Between the closing of the Busy Bee in Wicker Park and the opening of IKEA in Schaumburg, the vision of a homogeneous world slowly descending must keep some Chicagoans up at night. On Michigan Avenue, the rows of identical chain clothing stores and identically dressed mannequins in the windows is enough to make anyone feel like she’s turning into a robot. For this reason, the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) is a unique and important place. CAF’s role is to demonstrate the diversity of our city’s architecture, its rich history and varied styles.
In 1966, a house on South Prairie Avenue that previously had been owned by John and Frances Glessner was scheduled for demolition. There was nothing unusual in that. The fifties and sixties were decades of the wrecker’s ball when residential homes, early skyscrapers, older schools, and churches were being cleared away for new or projected development. Many of the planned new buildings never went up, leaving empty lots that filled slowly with trash. The old buildings were lost forever.
The Glessner house was extraordinary. It was designed in 1887 by Henry Hobson Richardson who is credited with being the first American architect to point a new path away from European derivative architecture and to an original American style. His modern emphasis on simplicity and horizon lines would later lead to the early Chicago skyscraper. This vision would influence many American architects, including our own Frank Lloyd Wright.
So a group of architects and volunteers gathered together to save the Glessner house, in effect defending the beginning of American architecture and the Chicago contribution to it. In a citywide campaign, they raised funds to repair and refurbish the house and to open it to the public as a museum. This group became the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
Over the years CAF has gone through many changes. In 1971, docent volunteers began conducting tours of the Loop and of select historic houses. In 1976 CAF moved their headquarters to the Loop and, a few years later, split from the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois (which is now solely devoted to identifying and preserving historical architecture). CAF is the educational arm of Chicago architecture. Its mission is to increase public awareness and appreciation through tours, exhibitions, lectures, and adult and youth education programs. Today, almost twenty-five years after the Glessner effort, CAF is a lively organization with 6,500 members and 375 active docents offering sixty-five Chicago-area tours.
The tours are great fun. The docents are cheery and engaging. They point out buildings and details, explain schools of thought, tell stories about the architects, zoning laws, materials used, and engineering innovations. Our docent told us the story of the Amoco Building, how in 1973 the client, to please his wife, insisted on covering it in Carrara marble, the same marble Michelangelo used. This fragile stone began to fall and break off in the harsh Chicago weather, raining bits of marble from the sky. It all had to be replaced at outrageous expense.
The docents are certainly the fastest walkers I’ve ever seen. Our docent marched down the street while we scampered behind like squirrels. My group was made up of people from different nations. They contributed to the discussion with stories about architecture in their own countries. Our docent seemed to have a good time. "I love the Germans!" she chirped. "On the coldest, bitterest days, I think,‘No one’s coming today,’ and then I show up and there’s four Germans, all bundled up. It’s twenty below and windy. They say,‘We go on tour.’"
The Early Skyscrapers tour is a must. It is offered every morning at 10:00. The price is $10, and the tour leaves from the Santa Fe Building at 224 S. Michigan. It highlights the founders of Chicago architecture after the fire, greats like Sullivan, Burnham, and Root. We walked through the Auditorium Building, now home to Roosevelt University, the best school in the city (and coincidentally where I teach!). Designed by Louis Sullivan, the man who coined the phrase, "form follows function," the building is a mix of modernist expression. The interior structure of the building is visible on the exterior of the building, which emphasizes its utility instead of suppressing it, and references past architecture and important architects, such as the Romanesque facades H. H. Richardson (of the Glessner House) used in his work.
At 1:30 each afternoon, the Modern and Beyond tour runs. Here we look at and discuss buildings that are examples of the International style (noted for its symmetry and uniformity), Modernism (noted for its simplicity), and Post-Modernism ( known for its wild exaggerated references to past eras). I had an eerie Alice-in-Wonderland moment in the plaza in front of the Post Office and the Chicago Federal Center, designed by Mies van der Rohe, a minimalist known for the axiom "less is more." His project was a search for universal order and uniformity and an attempt to express it through architecture. The plaza has lines, dividing the space into squares and as I followed the lines south to the Federal Center or east across the street to the Dirksen Building, I realized the vertical pattern continued in perfect alignment up the buildings around me, continued on the projecting steel beams, the windows, and even the position of the overhead lights inside the building. It was as if I were enclosed inside the perfect square he had constructed. For one moment I thought perhaps this grid continued on, stretching away from me over the earth. Certainly worth a look. The tour continues with a look at buildings that were reactions to this style, buildings that used curves, angles, and circles instead of squares, such as the building at 55 E. Monroe, and finally at flamboyant post-modernist structures such as Harold Washington Library.
