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. It is also imperative that architects do a little more than just

1 practice architecture in order to know about planning. So that led me to go into partnership with a young man who was also an architect, and we started a small office known as Stanton and Rockwell It was the first architectural office which had any planning commitment. The war came along, and I was anxious to be a square peg in a square hole and I had done a thesis at college for the army dealing with the development of an army camp.

Blum: Was that prophetic, or was it evident that the war on the horizon?

Rockwell: I don't know but some of us had decided at MIT that we ought to get our commissions in the army in case there was war. And I did happen to go down and enlist before war broke out so that I had a position which, when war broke out, put me in the position of designing army camps, large cities, 30,000 men cities, which were used by troops. I did this for three or four years in the Midwest; I was the planning officer in charge of structure. That's where I met Bill Keck. I gathered around me a number of professionals including Alfred Caldwell, who is a great landscape architect from IIT. He just recently got the ALA honor award, and together we built a team that did all the planning, the advance planning for army camps, army ordnance depots and airfields. That's how I came to be the designing planner for O'Hare Airport. O'Hare was one of our projects, and I was the chief planner in the development of O'Hare both as to where it was located and also the design of the field as it emerged. I've got some displays over here I might show you as we go along; it might help a little bit. This is a photograph of O'Hare in 1943, which is forty years ago when it was developed as an army assembly plant for aircraft. That was the purpose of having O'Hare, so that the Douglas Aircraft people who were going to produce airplanes here would have a field from which they could operate. I traveled with a group of Army Air Force officers who came out here to locate this, but I was the planner in the team and we looked at finally three major locations around Chicago: one which was down near the Indiana border, one which was on the South Side of Chicago and then this one. And this one was a good location for potential people density but the field was surrounded with very high smoke stacks from the landscape nurseries which ringed the field. We had to carefully plot

2 this so that, if this had been built and operated during peacetime, the smoke stacks from these nurseries wouldn't bother it. As it so happened this did become the major airport in Chicago, and all the nurseries disappeared and all this became industrial and semi-industrial around the field. Now, on another side of the field it became Bensonville and a residential area out there. But it was the beginning of O'Hare, and the first plans were plans made by an architect planner.

Blum: Are there any simple rules that can generally be applied to planning?

Rockwell: Yes, the whole thing was a planning project. We could not have located it if I hadn't had some background in planning, and our approach to the project was with the planning expertise in the background, which had been developed by an association here in Chicago known as the Chicago Regional Planning Association. This was a marvelous organization because it was led for many years by Daniel Burnham, Jr., and it was the first in the United States. It became the spearhead for New York Regional Planning Association, which became a very well known and well heeled organization. This office did not have the resources that the New York office did, but the marvelous plans that this group did under a man, whose name is Robert Kingery, provided a great residuum of transportation information from 1925 on. And then as a summer student from MIT, I went to this office and worked for a summer so I knew where the material lay. And we went through their vaults, and we got out all this material; we laid it out for Lansing Airport out of the South Side and then we added it all up and it was obvious that this was to be the place for O'Hare. O'Hare was the result of a very careful study. This organization went out not only into transportation, highway, and railway and all that, but into land use and into population density.

Blum: Was this an implementation or an extension of what Burnham had done in 1909?

Rockwell: It was intended to be. Burnham's plan was a marvelous thing, and a lot of people pass up the aspect of the plan that dealt with regional development. If

3 you look at the Burnham plan—Burnham in his plan book, on page 40, and your illustration numbered whatever that number is...

Blum: Well, it's plate number 40 and, for the benefit of those who may read this transcript later, it's on page 44 in the exhibition catalog, The Plan of Chicago: 1909-1979 [Art Institute of Chicago, 1979].

Rockwell: All right. Now, the map on that page shows that Mr. Burnham could think in terms which stretched in detail from Michigan City on the east all the way around and up to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on the north. He anticipated, at a time when the automobile was barely used, a tri-state highway coming around Chicago, a little bit further out than the one that was actually built. The one that was built was actually east of Aurora, but you see he has an inner- expressway here, too. But here is an architect thinking in planning terms, the broadest possible planning terms. You also have a map in the catalog [page 30, plate 35] which shows that he took the whole Great Lakes area and did a sketch plan for highways around the Great Lakes area which I hadn't seen before.

Blum: Well, you know, it's interesting that you're pointing to this drawing because, apparently, this drawing is unlocated.

Rockwell: It's such a shame. This is a beautiful thing, too. But, in any case, the regional plan did grow out of the 1909 plan many years later. The Chicago Regional Planning Association wasn't born until 1925. It stumbled along with very small contributions, usually from the utilities like the telephone company, people who dealt with growth. Commonwealth Edison would put up dollars for this, and when I went to MIT in 1939,1 think, it had a staff of four or five people trying to cope with this whole metropolitan area. And I came to it that summer because I knew at the time that I not only wanted an architectural degree and practice that way, but also a practice of planner.

