ORAL HISTORY OF BENJAMIN HORACE WEESE
Interviewed by Annemarie van Roessel
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 © 2001 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available 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 the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.
ii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface iv
Outline of Topics vi
Oral History 1
Selected References 131
Appendix: Curriculum Vitæ 134
Index of Names and Buildings 136
iii PREFACE
Born into a family that nurtured independent and precocious thinkers, Ben Weese was destined to pursue his own path to distinction in the arts. He initially followed his older brothers Harry and John into the mainstream world of architecture and urban design, but soon forged his own identity as an architect and urban planner finely attuned to social responsibility. His projects for non-profit and educational clients, designed with thoughtfulness and sensitivity to the vernacular environment, are found in large and small towns throughout the Midwest. In the mid-1970s, while practicing in his brother Harry’s firm, Weese accepted an invitation to join the Chicago Seven, a brotherhood of brash young architects that challenged the reign of Miesians in Chicago through architecture and sought to reclaim the legacy of lesser-appreciated architects through writings and exhibitions. Although the most well-defined activities of the Chicago Seven ended in the mid-1980s, these choices, and others, have led Weese to his current position as one of Chicago’s most respected architects. Now, nearly twenty-five years after Chicago Seven’s debut in "Chicago Architects," the first of their controversial and thought-provoking exhibitions, the definitive history of the Chicago Seven’s legacy has yet to be written. It is our hope that Ben Weese’s recollections, reminiscences and interpretations of the Chicago Seven’s activities and his own career will shed a bright light on this critical period in Chicago’s architectural history.
I met with Ben Weese at his home in Chicago on April 28, 29, 30 and May 5, 1998, to record his oral history memoirs on four and a half ninety-minute audio tapes. We conducted the interview in a spirit of thoughtful reflection, recognizing that this oral history would address only a fraction of his career. The transcription has been minimally edited to maintain the spirit, tone and flow of Weese’s original narrative and has been reviewed for accuracy and clarity by both Ben and me. The selected references I found useful in preparing this interview are appended in two sections: those of general interest about the Chicago Seven, and those written by Weese and by others about Weese’s work. Weese’s oral history is available for study in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago as well as on The Art Institute of Chicago’s web page, www.artic.edu.
Thanks are due to many people in the process of bringing this oral history to completion. First, I am deeply grateful to Ben for his eloquence, candor, and ready willingness to commit the hours needed to record his oral history while balancing the heavy demands of a busy
iv practice. Special thanks go to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts for its long-range vision in funding this group project. For her canny eye, unflagging patience, and good humor in editing this manuscript, and for her ongoing mentoring in the art of oral histories, I am deeply indebted to Betty Blum, Director of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project.
Annemarie van Roessel February 2001
v OUTLINE OF TOPICS Family Background 1 Attending the New Bauhaus Saturday School 6 At Harvard and Exposure through Family Connections 8 Involvement with Social Issues 15 Graduate Study at Harvard 17 Summer at Versailles 22 Work in the Office of Harry Weese and Urban Issues 25 Opinion of Mies’s Buildings and High-rises 26 More About Working in the Office of Harry Weese 30 An Aside: the Harry Weese Design Archive 32 Still More About Working in Harry Weese’s Office 34 Saving Glessner House and Preservation 40 Tumultuous Times and Two Exhibitions of Chicago Architecture 49 Ideas and Opinions 57 Chicago Seven Exhibition at Richard Gray Gallery 62 Architectural Drawings 70 Leaving Harry Weese’s Office 72 Opening Own Private Practice 75 Ben’s Approach and Ideas 80 “Exquisite Corpse” Exhibition 84 Townhouse Competition at the Graham Foundation 90 Symposiums 92 Publications and Publicity 93 Revival of the Chicago Architectural Club 96 “Late Entries” Exhibition 99 “New Chicago Architecture” Exhibition 105 Recession of 1982 111 Various Exhibitions 112 7+11 Symposium 117 Chicago Seven and 150 Years of Arts in Chicago 122 Reflections and Opinions 124 The American Institute of Architects 126 What Does the Future Hold for Architecture? 128
