Among the narrative threads I’m trying to weave together with the postwar Chicago project, the role of high-rise housing is one of the most intriguing–and under-appreciated. Public housing in the city is the most obvious and damning piece of this story, but the role of skyscraper housing in the private sector is also a key element in understanding how and why skyscrapers have been so integral to Chicago’s growth and development.

Developers in Chicago built high-rise housing for the city’s middle and upper-classes consistently through the 1920s, most of it along the lakeshore extending north from downtown and in Hyde Park. New financial instruments–housing cooperatives and, eventually, federally-backed mortgages made high-rise residential towers financially viable and affordable for a broad market. They also exacerbated the city’s entrenched segregationist patterns as they could be exclusionary and targeted toward white neighborhoods at the further expense of desperately overcrowded Black neighborhoods concentrated on the south side. While high-rise co-ops partially democratized the city’s valuable lakefront property, they also set in stone (literally) racial patterns that would define the city’s geography later in the century.

After the war a handful of progressive developers aimed projects squarely at the middle class, taking advantage of city politics that sought–often desperately–to keep as much of the city’s population as it could from moving to the suburbs, in particular its downtown workforce. Among these developers, Herbert Greenwald, a University of Chicago graduate, proved to be a particularly enlightened client. Much more on him to come, but he’s best known as the instigator of Mies van der Rohe’s first (and, arguably, best) high-rise projects–Promontory Apartments on south Lake Shore Drive and their progeny, the iconic 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments just north of the Loop.

Promontory is often thought of as a sort of ‘starter-Mies.’ It was Greenwald’s first high-rise, and it was designed in 1947-49 in the midst of an ongoing crisis in the steel industry that limited availability. Its concrete frame is expressed and subtly detailed, but compared to 860-880’s delicate steel tracery it comes across as more plain-spoken and even crude. Nonetheless, Promontory itself was profoundly influential and led to several projects–particularly CHA high-rises–that adopted its exposed concrete and brickwork with admittedly mixed results.

Seeing Promontory as nothing more than a premonition of 860-880, though, ignores the fact that nearly all high-rise housing in Chicago relied on concrete construction. 860-880, for all its influence on American commercial skyscrapers, was a total one-off in terms of its steel construction–a material dead-end in housing that I’m trying to get to the bottom of.

2933 Sheridan was designed and constructed almost exactly in parallel with 860-880, and it shows that Mies certainly regarded Promontory as a valid and ongoing experiment. It suffers a bit from a more crowded site–none of the convenient long vistas for photography that have made Promontory a more appetizing subject. But it merits a closer look, both for its clearly targeted demographic–young professionals with and without children–and for the way it developed the exposed, infilled frame that made Promontory such a revolutionary presence on the skyline.

Greenwald’s great genius was catering to urban professionals–young buyers, some with children, who rejected the suburbs and wanted to remain downtown, close to amenities and within a walk or a short drive from the Loop. This demographic was generally well-educated, knowledgable about design trends, and empowered by the postwar economic boom to afford a modest lifestyle boost. The Baldwin-Kingery store, which began selling Scandinavian furniture to young design enthusiasts on Michigan Avenue in 1947, catered to exactly Greenwald’s target audience. In both cases, bringing high design down from the luxury level was a brilliant and profitable endeavor.

The building’s promotional brochure featured perspectives far from the precise, almost clinical drawings for which Mies’ office was known, showing instead sketchy, cartoon-like renderings of softly textured carpets and Eames or Saarinen chairs instead of marble surfaces and Barcelona chairs, all looking out over nearby Lincoln Park. Its mix of apartment types–fully 1/3 of which were two-bedroom units designed for small families–reflected the market for apartments suitable for singles, couples, and children.

Most notable, though, to Al Chase, the Tribune’s chief real estate reporter at the time, was 2933 Sheridan’s unique exterior appearance:

“This is the second large apartment project to have windows extending flush from floor to ceiling, thus making the exterior an almost solid sheet of plate glass, broken only by horizontal or spandrel beams and vertical columns, which are of reinforced concrete.”

Al Chase, “Work Started on 244 New Family Units.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 25, 1950.  C5.

It was the second apartment building to do so only by a few months–860-880 opened just prior to it. But the combination of floor-to-ceiling glass and exposed concrete edge beams and columns became one of several default formulas for Chicago apartments going forward. If 860-880 was, in fact, a dead-end in terms of the city’s residential high-rises, 2933 Sheridan advanced Promontory’s tectonic formula in a way that was imitated in dozens of high-rise blocks over the next couple of decades–perhaps most clearly in the 1963 Lakefront Place, a 16-story block in South Shore by Schmidt, Garden, & Erikson (who, probably not coincidentally, were then working with Mies’ office on the Federal Center):

More to come on that status as “second” apartment building to have floor-to-ceiling glass…but for the moment worth pointing out that the various Greenwald projects that seem like they’re warmups for 860-880 had important impacts on their own, and their concrete, brick, and glass solutions proved to be more influential than generally credited…

Inspired by Lee Bey’s Southern Exposure, which celebrates the often-ignored architecture of Chicago’s South Side, my weekend mornings have involved skyscraper scavenger hunts to find some of the city’s tall buildings that have never made the canonical history books. Most of these are residential blocks–some public housing, but also numerous developer towers that extend and complicate the tidy narratives of downtown’s commercial architecture.

Several of those to come, but this morning I turned inland through Hyde Park to zip past I.M. Pei’s University Apartments from 1961. These are well known for the way they sit in the middle of 55th Street and for their role in the infamous plan to “renew” the neighborhood around the University of Chicago. Those are both well-traveled tales, but I have a parallel interest in them that’s actually tied directly to those more celebrated towers downtown…

One of the best known stories of postwar Chicago is the development of the tube structure by Fazlur Khan and a team of engineers and architects at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Khan recognized that beyond 35-40 stories, a skyscraper is most efficient if it’s thought of as a giant column, subject to all kinds of random bending and buckling loads from wind. The theoretically ideal shape for a tall column is a hollow cylinder–a tube–and Khan realized that by concentrating a skyscraper’s structure around the perimeter, he could take advantage of this principle on a large scale. The results were towers like the Brunswick, which distilled its structure into dozens of small columns around the exterior, all fixed to deep spandrel girders and thus working together as four giant (but heavily perforated) shear walls.

But, like any other structural innovation, the Brunswick didn’t come from nowhere, and Hal Iyengar, one of Khan’s trusted engineers, recalled later that the idea for stiff perimeter connections and oversized columns that would approximate a hollow tube structure had played a role in engineering the Equitable Building, at Michigan Avenue and the River, in 1963-65.