Blum: How did you arrive at that combination?

4 Rockwell: Because I've always seen that planning in its purest sense is a structure itself. When you're dealing with a regional plan or a city plan, you're dealing with three dimensions even though you're only drawing on one. And some architects would say, well, what about the vertical dimension. And I see a vertical dimension in the city. I don't mean just the height of a skyscraper, but I see that the structure itself is an architectural structure. I want to illustrate that with something I have here. This is called a string sculpture—you've seen them before—and it's a very small one—I can't afford anything larger—but this was done by a New York sculptress named Fuller—Sue Fuller. It's a structure of strings tied together in equilibrium, which, in many different forms, can be three-dimensional and can really be quite captivating as to the sculpture itself. This happens to be almost one plane. But when I was doing the plan for the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, when we were trying to do this plan for Chicago in 1963, I'd been reading a book about Rodin's life, a French sculptor. You will recall that he was very poor and he couldn't really afford very much and his first clay was mounted on a very weak armature. He got down on the cobblestones and tried to move it to another place, but it fell apart. So it started me thinking in terms of doing a regional plan with all of the detail, the millions and millions of little details that I have to work together—that the best thing to do would be to try to do what architects learn to do. For years we have tried to do a sketch plan or maybe an armature plan. See that little figure over there, that's a lead figure arranged by me on top of an old pen-holder. I had a young architect in my office do that for me. It's Rodin's Thinker. Well, it's a lead armature, too, you see, and that was an inspiration to me to go further into understanding how we can do a sketch plan for a large metropolitan area, the only one that's been done, to my knowledge, and it was unique to our Chicago area. I went to the Art Institute, wandered around there one afternoon and came to two or three modern sculptures which I felt could form the basis for our thinking here in Chicago. One of them was Roszak's Whaler of Nantucket, which is in one of the galleries, and it reminded me in its purest form of the armature which must lie behind the city of Cleveland. It's a flat anvil-shaped thing that could be the base of Lake Erie. The base itself works down underneath the anvil toward the bottom in the way in which Cleveland shapes itself around Erie. Calder

5 had a marvelous thing that looked like a star, I think it was. I had just returned from Washington, and I thought Calder's piece represented Washington as an armature. I wandered around until I came across Naum Gabo. He was a Pole who started string sculpture from whom Sue Fuller learned much of her work. Gabo does marvelous creations of three dimensions. I looked at one of his pieces and I said, now if we can do a sketch plan on the same basis as Gabo did for this composition, Linear Construction, Number 2, if we can do that for Chicago, we will have solved the problem that Chicago needs as a plan toward which to grow. And we worked on it for two-and-a-half years. I got a small crew of architects together and trained them, and we worked together and we did finally turn out—in 1969, I think—the first major regional plan for Chicago toward which the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission is working today and has been for the past twenty-two years now. That's how I happened to get into O'Hare. We walked into it backwards because O'Hare is where it was, because I had an experience with the Chicago Regional Planning Association, which had grown out of the Burnham group. And how did Burnham get into the picture? Well, Burnham led me as an architect into a study of architecture and planning which ultimately led through all the cultural processes, sculpture and so on. That led into the basis now for regional planning and city planning, too—but not so much city planning, although some city plans can be drawn on the basis of a mutual plan but led us at least to a very unique solution, I think, in Chicago.

Blum: Your process is fascinating, the way you have related sculpture to planning.

Rockwell: Well, you see, back of every city there are certain basic forms and shapes and features. The Chicago River has a very major influence. I have been studying three European cities fairly recently to understand why—to give a few college classes—why cities like Paris, London and Rome are beautiful. How do you analyze this? If you break down the major features which make these cities beautiful, you'll find the three shapes are roughly similar and they are all great cities because they have a river which forms the core and around which design elements have been created. Now Paris, the general drift of the

6 Seine River is east to west and not north. The Tiber flows north to south in Rome.

Blum: You have a unique vision to see the entire city with the river running through it and the direction and an actual two-dimension, and you say three- dimension, but a two-dimensional vision of that city.

Rockwell: Well, when you were last in Paris, I'm sure you felt the presence of the river. You were conscious of it as a design-related feature. So you see, that's the essence; that's the beginning of planning. When you take a book like Ed Bacon's book on the design of cities—I use that in my classes almost all the time—the way in which he describes the city elements, you then begin to see why it's a three-dimensional concept.

Blum: You have really pointed out the special vision a planner must have and how you conceptualize.

Rockwell: One of the secrets to the Chicago problem is the vast number of governments. The curse of the Chicago region is that every man who has begun to look successful in his business has wanted to be a king. The only way he can be a king is to be president of the park district or the school board or the village board. And we have 10,000 of these men around Chicago. And the reason that keeps us apart, that keeps us from having a real nucleated region is the desire of these local officials to be preeminent in their own right, not to be too fettered; they don't want to be too much a part of an organization. So we have the greatest number of governmental units in the United States right here in Chicago's backyard.