vi Benjamin Horace Weese
vanR: Today is the 28th of April, 1998, and I’m here with Ben Weese at his home in Chicago and we’re going to talk about your career as an architect. You’ve practiced architecture in Chicago for more than forty years—forty-one, if I’ve done the math correctly. First, after graduation, you worked in the office of your brother, Harry Weese, and later, in the 1970s, you entered into a partnership with several other architects, including your wife, Cynthia, who’s a very accomplished architect in her own right. From a very early time in your career, you’ve made a name for yourself as an outspoken advocate for preservation and the built environment, and the history of architecture in urban and in rural areas. You’ve also established a reputation as a very humane, thoughtful, architect, who cares deeply about the fabric of architecture and urban living. In the 1970s, you became involved with a group of radical architects that has been known as the “Chicago Seven.” We will eventually get to that period of your career, but before that, I’d like to begin at the beginning. You were born on June 4, 1929, in Evanston, Illinois, into a family that would become rather precocious in the architectural world. You had two older brothers—your brother John has passed away—and your oldest brother, Harry, I believe is fourteen years older than you.
Weese: That’s right, yeah. My brother John was ten years older. vanR: Both John and Harry were also architects.
Weese: That’s right. vanR: They worked in Chicago and John also worked on the West Coast. I want to ask a bit about your family and how it happened that three sons became
1 architects. Can you describe your parents and whether they encouraged all of you to pursue this path?
Weese: I think they did. My father was creative in all sorts of areas that he didn’t enjoy professionally. He was a banker. He was a lot older than me—he was fifty-three when I was born. He was born in 1876 and his father before him in 1853. And the generations—I don’t know how far back we should go. But briefly, his side of the family came over as indentured servants and each generation moved farther west. They landed in Virginia and went to West Virginia and Ohio and Indiana. They homesteaded on a farm in Indiana. My great-grandfather was born in 1818, so that side of the family experienced the westward movement of America. They were tradesmen. My father came to Chicago by shoveling coal behind the engineer of the Wabash railroad and he saw the fair of 1893 and I think that gave him a great urge to see more of the big town. He dropped out of college and became a railway mail clerk between Toledo and St. Louis and he didn’t finish college until 1903. He spent almost seven or eight years saving money, traveling across the Eads Bridge to St. Louis. I don’t know what his aesthetics were other than that he was very determined to get ahead and so he worked for almost forty years—thirty-eight years, exactly—at the Harris Bank, but always having other desires. He wrote shows for the University Club, which were musicals. He was a poet, a doggerelist. He had all these frustrations that turned out to be laid on others. My mother’s side was Amish, Pennsylvania Dutch. There was a strong streak of Anabaptism, dissension. Her side were wandering, transient frontier preachers. So, she had an interesting background. She grew up in Chicago and I think there was a certain aesthetic of taste running through her family. Her father was the assistant to the president of Illinois Steel, ultimately. But they were Midwesterners. I think they were quite beautiful, the three sisters, and were pursued by a lot of gentlemen. She went to four different high schools. I don’t know if they were running from the landlord or not, but she went from Lakeview to Senn on the North Side to John Marshall on the West Side to Hyde Park High School on the South Side. She went to all of those very fine urban schools and got a very good education through high school but then quit because women weren’t
2 supposed to do anything more except get married. My father proposed to my mother after an opera at the Auditorium Theatre in 1914. My brother Harry was born in 1915, my sister Jane in 1916, my brother John in 1919, my sister Sue in 1923, and I was an afterthought in the teeth of the depression, 1929. Everyone in my family had some aesthetic training. Harry was very precocious. My sister Jane took courses at the American Academy of Art and she became a fashion illustrator and she also spent time, under my brother’s suggestion, at the New Bauhaus with Moholy. vanR: Here in Chicago.