But even that idea seems to have come from somewhere else–New York, to be exact. Concentrating structure around the perimeter means, necessarily, that the 19th century fight between windows and structure was back on, and the compression of window wall and bearing structure into a single plane was employed by I.M. Pei on two projects in 1961–Kips Bay Plaza Apartments in New York, and Hyde Park’s University Apartments. These were both mid-rise buildings, but they were significant for the way their structures suggested a return to exterior bearing walls, albeit ones with wildly different proportions since they were made of reinforced concrete instead of simple masonry. Such a circling back to bearing wall construction was lost on many, including the New York Times’ Glenn Fowler, who reported on the two projects as:

“…a new method of concrete construction, in which the facade of a building serves as its supporting framework…”

Glenn Fowler, “Facade of Building Forms Structural Support for High-Rise Apartments:  New York Times, Apr 23, 1961, pp. 449.

Bruce Graham, interviewed for the Art Institute of Chicago’s Oral History Project, recalled that the Brunswick wasn’t as innovative as it was made out to be–“the idea of the tube was not ours. It was taken from a building by Pei in New York,” he told her, and even Chicago partisan Carl Condit acknowledged, in 1964, that the concrete tube had originated with Pei:

“…the Brunswick is the largest building to date with external bearing walls of rigid-frame concrete trusses (also known as load-bearing screen walls and window truss walls).  A wall of this kind is the most recent structural innovation in multi-story American building but it springs from a long and complex history….It was first adapted to the construction of entire building walls by the architect I. M. Pei in the design of two apartment groups built in 1959-61 in New York and Chicago: the Kips Bay Plaza Apartments in New York and the University Apartments on 55^th Street in Hyde Park.  Loewenberg and Loewenberg were the associated architects on the latter buildings.”

Carl W. Condit, “The New Architecture of Chicago.”  Chicago Review, 17:2/3, special issue on New Chicago Writing and Art.  1964.  11

Much more on those associated architects in a future post–but what’s most interesting to me about Condit’s reporting is that Kips Bay was actually finished in 1963, while the University Apartments–on SOM’s doorstep–were finished in 1961, just as the Brunswick was being announced. While University apartments are also mid-rise–at 470 feet long and just 94 feet tall, they’re the ultimate groundscrapers–it’s easy to imagine the construction site being of particular interest to Khan, Graham, and the other designers contemplating a high-rise concrete structure and primed by their experience on the Equitable to be thinking of exterior structures.

Things get even more interesting, though, when you dive into University Apartments’ engineering, because the structural engineer for the project was August Komendant, better known for his work with Louis Kahn and, at the time, New York’s premiere concrete engineer. Komendant and Pei developed a styrofoam forming system for University Apartments that produced super-smooth finishes–a technique not dissimilar to that adopted last year by SOM for their Stereoform Slab project. And two years after University Apartments, when Kips Bay was being completed and Kahn was struggling with mixtures and formwork on the Salk Institute in the summer of 1963, he had Komendant approach Pei for advice, and Pei generously shared his office’s concrete specs. While its local legacy is a decidedly mixed one, University Apartments’ more subtle influences were widespread…

Word this week that Hospitality Design’s student awards this year were–again–a clean sweep. Iowa State’s interdisciplinary Paris studio, which proposed a mid-range convention and tourist hotel on the site of an aging sports center in the Grenelle neighborhood took both finalist spots. Lee Cagley, ISU’s Interior Design Chair, and I have taught a studio that puts interior designers, architects, and landscape architects onto teams and gives them an impossible program on an intimidating site–after two years in Panama City, Panama, we moved the site to Paris and took advantage of ISU’s study abroad policies to spend a week there in January, 2019. Student teams were, obviously, inspired by the day-long “death by Corb” walking tour and, perhaps, by other stuff in Paris–the work from that studio was stellar, as reflected by the second sweep of the HD awards by ISU teams.

This studio is, hands-down, as much fun as you can have teaching. Students slowly get used to the subtly different sets of values that each discipline brings to their team, and once things start rolling the complementary knowledge that they’ve acquired over their three or four years in design school can meld in interesting ways. Lee and I think the studio is successful when we see landscape architects arguing about carpet patterns, or interior designers figuring out a curtain wall detail, or architects drawing (gasp) trees.

Lee and I thought that any one of a handful of teams could have easily taken one of the top prizes, but the two that did win, shown here, did a remarkable job of weaving together a structurally diverse set of program elements into efficient but wildly expressive forms that contained rich, evocative spaces. They both embodied the studio’s premise, which is that the collision of interests and values that occurs when young designers come to a project with as much curiosity as energy usually results in projects that are solid in many, many dimensions. Glad to see the jury thought so, too.

Oh, and if you think these are good, wait until last spring’s Honolulu studio sweeps next year’s awards, because holy smokes.

Last week saw the announcement by French president Emmanuel Macron that the spire of Notre Dame is to be rebuilt as an exact replica of the one that was lost in the fire of last April. The announcement was no surprise, given that the French senate ordered that the reconstruction reproduce the “last known visual state” of the cathedral, but it puts to rest any idea of a modern reconstruction.

Such a re-visioning of the lost roof and spire was the subject of more than one ideas competition and a flood of unsolicited proposals from architects worldwide. Many argued–not incorrectly–that the cathedral had evolved over time, even during the Gothic era, to match changing tastes and cultural ideals. Fires had often been cause to rebuild in new styles, and on paper the thought of rebuilding a cathedral using modern materials, or with contemporary concerns at the forefront, seemed like an inspired take. Louis Kahn, after all, famously pointed out that “Beauvais needed the steel we have today.”

On paper this seemed like a fine approach. Online, the results were, perhaps, not contemporary architecture’s finest hour. Spires made of crystal, voluptuous, curved greenhouse roofs, the tongue-in-cheek collages of car parks and fast food restaurants all suggested a rush on the part of designers to use the fire as an avenue for cheap publicity, and few of the ideas drew any public support. The French Senate’s reaction was swift, and welcomed by much of Paris.

