Brilliant designer, consummate city man, piercing wit, Harry Weese is such a Chicago original that only he could have invented himself. For decades, he was the city’s conscience, chastising the way it despoiled the built environment while he gave it a diverse and sometimes extraordinary series of buildings. Now 82 years old, battered by ill health, the former engineering officer for Navy destroyers lives in a veterans home in Downstate Manteno, unable to recognize old friends, even his family.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the still-ongoing firm Weese founded in 1947, so it is appropriate to reflect on his legacy. His much-honored work here includes the muscular Time and Life Building at 541 N. Fairbanks Ct. and the federal prison at 71 W. Van Buren St., a slit-windowed triangle that’s as fresh today as when it rose in 1975. His masterpiece undoubtedly is the subway system in Washington, D.C., one of the few in America that clearly bears the imprint of an architect and by far the most handsome.
If you’re primed for a decade-by-decade review of Weese’s career, highlighting his major designs, you’ll have to wait until Dec. 4 when the Chicago Architecture Foundation presents a retrospective organized in cooperation with Harry Weese Associates. In the meantime, a fine little exhibition at the Chicago Historical Society opens a window into the mind of an architect who often found a way to resolve tradition and innovation, standardization and humanism. Even if you don’t know Weese’s buildings, it’s worth a look.
Titled “An Architect at Work: Drawings by Harry Weese,” the show presents more than 40 examples culled from the thousands of files and drawings the Weese firm has donated to the museum. There are pencil and ink drawings, water color sketches, as well as studies. They reveal a straightforward truth: How an architect thinks affects how he builds, and thus, how we live.
Weese, the exhibition demonstrates, possessed the rare ability to think globally and locally. Big plans didn’t matter unless they were conceived down to the most minute level of human experience. Yet artful details meant little unless they were part of a carefully conceived whole. Even if the show’s rather thin wall text, by co-curators Bernard Reilly and Walter Reinhardt, doesn’t make this point forcefully, the drawings do. The curators have selected and arranged them well, and their installation is crisp and nicely paced.
From the beginning of the show, where a huge horizontal mural of the Chicago lakefront stretches across the wall, you see Weese’s big-picture view and how different it was from the sterile utopias sketched by other modern architects. His quick, freehand strokes depict a city pulsing with activity. Tiny triangles represent sailboats on Lake Michigan. The bridges across the Chicago River rise in heroic splendor. The beacon atop the old Palmolive Building at 919 N. Michigan Ave. shoots into the sky. New towers rise on the fringe of downtown.
In this 1980 drawing, probably done for a public presentation, the city is not a machine–cool, rational, efficient. It’s a thriving organism, with the new layered upon the old, and Weese celebrates both its diversity of forms and apparent chaos.
Yet if his sketches resemble cartoons, his thinking was anything but cartoonish, its highly analytical search for order made clear by another vast horizontal work–this one from 1959 and consisting of a series of pictures and handwritten text analyzing a visit to an airport. The sequence begins with the driver’s view from behind the windshield, showing a confusing tangle of expressway spaghetti. Then it shows rain falling on the traveler because his parking space wasn’t near the terminal. Finally, with minutes to spare, the poor fellow huffs and puffs to the gate and collapses in his seat.
What matters to travelers, Weese is saying in this drawing, isn’t the glamorous image of a building like Eero Saarinen’s swooping, bird-shaped TWA terminal at New York City’s Kennedy Airport. The total package of reliability, service and design counts. His prophetic call for a “Union Station of the air” anticipates by 25 years the way Helmut Jahn would put a new spin on the old romance of the railroad stations in his United Airlines Terminal at O’Hare International Airport. Moreover, Weese’s emphasis on the machine serving the traveler, instead of the reverse, foreshadows how his people-friendly approach would impress federal officials in the mid-1960s and win him the coveted job of designing Washington’s subway system.
Metro, as the system is known, is among the world’s most civilized transit systems. Its graffiti-free underground features spectacular concrete vaults that evoke, but do not imitate, the capital’s classical monuments. They are based on prototypes that, while adjusted to the specifics of each site, give the system a consistent visual identity. Disappointingly, the show has only a smattering of Weese drawings for the project. Even so, they are fascinating, portraying his unrealized plans for moving passengers directly to train platforms from street level and for using skylights to infuse the subway with natural light.
The exhibition also serves up some delightful dollops of Weese’s humor. His capacity for satire was as light-touched as his drafting pencil. Sketching eight variations of the single-family home for Life magazine in the early 1960s, he drew homes that reflected local climates and customs, such as a Deep South house with palm trees, overhanging porches and a carport. There was one exception: a could-be-anywhere box called “SOM,” a reference to the Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which in the 1960s remained under the sway of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the International Style.
Departing from the International Style and its search for a universal architectural grammar, Weese was unafraid to reinterpret the past even as he anticipated the future. An example in the show is the United States Embassy in Accra, Ghana of 1956, in which Weese used inexpensive native mahogany and elevated the building on stilts to catch the breezes, long before energy conservation became fashionable.
In recent years, following the departure of its namesake, the firm of Harry Weese Associates has turned out solid, sometimes exemplary work, such as the award-winning restoration of Buckingham Fountain and the fine student union at Chicago State University. The latter has a conical skylight that suggests traditional thatched dwellings in Africa, an appropriate gesture because the student body is predominantly African-American.
Chicago architect Jack Hartray has written of his former boss: “In the ’50s and ’60s, when Mies was leading most of Chicago’s young architects up the straight, gray road to perfection, Harry Weese provided a few of us with a meandering, sunlit detour. He taught us to follow our senses, even when our intellects objected, and to trust in the abundance of the material world rather than in ideal systems which were distilled from it. . . . Harry built to adorn human activity rather than to mold or direct it.”
True, Weese left one clunker, the graceless Marriott Hotel at 540 N. Michigan Ave., and there is a certain uneven quality about his buildings when they are considered as a whole. But that’s an inevitable byproduct of not being bound by a rigid formula. In fusing the past with the future, and in recognizing the uniqueness of every work of architecture while searching for patterns that could be broadly applied, Weese constructed a humanistic way of thinking and building. It still speaks to us today.
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“An Architect at Work: Drawings by Harry Weese” appears in the Chicago Historical Society’s A. Montgomery Ward Gallery through Jan. 18. The museum is at Clark Street at North Avenue. “Harry Weese Associates: 50th Anniversary Exhibition” opens at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S. Michigan, on Dec. 4 and runs through Jan. 31.