Weese: Yes. My brother John spent two years at Cornell University but he was playing around too much and so he was sent to the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1939. vanR: Where he could be more under the watch of your parents?
Weese: That’s right. It was serious stuff at that time, under Mies. My sister Sue went to Wheaton College in Massachusetts but she didn’t discover her talents… She’s a very good watercolorist—I guess you could call her a Sunday painter now. So the aesthetic thing came out in every respect across the board. vanR: Did your parents actively encourage that?
Weese: Yes. Well, I have to tell you… I kind of went around the horn there to get back to Harry, who was kind of a surrogate father, in a sense. The generational distance was quite great here. My father was a Victorian- Edwardian type and was thirty-nine when my brother Harry was born. What happened in my youth was this kind of intercession of what’s new around town at the time. My brother felt that the educational output of Joseph Sears School in Kenilworth, where we grew up, was not enough. So other things immediately took place under the direction of my brother, actually. He sent me to Moholy’s Bauhaus in 1941. I’d take the North Shore line down to the city and the Grand Avenue streetcar to the Rotogravure building, which was
3 where the Bauhaus was in 1941. He thought that I needed exposure to the children’s class, although the children’s class was way beyond me—the geniuses were six and eight years old and I was twelve and already damaged by a lock being put on my creativity. In a sense, it was true—we were given big pots of paint and were supposed to dash them off in kind of a Kandinsky style. vanR: Who had put the lock on your creativity?
Weese: The educational system in the Joseph Sears school. The art class was taught by Miss Robinson and she was seventy, I think. She had us outlining everything in a very stiff manner. vanR: So your brother thought that was not the best way for you—it was a little old-fashioned?
Weese: The message here was that my brother had certain intercessionary concerns about education. He went to New Trier and was fairly precocious. I think he was early seen as a person of talent and drive. He spent the first three years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then he thought he wasn’t getting enough class education and so he transferred to Yale for a year. I’m not sure if he met Eero Saarinen at Yale—he might have been around there at the time. That would have been about 1937. In 1938 he graduated with a five- year degree from MIT and I can remember going to his graduation and meeting his classmates, some of whom later became famous. Then my sister emerged, going to Wheaton College, and my brother bought her tickets to the Boston Symphony. So there was this kind of intercessionary, “Well, you’re not complete until you’ve done these things of looking around a bit.” vanR: So Harry was a cultural mentor to you children.
Weese: Well, yes. He then left MIT and went to Cranbrook and there he met Eero and Charles Eames and he did his first buildings. The first building was actually a log cabin in 1936 by a lake in northern Michigan. Then, in 1940,
4 with my father as patron, he did two more buildings. One was for a bank vice-president, a colleague of his, and the other was just an experimental rental house next to the log cabin. But in 1940 Harry brought all of his Cranbrook colleagues to experience this modern architecture, because you had to go a long way to see a flat roof and a lot of glass. vanR: How aware were you of what was going on at this time?
Weese: I was there. I got paid seven or eight cents an hour to pick up the wood chips from the second house. I guess I would have to say that my brother was very generous. If he had something to do he would always ask me to go along. His car was a Model A and we could go to visit sites and he would include me in the process. My sister Sue and I competed for the curtain design in the 1940 house covering the front wall of glass by arranging compositions of little colored strips of fabric and she won. But my brother had this way—I think it may have come from Moholy or some of the new methods of teaching at the Bauhaus—it wasn’t strictly academic, it was hands-on testing of the materials and so forth. I just want to mention that because I think it was very key in our relationship, which was very close. He bought me a series of books—the Heritage series. They were very fine replications of serious literature and he designed me a bookmark for that and it says “Ex Libris Ben Weese.” I really appreciated that. vanR: How old were you when he did that?
Weese: I think I was about twelve or thirteen. vanR: That’s pretty young for serious literature.
Weese: Yeah, well, maybe I was a little older than that. I want to underscore that because at that point—later things would change in our relationship—at that point, he knew that he was in touch and he wanted to share the new methods of education with us.
