ALFRED CALDWELL: The Life and Work of a Prairie School Landscape Architect
Edited by Dennis Domer
Johns Hopkins, 307 pages, $39.95
At 94, Alfred Caldwell is a Chicago legend with a thundering life story that has long waited to be told. Finally, here it is, and it is captivating: part biography, part autobiography fleshed out with his own jawboning essays and brooding sonnets and letters and jeremiads.
A defiant survivor of hirings and firings and resignations and indignations, Caldwell has been practical builder and visionary city planner, architect, landscape master, poet, celebrator of married love, philosopher of man, nature and society; artist, writer, impassioned teacher, apocalyptic prophet, stump orator, pessimistic optimist, optimistic pessimist, scorcher of his money-grubbing times, relentless town crier and decrier.
He learned early to live on the edge. There were times during the 1930s Depression when he and his wife, Geda, hardly knew where their next bite of cornmeal was coming from. “The depression made me belligerent,” he says. “I have been belligerent ever since.”
For years he taught architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology under the eminent Mies van der Rohe. But his guiding inspiration came from Frank Lloyd Wright and landscape architect Jens Jensen, titans of their time. Growing up in Chicago, Caldwell came to detest cities: their brutality, squalor, slums, their lethal grid of streets. Like Wright, he would decentralize the world and resettle everyone in gardens if he could: the “city in the landscape and the landscape in the city.”
His charmed hand is on the Zoorookery in Lincoln Park, a sort of secret if not sacred garden at Fullerton Avenue. As usual, it took a long time to give him public credit for it. Early on, toiling night and day for $40 a week, he created enchanted park buildings in Dubuque, Iowa, but fell prey to small-town backbiting. Remembering it 57 years later, he groused, “the bastards had no dreams.” He does not love all of his fellow men, and he has reasons.
“God is spelled GNP” is a Caldwellism. So is, “Most men are so cheap that they will not even spend themselves.” Los Angeles is “the city of beautiful women weeping in smog.” Chicago is “the capital of Philistia,” a “catastrophe yet to be cleared.” The Loop is a “gaudy acropolis of a frontier town, lined with catchpenny skyscrapers.” “America is the machine state, the corporation state, the state on ball bearings.”
Years ago, this encompassing nay-sayer (and yea-sayer) built his own green retreat in Bristol, Wis. And there he lives, still at work.
DESIGNING DISNEY’S THEME PARKS: The Architecture of Reassurance
Edited by Karal Ann Marling
Flammarion, 223 pages, $50
Walt Disney and his Imagineers drew from an astonishing mix of sources for Disneyland and all that came later. The roots trace to fairs and carnivals and royal pleasure grounds and slipcovered malls and small-town Main Streets and miniature railroads and back to the Garden of Eden. In Chicago, the Imagineers took note of the Museum of Science and Industry and its old-time Main Street and Colleen Moore’s fairy-castle dollhouse, the old Ivanhoe restaurant with its spooky “underground” haunts (now vanished, alas), world’s fairs and the Railroad Fair of 1948 and the tiny Thorne rooms of the Art Institute.
Basically, however, Walt adapted the streetside pop imagery of Los Angeles for his feel-good fantasyland of myths and storytelling, nostalgia and futurism. But the theme parks are also a critique of what he disliked in that city: the automobile cult, the lack of decent public transportation, streets without people, the monotonous bungalow belt, the missing center of town, the dirt, the clutter, the turmoil. He wanted to do a real city, and 31 years after his death, the Imagineers are building one, called Celebration, Fla. We’ll have to wait and see how real it turns out to be. Real cities have real problems.
Art historian Karal Ann Marling explored the Disney archives for this fruitful and exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) account of world-conquering Americana. This is no mere Toontown adventure; the essayists include historian Neil Harris of the University of Chicago. The book was written to accompany an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and there are many fetching drawings by the Imagineers.
KRUECK & SEXTON: Work in Progress
By Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton, introduction by Franz Schulze
Monacelli, 191 pages, $35
Chicago, too often, has settled for stodgy if not backward-looking architecture in recent years. The firm of Krueck & Sexton is a stellar exception, with work as knowing as anything in Paris, and yet rooted in Chicago’s pervasive grid. Taking off from the basic Chicago rectangle of Mies van der Rohe, Krueck & Sexton mutate and rotate planes and lines and spaces, warp and invert and fracture, screen and layer. It’s all smartly done with high gloss and a palette of light and color and luxe materials.
Nearly always it seems to be done for wealthy patrons. It would be enlightening to see how this polish and patina would play in a typical tightwad budget. Among the many color photos in this book are some prize houses and apartments, and the firm’s finalist (but losing) competition project for the new Arts Club of Chicago.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT FIELD GUIDE, VOL. 1: Upper Great Lakes: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan
By Thomas A. Heinz
Academy, 168 pages, $19.95 paper
For motoring Wright pilgrims, here is the first of four volumes that promise to cover most of the country. The master built in about three out of every four states, and more than 400 of his buildings still stand. Tom Heinz offers directions, locations with color photos, and commentary with maps. He warns against unwelcome intrusions or vicious dogs on the premises, ranks accessibility and rates each house on a scale of one star to five stars. In this Midwestern trove of nearly 100 buildings, five-star ratings go to Taliesin in Spring Green, Wis.; Johnson Wax Co. headquarters in Racine; and the Smith House in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. The great man had great clients.
TERRA-COTTA SKYLINE: New York’s Architectural Ornament
By Susan Tunick, photos by Peter Mauss
Princeton Architectural Press, 160 pages, $45
Terra cotta (baked earth) is a wonderful and malleable material. It coats the Wrigley Building, Carson Pirie Scott, the Railway Exchange at 224 S. Michigan Ave., the gleaming Reliance at 36 S. State St., 35 E. Wacker Drive, the Chicago Theater, the rainbow-hued 10 W. Elm apartments, and many another. The Romans used it, Bernini modeled sculptures in it 15 centuries later, and Chicago led the way in applying it in construction after the Great Fire of 1871. It is fire-resistant and very strong and durable, and can be brilliantly colored.
Unfortunately, it fell out of fashion when Spartan modernism took over architecture. “Terra-Cotta Skyline” explores its triumphs in such New York landmarks as the Flatiron, Woolworth and Fred F. French Buildings. There are even a couple of pages where Chicago buildings sneak in, and some wistful hopes for its return.