The lost spire was not, of course, a Gothic structure; it was built in 1859 to the designs of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc as part of Napoleon III’s campaign to restore monuments damaged in the Revolution or neglected as symbols of the ancien regime. This overlapped with the emperor’s wholesale rebuilding of Paris, which included Hausmann’s boulevards, railway stations, and new commercial and residential sectors, and Viollet-le-Duc’s ‘restorations’ often involved reconfiguring or even re-designing monuments to live up to the Emperor’s ideal of the glorious era of medieval France. Viollet-le-Duc removed and replaced statuary and ornament that had been damaged, but he also replaced or built entirely anew building elements to bring monuments into conformity with contemporary ideals and images of what the Gothic, perhaps, should have looked like.

Notre Dame, as it came down to us, was a medieval structure cloaked in a Second Empire vision of the 13th century; Viollet rebuilt the structure’s flying buttresses, removed later additions that had encrusted the base, constructed a wholly new sacristy and topped the crossing with a new, oak and lead spire. There had been a spire on the original church, but it had been removed in the aftermath of the Revolution. Viollet’s version was nearly sixty feet taller than the original and modeled after the later, High Gothic spire at Amiens. It was typical of the campaign to not only restore, but to improve upon the work of the original builders, an approach that is anathema to today’s preservation community but one that, in this case, left the structure with a consistent exterior style and an iconic skyline. Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration is what everyone alive today knows as “Notre Dame,” and the few images of what the cathedral looked like before the restoration have practically disappeared in the torrent of photos, images, selfies, and films of its 19th century incarnation.

So, on one level there’s an intriguing story here about how attitudes circle around, how a modern approach in one century produces a building element that’s seen as both historic and outdated in another, and how preservation is constantly engaged in a debate between fidelity to ‘originals’ on the one hand and a realization that the essence of an historic structure is often dependent entirely on the values and prejudices of the day. But, by odd coincidence, Macron’s announcement came in the middle of my trying to revive a project on John Ruskin, specifically his hastily composed reaction to the opening of the Crystal Palace that was inserted into the first edition of The Stones of Venice as an appendix in 1851. Ruskin, not surprisingly, was not a fan, seeing the structure as transitory, illusory, lacking character, and symbolizing the triumph of industrialization over craft. Such secular optimization, he felt, lacked humanity in its realization and in its experience. He found the displays within to be vulgar and cheap, and the whole enterprise to be a commentary on the hubris and newly sanctioned drive for profit of the era. “Largeness of dimension does not necessarily involve nobleness of design,” he argued, and went on to damn its creator, Joseph Paxton, with the faintest of praise:

“The quantity of bodily industry which that Crystal Palace expresses is very great.  So far it is good.

“The quantity of thought it expresses is, I supposed, a single and very admirable thought of Mr. Paxton’s, probably not a bit brighter than thousands of thoughts which pass through his active and intelligent brain every hour,–that it might be possible to build a greenhouse larger than ever greenhouse was built before.  This thought, and some very ordinary algebra, are as much as all that glass can represent of human intellect.  ‘But one poor half-pennyworth of bread to all this intolerable deal of sack.’ Alas!”

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice. (New York, P.F. Collier, 1900.) 406-407.

That, alone, is a powerful indictment–the punch line is a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard IV, in which the titular prince complains about the ratio of bread to wine he’s been left with, and Ruskin makes a clear judgment about the lack of architectural nourishment on display versus the intoxicating effects of so much glass and delicate, gymnastic structure.

But, not content to leave the reader with the sense of a tectonic hangover, Ruskin goes on (in this essay and a later one, in 1854) to compare the Palace’s opening with two other cultural moments: the death of painter J.M.W. Turner, in December, 1851, and the very restoration program that would, by the end of the decade, see Viollet-le-Duc’s spire rise over Notre Dame. These, at first glance, are pretty incongruous comparisons. Neither had anything to do with glass houses or industry. But in setting the Palace’s ‘intolerable deal of sack’–it’s vaporous, sensational aesthetics–against the sublime land- and seascapes painted by Turner and the “mathematical” restorations being carried out for Napoleon III, Ruskin was elaborating on one of his great themes–the moral effect of architectural aura. Raised in an evangelical household, his belief in a ‘protestant Gothic’ gradually gave way to a more secular interest–famously, Darwin’s Origin of Species shook his faith and turned his argument toward a more socialist bent after 1858.

But throughout all of his work–religious and otherwise–the interest in art and architecture that imparts a sense of human limits in the face of the divine (or, at least, the infinite) was to Ruskin the key to moral force in all artistic production. Turner’s paintings were paradigm examples of the sublime, in which human scale and ambition is, literally, sublimated to the ravages and scale of nature. The Cathedrals, with their awesome scale, were great theological machines that imparted a similar humility in those struck by their vastness. And the workmanship on those cathedrals, Ruskin felt, was exemplary of human fallibility; he valued the imperfect carving or the marks of tools precisely because they make us recognize the struggle of mortal hands in shaping the raw materials of the earth toward our divine aspirations. In “The Nature of the Gothic,” he makes a clear allusion to Protestant theology:

Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do ; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame. And it is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

Ruskin, “Nature of Gothic,” 185

This confessional tectonic had, for Ruskin, a salutary moral purpose–reminding us of our own imperfection in the eyes of the divine but modeling a project that could drive us closer, at least.

His complaint against the restorations was, essentially, that they were too good–too precise, too mechanical in their reproductions, too finely honed. The resulting monuments lacked the patina of age, and thus the instructive atmosphere of antiquity; they lost (for Ruskin, anyway) much of the temporal sublime that comes with ruins whose vast timescale dwarfs our lifetimes in the same way that the Cathedrals’ scale sublimates our physical dimensions. The “white accuracies of novelty” replacing the decayed and ruined stones in the restorations replaced an aura that conveyed the structures’ very humanity–their soul:

Grant that it can do all this, and that the new building is both equal to the old in beauty, and precisely correspondent to it in detail.  Is it, therefore, altogether worth the old building?  Is the stone carved to-day in their masons’ yards altogether the same in value to the hearts of the French people as that which the eyes of St. Louis saw lifted to its place?  Would a loving daughter, in mere desire for a gaudy dress, ask a jeweler for a bright facsimile of the worn cross which her mother bequeathed to her on her death-bed?—would a thoughtful nation, in mere fondness for splendor of streets, ask its architects to provide for it facsimiles of the temples which for centuries had given joy to its saints, comfort to its mourners, and strength to its chivalry?”

John Ruskin, “The Opening of the Crystal Palace : Considered in Some of its Relations to the Prospects of Art.”  (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1854).