Blum: Are there any umbrella organizations?

Rockwell: One of the things is that we must recognize here is that in a string sculpture you tie together thousands of organizations. I used to say to my class the blue cords might be sanitary districts, the red might be school boards, the yellow might be village boards and you can get all of these into an equilibrium if you

7 try and if you plan. I think we're making some progress toward it here in Chicago, but that's a long story.

Blum: It sounds like it is highly specialized. I can see the connection between designing a building and planning it on its own piece of ground. Why aren't more architects in planning?

Rockwell: And you can see why the architect has a major interest here, although he's given up the field, frankly, because there is not enough money in it. When you ask me why aren't architects interested in planning today, I can simply tell you that Burnham might get $50,000 for doing a Burnham plan, whenever he did that—I forget exactly what he got paid. Chicago was free. He got paid for San Francisco. But $50,000 for a city plan was nothing in comparison to the commission of a lifetime of buildings, and he could only do one plan for Chicago. So all over the country I have found that architects avoid planning unless it can produce a commission. There is one large firm in Chicago, which shall be unnamed, which does planning work, terrible planning work. They do it for free because they have the assurance of a very large commission at the end. So that's part of the problem. I've been working for fifteen or sixteen years with Frannie Stanton. I've been doing residential buildings on the North Shore; we've done some commercial work. And I had done, slowly, tone after tone after tone. I've never done a big city, but, as a small architect, I could go into Deerfield and get the job of replanning Deerfield.

Blum: Do you mean the village center?

Rockwell: The whole village: the center, park district, park plan, village plan, the whole works.

Blum: When were these towns experiencing their most rapid growth?

Rockwell: The 1940s and 1950s when there was federal money for them. I did dozens of them, and we were the only office at that time doing them. That's probably

8 why, when they went looking for a new director of the NIPC, Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, that I was considered, and was able to get that job and to do the job which an architect would not have been considered for.

Blum: Would you explain what the dimensions or parameters are of NIPC and what its responsibilities are?

Rockwell: All right. There are in the Chicago region 269 villages, and they occupy all the space between the Wisconsin border and the Indiana border, which is about 4,000 square miles. It's not the largest region in the country by geography, but it is the second largest in population when you include the Indiana side. There has been some argument back and forth whether or not Los Angeles is a little larger, but if you take the Indiana portion and then you're tied into it. Some time ago when I was afraid that some of these plans were going to be destroyed, I talked to John Zukowsky about this to ask if the Art Institute would like to have them. I'm afraid many of them were destroyed. I had saved two or three of them because my fellowship in the American Institute of Architects was based upon the design of a plan for Chicago, and the two or three plans that I've saved here were from that submission. This plan that you're looking at is a rough drawing, hardly the character of the Jules Guérin work for the Burnham Plan, but the kind of planning document that's used today in a great many locations where we don't begin to have the dollars for planning presentations that we had in the Burnham days. So we won't turn up very many planning documents of the artwork caliber of these. But you can see here that you're dealing with a major highway, that red line going through the area of about fifteen suburban communities, a couple of forest preserves, some industry, some very rough land. This is out in the vicinity of Arlington Heights and Barrington; that's Busse Woods, that large green thing down at the bottom, right here down near the yellow green. That in itself is an architectural environmental feature of great importance. Talk about three-dimensions, that goes down to the strata in which water is captured from runoff and is stored there and provides a source of water for the communities nearby. The upper portion, the land that captures the water, has been developed for park space.

9 And then the third general feature is the development of water, the water resource, in the preserve itself, where you have boating and all of that. Now, in my opinion, only an architect is able to take all of these strings and tie them together. That's why the development of the original plan was so exciting. I had a group of young architects who have become well-known figures today in Chicago who were willing to work like dogs and put this thing together. And, I've said, in my opinion, social scientists were necessary for the background—geographers were also, economists and so on. But only the architect had the ability to assemble and produce the emerging structure that came out of this.

Blum: Is that because of that remarkable far-reaching vision, or whatever it is, planners seem to have?

Rockwell: It is a vision that we all experience in the architectural field, I think, but of course, I'm partial. And a lot of my planning colleagues wouldn't agree with me. On the other hand, I don't think very much of some of the plans they do.

Blum: Would you name some of the people with whom you worked?

Rockwell: Stephen Lincoln, the chief architect for Urban Investment, was my chief architect.

Blum: Who were the other young architects you spoke about?

Rockwell: Well, Steve was a young architect at that time. Ernie Porps was a graduate student just coming out of the University of Illinois, a very gifted guy who is now out in Denver. He went to the Art Institute and studied painting after getting his architectural degree and is now teaching dancing at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And Roger Seitz, a chief planner at SOM was another one, and there are probably a couple of others that I don't remember. But, they worked very hard, and we did a number of unique things. Do you want to hear about this kind of thing?