5 vanR: So he sent you to the New Bauhaus.
Weese: I went on Saturday mornings; it was during the war. vanR: Who were your teachers?
Weese: I had Gordon Webber, he was a Canadian, and he taught the kids. I don’t think that I ever set eyes on Moholy, to my knowledge—there were other teachers in the photographic department. And there were always experimentational exhibits about what was going on. This was during the war and some of the more radical things were the use of wood as substitute for metal. The most incredible thing that I saw was a bedspring that was made out of plywood sheets by cutting them into strips, free at one end and solid at the other, like combs, then compressing them horizontally into top and bottom frames, each strip forming an elegantly arcing spring. This way they made a whole bedspring out of plywood under tension. As a kid that amazed me as a structure, even though it was only a bedspring. So these experimental things were right there. It was quite unusual in the stodgy North Shore where I grew up. vanR: So you were doing two- and three-dimensional work at the New Bauhaus Saturday school?
Weese: Not me. I was just putting blobs of paint on large sheets of newsprint. vanR: Did you enjoy it?
Weese: Yeah, but I felt self-conscious with these little genius kids that were below my waistline. But it freed you up. vanR: So that was probably one of the first applications of your interest in art. Did it continue through high school?
6 Weese: Yeah. Well, what actually happened was that my father was getting desperate that we all wanted to be architects, so I wrote an essay in high school about why I didn’t want to be an architect for my freshman course—the obligatory course. My father retired in 1942 and we moved into a house in Barrington that my brother designed. So we were always living in houses of that sort. My father backed Harry to do three other houses for my two aunts and my uncle, so construction was taking place on all sides. I grew up in Barrington during the war—1942 to 1947. My brother was off as an engineering officer in the Navy on a destroyer and my brother John was in the paratroopers, so we were really hunkered down doing victory gardens and waiting it out. Then I got into Harvard in 1947, majoring in either philosophy or sociology. vanR: Can we go back for just a minute? Why was your father worried that you were all going to become architects?
Weese: My father was a product of the panic of 1893 and the Great Depression. He had a slight nervous breakdown as chief of personnel at the bank because he had to fire a lot of people in the late 1920s and 1930s. He was desperately concerned about security, about making a living. He had experienced so much. He had gotten all his siblings through Northwestern University by saving money for them. My uncle came back from the land bust in Montana in 1926 and there was already a downturn in Florida in 1927, so it was a buildup to the Great Depression. We had people living in the attic—former bond salesman friends and my uncles and aunts, they all took refuge in our household as a result of the Great Depression. We grew up with that. vanR: Even though Harry, at least, certainly was fairly successful soon out of college?
Weese: Harry was sponsored mainly by my father in several houses that were very modest. They cost four or five thousand dollars each and were twelve hundred square feet or less. That’s what they were building, you know, prior to the war and immediately after the war. But there was enough capital there
7 due to my father’s saving instincts. But that was the atmosphere, I guess you could say. vanR: So when you wrote your essay in high school about why you didn’t want to be an architect, were you being truthful?
Weese: I was dallying. I did a kind of a collage of modern architectural… I cut up Architectural Forum and I was composing something quite interesting on the essay cover, which was probably a giveaway. I think I was honoring my father, who had nothing to do but give me advice, since he was retired. vanR: So what led you to Harvard?