The weight–literal and emotional–that old things carry was for Ruskin an important reminder of human limits, an antidote to the blithe hubris represented by the Crystal Palace and to the sensational, short-lived thrills that its insubstantial walls and structure provided. Lingering behind Ruskin’s wrought prose is the sense that the efficiencies and lightness so skillfully developed by Paxton presented a moral danger–architecture as commodity and entertainment rather than as an instructive model of our mortality and our limitations. Lacking character or substance, an industrially produced structure like the Palace might provide momentary pleasure of the senses, as Augustine would have put it, but it can never, as the Cathedrals did, reach our soul through them.

As a fan of both Paxton and Viollet-le-Duc, reading up on this is a bit (*ahem*) sobering. What Ruskin would have made of the current plans to replace Viollet-le-Duc’s spire is an intriguing question–but any moral critique of the fire’s aftermath would no doubt look at the ‘intolerable deal of sack’ generated as ideas for its replacement and seen a clear parallel to the breathless publicity that accompanied the Palace’s opening. One problem with the easy fluency of production is that, while it’s easy to produce intoxicating images, it’s harder and harder to come by genuine nourishment through methods so geared toward the commodification and sensationalism that Ruskin so feared.

It’s small beer compared to everything else going on in the world today, but I’m pleased to report that “Chicago’s Other Skyscrapers: Grain Elevators and the City, 1838-1957” will be in print in the next issue of the Journal of Urban History and is online now on SAGE Journal’s website (possibly requires registration and/or subscription…the raw version is here on ResearchGate and here on Academia.edu).

This has been a happy rabbit hole over the last five years or so–a chance discovery of a paper on concrete grain elevators from 1902 left me curious about what a non-fireproof elevator might have looked like, and the mention of Chicago engineers’ and contractors’ roles in perfecting both timber and concrete elevator construction led me to dig into the history of elevators in the city. I can’t claim to be the first one to be interested in these–agricultural historian Guy Lee and environmental historian William Cronon have both pointed out the importance of elevators to Chicago and the midwest. But neither of their histories looked at the construction of elevators themselves, and neither presented a comprehensive study of elevator construction and operation during the era.

So, while this has been something of a running joke among colleagues and friends (‘you’re studying what?’ has been a common refrain), the finished paper is one that I’m particularly happy about, because it demonstrates many of the same lessons that Chicago’s ‘real’ skyscrapers have done–that buildings can be thought of as the resultants of complicated networks of economics, finance, politics, and geography (among others), that the actual fabric of building can be interpreted to reveal broader narratives about who built them, where their material came from, and why they were built, and that zooming out and looking at building types over time inevitably suggests that they evolve in a process similar to what Steven Jay Gould called “punctuated equilibrium,” in which long periods of stasis are ‘punctuated’ by moments of rapid adaptation and change–speciation, in the world of paleobiology.

The change from tiber elevator construction to concrete is a clear example of this–nearly every grain elevator in the country before 1900 was built out of timber, and nearly every one after was made of concrete. There are good reasons for this at the macro-level (fire, e.g., meant that elevator builders were constantly looking for ways to build in anything but timber), but it also demonstrates the importance of innovation–three experiments in particular, in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis, around the turn of the century provided proof-of-concept, and a patented system of construction (sort of an early version of slip-forming) meant that within ten years it was not only more effective to build out of concrete, it was also cheaper and faster. Instant speciation and the birth of a new, now-ubiquitous type, the concrete elevator.

While this all makes for a great case study in construction history, elevators also, like commercial skyscrapers, tracked the growth and development of Chicago and its infrastructure–but on a larger scale. Their reliance on rail and water connections meant that they sprung up wherever these two transport systems connected–first along the main branch of the River, and then farther south as better rail connections were built to the west. An elevator complex on Goose Island rose in response to rail connections to the particularly rich grain belt of the northwest–Minnesota and the Dakotas. And, finally, when new harbor facilities at Calumet replaced those of the congested main branch, the elevator industry moved, wholesale, to take advantage of better facilities there.

So, lots of resonance with familiar themes. And, fortunately, some really fascinating anecdotes that involve corruption, skullduggery, and construction as financial weaponry. Some of the city’s best known figures had unexpected–but, in hindsight, obvious–connections to the elevator industry, in particular meatpacking titan P.D. Armour, who entered the grain trade almost as a hobby and emerged as one of the city’s most feared commodities buccaneers. Elevators and the fortunes they represented also underlay some of the city’s great institutions and monuments, and names from the industry now appear on Chicago landmarks ranging from IIT to Buckingham Fountain and the Art Institute.

An enjoyable ride, in other words. I’m back more or less full time on those ‘other’ skyscrapers now, but this has been a fruitful interlude…

A small contribution to understanding the long history that this week’s events in Chicago, among other places, are a part of. This paper, presented at the CAA conference in Chicago earlier this spring, is part of my current project to show how the city’s (deservedly) heralded commercial and civic high rises of the postwar era didn’t happen in a vacuum–they occurred within the political, social, and economic contexts of the city’s violent reactions and resistance to change. How do terrible decisions like those that led to Cabrini-Green get made, and why do seemingly good intentions metastasize into such projects? This brief overview of the city’s skyscrapers that didn’t work, and that rarely get discussed in architectural histories, looks at the forces that made physical monuments out of Chicago’s horrifying history of segregated housing. Further reading, highly recommended: D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago’s Public Housing.  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).  146-147.

Introduction:  Low Rise Housing by the CHA, 1938-1941

Chicago’s first public efforts at social housing, designed and built between 1938 and 1941, were low-rise row houses and mid-rise garden apartment blocks.[i]  The four-story Lathrop Homes on the north side and the Trumbull Homes rowhouses on the far south side re-housed Polish and Italian families living in slum conditions nearby, while the Ida B. Wells row houses and walkup apartment blocks in Bronzeville were intended exclusively for black families.

The Jane Addams Homes, constructed at the intersection of Italian, Jewish, and African-American neighborhoods on the west side, could have been a leading example of integration.  Yet the CHA assigned just one of the project’s thirty-two buildings to black families, revealing what the Defender called the CHA’s “Jim Crow provisions.”[ii] 

Begun just three days after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Cabrini Homes on the north side were recast as housing for wartime workers and were thus subject to government non-discrimination requirements. 

