There’s a bright light glimmering amid the darkness of a Chicago that has lost its status as the first city of American architecture. It’s coming from the basement of a rehabbed Near South Side tire warehouse, the right kind of place in a town where the elevated train still rumbles and the factories roar.
There, architect Stanley Tigerman and interior designer Eva Maddox are running an adventurous little school that’s putting all sorts of design at the disposal of those who rarely enjoy its benefits: the poor, the homeless, the disabled. The school is called Archeworks (pronounced AR-key-works) and it has a mission: to forge a new, socially conscious model of design, as well as new identities for the troubled profession of architecture.
That’s a lofty goal, and the only way to reach it, as the founders acknowledge, is to take things one small, and sometimes faltering, step at a time. Attached to the wall alongside the school’s front door, a Ten Commandments-like statement preaches: “In a town whose motto is `make no little plans,’ we believe in making every little plan the best it can be.”
In the school’s second year, the jury is still out on Archeworks–and how vibrant a force it can be, both in Chicago and worldwide. But some very good little plans indeed are emerging from the basement of the loft building at 1727 S. Indiana Ave., across from Henry Hobson Richardson’s landmark Glessner House. There’s a rich intermingling of backgrounds and approaches down there, and it’s showing up in zestful work.
One team of students consists of an athletic footwear designer who worked for Nike, a retail display designer at Crate & Barrel, a recent architecture graduate and a former nurse who once worked for the Archdiocese of Chicago. Melding their talents, they developed an elegant head-mounted pointing device that may free people with cerebral palsy from wearing equipment that is ugly and uncomfortable.
Another team envisions an upbeat visual identity for the down-but-not-out West Humboldt Park neighborhood. Custom-designed postcards and shopping bags not only would promote the area’s fortunes, but would improve them by creating cottage industries.
A third group of students has crafted a plan to help the homeless. Among the ideas they’ve proposed: bright yellow ponchos that would transform themselves into makeshift tents, plus a survival kit that points out where basic needs, like taking a bath, can be met for free.
Bright ideas with no chance of making it off the drawing board? Think again.
CTA officials have met with the students and take seriously another of their ideas for West Humboldt Park–letting it and other communities promote themselves on specially painted buses. The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago is testing the head-mounted pointing device on one of its patients. And the leadership of the West Humboldt Park Development Council applauds the school, even though most of the students are white and most neighborhood residents are minorities.
“It’s not a goofy program,” says Sheila Altieri, the council’s executive director. Besides, she admits, it’s nice to get free products from an idea factory supervised by two of Chicago’s top designers: Tigerman and Maddox.
A `do tank’
They are, at first glance, an odd couple of the first order–he the brilliant, cantankerous Jew who grew up in North Side Edgewater; she, the accomplished, more tightly wound Methodist raised in tiny Viola, Tenn. (pop.: 225). He’s internationally recognized for provocative buildings. She’s widely respected as a creative interior design problem-solver. He can be as cuddly as a teddy bear or as nasty as a ward committeeman. “When push comes to shove (between them),” she says, “I push like hell.”
They’ve been friends for 25 years, but only a few years ago did they get serious about opening a school that would hark back to the German Bauhaus, the legendary between-the-wars institution founded by architect Walter Gropius. Their discussions took on renewed intensity in early 1993, after Tigerman was booted from his post as director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s architecture school.
Close to two years later, after furious rounds of fundraising, Archeworks made its debut–not as a think tank, but as a “do tank,” the better to stress the connection between thought and action.
It is not, by any measure, a conventional architecture school. The 12 students, all of whom receive scholarships to offset the $7,000 annual tuition, are referred to as “interns.” The six faculty members are “coaches.” The students work in teams and interact with real clients. They often fabricate what they design. In the hands-on spirit of the Midwest, there is a workshop, complete with drill saws, a few steps from their drafting tables and an old-fashioned dark wood bar, dubbed the “Archebar,” where everyone hangs out.
This year’s class of 12, selected from more than 300 applicants, ranges in age from 22 to 55. A little more than half have conventional backgrounds in architecture; the rest come from related design fields. Upon completion of the one-year, non-accredited program, graduates receive a “Diploma for a Year of Study in Alternative Design and Architecture,” with the emphasis on “alternative”–as in “alternative career path.”
It’s no accident that Archeworks came into being at a time of crisis for the profession of architecture. Thousands of draftsmen were thrown out of work when the commercial real estate market collapsed in the late ’80s. Computers have eliminated many entry-level drafting jobs. The usual debates go on about style, but beneath the glistening surface of picture spreads in the trade journals, it’s widely accepted that old career models are outmoded–in particular, the myth of the solitary, uncompromising hero architect epitomized by the character Howard Roark of Ayn Rand’s classic 1943 novel “The Fountainhead.”
