Postcard from Chicago, part two
John Wyver writes: A second missive from the mid-West, following on from Postcard from Chicago, part one. And let me begin with a tale of two campuses (campi?). One morning this past I explored the low-level lay-out of the Illinois Institute of Technology, conceived and begun by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the immediate post-war years. It’s a seductive modern(ist) world distinguished by a number of Mies’ key buildings, including the hugely influential S.R. Crown Hall, 1956, above.
I’ve seen images of this a hundred times in accounts of the modern movement, and it is especially reminiscent of his later Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. I was delighted, and to be honest slightly disconcerted, to discover that I could walk in the front door and wander around among the detritus of what looked like an end-of-year student show. There was literally no-one around, and for the longest time the space was simply mine and Mies’, with the master present as his sculpted head (below).
Elsewhere on the campus there is Rem Koolhaas’ McCormick Tribune Campus Center, 2003, the roof of which is a tunnel for the Green Line train…
… and John Ronan Architects’ Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, 2018, with a second floor wrapped in white energy efficient ETFE foil cushions.
Another morning Clare made a return visit to the Joseph Regestein Library and its special collections, for her research for her Annie Besant book. So this took us to the University of Chicago campus, which is a much more traditional Oxbridge-influenced affair. Not that there aren’t modern buildings, including Walter Netsch’s brutalist library building of 1970, about which the AIA Guide to Chicago is sniffy (‘meant to allude to the surrounding Gothic buildings but more of a product of Netsch’s own idiosyncratic design concepts’), but which we both admired.
Round the corner from there is Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy, 1967, one of the relatively few major Moores that I’d not encountered at full-size. This commemorates the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on 2 December 1942, overseen nearby by Enrico Fermi. It holds its space powerfully.
And then across the street is Hutchinson Commons, 1903, with the Mitchell Tower explicitly modelled on the tower of my Oxford alma mater, Magdalen College. Just inside the base there’s a busy ‘Pret’. Pastiche and pastries.
After which, and another visit noted below, as Clare tracked down accounts of Charles Webster Leadbeater’s pederasty (you’ll have to wait for the book in 2025), I wandered along Midway Plaisance to Jackson Park. This is where the 1893 Columbian Exhibition was held, and the Midway was the site of the associated carnival attractions, including the world’s first Ferris Wheel. Now it’s simply a grassy swathe at one end of which there’s a busy construction site with a half-built tower. I failed to take a picture, and only later realised that this is the Barack Obama Presidential Library under construction.
What I did snap is the neo-classical rear facade of the Palace of Fine Arts which looks out over the Columbia Basin. This was the only major structure of the exhibition built in stone; everything else was plaster, wood and the like, glistening white then but long since gone the way of yesteryear’s snows.
I’ll build a house high upon a grassy hill
On the campus itself is the Frederick J. Robie House, created by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1908-09. This is regarded as the last of the architect’s ‘Prairie Style’ homes, all horizontals and overhangs, constructed in distinctive long-form ‘Roman’ bricks along with mortar that, fastidious as Frank was, is specially inset.
Of course the building is remarkable, and we had an informative guide who celebrated its Japanese-influenced spaces and screens, its fine detailing and decorative windows. But with no chance of hanging your own choice of pictures or making your own mark in any way, you so would not have wanted to live there. Which is perhaps what the bicycle manufacturer who commissioned it may have felt, since he moved his family out within a year of completion. (The unfortunate loss of much of his fortune at just this moment might also have had something to do with this).
On a third morning, early, we took the train out to Oak Park and had another of Frank’s Chicago constructions to ourselves for the best part of an hour. We opted for the self-guided audio tour of Unity Temple, 1909, commissioned by the social progressive Unitarian Church after their earlier house of worship burned down.
Since I would have had to spend only an hour or two a week here as a member of the congregation, this felt like a much more welcome, and indeed welcoming, structure, comprising a social area across a hallway from the spacious and yet intimate sanctuary. The horizontals here, the sense of the interlocking spaces, the light, the colouring, the overall clarity, are all simply wondrous. As is the concrete mass of the exterior, with its Mayan-like details.
I was raised out of steel
On Wednesday too we joined one of the Chicago Center for Architecture’s walking tours, visiting buildings erected between 1950 and 1970 as part of Mayor Daley’s initiative to revive the city’s downtown. There was much more Mies here, but the highlight for me was the early and comparatively modest Inland Steel Building, designed by Bruce Graham and Walter Netsch in 1956.
Not only does this have the exquisite detailing of the best of mid-century modernism, but in the lobby there are three notable artworks: Richard Lippold’s constructivist Radiant I, 1956, that is just perfect for the space; Anish Kapoor’s Blood Mirror, 2000, by the elevators; and a gloriously incongruous Frank Gehry reception desk.
And then you turn a corner and in the plaza of the Major Daley Center is the untitled form known as ‘The Picasso’, 1967. Supposedly at its grand opening, when the wrappings fell away, there was a stunned silence.
But it’s not all been art and architecture. Tuesday evening we saw Mario Abney and his really excellent quintet The Abney Effect at Andy’s Jazz Club (above, although not quite the same line-up) and on Wednesday night we were at Wrigley Field for the second game of the Chicago Cubs hosting the Atlanta Braves. The Cubs were well beaten 9-2.
I had a friend was a big baseball player
I’ve long wanted to see game at the much-storied Wrigley Field, and in many ways it didn’t disappoint – the arena, the friendly crowds, the atmosphere, the (to us) eccentric rituals – at one point we all stood for a Military Salute to an Admiral who in his dress uniform waved at the crowd, and for the ‘Seventh Innings Stretch’ we got to our feet to sing ’Take me out to the ballgame’.
The beer, however, if you could endure the queues, was eyewateringly expensive. And then there was the sport itself, in which pretty much nothing happened. I know people say this about cricket, and I understand that baseball, like cricket, is a game of high strategy. But watching it in the park, at least on this evening (and as opposed to having a learned television commentary), there was little sense of involvement and remarkably few moments of drama. But then I’m not a lifetime fan.
Well what else can we do now?
We had another walking tour to do on our last full day in Chicago, and a magic show with the really excellent David Williamson at the Rhapsody Theatre.
Then we picked up a car (and believe me, that was a saga) and headed off down the highway, first to Fort Wayne and then Sidney, Ohio. Where, you say? And why? The third Postcard will reveal all.
But before you, and we, go, here’s an image of half of the DuSable Bridge, 1920, raised up to permit a masted yacht to go through…
… and here’s an item of street furniture, of which there are dozens scattered around town, and which feel like gravestones, not only for the daily news but for a whole world receding fast in the rear view mirror.
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