Chicago’s Urban Nature:
A Guide to the City’s Architecture + Landscape
By Sally A. Kitt Chappell
University of Chicago Press, 300 pages, $45, $20 paper
This compact volume, meant for backpack or glove compartment as much as the coffee table, is equal parts graduate school lecture, architectural guidebook and unabashed paean to Chicago’s designed landscapes. Sally Kitt Chappell belies her professorial credentials when she turns to coining a term like “anthrostructure” and uses the obscure “cosmopolis” to bestow accolades upon those who have shaped the city. These linguistic turns are unnecessary, as the stories are fine enough, and Chappell is a more-than-capable instructor.
Chicago took its motto — “Urbs in Horto” (city in a garden) — seriously long before the current mayor went on a tree-planting binge a decade-and-a-half ago. For the entire history of the city, prominent landscape designers have plied their craft across our acres — often as part of larger-scale projects that are generally more noted for their buildings. Chappell’s book is an antidote to the overemphasis on bricks and mortar that have long dominated similar books on Chicago’s built environment.
This book should take its place with the ample assortment of guides most Chicago architecture aficionados have on their shelves. As the city becomes greener in the years to come, Chappell’s guide will become ever more necessary to understand Chicago’s development in its entirety.
Building a Century of Progress:
The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933-34 World’s Fair
By Lisa D. Schrenk
University of Minnesota Press, 357 pages, $39.95
International events such as the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition positioned Chicago as a world-class city. And while current news stories about Chicago’s 2016 Olympics bid sustain this image, the fact is that the last truly large-scale international event to take place on the shores of Lake Michigan was the 1933 Century of Progress International Exhibition. Lisa Schrenk’s book looks at the event that first filled the lakefront site now best known as the former site of Meigs Field.
In 1893, Daniel Burnham gave the most prominent building commissions to East Coast architects, but Chicagoans kept a stronger (albeit not monopolistic) hand on the designs at the Century of Progress. Old stalwarts like Holabird and Root, a nascent partnership between Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owing (later to become SOM), and smaller local firms like that of George Keck helped define a progressive style during the summers of 1933 and 1934 when little new construction could be found anywhere in the Depression-wracked nation.
Schrenck tells the ins and outs of the story as Chicago tries to resuscitate the success of the 1893 fair while sometimes awkwardly defining a new direction for so-called Modern design. The American designers worked in modes that drew on European precedents developed during the 1920s, although local designers creatively added color and other streamlining motifs to the work to capture the imagination of fairgoers.
The architects’ most influential legacy from this fair was the introduction of many new building materials, including glass block, plywood and gypsum wallboard. These inexpensive and labor-saving products that are ubiquitous today could only be used because city building codes didn’t have jurisdiction over the site on Northerly Island.
The Century of Progress marked a turning point in the status of World’s Fairs. Although they still occur regularly, the 1933-34 fair was one of the first to compete with mass media entertainment like movie theaters and radio. Today one needs merely to Google something rather than travel across the city or world to discover the newest invention. Schrenk’s account covers these details and more in a well-illustrated, thoughtfully written account that’s as accessible to a general audience as to a professional one.
Women and the Making of the Modern House
By Alice T. Friedman
Yale University Press, 242 pages, $29.95
Architecture — particularly the single-family home — is always to some extent a collaborative process between architect and client. Alice Friedman looks at six seminal 20th Century homes famously designed by men and explores the role of the women for whom they were built.
The architects and each house will be known to anyone who has taken a college-level seminar on modern architecture — Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroder House, Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Richard Neutra’s Perkins House and Robert Venturi’s House for his Mother. What’s missing from most seminars is the role of the client. Friedman explains the unique circumstances each patron brought to her project as a woman during a century when gender roles were radically redefined in the home and society. She frames the shifting cultural territory marked by sex and power as a catalyst for the more daring and unusual architectural forms that still define Modern architecture.
Friedman’s history of these six houses — and several others, including Philip Johnson’s Glass House, that work their way into the accounts — should be seen as a provocative and necessary revisionist project. Architecture is the most complex of the arts — expressive of the desires of client, architect, builder and the milieu in which they each work. Too often, architectural histories are stories of either powerful clients or egotistical designers. They’re here, too — within each chapter — but Friedman tells each story as the complex interplay that’s more true to life than what we’ve heard before.
While the book is a re-examination of what was previously thought of as well-covered territory, it will be interesting to see how Friedman’s overemphasis on issues of gender will wear. There are moments when the analysis already seems dated — a politically correct obsessive compulsion that reflects the period in the 1990s when most of these chapters were originally published.
Glass House
Edited by Toshio Nakamura
Monacelli Press, 256 pages, $95 paper
It’s not every day that a $95 paperback crosses your desk. When it comes to photographs of a glass house — one of the two most iconic glass houses built during the 20th Century — it’s hard not to think of the emperor’s new clothes. But what beautiful clothes they were that Philip Johnson custom tailored on his New Canaan, Conn., estate, just recently opened to the public by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This expensive tome is actually the cheap reprint of a limited edition produced for a Japanese patron a decade ago. As such, it exists someplace between a tribute volume and the documentary of a rather singular fetish.
The sumptuous presentation — alternating between color and black-and-white photos, some sharp and clear, others gauzily enticing, and the sparsely designed text — makes for an immersive read that makes much of nothing in a manner that’s distinctly enticing and most pleasing to the eye. But how often does one come across words such as “volumetricity” or “agglomerativity?” These terms of literary overexuberance and pomposity reflect the reams of print that have appeared over half a century to ironically describe a home that is constructed of almost nothing.
The book will appeal to Chicago architecture enthusiasts on several points. Johnson was arguably the most influential individual in architecture throughout the 20th Century. He was largely responsible for introducing Mies van der Rohe to an American audience half a decade before that architect left Germany for Chicago. The Glass House is, in many ways, an homage to Mies as well as a knockoff of the master architect’s Farnsworth House in Plano. Chicago architecture buffs should know both buildings and — save a cross-country trek to New Canaan — this book is the next best thing.
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Edward Keegan is a Chicago architect who complements his independent practice by writing, broadcasting and teaching on architectural subjects.