10 Blum: Yes, yes.

Rockwell: Well, it was important that we not just show the plan downtown because the plan was for seven million people out in the sticks, in the boonies. And the question of how to get it out there was solved when I read in a Louisville newspaper one day that the arts and crafts, the Kentucky arts and crafts enterprise, was carried on through railroad cars that went back into the hills around Kentucky. And so I went to the North Western Railroad and asked to borrow a couple of cars. They used to run a train here called the 400; the 400 ran between Milwaukee and Chicago. And they were wonderful cars that were being broken down about that time and being sold in South America, I guess, for South American barons.

Blum: About what year was this?

Rockwell: I think 1968, 1969, 1970—somewhere in there. And the North Western was very congenial. They tore out all of the seats and told us we could have two cars all one summer and that they would ferry the cars from community to community with their own locomotives, park them on the siding in the town for say a week's showing. We took them up on it, and these architects made map boards which were erected. In one car we had—we didn't just make one plan; we made five, made eleven first and then boiled down the eleven to five. We felt the people should have a choice of the type of plan that they were going to have, assuming each one was created. We took the train out on the tracks; we cut the ribbon. We had folding chairs in one car, and the mayor of each community went into the car where the chairs were and we described all of this. And then after the opening we left the car there for a week, and we showed people around and they voted on the plan that they saw.

Blum: Did they actually have a vote at the poll or was this your private ballot?

Rockwell: This was our own private ballot. We had 8,000. You see we hadn't picked out the plan yet—we took back their votes, and we found the plan that they liked the best was the plan that we adopted.

11 Blum: That's interesting for you to have involved the public.

Rockwell: Part of the problem of planning today is involving the general public. Even those people you can get to the Art Institute, the thousand who get there, are not terribly representative of ordinary people who don't have the time to come out and do these things.

Blum: That was a wonderful way of bringing it out, as you say, into the community. What was it about the plan that people selected—why do you think they selected the plan that they generally found more favorable? What was it about the plan, as you were able to analyze it?

Rockwell: In today's planning area, they like the environmental feature. This drawing is an environmental analysis. But, first of all, they wanted ease of parking; they wanted ease of traffic and transportation; they wanted better shopping facilities and better industrial areas. They wanted all these things that have since become environmentally important to us. People were beginning to use a word then—that was the word "environment," which they had never thought of using before, in the 1950s. They could barely write it; they could barely spell it. But, as you can tell from these drawings, these were important considerations. And this happens to be a shopping center, a nucleated shopping center, built in a park at the intersection of two major, three major, highways with amenities around it of housing, parking, and boating and all the rest, much of which has been done in some places of the region. I could take you to a local county forest preserve that would make you think you were in Yellowstone Park, right out here on the West Side. People in downtown Chicago don't know about this; they don't realize that these things have been done and that there are marvelous places to go to, but there aren't many of them yet. There is only one that I can tell you about. To develop this consciousness further, we even tried, after feeling that 8,000 people weren't enough; a couple of years later we went on television, and we had the first public hearing on television for approving and endorsing and questioning plans of the region. This was all transportation. A master plan

12 consists of land use, transportation, open space and utilities. There you begin to get your depth; you begin to get three dimensions. It comes in a different way than three dimensions do in a building, yet it is still a structure. Put these elements together, and you have a structure. That's the important thing about planning that makes it adaptable to an architect, to an architect's thinking, if you can pay him enough to keep him in the field.

Blum: You know, if you say this is a recent awareness for the public, were you aware of this when you were being trained in school?

Rockwell: I've been a lifelong Chicagoan, you see, and I've been brought up in the Burnham tradition, so when I went to architecture it was a natural thing for me to say I want to be a planner.

Blum: Were there a many Chicago students, or people out of that tradition, that were as aware of planning as you?

Rockwell: I don't think so. I told you about Harry Weese, who was at MIT. Ieoh Ming Pei sat in the row behind me. Bunshaft, who did the Lever House, was in the class just ahead of me. Hartmann, who ran the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill office here for years was in Harry's class with me. We all talked architecture and planning. I was the only one who had a particular interest in planning as such. I was the only one who went on and took my master's. But I think we were all thinking about it. I don't think that anyone was practicing planning at that time. There had been a few people—one of the people you should talk to, if you haven't already, is Larry Perkins's father. Dwight Perkins was the creator of the Cook County Forest Preserve District or the major movement behind it.

Blum: I have talked to Larry, but I think we got very much involved in something equally fascinating and that was Crow Island School. I suppose that was just a natural topic for Larry and we didn't really talk much about planning other than simply mentioning it.