“Something is changing,” Tigerman says. His friend, the hyper-intellectual New York City architect Peter Eisenman, thinks Archeworks won’t work because it isn’t devoted to a single discipline. “When Eisenman said he hated Archeworks,” says Tigerman, “I knew we were on the right track.”
Team effort pays dividends
But cooperation between the disciplines is much more easily achieved in theory than reality, as Caryl Anselmini of Houston found out last year at Archeworks. Working on a team with an art historian and two architects, the Crate & Barrel retail display designer encountered “lots of fights, lots of people who couldn’t leave their egos at the door.” Her teammates would say: “It’s my design. I don’t want to listen to your ideas.”
This year, returning to complete her study, she has had an entirely different experience–a model of creative synergy. She’s on the team that designed the handsome, head-mounted pointing device for people with cerebral palsy. The beneficiary has been a patient named Brian, who previously had to wear a clumsy-looking contraption that was heavy and uncomfortable.
Cerebral palsy is paralysis due to a lesion of the brain and is characterized chiefly by spasms. Unable to use their limbs, people use the pointer to drive a motorized wheelchair or to peck at a computer keyboard that helps them to communicate. The team’s quantum leap was to conceive of the headpointer not as a piece of engineering, but as a piece of sportswear–as cool-looking as a streamlined bike helmet or a pair of Air Jordans.
In Susan Ryder, who used to design athletic footwear for Nike and now works for Chicago-based Wilson Sporting Goods, it had the perfect person for the job. From her shoe-design experience, Ryder knew of a strong but lightweight, graphite-glass composite that could form the pointer’s head-cupping frame. For the frame’s inside, she suggested a foam treated with an odor-absorbing material, essentially the same stuff used in the shoe product Odor Eaters. That attention to hygiene was important because the pointers are worn 12 to 18 hours a day.
As Ryder evolved into the product designer, Anselmini became a self-described “worker bee,” figuring out how to make concepts work. Recent architecture graduate Christopher Nigro supplied a design concept, known as triangulation, for the elastic straps that stabilized the pointer. Kathryn Hartigan, previously employed by the Archdiocese of Chicago to minister to disabled people, helped the team navigate the medical system and guided its interaction with Brian.
Like the body itself, the head-mounted device is composed of curving forms, not hard geometric edges. The most prominent curving element, the pointer itself, is bent at a high angle, unlike a conventional straight pointer, so Brian does not have to stare directly at it. The device is shaped closely to the head, practically disappearing in Brian’s dark hair.
“Brian was so thrilled,” Ryder says. And there was a larger lesson, she adds: “People with disabilities had the same aesthetic needs and comfort needs as everybody else. Products designed for people with disabilities . . . have to work, but they also have to be beautiful and comfortable.”
This was precisely what the founders had in mind when they started Archeworks–a design that grows out of human needs instead of precious philosophizing. Still, there are obstacles, for both the head-mounted pointer and for Archeworks.
The Rehabilitation Institute must test the device to see if it can be made cost effective. And while the tale of the pointer is inspiring, it’s an example of product design, not subject to the politics that typically stymie efforts to solve homelessness and other social problems. The more political a problem, the harder it is for a designer to solve. The risk for Archeworks is that it will be nothing more than a well-meaning boutique.
Building from the bottom up
Yet Tigerman and Maddox hold that design can be a catalyst that redefines the image of a community. When image changes, reality sometimes follows. Postcards and Bloomingdale’s-like shopping bags seem unlikely for West Humboldt Park. But they not only would enhance the self-image of the community, they would–if residents manufactured them–provide jobs while the neighborhood awaits more substantive economic improvement.
Clearly, there are limits to what a school can do, yet there are no limits on the impact it can make with ideas–not in this computer age. Archeworks was scheduled to inaugurate its own page on the World Wide Web last week; a program comparable to Archeworks already is up and running at the Yale University School of Architecture, where Tigerman tried out a prototype of the school.
How should one measure the school’s success? Perhaps in the way it changes the way we measure success in the real world–moving away from the standard set by “The Fountainhead” and toward a model that centers on the needs of the user and the community rather than the ego of the architect. “What you’re really looking for are small things that collectively can make big things,” Tigerman says.
“It’s all building blocks,” Maddox says of the school’s projects and their long-term effect on the students.
In that modest spirit, the school’s basement quarters convey an unintended message: Change must come from the bottom up, not from social engineers in an ivory tower. It is best to design with the disadvantaged, not for them. If designers are going to help save the world, they’d best attack it one very good little plan at a time.