They became more integrated than other CHA projects, though they lagged behind the surrounding neighborhood’s changing demographics.  Despite attempts by a neighborhood church and ‘outside agitators’ to keep black residents out, the Homes developed a tenuous reputation for racial harmony in their early years.[iii]

The Cabrini Homes exemplified the Authority’s ability to provide well-built, inexpensive row houses; double-story apartments for families were located above single-story, ground-level apartments designed for childless couples and seniors.  (Figure 03)  This allowed for a dense development without resorting to elevators while opening up shared yard space that was accessible—and visible—from every unit.[iv]  Architect Henry Holsman experimented with new, durable materials such as precast concrete, and at $6,500 per unit, the Homes stretched minimal federal funding to achieve  a “decent, comfortable place in which to live.”[v]

Mid-Rises

As D. Bradford Hunt and others have showed, the CHA planned to scatter low-rise projects throughout the city, but their attempts to house returning black veterans in white neighborhoods met with a rock-throwing mobs.  The Airport Homes riot in 1946 was just the first of many violent reactions that terrorized black residents and intimidated city agencies.[vi]  That year, a Mayor’s committee determined that “the answer to housing shortages in Chicago is the construction of apartment buildings instead of individual houses,” handing white mobs a victory, and leaving the CHA to find sites only in politically safe, black neighborhoods.[vii] 

The Authority was thus pressured into ‘slum clearance’ projects to ‘rebuild’ black belt  neighborhoods from within.[viii]  Initially, this involved harnessing private capital to eminent domain.  Developers were given financial incentives to build middle-class housing on former slum sites and displaced residents would be housed in new, modern apartments built by the CHA.[ix]  The first slum clearance projects involved sites adjacent to the Lake between 31^st and 35^th Streets, and at the Federal Street neighborhood’s north end, between 27^th and 30^th Streets.  The lakefront site was cleared for New York Life’s Lake Meadows project, ten apartment towers designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill for middle-class, black residents and built between 1951 and 1957. 

Displaced families were provided with flats on the Federal Street site in the Dearborn Homes, where architects Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett laid out one, two, and three bedroom units in six- to nine- story towers, providing a demographic mix that reflected community patterns.[x]  As Chicago’s “entering wedge in the high-rise field,” the Dearborn Homes catered to family logistics, with shared play areas and pram storage on each floor.[xi] 

CHA director Elizabeth Wood noted that elevator buildings like the Dearborn Homes opened up shared outdoor space on crowded sites.[xii]  But she—and the CHA—knew that high-rises were problematic for families.[xiii]  Writing for Architectural Forum, she urged row houses for tenants with children, and she was cited by Catherine Bauer in a 1952 essay arguing against “skyscrapomania” in public housing.[xiv]  Bauer’s research showed that families craved the ground level access, individualized heat and water, and private outdoor space offered by row houses.  The “elevator building” worked for “people with servants, cars, and summer homes.”  But low-income families could not thrive in projects where they had no supervised place for children to play, opportunities for social exchange with their neighbors, or private outdoor space.[xv] 

A Brief Flurry of Innovation:  Gallery Apartments

Federal support for housing programs waned during the 1950s.  In response, the CHA sought creative solutions to tightening constraints from Chicago’s “top-flight architects,” settling on linear schemes with outdoor, ‘gallery’ circulation that doubled as semi-supervised play space for children.  Housing experts compared these to the Chicago’s traditional back stairs and porches and the CHA embraced galleries as “sidewalks in the air.”[xvi]

The first gallery plan project in Chicago was Loomis Courts, designed by Loewenberg & Loewenberg with Weese & Van der Meulen, Associate Architects (1950-52).  (Figure 05)  Designed for 126 families, the complex consisted of two seven-story structures adjacent to the Jane Addams rowhouses.  CHA planners rejected an initial nine-story skip-stop scheme, and design architect Harry Weese responded with angled gallery plans centered on a central elevator core.  The shared, eight-foot wide ‘sky sidewalks’ opened into each apartments’ kitchen, providing, effectively supplementing ground-level playgrounds in the wide space between the two buildings.

Ogden Courts (1951-52), designed by SOM, were planned around similar galleries, but they also borrowed exposed construction techniques used by Mies van der Rohe in Promontory Apartments (1949).[xvii]  Promontory was developed by Herbert Greenwald, a mentee of Henry Holsman, whose expertise had been so critical to the Cabrini Row Houses. Holsman served as a consultant on Promontory and was influential in refining its budget-conscious palette, another economic achievement that convinced the CHA that materials frankly expressed–or, in other words, left bare–could serve as architectural finishes. Ogden Courts’s exposed frame used dense, water-resistant concrete, which also formed bare flat slabs to create durable architectural ceilings within.  The “building straight” approach, inspired by Promontory but with its roots in Holsman’s work at Cabrini, required “neither veneer nor paint,” and at just $9400 per unit, Ogden Courts set a formidably low bar for future CHA buildings and budgets.[xviii]  Prairie Courts (1950-52), designed by Keck and Keck, deployed galleries with elevator cores at their 1/3 points in two 14-story buildings, while several seven-story blocks were arranged around continuous galleries with a single elevator core in the center.  Apartments in these buildings had just one or two bedrooms, while lower row house blocks accommodated three- to five-bedroom units that offered immediate outdoor access.[xix] 

Finally, Archer Courts (1951-52), along Archer Avenue at Cermak Road, were designed by Everett F. Quinn & Associates with Alfred L. Mell.  (Figure 07)  The two thin, gallery-plan  slabs included three-bedroom units on the bottom two stories, with single-level units above, all contained within just a 21’ depth.  This allowed cross-ventilation, but it also required no intermediate girders, simplifying formwork and allowing for exposed concrete ceilings.  Archer Courts won praise for their “clarity and orderliness” and angled solar orientation.[xx]  At $10,270 per unit, they were expensive, but they proved more functional and successful than their contemporaries.[xxi]

The March Toward High Rises

The Authority’s experiments in mid-rise housing were, however, short-lived.  Federal agencies tightened budgets and standards while steep inflation and pressure from white neighborhoods forced the CHA into ‘slum clearance’ sites that came with steep land costs.  With smaller, more expensive sites and shrinking federal support, there was nowhere for the CHA to go but up.  The Authority commissioned budget and site driven ‘extensions,’ high-rise expansions of existing projects.  Extensions had two advantages: they were already in politically safe, black neighborhoods and they allowed the CHA to make use of existing services.  The first extension, the 15-story Grace Abbott Homes (Shaw, Metz, & Dolio, 1955) was constructed adjacent to Loomis Courts.  It was followed by the nine-story Harold Ickes Homes (Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill, 1955) north of Dearborn Homes. These adopted the gallery plans that had informed the Authority’s mid-rise construction, but at new scales, adding 1200 and 700 units to their respective neighborhoods in towers ranging from nine to fifteen stories.  Shoddy workmanship at the Abbott Homes suggested that low budgets had bred negligence and corruption, however.[xxii]  Stateway Gardens, built between 1955 and 1957 in the Federal Street neighborhood, packed 1650 apartments into ten and seventeen story blocks.  Designed by Holabird, Root, and Burgee, these were built of reinforced concrete with brick facing, with apartments bare concrete walls and ceilings, laid out to avoid freestanding columns.[xxiii]  Stateway, too, fell victim to corruption and corner-cutting; inspectors uncovered a kickback scheme during its construction that raised concerns about the CHA’s hiring policies.[xxiv]