13 Rockwell: Maybe you'd be interested in seeing a book that I edited in Washington on planning. I'd worked at Stanton and Rockwell up until the time when John F. Kennedy came into office. I was terribly interested in seeing the federal establishment come closer to planning, and I knew that there was in the offing a department on urban development, which later became HUD. So I accepted an invitation to go down to the American Institute of Architects main office in D.C. at a time when a man from Chicago, an architect from Chicago, was the president of the AIA, Philip Will, Jr.—he was Larry Perkins's partner. Will and I had many talks together about planning, and I said look, architects really don't know an awful lot about planning; why don't we put out a book on it. He said fine, let's see if we can get the dollars. He worked with me to get the dollars, and I went and found a young architect in Washington who we hired at the AIA. He could sketch and he could think, and we put together the first textbook on urban planning, which is called The Architecture of Towns and Cities. And if you look at that, you will see the potential for architects in the whole urban scheme of things. Now there are individual buildings, sure, which an architect might design, but there is a whole plethora of great landscapes, which shouldn't be done just by a landscape architect or by an economist. At any rate, look at that. Phil Will and I put together this thing, and, while I was there working on it, the position of NIPC became vacant and I was then asked to come and fill that position, which I did in 1963.

Blum: Some time ago you spoke about three European cities, and it occurred to me that in a democracy such as we call ourselves that to dictate a plan over a large area, a large space, is not very feasible if it is already built.

Rockwell: You put your finger right on the greatest weakness of planning and you can get around the shortcoming of not dictating a plan, but leading people. The whole railroad experience I told you about, the whole television experience I told you about was an effort to bring people into the planning process and, as you do that and you make planning a tool of theirs, then you can do your own planning. An architect does this with his buildings.

14 Blum: Isn't that very manipulative?

Rockwell: It's called public acceptance, not public relations. The term we talk about today is public participation, and it's no different than the architect who works with his client. He sits down—when I was doing homes around Winnetka and other places, I spent evening after evening public-participating my clients. Around this area was a hotbed of colonialism, and we were the first architects, Stanton and Rockwell, who did any modern architecture anywhere in this area except for the Kecks.

Blum: Now, this was in the 1940s.

Rockwell: 1946. It was right after the war 1946 to 1961, and it was difficult going. We weren't the greatest, but we did a few houses we liked.

Blum: Not much has been written about the client-architect relationship. Now, you're suggesting that the architect designs the plan, be it a building or a master plan for a larger area, and then sells his client on the merit of his plan. He asks for a little feedback but not too much to change the plan. Bottom line, the client must accept it or reject it. You were saying you accept one of these methods. Which one?

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Rockwell: All right. Now, you're very accurate in your discernment of the process. That's the way it was done, and that's the way we learned to do it. In the 1950s we began to see that there is something else that had to be done, and one of the things that we did at NIPC—NIPC was a hotbed of firsts—we did one thing after the other that hadn't been done anywhere else in the country because we were architects, because we had the creative splash of architects. A lot of the agencies around the country, run by engineers and city managers, didn't think too much of us, except later on. But the one thing we designed was a wholly new attitude toward public participation. And we learned that, before we did plans, we had to find out people's points of view.

15 One of the lectures I give at Northeastern University with people who are not technicians of any sort, just liberal arts students, is on public participation. How do you find out what people really want before they know it? At the University of Wisconsin, they have come up with some industrial surveys that have been revolutionary, which were revolutionary in the 1960s, toward designing a wholly new way of finding out what people want. If you're a shy person and if you want to go to the village to a public meeting and express yourself, you're not apt to do it because you're shy. But your plans, your ideas may be the most important there. And Wisconsin realized this, so they developed ideas which our people went up to Madison to learn and came back and said this is the way we do it. We go out to the Barrington town hall, and we set up fifteen tables of six or seven people each and we have people lead discussions at these tables. The shy person is brought out as a member of that table and his or her idea is talked back and forth until it emerges and reaches a level where the whole group can vote on it. Now, we did this all over the region in very many different ways. It can be done both at a public meeting, as it was done in Barrington, or it can be done on paper in the Delphi process, which is a mail process, and that in itself is terribly important to the planning process. There will be more and more in the future. And all of our later plans were done this way; our earlier plans were done in the traditional manner.

Blum: Are you saying that you first went to the people to get some ideas?

Rockwell: We did the first time.

Blum: Then you took a lot of these ideas back?

Rockwell: Because that's the way we were trained in school. That's the way the original plan was drawn. But we revised it, and we revise it every few years.

Blum: Do you mean the method?

16 Rockwell: We revise the method and the plan, the whole public participation aspect. The television process is public participation at its best. We changed the transportation plan in forty different respects because of going on the air before the plan was crystallized. The first time we did the plan, we took crystallized plans out; we gave them a choice of these five. The second time around we did it differently, and the third time around we're doing it even differently—we, I'm not there any longer. I'm doing some other things now. I'm painting and sculpting and stuff like that. But the method has been established, and everyone is learning this. People in highways are learning it.

Blum: So to pursue my question about the process between a strong client and a creative architect, I still don't know who decides what.

