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INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW L. ROCKWELL Interviewed by Betty J. Blum Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago Copyright © 1995 Revised Edition © 2005 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available to the public for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface iv Preface to Revised Edition vi Outline of Topics vii Oral History 1 Selected References 25 Curriculum Vitae 26 Index of Names and Buildings 27 iii PREFACE Since its inception in 1981, the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago has engaged in presenting to the public and the profession diverse aspects of the history and process of architecture, with a special concentration on Chicago. The department has produced bold, innovative exhibitions, generated important scholarly publications, and sponsored public programming of major importance, while concurrently increasing its collection of holdings of architectural drawings and documentation. From the beginning, its purpose has been to raise the level of awareness, understanding, and appreciation of the built environment to an ever-widening audience. In the same spirit of breaking new ground, an idea emerged from the department’s advisory committee in 1983 to conduct an oral history project on Chicago architects. Until that time, oral testimony had not been used frequently as a method of documentation in the field of architecture. Innumerable questions were raised: was the method of gathering information about the architect from the architect himself a reliable one? Although a vast amount of unrecorded information was known to older architects, would they be willing to share it? Would their stories have lasting research value to future scholars, or would they be trivial? Was video-recording a viable option? How much would such a project cost? With a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we began a feasibility study to answer these questions. Our study focused on older personalities who had first-hand knowledge of the people and events of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—decades that have had little attention in the literature of Chicago’s architectural history. For nine months in 1983, I contacted more than one hundred architects in Chicago and suburbs and visited most of them. I learned not only that they were ready, willing, and more than able to tell their stories, they were also impatient to do so. Many thought such a program was long overdue. For each visit, I was armed with a brief biographical sketch of the architect and a tape- recorder with which I recorded our brief exchange. At that time, we considered these visits to be only a prelude to a more comprehensive, in-depth interview. Regretfully, this vision did not materialize because some narrators later became incapacitated or died before full iv funding was secured. Slowly, however, we did begin an oral history project and now, more than twelve years later, our oral history collection has grown into a rich source of research data that is unique among oral history programs worldwide. With the completion of these interviews our collection of memoirists now numbers more than fifty and the collection continues to grow each year. This oral history text is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in a complete electronic version on the Chicago Architects Oral History Project's section of The Art Institute of Chicago website, www.artic.edu/aic This interview is one of several dozen short interviews that were recorded in 1983 during the feasibility study. Surely each one of these narrators could have spoken in greater depth and at greater length; each one deserves a full-scale oral history. Unfortunately, thirteen of these twenty architects have already died, which makes these short interviews especially valuable. These interviews were selected for transcription, despite their brevity, because each narrator brings to light significant and diverse aspects of the practice of architecture in Chicago. We were fortunate to receive an additional grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to process this group of interviews. Thanks go to each interviewee and those families that provided releases for the recordings to be made public documents. Thanks also go to Joan Cameron of TapeWriter for her usual diligence and care in transcribing; to Robert V. Sharp of the Publications Department and Maureen A. Lasko of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago for the helpful suggestions that shaped the final form of this document; and, once again, to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for its continuing support, with special thanks to Carter Manny, its former director. Personally, I would like to thank John Zukowsky, Curator of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, for his courage in taking a chance on me as an interviewer in 1983, when I was a complete novice in the craft of interviewing. Since then, I have learned the art and the craft and, more importantly, I have learned that each architect’s story has its own very interesting and unique configuration, often filled with wonderful surprises. Each one reveals another essential strand in the dense and interlocking web of Chicago’s architectural history. Betty J. Blum 1995 v PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION Since 1994, when the previous preface was written, advances in electronic transmission of data have moved at breakneck speed. With the ubiquity of the Internet, awareness and demand for copies of oral histories in the Chicago Architects Oral History Project collection have vastly increased. These factors, as well as the Ryerson and Burnham Library's commitment to scholarly research, have compelled us to make these documents readily accessible on the World Wide Web. A complete electronic version of each oral history is now available on the Chicago Architects Oral History Project's section of The Art Institute of Chicago website, http://www.artic.edu/aic, and, as before, a bound version is available for study at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago. In preparing an electronic version of this document, we have reformatted it for publication, reviewed and updated with minor copy-editing, and, where applicable, we have expanded the biographical profile and added pertinent bibliographic references. Lastly, the text has been reindexed and the CAOHP Master Index updated accordingly. All of the electronic conversion and reformatting is the handiwork of my valued colleague, Annemarie van Roessel, whose technical skills, intelligence, and discerning judgment have shaped the breadth and depth of the CAOHP's presence on the Internet. This endeavor would be greatly diminished without her seamless leadership in these matters. Publication of this oral history in web-accessible form was made possible by the generous support of The Vernon and Marcia Wagner Access Fund at The Art Institute of Chicago; The James & Catherine Haveman Foundation; The Reva and David Logan Family Fund of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region; and Daniel Logan and The Reva and David Logan Foundation. Finally, to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago and its generous and supportive director, Jack P. Brown, we extend our deepest gratitude for facilitating this endeavor. Betty J. Blum February 2005 vi OUTLINE OF TOPICS Interest in Planning 1 Planning O'Hare International Airport, Chicago 2 Daniel H. Burnham's Plan of Chicago, 1909 3 Planning and Sculpture 5 How a Planner Plans 6 Planning and Public Participation 7 About Some Colleagues 10 Planning and the Environment 12 Successful and Not-So-Successful Planning 18 vii Matthew Laflin Rockwell Blum: Today is June 29, 1983, and I'm with Matthew Laflin Rockwell in his home in Winnetka. Rockwell: That's very accurate, but let's just call me Matt Rockwell. Blum: That was the name that William Keck used when he said, "You really ought to speak to Matt." Rockwell: Did he tell you how he knew me? Blum: No, he didn't. I had the feeling that you and he had been associated in some way, but he didn't explain. Will you, please? Rockwell: Let's start at the beginning. I took my bachelor's degree in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I took it at a time in the recession when there were a number of very brilliant people around, and it was a very exciting milieu where these great minds were talking about all kinds of things. My interest happened to be in city planning, and, after I got my bachelor's in architecture, I took my master's in city planning intending to practice in both fields. At that time, Mies had not yet come to the Illinois Institute of Technology—he was about to go there. There weren't too many people in the country who could see a role at that time for architects in planning. Burnham had been the one shining light, but other planners or civil engineers and landscape architects and architects weren't really doing too much about this. And they were losing ground to a career which could have been, or which would be, fruitful to them and to our culture. They designed with the creative instincts of the architect but planning was awfully important.

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