Worse than this low-level corruption, however, poor construction, inadequate services, and indifferent maintenance marred these projects’ early years.  In 1958, the Tribune reported that patronage and “featherbedding” meant the CHA’s maintenance costs were 80% higher than in other cities’.[xxv]  A Wall Street Journal reporter found that the three-year-old Abbott Homes were already neglected, with broken elevators and windows as well as cockroach and rat infestations that routine maintenance should have addressed.  CHA’s patronage jobs rewarded political connections over ability or attendance.  With underqualified or idle maintenance staff, buildings decayed quickly and irrevocably.

Laissez-faire maintenance was exacerbated by an ill-conceived drive toward multi-bedroom units.  In January, 1958 CHA Director Alvin Rose argued for more than 4,000 new units with three to five bedrooms to accommodate larger families emigrating from the south.  The Authority developed designs for five-story walkup structures, with single units for elderly residents on the ground floor and two rows of double-height multi-bedroom apartments above these.[xxvi]  Rose touted the “built-in babysitters” provided by the elderly housing, but the scheme failed to come in under a $17,000 per unit federal budget. 

As D. Bradford Hunt has noted, the Authority faced an impossible choice; it could not meet federal budgets with midrise housing on expensive clearance sites, but it also could not overcome the racial inertia that prevented it from building on cheaper, outlying land.  Meanwhile, a long waiting list for multi-bedroom housing grew.  Rose was despondent.  “We cannot build the type of low buildings that we need unless the federal government changes its regulations,” he told the Tribune.[xxvii]  “We can only build tall apartment buildings in which there must be many small apartments….We hope to build these large apartments in low buildings which would be much better for children than high rise apartments.”[xxviii]  The CHA abandoned the “row-on-row” idea and planned instead for 11,000 new units in gallery-plan high-rises despite grave doubts.[xxix]  Howard D. Gould, columnist for the Defender, warned, presciently, “for a family with several children in a high-rise building, how much supervision can a mother give children—if she is on the 12^th floor—and they are travelling back and forth to the street on elevators?”[xxx]

The Colossal Projects: Cabrini Extension and the Taylor Homes

The Authority proposed large high-rise extensions for the Cabrini row houses on the north side, and the Dearborn Homes and Stateway Gardens projects on the south.  The Cabrini Extension site required condemnation proceedings and relocations before construction could begin; as those were resolved, cost pressures piled further expectations on the project.[xxxi]   Originally planned for 2,000 units—already a huge undertaking—it was split into two phases that, between them, provided over 3,000 apartments, most with three, four, or five bedrooms. 

Cabrini Extension’s first phase (1958) was designed by A. Epstein and Sons, an engineering firm known more for rebuilding the Stockyards than for its hotels and residential buildings.  (Figure 08)  They adopted the exposed concrete and brick used by SOM in the Ogden Homes, but at a larger scale, with fifteen buildings of seven to nineteen stories each.  The William Green Homes north of Division (1962), were designed by Pace Associates, which had been formed to carry out working drawings for Mies’ Promontory Apartments and had evolved into an independent firm specializing in high-rise housing.  These fifteen- and sixteen-story blocks repeated Promontory’s exposed concrete walls, columns, and girders.  (Figure 09, Figure 10)  The Green Homes were planned for large families, with five bedroom apartments on the lower floors, three- and four-bedroom units on the third through sixth floors, and one- and two-bedroom units above.[xxxii]

Named for former CHA executive Robert Taylor, who had died in 1957, the 4400 units of the Federal Street project project were arranged into twenty-eight sixteen story blocks designed by Shaw, Metz & Associates and stretching for two miles along Federal Street.   Faced with the need to fit so many units onto a 95-acre site, the masterplan wrapped towers of gallery plans with central, exposed elevator cores into tight, repetitive clusters.  3500 units had three bedrooms while just 900 units had one or two, packing 27,000 tenants onto less than 100 acres—a population density four times Chicago’s average.  To achieve this, apartments throughout had to be two rooms deep instead of one, reducing cross-ventilation and forcing kitchens into the center of each unit.[xxxiii]  (Figure 12)  With neither close proximity to galleries nor any view of the playgrounds below, these landlocked kitchens left each cluster with virtually no supervised outdoor play space.

The Taylor Homes proved ill-conceived soon after their opening in March, 1962.  (Figure 13)  As Hunt has shown, the high percentage of three bedroom units skewed their demographics, exacerbating their inherent visibility and supervision problems.[xxxiv]  Within the towers, a late decision by the Authority to cut elevator numbers from three per tower to just two, despite warnings from the PHA, meant extraordinarily long wait times, while a lack of skilled maintenance staff meant constant breakdowns.[xxxv]  A typical block in the Taylor Homes had an elevator-to-bedroom ratio of 225:1, almost three times that of contemporary residential towers on Lake Shore Drive.  Even the CHA’s own mid-rise projects had ratios of around 70:1 to 80:1.  Children found high rise elevators to be irresistible playgrounds, often disabling or damaging them, and whole towers frequently went without any service at all.  In September, 1963 three children died when firefighters arrived at an apartment fire to find both elevators broken.[xxxvi]  Poor elevator service was matched by inadequate heating, plumbing, and recreational facilities. 

Worse than their functional problems, however, the large high rise projects concentrated social problems and exacerbated racial segregation.[xxxvii]  (Figure 14)  Initial requirements that established minimum incomes to ensure that tenants were employed were abandoned as the high-rises became housing of last resort.  With no employment in the surrounding neighborhoods and inadequate social programs, some residents turned to an underground economy that coalesced into organized gangs that exploited the towers’ poor visibility and flawed design.  By January, 1964, violent assaults in the Taylor Homes’ laundries and elevators led to threats of rent strikes.[xxxviii]  Further deaths—including a teenager who fell through a faulty gallery railing in 1964—and a growing crime problem cemented the high rises’ reputations as dysfunctional, dangerous communities. 