Rockwell: There has been a change in the client relationship in pure architecture. It's not the same change as we've had in planning, as I've told you, but in pure architecture we've also had a change. We now have the developer telling the architect he wants to take this corner and develop it this way. And the architect, unfortunately—I would say there are more architects who are captives of the developers today than the developers are the recipients of good architecture.

Blum: Do you think that's true of the architects in Chicago and elsewhere who are known as superstars?

Rockwell: Yes. Very true of them. More true of them than it is of the lesser stars. I can think of a half dozen smaller offices who won't take, probably aren't taking, these large ones because the superstars have become the captives already of the developers. Take a case in point. Walk down Wacker Drive. A developer determines that there is a nexus of activity in the vicinity of the North Western Station. He knows perfectly well that that station is a borderline case of preservation. It is not a great station, but it is not a bad station, either. There are good reasons for saving it, but there's not really that much support to save it out there. And, furthermore, he can sweep Chicago off its feet with a really great design for that corner, and they can keep the trains operating.

17 Now that architect could be less concerned about preserving that station; he is in business not to preserve stations but to do high-rises. That's how he makes his bucks. That's how he keeps 500 architects on his payroll. Now, you can hardly blame that man. After all he wants to make a name for himself. He can produce a waterfall there, or whatever he wants, that is eye catching. And that's what he does. Perkins and Will goes down on the other side of Wacker Drive, and they are given an opportunity twenty years ago to make a splash for Wacker Drive. How do they make it? They don't make it by putting a building four square there. They sell U.S. Gypsum with cocking at 45 degrees on the building site. And that's what catches the eye, whether it makes a hell of a street out of the remainder of Wacker Drive. It's the only building on that street which is cocked at 45. And is that good urban design? Another book on planning is by Edmund Bacon, A Design of Cities, and when you look through it, you will understand what is the design of cities. Look at the aqua way structure in and around Venice. Look at the design credos of Rome and of Paris, a favorite city.

Blum: Paris is my favorite city, but I didn't say it was.

Rockwell: I understand why it is. Look at how the river curves in Paris. I've got map after map of Paris down in my office. Look at the design feature. Here's a design feature of London.

Blum: Does that follow the natural topography?

Rockwell: Some of it, but not much. Here's Rome, the natural topography of Rome. Have you been in Rome? How many of these hills could you recognize? None, right? It's because they've leveled off the edges. But the Coliseum was built in a swamp. Did you know that?

Blum: No. But I also have the feeling that the reason European cities were these little rabbit-warren kind of things, and difficult to drive through today, were because they developed not only in accord with the lay of the land but also

18 over a period of time where nothing was really leveled, demolished and a grid overlaid on that ground.

Rockwell: I used to think that way, too. I used to hope that I could prove that a city would be better because it built itself on natural topography. I haven't been able to find very many examples of it. Washington was one city that tried to do this. Washington was a swamp also. A good many of these three towns I told you about were all built on swamps. Swamps must make good sites and here's the Washington swamp, flat as it can be here. It was dictated by topography only in the sense that it stopped the line of development when it got to the hills. You see how the streets come right up here to the hills. Each of these is a hill. Have you ever seen La Defense in Paris? The next time you go to Paris, go out and see where they put all the skyscrapers. It's at the end of the Champs Elysees as you come out there. La Defense was a port during the Franco-Prussian Wars, and the Parisians had enough sense to say the hell with any more high-rises downtown; let's build them all on the edge of town. And La Defense is where United Biscuit is, and all the other American corporations.

Blum: Chicago is very understandable because it is on a grid but we had the fortune, or misfortune, to have had the Chicago fire. Now, would Chicago, with or without that fire, have developed in this way from a planner's point of view?

Rockwell: Every city that has had a great catastrophe, all the way from Rotterdam back—Rotterdam was destroyed by the Germans. Rotterdam, London, Chicago—all those have rebuilt themselves on their old lines of development because we've been too lazy to take the time to work out new ways of giving a person an equivalent amount of real estate for what he had before the fire so that he would feel satisfied. He wanted that little corner there. He'd grown up right there in this little corner; he wanted that even though it was destroyed. Now, when Haussmann did this in Paris, that man who gave up the land was paid. The Dutch tried to find a solution to it called the lex Atinai, where if you redesign the city everyone in the original area was given

19 a proportion of one's property. But it takes time. Christopher Wren came up with a brand new plan for London after the fire. The king—I forget who, King William maybe—wouldn't buy it because they had to rebuild London the next day. They didn't have time. And Wren had to get busy on fifty-two churches. That's what he built. Can you believe that the man built fifty-two churches in the year after the fire? Maybe it took him a little longer. Anyhow, the next time you go to Paris, think about these features. This is the Louvre; this is the Place de la Concorde; this is L'Etoile; La Defense is out here. Here's the Seine River. The Eiffel Tower is right here, the Luxembourg is here. Here is where Napoleon is buried. Each of these had a relationship to one another, and that was the essence of Haussmann's plan.

