When he was a kid back in the 1950s, Richard Solomon wanted to be a jet pilot because flying seemed adventurous. Instead, the 58-year-old Solomon eventually embarked on another sort of adventure — running an influential Chicago-based foundation that makes grants for provocative books, exhibitions, journals and conferences about architecture.
Established in 1956 by the estate of Ernest R. Graham, who carried on the architectural practice of Daniel Burnham, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts has assets of nearly $40 million and has funded such landmark works as Robert Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” the 1966 book that launched a revolt against orthodox modernism. Like the National Endowment for the Arts, the foundation’s imprimatur can make or break a fledgling idea.
“The big thing about the Graham Foundation is that we have lubricated the intellectual discourse about architecture and the built environment,” Solomon said in an interview at the foundation’s Gold Coast headquarters, a converted turn-of-the-century mansion at 4 W. Burton Place.
Solomon got his architectural training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. He later worked for the Chicago architectural firm of Solomon Cordwell Buenz, founded by his late father; taught architecture, and was the editor of Inland Architect magazine. That eclectic career path turned out to be just the background for heading the Graham Foundation, where he became director in 1993.
Last year, the foundation made 113 grants totaling more than $1.2 million, its money backing everything from an upcoming exhibition about the Chicago bungalow to a roundtable discussion on Chinese gardens. About one in every four grant applications wins the support of the foundation’s board.
A tiny number of grants flop, like one the foundation awarded to a researcher who promised to record the sound, or “harmonic frequency,” made by the Golden Gate Bridge. But these rare flubs go with the territory of encouraging creative thinking about design and how it shapes our world.
“You get wonderful results and some failures,” Solomon said. “It’s like investment banking.”