By 1970, the CHA’s original mission, to provide “bootstrap” housing to families as a first step toward finding their own accommodations devolved into ‘warehousing’ the most city’s most challenged residents.  Gang activity increased throughout the 1960s; sniper fire became a terrifying hallmark of life in Cabrini-Green.[xxxix]  Tribune reporter Cornelia Honchar argued that the projects’ “Hydra’s head of problems” were exemplified by the towers’ “slow, undependable, dirty” elevators, which were unsecured from the outside and invisible from both apartments and the complex’ public areas, leaving residents vulnerable to assault.  The underground economy, lax security, skewed demographics, and poor visibility, she argued, allowed teenage mischief and minor vandalism to metastasize an uncontained, ongoing revolt.[xl]

Chicago built its last multi-story housing in 1963.  It was prohibited from constructing large housing projects after the landmark civil rights case of Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority in 1969, which showed that the city’s housing policies had actually hardened segregation patterns.[xli]  Chicago instituted a voucher system aimed at dispersing tenants.  The CHA’s high-rises themselves lasted less than two generations.  The Authority embarked on a “Plan for Transformation” in the 1990s, moving 25,000 tenants from high-rise “warehouses” to low-rise CHA units, or to subsidized private housing.  Some CHA housing stock was reconceived.  Loomis Courts were privatized and converted to subsidized housing.[xlii]  Dearborn Homes were gutted and renovated in 2009-2010 and Archer Courts were renovated in 1999-2001 and expanded with new townhouses.[xliii]  Cabrini-Green, the Taylor Homes, Stateway Gardens, and other high-rise projects, however, were all demolished between 1995 and 2015.

In 1985, the Tribune’s William Mullen interviewed architects, CHA personnel, and residents who been involved with Cabrini-Green and other high-rise projects.  “The Road to Hell” outlined the desperate situation that the CHA had been placed in by aldermen representing their constituents’ virulently segregationist views and by punishingly tight federal budgets.  But Mullen also noted planners’ and architects’ complicity in the high-rises’ planning and design, quoting Monsignor John Egan, the Catholic church’s most vocal public housing proponent in the 1950s:

“When it was being planned in the 1950s, it seemed like a good idea,” he said of the Cabrini Extension….The problem is, we didn’t learn from our mistakes. We should have stopped the massive high-rise developments as soon as we saw what was going wrong in Cabrini. But we didn’t. We kept doing it over and over again.”[xliv]

---

[i] Al Chase, “New Chicago Housing Authority May Take Over Four Government Projects Here.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 14, 1937, pp. 1-c14.

[ii]C Cecil Craigne  “Disclose Jim Crow Unit At Jane Addams: 30-Apartment Building Is Set Aside.”  The Chicago Defender, Feb. 5, 1938. 7.

[iii] Carl Wiegman, “Story of City’s Big Problem: Negro Housing.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec 30, 1949, pp. 3.  “White Kids Rebuff Hate, Elect Negro Boy ‘Mayor’.” The Chicago Defender, Mar 20, 1943, pp. 6. 

[iv] “Furnish Model Apartments for War Workers in New Project.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jul 12, 1942, pp. 16.

[v]Al Chase, “New Construction Methods Save Time and Materials in CHA Housing.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug 23, 1942. pg. B10; and Ralph W Cessna, “Housing Units in Chicago Add to Comfortable Living.” The Christian Science Monitor, Jan 07, 1942. 20.

[vi] “Airport Homes.” The Chicago Defender, Nov 30, 1946. 14 and “It Happens In Chicago.” The Chicago Defender, Dec 14, 1946. 14.

.  See, too, John Bartlow Martin, “Incident at Fernwood.” Harper’s Magazine, Oct 01, 1949. 86.

[vii] “Key to Housing is Apartments, Planners Told.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr. 18, 1946.  9.

[viii] Howard Wood, “Chicago Points New Way to Slum Clearance.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 14, 1938.  G4.

[ix] Wood, op. cit.

[x] “Ask Bids on New Project [Dearborn Homes].  The Chicago Defender, July 24, 1948.  7.

[xi] Julian Whittlesey, “Chicago’s Multistory Public Housing Projects: An Appraisal.”  Progressive Architecture.  April, 1951.  57-58.

[xii] D. Bradford Hunt and Robert Lau, “Understanding the Demise and Transformation of Chicago’s High-Rise Social Housing.”  CTBUH 8^th World Congress, Dubai.  March 3-5 2008.  3.

[xiii] Julian Whittlesey, “Chicago’s Multistory Public Housing Projects: An Appraisal.”  Progressive Architecture.  April, 1951.  58.

[xiv] Cited in Catherine Bauer, “The Low-Income Tenant.”  Progressive Architecture, May, 1952.  61-64.

[xv] Bauer, op. cit., 61-64.

[xvi] Whittlesey, op. cit., 60.

[xvii] “Glass and Brick in a Concrete Frame.”  Architectural Forum, vol. 92.  January, 1950. 

[xviii] “Open Corridor Design.”  Architectural Forum, vol. 92.  January, 1950. 

[xix] Whittlesey, op. cit., 64.

[xx] Whittlesey, op. cit., 67.

[xxi] “$1,520,000 Bid For Building Homes Project.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 22, 1950.  14.  See, for instance, Jarrett, Vernon. “Neighborhood Group’s Victories.” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 14, 1973. 18.

[xxii] “Reveal Shoddy Work on New Housing Units.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep 15, 1953. 7

[xxiii] Thomas Buck, “Housing Project to Blot Out Slum Area.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep 04, 1955.  4.

[xxiv] “Confesses Stateway Gardens Shakedown.” Daily Defender, Nov 18, 1957.  2.

[xxv] “Waste In Public Housing.” Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963), Apr 14, 1958.  18.

[xxvi] Thomas Buck, “Plans OK’d for 7,396 New Housing Units Here.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 20, 1959.  15; and “Propose New Type Of Public Housing Here: Seek Federal Approval Of Novel Units.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 01, 1958.  11.

[xxvii] Thomas Buck, “Mayor to Ask New Type of Public Housing.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan. 15, 1958.  23.

[xxviii] Thomas Buck, “Larger Flats Called Public Housing Need.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Jan 10, 1958. 7.

[xxix] Ray Vicker, “Changing Housing: Public Housing Men Try Smaller Units, Dispersal to Cut Social Problems.” Wall Street Journal, May 02, 1958. 1.