Blum: But Haussmann was doing it in a political climate that allowed him to cut a big thoroughfare, and, if there was a little shack there, it just came down. But is that likely to happen in New York or Chicago?

Rockwell: Robert Moses did it in New York. Robert Moses lasted thirty-three years. Haussmann lasted seventeen. In the book on Robert Moses by Robert Caro, he explains about the design of the parkways, the state park system, the roads in New York when people got the first automobiles. Read how Robert Moses did it in New York. Anyhow, architects should know more about building highways, for example. One area where architects could prevail more than they do would be in highway design. And a few years ago, a lot of people made a big noise about the way highways were built. So the housing authority put together a team: Kevin Roche, I was on it, Larry Halprin a great landscape architect, and a bunch of us. And we went all over the country to look at highway structures, and we said, listen, our highways have got to be better attuned to our developments than they are. Do you remember in Chicago when the ladies barricaded themselves in front of the trees in Jackson Park? All right. One of the great architectural accomplishments in New York was Brooklyn Heights, or Prospect Heights in Brooklyn. Wonderful park, and look at what's underneath it, a three-tier major city highway looking out over the river.

20 Blum: So are you suggesting there was no need to destroy the trees and just build up or down. Is that what you're saying?

Rockwell: Yes. I'm saying that whole fiasco lacked architectural involvement. We've had a plan once in a while. We had it for Oak Street with Christopher Chamales. I don't know if he is still practicing. Phil Will, too. He is great, and he knows more than any average architect knows about planning. But he has never practiced it.

Blum: You used the word "preservation." What role does preservation play in urban planning?

Rockwell: The great bulk of planners today are nice guys, very thoughtful guys, but the whole complexion of the field has changed in the last twenty, thirty years. From a design-oriented field it has turned to a socially oriented field, which is not to say it's wrong. It's very good that they are socially oriented, but we aren't doing creative design-oriented planning any longer, very little of it.

Blum: Do you see the two in conflict?

Rockwell: Only because the design people have abandoned the field. This was the bone of my contention; this is what Phil Will and I went to Washington to try to correct. I don't think the average architect has picked up the importance of planning. I think he still sees it as an accessory use to something bigger, his next commission. And I am not a bit bitter about this at all. It's perfectly logical. There are a few planning firms that still try to subsist on the basis of the dollar commission that they get for a planning project, but there aren't very many planners who have the sensitivity, the architectural sensitivity, to preserve or to want to preserve certain sections of the city. The architects themselves have gotten much more sensitive to the preservation need, and they've done a great job on it. But I'm not sure that it's only the architects who are doing it. I sit on the Commission on Chicago Landmarks advisory committee. The chairman is a mathematician who knows more about preservation that any average person would, and almost as much as an

21 architect because he's a buff. There is an economics professor from ITT in the group who knows more about Chicago churches. There is only one architect beside myself, and most people think I'm a planner so they don't start talking about the architects. And if John Vinci isn't there, why, they don't say more. But, in any case, I don't think they realize it. No. I've seen city after city torn down in areas which should have been preserved. Take St. Louis as a case, and I think that it's been too bad. The only city where I think that there's been a noticeable attempt to save and preserve areas was Ed Bacon's city, Philadelphia. And Ed was also trained as an architect. There aren't men coming along like this.

Blum: Do you think they were unique and are still unique because the dollar is not there to compensate them for their talent?

Rockwell: I don't see a great growth in the interest in urban design that there should be. There is now a brave little woman at the State University of New York who is trying to start, on a shoestring, an institute of urban design. Urban design should be in the American Institute of Architects. When I was in Washington, that's what we called our division. We didn't get the support for it, and don't today. The committee goes around the country—it just met here in Chicago—they don't know beans about it. They are just nice architects whose hobby is urban design. It's got to be more than a hobby; it's got to be a real force. There are few urban designers in the country who are doing good jobs. There is one in Baltimore, one architect in Philadelphia; there is none in Chicago. There is no architectural firm specializing in urban design in Chicago. But the market hasn't been developed in the Midwest. There is one in San Francisco, I think.

Blum: Are you an urban designer?

Rockwell: Partly, partly.

22 Blum: Is this an ongoing and renewable kind of need, or is it that you plan Barrington and, if it's a good plan with foresight, it remains in force—such as the Burnham Plan. We're still working, in part, on the Burnham Plan.

Rockwell: Yes. I talked to the planner for Geneva the other day who is a civil engineer—offices in Evanston; he's been the city planner for Geneva, he said, for eighteen years, I think. So, many of the ideas that he has proposed for Geneva are being built slowly.

Blum: And why is there a need for another firm to come in and redesign it if they are already working on a very forward looking plan that they probably couldn't afford to put in force all at once?

