Total Architecture / Destruction in Total

by Grahm Mathew Balkany Director Emeritus, Gropius in Chicago Coalition

“We have to discern between the vital, real needs of the people and the pattern of inertia and habit that is so often advanced as ‘the will of the people.’

“The stark and frightening realities of our world will not be softened by dressing them up in the ‘new look’ and it will be equally futile to try to humanise our mechanized civilization by adding sentimental fripperies...”

- Walter Gropius, 1956.i

Walter Gropius is among the small handful of twentieth century artists who truly need no introduction. A pioneering Modernist architect from the age of 22, founder and director of the world-famous Bauhaus institute in Germany, social paladin and incessant promoter of free expression in the arts, there are few creative minds whose vision and actions have more convincingly shaped our contemporary world.

Having permanently fled Nazi Germany in 1934, by 1937 the iconic architect had commenced a new life in America by accepting the chairmanship of the Department of Architecture at Harvard University. This rather abrupt shift away from the forefront of the international avant-garde, into what must have appeared to be a nearly impotent role in the stodgiest of American institutions, likely confounded many of Gropius’s adherents. Furthering this notion, Gropius settled placidly in a masterful New England countryside home of his own hand, and comfortably occupied himself with the design of opulent suburban houses for his elite New England neighbors. To those who subscribed most closely to Gropius’s socially charged, egalitarian Bauhaus manifesto, his actions likely were anathematic.

Hence, in part, the reality that Gropius’s American portfolio is relatively overlooked and has not received the acclaim it deserves. However, it is neither correct to state that his American output is without masterpieces, nor to assume that his deep-seated commitment to social causes was cast into the Atlantic when he left Europe behind. On the contrary, his social convictions strengthened in this country, and the scope of his vision in this regard only expanded.

“In the course of my life I became more and more convinced that the usual practice of architects to relieve the dominating disjointed pattern here and there by a beautiful building is most inadequate and that we must find, instead, a new set of values, based on such constituent factors as would generate an integrated expression of thought and feeling for our time. …such a unity might be attained to become the visible pattern for a true democracy….”

- Walter Gropius, 1956.ii

The greater Michael Reese Hospital project on Chicago’s South Side was undoubtedly the largest work of socially driven architecture Walter Gropius enacted in the United States, probably second in the world after the later Berlin commission for an entire new city sector, now known Gropiusstadt.

Gropius’s humility and modest title as “architectural consultant” on the Michael Reese project, coupled with heaping doses of cloying Chicago politics, helped to assure that his involvement would remain relatively unheralded, despite his strong participation from 1945-1959. Only through later research has his work gained new clarity: At minimum, Gropius’s authority encompassed the master planning of an entire neighborhood of the South Side, multiple site plans for the Hospital Campus proper, close collaboration on landscapes and broader site planning, and partnership with various local architects of record on at least eight individual hospital buildings.

Joined by some of his closest associates, at Reese the master crafted the first living example of what he later termed Total Architecture. It was a community-focused design program, one which dauntingly situated the architect foremost as a designer of human welfare, requiring him to think of the city and all components holistically. Undoubtedly, the broader Reese planning area was one of the most extensive, fully enacted, and successful visions of Modernism to be found in the United States, its end results unique and striking. A rare U.S. example of an urban, completely Modernist neighborhood, it remained closely attuned to Gropius’s vision, with buildings of the highest standards blending with copious parklands into a seamless whole. Further, the area has remained stable throughout the years despite the changing fortunes of surrounding districts.

Miserably, it is appropriate to speak here of the place in the past, after the mercilessly bludgeoning, philistine hand of city government has quite literally crushed the formerly lush campus into nothing more than an empty, weed-strewn, dust-laden morass on the shores of Lake Michigan. Operating under the patently false illusions that these actions were necessary to secure the 2016 Olympic Games, now- departing Mayor Daley and his conspirators have, in just a matter of months, destroyed decades of passionately altruistic work by some of the greatest artistic minds ever to grace our country. In the process, the total count of lost Gropius works worldwide has nearly doubled.