Weese: Oh, that was lucky. My brother-in-law had been at Harvard and everybody had been down on the East Coast and they said that I should get out of Chicago. So, miraculously, I came from a small high school and I did a lot of things, like sports, so in a class of sixty-three you become prominent. Harvard had enough sensibility about distribution that I got in, even though my grades were not in the genius category. It’s something that would never happen today. I’m grateful in a number of ways to have gotten into Harvard and to have spent four years there and three years in the graduate school. But I have mixed feelings about institutions of such huge and overpowering dimension. I studied Social Relations under the new program that had been put together by President Conant—distributing postwar thinking in a totally new vein. But I quit Social Relations in my sophomore year, when you had to declare in the spring of your sophomore year where you were going to go. I was sent to Roxbury to do a door-to-door survey of people’s opinions. I figured that I was actually formulating their opinions by coming as a kind of a Harvard person to this blue-collar neighborhood. I thought I was phony. I quit and said I was going to major in architecture. In the spring of 1949, my middle brother, John, got married in Akron, Ohio, and Harry said, “Come west and we’re going to meet Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook. There’s going to be a big session.” So in 1949, in February, I went to Cranbrook and there were two tables in a restaurant and I was at the second table, you understand, but I
8 did meet Eliel Saarinen and I saw all these architects from Skidmore and God knows where, just a bunch. They were very impressive. They were revolutionary and I was just a kid. That kind of sealed it. I said, “Gee, I can do that too.” vanR: But was it easier for you to make that decision, knowing that your brothers had already found some success in that?
Weese: Yes. My brother and his wife Kitty had opened up a furniture store, Baldwin Kingrey, on Ohio Street in 1947. They had a pre-war slight contact with Aalto. Aalto wanted dollars. He wanted desperately to ship Finnish furniture and get some hard currency. Harry was his big contact. They set up Baldwin Kingrey in 1947 and Harry set up his office there. He had left Skidmore after a year and he was getting commissions. Eero was helping him because they were very close since Cranbrook and Eero began then to divert commissions that were too many for him to Harry, so there was that pipeline. I spent the summer of 1949 assembling Aalto furniture in the basement of Baldwin Kingrey so I got an appreciation of all of this furniture, and it was a modern art gallery as well. vanR: It’s funny that in Harry’s oral history he had a very interesting comment to make about your choice to become an architect. He said, “First, Ben wanted to be a farmer, then a teacher, and then he went to Harvard and in his junior year I got a letter, very laconic, saying ‘By the way, I have shifted to architecture.’”
Weese: Yeah, that was about it. The farmer thing was the war. We had a hell of a garden and I raised goats and I milked goats and we had sheep and chickens. My father was reverting to his heritage. I think that what my brother said was pretty on-target, yeah. vanR: So you decided on architecture and ended up working toward a bachelor’s degree in architecture, which you received from Harvard in 1951.
9 Weese: Yes. Harvard was under stress. You could take an undergraduate degree and latch on for another couple of years. There was certainly a lot of curriculum turmoil at that point. The real turmoil was Hudnut versus Gropius. vanR: Were you aware of their differing views?
Weese: No. I just read this very interesting piece by Jill Pearlman in the Journal of Architectural Historians on Hudnut versus Gropius and it all happened while I was there, but it was kind of sotto voce, very bitter. History still hasn’t straightened it all out, which is the interesting part. vanR: Well, Hudnut certainly has not been given as much attention as Gropius.
Weese: And Hudnut was not all bad. The revisionist piece by Jill Pearlman from Bowdoin College indicates that Hudnut was highly sophisticated, highly educated, not a propagandist, and quite modest. I was somewhat poisoned by the radical necessity of modernism. This manifested itself in the kind of embattled situation of modernism. And there were outposts. There was Ralph Rapson—I can’t remember where he was, maybe in Minneapolis by then—but he’d come to Chicago and he’d travel three hundred miles to see a modern house. He spent all day in the car and then my brother, again, would take me along on these trips to go and look at some isolated mono-pitched roof somewhere on a hillside. The overwhelming force of propaganda that was the accomplishment—and the final victory, I guess you’d say—of Giedion and Gropius. It was unbelievable and Hudnut got swept away by that, quite unfairly. The interesting thing was that Hudnut was a great humanist—he didn’t want to throw away history. I had him as a lecturer and he wasn’t totally inspiring, he was very technical and dry, but a very humane man. I feel embarrassed that as a student I didn’t support or understand this more. vanR: Do you think that other students did and you were the exception?
