes, and strings his phrases together in a broken meter often impossible to quote. He is a brilliant man, and eminently worth listening to, as long as one does not try to parse his sentences.
How does Weese feel about the planning and building of Chicago after years of trying to coax and goad its political and other leaders into saving and enhancing the best of the urban fabric?
”Planning in Chicago has been going downhill ever since Daniel Burnham`s time, and between World War I and 1950 there was hardly any planning at all,” said Weese, rather more tersely than usual. He believes that the late Frederick T. Aschman, who ran the Chicago Plan Commission in the early 1950s, was ”the last bona-fide planner we had” in City Hall.
”The Illinois Central Railroad was always one of the great villains on the planning scene, since it controlled and allowed the misuse of all of that right-of-way land running down the lakefront,” said Weese. ”And look at what has been built along the lake that doesn`t belong there: Things like the downtown water filtration plant, which should have gone inland, and McCormick Place, which could have been built just south of the Loop.”
Weese has spent nearly 30 years promoting more creative uses of waterfront land. Still, his proposals for manmade islands, marinas, less intrusive lakeshore roads and riverbank improvements have gone mostly unimplemented. The architect also fought for a world`s fair of 1993 that would have been strung along the downtown shoreline instead of concentrated on the Near South Side, where its main backers wanted it to be. The whole notion of a fair eventually died, of course.
The Metropolitan Sanitary District`s Deep Tunnel project was from the beginning persistently attacked by Weese as an overpriced and clumsy flood control measure, but he and other environmentalists lost that battle, too.
”A lot of this is about water, isn`t it?” smiled Weese. ”For my part, I suppose you could say it began when I was in the 8th grade and built a model of the Panama Canal as a science class project.” One might also observe that Weese served in the Navy during World War II and still sails on Lake Michigan aboard his 44-foot ketch.
In any case, Weese`s concerns for the commonweal extend inland as well. He is among those who see clearly the long-term damage Chicago has done to itself, particularly in the central area.
”We let the highwaymen run their interstates everywhere while our magnificent city boulevard system fell into decay. I suppose Mayor Daley gets the blame for that. Downtown, we demolished legitimate theaters and let all of those big retail stores disappear. Nobody seemed to be in charge.
”Today, we`re losing landmarks like the McCarthy Building and some say we may even lose the Reliance Building and others as well. Certainly, that could happen. I`m surprised we`ve saved anything except churches, and now they`re in danger, too.
”Land values are out of control, and that means taller buildings of more density, but the real estate taxes don`t go up at the same rate. And we cling to so many mistaken practices when it comes to housing, like kicking people out of public housing when they start making too much money. In England, you know, they just raise the rent and let the people stay.”
Weese is among many Chicagoans who are disenchanted with the barrenness of Illinois Center, although he designed a hotel that is under construction there. He is skeptical about future development of the Chicago Dock & Canal Trust property east of Michigan Avenue and the American Medical Association real estate project west of Michigan.
The veteran architect`s fondness for hanging nicknames on prominent people often pops up when he talks about ”Czarina” (also known as Elizabeth) Hollander, Chicago`s laissez-faire planning commissioner. Weese also enjoys referring to ”Genghis” (Helmut) Jahn, designer of the state office building that Weese calls the ”ice palace,” a reference to its once-ailing air cooling system.
His gentility notwithstanding, Weese sometimes uses even tougher language when discussing other nationally prominent architects whose work does not enchant him.
”Philip Johnson has called himself a whore,” said Weese, ”but I think it more accurate to call him a pimp. After all, look at all those other architects he carries around on his back, like Michael Graves.”
Weese believes that Johnson-promoted Postmodernism and kindred design forms that are fashionable in America these days reflect a ”general loss of values” in the architectural community.
”Vitruvius said the three qualities of architecture are commodity, firmness and delight, but too much of what`s being designed today can only delight the ignorant.”
Weese`s own body of work can be best described as eclectic, although it has been influenced by Le Corbusier, Alvar Alto, Eliel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen. Nor can Weese disclaim sometime rooting in the International Style. While his commercial and institutional buildings enjoy high visibility and have brought him many design awards, Weese`s houses have until now received much less attention. That, however, is changing with the publication of ”Harry Weese Houses” (Chicago Review Press, 160 pages, $35).
The architect`s wife, Kitty Baldwin Weese, wrote the book. It covers everything from a log cabin Weese did when he was 21 to a spectacularly cantilevered Door County extravaganza he turned out in 1970. The book includes comments by the house owners, but is no blind paean. One only hopes that someone will now produce an even more substantial overview of Weese`s full oeuvre.
Weese`s work in recent years has included the 200 S. Wacker Dr. office skyscraper, a U.S. Embassy housing complex in Tokyo, and transit design in Los Angeles and Singapore. One current Chicago job about which he is particularly enthusiastic is a master plan for Chinatown that will tie the neighborhood to the river and provide it with new housing.
There seem to be contradictions in Weese`s thinking about the city fabric and traditional urban values. He has spoken out sharply about excessively tall buildings, for example, but has himself proposed towers more than 100 stories. His opposition to ”highwaymen” is also a bit uneven, since he favors the long-discredited and abandoned proposal to build a Crosstown Expressway just east of Cicero Avenue.
One of the most obscure facts about Weese`s role as a civic tastemaker is that he was chiefly responsible for selection of the controversial Vietnam War memorial design in Washington, D.C. None of the other people serving on the competition jury with Weese paid any attention to a rough pastel rendering submitted by a Chinese architecture student named Maya Ying Lin. Some did not regard it as a ”serious” entry. Weese lobbied the design into reality, and the memorial is today among Washington`s most emotionally powerful.
Weese has enjoyed other triumphs. He played an early and major role in conceptualizing the Printer`s Row area. He took over Chicago-based Inland Architect magazine when it was on the edge of extinction and-with the help of a new editor, Cynthia Davidson-Powers-turned it into one of the nation`s best design periodicals.
When Weese is honored at the Oct. 29 dinner in the Empire Room, fellow architects saluting him will include Edward Larabee Barnes, Henry N. Cobb, Bertrand Goldberg, John F. Hartray Jr., Daniel Kiley and Walter Netsch.
That is a heavy-hitting bunch, indeed, if you know a little about who`s who in architecture. Still, Weese deserves no less. He is not only the conscience of a town that continues to senselessly damage itself, but an architect deliberately remote from the fancy crowd of salon and jet-set designers who have never really learned what Vitruvius was talking about.