Rockwell: Well, the question is, is the plan that he gave them the design-oriented plan it should have been, or should be. I don't know. He's been working there for eighteen years, and, toward the end of his conversation, he said, you know what we're trying to straighten out now, all out—have you ever been to the Little Traveler? It's in Geneva and it's a marvelous little restaurant, antique shop, store for buying—it was the first boutique in the whole Chicago region, and it is so far above any of the others you can't believe it. He said, you know that area around Little Traveler; he said, it's all blacktopped—they were out of parking. And the ordinance in the city allowed them to pave all the parkways for parking. He said, we're trying to beat that down. And I thought to myself, goddam it, Bob, you've been there for eighteen years; why didn't you do something about it before they started. That's part of the town plan. That's part of the whole approach to planning. That's part of the urban- design approach. I said, well, what are you doing? He said, we might give some awards. I'm volunteering some time right now in NIPC, and I thought maybe we'd give some awards down here. He said, well, we're doing some work down by the river. Sure, the river is a sexy place to do design work, so that's where they're doing it. What about the backyard of Geneva? What's he doing about that? What's he doing about all these other things? In other words, no one is really making the rounds. And I'm not being that critical, I'm saying...

23 Blum: Are you saying there should be a watchdog committee?

Rockwell: Yes. More than that. There should be a whole spirit of urban design practiced all over the region.

Blum: Well, I think that requires a whole new awareness that only a few people like you seem to have at this time. Mr. Rockwell, thank you.

24 SELECTED REFERENCES

Ballard, William H. and Matthew L. Rockwell. A Survey in Respect to the Decentralization of the Boston Central Business District, Chicago: Urban Land Institute (October 1940). Heuer, Robert. "NIPC Speaks on Growth and Decline, Trends, Taxes and Land Management." Illinois Issues 19 (June 1992). Kearney, Daniel P. and Matthew L. Rockwell. Housing A Community Handbook. Illinois Housing Development Authority, 1973. "Matthew Rockwell: Architect and City Planner." Architecture: the AIA Journal 78 (April 1989):41. (obituary) Rockwell, Matthew L. "The Critical Land Shortage." Illinois Parks and Recreation 28 (January/February 1973). Rockwell, Matthew L. Freeway in the City: Principles of Planning and Design, Lighting Source, Inc., 1968. _____. What is Regional Planning?, Northeastern Illinois Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, 1977. Rockwell, Matthew L., editor. Architecture of Towns and Cities, 1964.

25 MATTHEW LAFLIN ROCKWELL

Born: 20 November 1915, Chicago, Illinois Died: 7 December 1988, Winnetka, Illinois

Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.Arch., 1938 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M.City Planning, 1940

Military Service: United States Army Corps of Engineers, 1941-1946

Professional Experience: Stanton & Rockwell, 1946-1961 Institute of Architects, Director of Public Affairs and Urban Programs, 1961- 1963 Executive Director, Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, 1963-1979 Rockwell Associates, 1979-1988

Honors: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1968 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School Medal, 1940

Selected Projects: General Binding Company, Northbrook, Illinois Hadley School for the Blind, Winnetka, Illinois James H. Ferry Residence, Glencoe, Illinois United States Post Office, Winnetka, Illinois Walter E. Straub Residence, Winnetka, Illinois

Educational Activities: Illinois Institute of Technology, Visiting Lecturer, 1953-1955 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Researcher University of Virginia, Lecturer

Service: American Institute of Architects, Board of Directors, 1966-1969 American Institute of Architects, Director, 1960-1961 American Institute of City Planners, Member, 1945 Architectural Board of Review, Winnetka, Illinois, Member, 1959-1961 Commission on Chicago Landmarks, Advisory Board U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Consultant, 1968-1969 Zoning Commission, Winnetka, Illinois, Member, 1958-1961

26 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

American Institute of Architects 14

Bacon, Edmund (Ed) 5, 18, 22 Bunshaft, Gordon 13 Burnham Daniel H. 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 22 Burnham Daniel H., Jr. 3

Calder, Alexander (Sandy) 5-6 Caldwell, Alfred 2 Chamales, Christopher 21 Chicago Regional Planning Association 3, 4, 6 Coliseum, Rome, Italy 18

Fuller, Sue 5, 6

Gabo, Naum 6

Hartmann, William (Bill) 13 Haussmann, Georges-Eugene, Baron 19, 20

Keck, George Fred 1, 2, 15

Kingery, Jody 3

Lincoln, Walter Stephen 10

Moses, Robert 20

Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC) 5, 6, 9, 23

O'Hare International Airport, Chicago, Illinois 2-3, 6

Pei, Ieoh Ming 13 Perkins and Will 18 Perkins, Dwight 13 Perkins, Lawrence (Larry) 13-14 Porps, Ernie 10

Rodin, Auguste 5

Seitz, Roger 10 Stanton and Rockwell 2, 8, 14, 15 Stanton, Francis Rew (Frannie) 8

Weese, Harry 13 Will, Philip 14, 21 Wren, Christopher 20

27