No major skyscrapers will be on the rise in Chicago this fall, but little matter. Two towering figures are on the architecture horizon-one a genius, the other a madman.
The genius is Midwest architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose eight decades of unparalleled creativity are to be featured in a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
The madman is German dictator Adolf Hitler, whose dozen-year reign of destruction is sure to be lurking in the shadows of two Chicago lectures, including one about the architect Philip Johnson, and an exhibition here on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The short list of significant buildings scheduled for completion in the next few months will continue the pattern already set in motion by an unprecedented glut of office space in the United States.
Cash-rich institutions and the public sector are driving construction forward while office building developers try to stay out of bankruptcy court.
In November, the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis will open its Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, a lively jumble designed by Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry and located on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River.
A few months later, when November’s falling leaves have given way to February’s slush, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business will complete its contemporary, but contextual, downtown center on the banks of the Chicago River. The project is by Chicago architects Lohan Associates.
Renovations of historic buildings are on the calendar, too.
In Chicago, the most noteworthy renovation is the old Goldblatt’s department store at 333 S. State St., which will be officially reborn Tuesday as the main building of DePaul University’s downtown campus. The building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is to be known as DePaul Center.
Several architects, led by Chicago’s Daniel Coffey, worked on the project, which transformed Goldblatt’s selling floors into classrooms, lecture halls, rental office space and stores on State Street.
The skyscraper is not totally out of the picture this fall. It’s just moved elsewhere. Or to put it more accurately, it’s being designed in the United States to be built on other shores.
They are in East Asia, where the economy is booming and the skylines are soaring to record-breaking levels. One of the tallest towers-a 1,295-foot office and hotel skyscraper for downtown Shanghai, which will be taller than the Empire State Building-is now being shaped by the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
To write about a “fall season” in architecture is, of course, a conceit. Architects don’t bring out a new line of buildings every September like Ford and General Motors once brought out new lines of cars. Architecture, by its very nature, is time-consuming, expensive and slower to change than the other arts.
“We don’t invent a new architecture every Monday morning,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once said of his finely honed steel-and-glass designs. Even if the remark expressed Mies’ personal distaste for architectural fashions, it still says much about the collective conservatism of his profession.
By sheer coincidence, Mies is loosely linked with nearly all the major figures in the upcoming architecture season.
He fled Hitler’s Germany for Chicago, met with Wright at the latter’s Taliesin compound in Wisconsin, designed the Seagram Building in New York City with Johnson and was the grandfather of Dirk Lohan, the Chicago architect responsible for the University of Chicago’s new downtown building.
Mies’ once-warm relationship with Wright eventually cooled, in part due to Mies’ embrace of the minimalism of the International Style. To reduce the art of building to its essence, Mies strove to create an architecture of “next to nothing.”
At the 1932 Museum of Modern Art show that brought Mies and other International Style architects to the attention of the American public, Wright turned the “next to nothing” phrase into a biting jibe, calling Mies’ work “much ado ’bout next to nothing.”
Cracks such as that, plus Wright’s broad-brimmed hat, swirling cape and, most of all, his visionary plans and masterful buildings make the architect more than just a towering design figure. He is a cultural landmark as well.
It is that side of Wright-the representative man, not the eccentric genius-that will be a focus of “Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect,” which has its sole showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from Feb. 20 to May 10.
Billed as the most comprehensive presentation of Wright’s architecture since his death, the show will consist of 350 original drawings, 30 models, full-scale mockups of Wright’s work, plus photographs and selected architectural fragments, many never seen before in public.
Organized by Terence Riley, the museum’s chief architecture curator, and Peter Reed, assistant architecture curator, the exhibition already is generating interest in Wright’s native Midwest, where Wrightophiles are legion.
The timing of the exhibition is odd, coming two years after the 125th anniversary of Wright’s birth. (Riley explains that other big shows filled the museum’s calendar in the anniversary year, 1992).
Still harder to fathom is the lack of corporate support for the exhibition, even in these times of economic slowdown. In an interview late last month, Riley said that not a single corporate sponsor was on board and the museum’s wealthy board of trustees had agreed to underwrite the show in the event hoped-for foundation grants don’t come through.
One of those trustees is Philip Johnson, the reigning tastemaker of American architecture and the subject of a much-awaited, forthcoming biography by Franz Schulze. In 1985, Schulze authored a lively and insightful biography of Mies.
Franz Schulze, a professor of art at Lake Forest College, will speak on “Writing the Life of Philip Johnson” on Sept. 23 at 6 p.m. at the Arts Club of Chicago, 109 E. Ontario St. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Nazism will be in the background as the Chicago Athenaeum, an architecture and design museum whose main gallery is at 1165 N. Clark St., presents “The Architecture of Remembrance: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” from Oct. 26 through Jan. 29.
The museum, designed by New York City architect James Ingo Freed, has a searing power that emerges directly out of the architecture of Hitler’s concentration camps and the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe.
Freed’s subtext is how Hitler transformed modern architecture’s machine for living into a machine for killing-an assembly line of death whose brutal efficiency was without parallel.
That theme is likely to resurface in what promises to be one of the most provocative lectures of the fall, “Bauhaus for the Fuhrer: Modern Architects in the Service of the Third Reich,” to be delivered by author Wolfgang Voigt on Oct. 6. The 8 p.m. lecture is at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 4 W. Burton Pl.
Conventional wisdom long has been that Hitler, whose megalomaniacal visions of classical architecture were turned into reality by Albert Speer, brought modernism to a halt. Hitler closed the Bauhaus and forced Mies, Walter Gropius and other celebrated architects to escape from Nazi Germany. Surely, other modernists fled along with them.
Voigt is poised to explode this myth. The majority of modern architects stayed in Germany and made their peace with the Third Reich, designing armanents plants and air force buildings, according to a preview of the lecture provided by the Graham Foundation.
“Many architects later denied or played down this part of their work for concerns about their careers in the postwar West German democracy,” the preview states.
The rest of the Chicago architectural scene promises to be less grim, with a sparkling array of exhibitions, lectures and tours.
The Chicago Architecture Foundation is offering several new tours, including visits to the new International Terminal at O’Hare International Airport, by Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will; and the superbly restored Rookery Building. For recorded information, call (312) 922-8687.
The Chicago Athenaeum is presenting several exhibitions, including one that spotlights new work from the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Also upcoming are shows about architecture and urban design in Sweden, Hungary and Germany. For times and locations call (312) 280-0131.
Among the architects of note who will be lecturing in town this fall are Chicago’s Joseph Gonzalez (Oct. 6, University of Illinois at Chicago), Frank Israel of Los Angeles (Oct. 20, University of Illinois at Chicago), and Dutch designer Rem Koolhaas (Oct. 25, Graham Foundation). The lecture series for the Illinois Institute of Technology is still being organized.
The final theme for this fall is the state of flux in Chicago’s design schools. The School of the Art of Chicago is inaugurating a new master’s program in the historic preservation of architecture. And the city’s two architecture schools are conducting searches for new leaders.
Having ousted Stanley Tigerman from his post as director of the architecture school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the school has turned to an interim director, Chicago architect Kenneth Schroeder. At the Illinois Institute of Technology, where Gene Summers resigned last spring, Chicago architect Jack Hartray is filling the dean’s job on an acting basis.
Mies even has a connection to the changing of the guard at the architecture schools. He was director of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, known as the Armour Institute of Technology when he assumed the post in 1938.