CAF offers several other regular tours. The Architecture River Cruise is very popular and will be starting up again this year on May 1. Buy your tickets in advance! You can get them at the CAF Shop and Tour Center or at the CAF/Mercury Cruise Line ticket booth or call Ticketmaster at 312-902-1500. There are also a variety of Frank Lloyd Wright tours to choose from: Sundays in Oak Park you can tour his home and studio. On Saturdays, you can take the Wright By Bus Tour, where you ride and walk, examining his prairie-style houses. Or, for the downtown-bound, there’s Wright On Fridays, a tour that takes you on a bus out to Oak Park, through the Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District, and back.
Also exciting are the lesser-known tours, the neighborhood tours that are offered less frequently, some only once a year, but that show the diverse cultures, complex history, and myriad layers of Chicago architecture in an off-the-beaten track manner. There’s the Historic Maxwell Street Tour where the open-air market was once located and where Chicago’s earliest immigrants lived. Another is the Movie Palaces By Bus Tour, where we tour the grand lobbies, extravagant theaters, and outside facades of the old film houses. Or the Graceland Cemetery Tour where we examine the monuments designed by architects and sculptors such as Sullivan and Taft. There are tours of changed and changing neighborhoods such as Wicker Park and Logan Square, tours of individual streets or blocks such as Hutchinson Street and Jackson Boulevard, bike tours along the lake or through Lake Forest, tours of single buildings such as the Auditorium Building and Carson Pirie Scott. For details on these and other tours, check out their web site at www.architecture.org, call them at 312-922-3432, or pick up a schedule at 224 S. Michigan Avenue.
According to Bonita Mall, vice-president of tours and programs, CAF is dedicated to celebrating Chicago’s immigrant and blue-collar history. When I go speak with her, she shows me the latest exhibition on display: "Wheel People," a study of mobile homes. This program took participants to the Recreational Vehicle Museum in Elkhart, Indiana. In the exhibition, I see a waist-high mobile home, all painted and ready to go for a mini-roadtrip. Bonita tells me about the Chicago Bungalow Exhibition to open early next year. The bungalow is known throughout the world as a Chicago style and as the first affordable stand-alone dwelling after World War II that was designed for single families. CAF is working with the Polish Museum, the Lithuanians, the Czechs and other ethnic groups who first lived in these structures. Working-class families and immigrants considered it the first step toward the realization of the American Dream.
Bonita also tells me that an important focus of CAF is student education. CAF heads the prestigious Newhouse Competition where eight hundred students a year from schools throughout Chicago work on architecture projects for eight months. The students attend weekend programs on drafting, color rendering, model making, and other skill-building activities. They work toward a final project that is judged by a jury of architects and businesspeople. The winners are honored in a gala awards ceremony and are granted paid summer internships at big-name architecture firms in Chicago. The goal, Bonita tells me, is to show kids what opportunities are out there and to reward them for taking advantage of those opportunities. New plans include a Loop tour specifically for children, a high school river cruise, and a teacher’s manual called Building Your Future, which teachers can use across disciplines to teach kids about architecture through interactive projects in their own communities.
Adult Education is also important to CAF. To this end, CAF hosts the longest running free lecture series in Chicago. Every week, except in July and August, eighty to two hundred people crowd into the CAF lecture hall for talks. Architects, developers, construction people, academics, social historians, preservationists, and design people come and speak on all sorts of subjects related to Chicago architecture. That’s every Wednesday at 224 S. Michigan from 12:15 to 1:00 pm; admission is free. The series’ upcoming topics are listed on the web, so take advantage! If you are looking to do some reading on the topic of architecture, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) puts out the AIA Guide to Chicago, a wonderfully informative publication. The introduction provides helpful background history to Chicago building trends.
Right now in Chicago we are experiencing an unprecedented period of growth: the new Millennium Park, the North Bridge development on Michigan Avenue, the residential development on the South Side and just west of the loop, the State Street effort, the world’s tallest building scheduled to go up at 7 S. Dearborn, and more. I asked Bonita whether she believes that a homogeneous veil is falling over the world. She seemed a bit shocked by my question. "I think there are some really dramatic designs going on all over the world. Just phenomenal, ground-breaking concepts. The way of building, the technology, the materials, it’s all so different," she said. Some of the concerns important to architects today? They’re looking for ways to make buildings safer, both for the citizens and the environment. The sharing of information and technology now possible has made innovations in these areas speedy and radical. "There’s a tremendous amount of creativity going on," Bonita tells me.
So look up.