[xxx]Howard D. Gould, “Population vs. High-Rise Housing.” Daily Defender, May 25, 1959. 8.

[xxxi] Thomas Buck. “Cha Will Add 97 Acres to Cabrini Homes: Project to Contain 1,950 t0 2,650 Units.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct 22, 1950. 1-n2.

[xxxii] “Dedicate Housing Project Named for William Green.” Chicago Daily Defender, Nov 21, 1961. 6.

[xxxiii] “CHA To Start 4,415 Homes Project Soon: Center Will Be Named For Negro Leader.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep 11, 1960.  28.

[xxxiv] D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago’s Public Housing.  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).  146-147.

[xxxv] “Dispute Over Elevators of CHA Settled.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr 14, 1960. 6.

[xxxvi] “CHA Tenants Get Warning on Elevators.” Chicago Tribune, Sep 19, 1963.  D3.

[xxxvii] “The Robert R. Taylor Homes.”  Daily Defender, Apr. 16, 1959.  13.

[xxxviii] “‘Accord’ Reached at Taylor Homes.” Chicago Daily Defender, Jan 15, 1964.  4.

[xxxix] Cornelia Honchar, “Cabrini-Green–Near North Hell.”  Chicago Tribune, Aug 2, 1970.  W3

[xl] Honchar, op. cit.

[xli] “Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 296 F. Supp. 907.” (N.D. Ill. 1969); U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois – 296 F. Supp. 907,  February 10, 1969.

[xlii] “No Small Plan for TRANSFORMATION.” Chicago Reader, Sep 21, 2017. 12-16.

[xliii] Blair Kamin, “CHA Polishes Its Rough Edges.” Chicago Tribune, May 22, 2009.  Online at: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2009-05-22-0905210676-story.html

[xliv] William Mullen, “The Road to Hell.”  Chicago Tribune, Mar 31, 1985. H11.

I’ve been casually adjusting my entertainment options as the new Chicago project ramps up. Interesting, for example, that the really great releases on Chess Records were coming out at the same time as the classic postwar skyscrapers were going up. So my background music while I’m pulling notes together has occasionally tended toward Muddy Waters, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, and Koko Taylor–no great leap there.

Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm was a touchstone for postwar literary culture in Chicago, and while he largely disowned its 1955 film adaptation, this seemed like required viewing. It’s the story of the evocatively named Frankie Machine, a recovering heroin addict who tries to turn himself around after a prison stint by returning to Chicago, learning drums, and trying to sign on with a jazz band. It’s a pretty typical noir-ish drama, and it certainly plays into the stereotype of Chicago as a haven for vice and crime. But it has a lot going for it–Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak as the leads, Otto Preminger directing, and the first of Saul Bass’ iconic animated title sequences. Despite (or, maybe, because of) being condemned for its depiction of drug use, it was a popular and critical hit. Sinatra was nominated for an Oscar, and the art direction and soundtrack were nominated as well.

But it’s a brief, five-second cameo that caught my eye, especially as someone who’s slightly obsessive about architectural cameos. Thirty minutes into the film, Frankie Machine gets dressed up in a suit and bow tie and interviews with Harry Lane, a musical agent. And where is Lane’s agency based? Why, in the well-known Lane Building, which I’m guessing is located in the 800 block of North Lake Shore Drive:

My first thought, of course, was that Preminger made a huge continuity error here–that font is not regulation Allzweck. But, more to the point, this is literally the one establishment shot in the entire movie–the rest of the film is clearly shot on soundstages that are deliberately devoid of any Chicago landmarks. There’s the standard police car with “Chicago” clearly written on its side, of course, but otherwise Preminger didn’t use any landmarks or skyline shots to set the location.

In 1955, he could have used the newly-completed Prudential Building, or any number of 1920s towers that would have been instantly recognizable as Chicagoan. Clearly, he was after a modern aesthetic, though–witness the Saul Bass title sequence. Given that, he could have used Lever House, or Manufacturers Hanover, two New York buildings that were more recent than 860-880. But he seems to have intentionally picked Mies’ 1952 apartment towers as a statement of particular Chicago modernity, as a statement of Lane’s success and sophistication.

Once inside? Ehhh, OK, here all bets are off. Lane’s office has chintz draperies, a brick fireplace, and a furniture palette that can best be described as Levittown modern instead of Miesian. Too much to ask for Barcelona chairs, I suppose, and there’s plenty of other visual sophistication around for the eyeballs to settle upon…finding Chicago landmarks in recent action films has become an architect’s version of trainspotting, but Preminger’s film shows that there’s plenty of untapped potential for this in classic cinema, too…

The Vernacular Architecture Forum’s annual conference took place virtually this past weekend, and while San Antonio was sorely missed (along with the chance to stay, again, in the Gunter Hotel, where Robert Johnson recorded his seminal blues record in 1936…) the online conference was well-organized and my session, on Agriculture and the City, had a good match of topics–Travis Olson from Wisconsin on Estonian and German farm buildings in rural North Dakota and Paula Lupkin from North Texas on the (lost) Farmer’s Exchange Building in Dallas.

Their papers touched on the necessity of railroads and boards of exchange to agriculture in the Plains and throughout the midwest, which linked nicely with my paper, which was an excerpt from a forthcoming paper on Chicago’s grain elevators, a happy rabbit hole that’s been my go-to procrastination research for the last few years. Their history parallels those of the city’s commercial skyscrapers in that they can be seen as ‘fossils’ of the economic, political, and social forces that shaped the city–structures that by their location, scale, and configuration show evidence of the flows of capital and power that converged on Chicago in a particularly turbulent era.

Philip Armour waded into Chicago’s grain trade as a sideline to his spectacularly brutal and efficient meatpacking empire in the 1880s, seeing potential fortunes to be won off of the vast–and often over-enthusiastic–bets being made on grain prices on the city’s Board of Trade. Few structures in the city owed their existence so directly to the machinations of commodities trading and speculation as Armour’s elevator complex on Goose Island, and few buildings in the city have disappeared with so few traces. But the elevators he built there at the end of the century illustrate the ways in which the city’s geography echoed the developing economic geography of the Midwest and upper Plains, and they show the scale and savagery of the fiscal warfare that took place on the Board’s trading floor every day.

VAF asked us to record our lectures, but decided not to archive any of the conference, so in the interests of previewing the larger paper and getting a ripping good tale of corn, bankruptcy, and tall timber construction out there, here’s my bit…