Chicago’s citizens are left to decipher what true causes the former mayor might have had for so desperately wanting to clear-cut this idyllic part of our city. Also, the taxpayers must decide how to pay for the $98-million (and rising) mortgage that the Mayor’s office silently structured to acquire and demolish these 37 acres, all the while proclaiming that no public funds were being spent on the Olympic bid.

“I have been told that a tree which is supposed to bear my name is to be planted in Chicago on the campus of the Michael Reese Hospital, for which I have been an architectural consultant for the last eight years. I want this to be a tree in which birds of many colors and shapes can sit and feel sustained. I do not wish to restrict it to species with square tail-ends or streamlined contours or international features or Bauhaus garb. In short, I wish it to be a hospitable tree from which many songs should be heard, except the fake sounds of the bird imitators.” - Walter Gropius, In an address to the crowd at his 70th birthday celebration. Illinois iii Institute of Technology, 1953.

In 2009, this “Gropius Tree” still towered, a fitting gesture reflecting the architect’s unfailing commitment to implementing adequate public open spaces on the South Side. Yet Gropius also took the tree as a symbol for the diversity and vitality he had striven to promote as a new democratic pattern for urban life: Total Architecture. In the end, the cancerous process that engulfed the Reese campus was anything but democratic.

How ironic it is to recall that Chicago’s first lasting action at the campus was to destroy well over three hundred trees on the site. Overnight, the vision was vanquished, the new order decreed.

“‘Creating new order’ is the artist’s task.” - Walter Gropius, 1956.iv

While the dust still wafts through the air of the Near South Side, while the reality that Chicago has lost nearly all semblance of its Gropius heritage begins to settle, visionary artists have instinctively begun the healing process, like platelets to a wound. The void left in Chicago’s cultural heritage certainly can never be restored, but there is undeniable power in this public “recapturing” of the campus. In this sense, the place can now be reconferred as a part of the public realm, restored to our social consciousness, and cemented in a state where it is never again to be denied.

Jeff Carter’s profound and riveting works touch on many of the themes central to the Bauhaus, to Gropius, and to the protracted fight to save Illinois’s Gropius heritage: Assembly and disassembly, mass production versus preciousness, hand craft in direct contact with the machine, those bitter questions concerning what society should retain and what it must discard. However, his unique process of appropriating and disfiguring well-designed, mass-produced objects in observance of the singular sanctity of memory might strike us as ultimately anti-Bauhaus. Carter’s work, nevertheless, somehow renders a perfect tribute to the uniqueness that was Gropius’s Michael Reese Hospital: Serious, yes, somber, yes; but clever, playful, and celebratory in the very same stroke.

Just months ago, the door to Chicago’s rich Gropius legacy seemed to have been slammed permanently shut, never to be reopened. Through profound creative works such as those of Jeff Carter, one now has a sense that this door is in fact slightly ajar. And a bit of light is streaming through the crack.

“The modern artist is frequently accused of moving in an exclusive world of his own, a stranger to his fellow men. But a true artist is always a candid interpreter of his society. … If we cannot always follow him, the fault may lie in our complacency toward the very forces that shape our times.” - Walter Gropius, 1956.v

i Gropius, Walter. “Architect – Servant or Leader?” In Scope of Total Architecture, 1956. p. 100. ii Gropius, Walter. “Preface.” In Scope of Total Architecture, 1956. p. 9. iii Gropius, Walter. Public address to crowd at 70th birthday celebration, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1953. Excerpted as “Introduction.” In Scope of Total Architecture, 1956. p. 13. iv Gropius, Walter. “Blueprint of an Architect’s Education.” In Scope of Total Architecture, 1956. p. 54. v Gropius, Walter. “Unity in Diversity.” In Apollo in the Democracy, 1968. p. 27.