10 Weese: I think that other students who had a fine arts proclivity probably did. There was a strange thing where the requirement for history had been turned into an elective. This was pretty bad. This was Armageddon for history, I guess. There was a half-course requirement, an elective, and I had a course with Kenneth Conant that I flunked. I guess my point is that Kenneth Conant was highly revered by some people and I think he was a great medieval scholar and that passed by me because I think I was still pretty much inoculated by modernism and embattled. I was in the States but I didn’t understand about Europe and history. What was happening was that modernism was preparing to sweep away everything in front of it. vanR: Can you recall what your curriculum was? You said that history was an elective, so what were required courses?
Weese: Well, I was reminded of it by the Pearlman article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians that the battle between Hudnut and Gropius was around the foundation course, the course that was taught by Moholy. Gropius wanted to get Josef Albers. He was supposed to come in and the final clincher was that the foundation course was supposed to be established as the fundamental take-off point for the curriculum at Harvard. vanR: This was for undergraduates?
Weese: Well, for architecture. Architectural Sciences—Arch Sci. Hudnut resisted that right to the end. He brought in a substitute, a man named George Tyrell LeBoutillier. He did a little course where we had to manipulate materials and play with plaster of Paris and cut sheet metal and so forth. It was a pale kind of substitute, but that was the battleground. Either Hudnut was going to lose everything and Gropius was going to take over… But then they did bring in a man… When I left, one had resigned—I can’t remember who it was. I think that Gropius resigned first, the year I left, which was 1952. I graduated in 1951 and in 1952 I took one year of grad school and then I got drafted, but that’s another story. But in 1952, Gropius had had it and he left. And Hudnut left the next year. And I was gone. I guess what I’m saying is that all of this
11 was taking place and I was totally ignorant of the level of struggle that was taking place. vanR: So you didn’t take that much history? You said you flunked Conant’s course. Did you take other history classes?
Weese: I had Giedion. vanR: What did you think of him?
Weese: Giedion was the guy who could never get his slides right and who had his glasses so thick that he couldn’t see his buildings. He had it in his head, you know, what was to happen—it was scary. You see, as a kid, you have to work your way through this. Giedion was the bible. You didn’t have any books, except his. If you went to Chicago on Wabash Avenue on the second floor, Paul Theobald had a shop where he had a table about the size of this one, which is about four by nine, with all the books face up. There was Moholy’s book and the other Hungarian—Gyorgy Kepes’s book—and a couple of graphics and Space, Time, and Architecture, and Mechanization takes Command. These were the distillations of the whole story. vanR: What about Corbu’s book? Was that too old?
Weese: None of that stuff showed up, as far as I can remember. It was translated via Giedion. vanR: Did you know of Corbu’s work, other than through Giedion?
Weese: Oh, yeah. Well, the great triumvirate—it’s unbelievable how three or four men could capture the world via Giedion’s incredible… But these guys, they worked a long time on it, it didn’t just happen automatically. They showed up at every event and they made it happen. But then when it did happen, it was like an avalanche when it hit. You have to sort those things out. In 1952 there still wasn’t much modern architecture in America.
12 vanR: You said that your brother, John, had gone to IIT. How much did you know about Mies? Was there much talk about Mies and IIT on the East Coast and at Harvard?
Weese: No. I think these people were keeping to themselves. You know, as we understand more about it—the Mies and Gropius relationship—they treated each other at arms’ length and they got together as they needed to get together as the Bauhaus was sinking. But I think they wanted their own realms. And then there was Chermayeff, you know, and the Institute of Design and the demise of the ID and that story. vanR: Did John and Harry keep you apprised of what was happening in Chicago?
Weese: Yes and no. My brother John got out—I think that Mies was very bad for him, because he was so authoritarian and I don’t think that John recovered from that experience. The more we know about Mies, I think we can understand. There was no room for just an ordinary American; you had to somehow transform yourself. It’s a very interesting psychological relationship. But he worked for Mies for a while—I think that Mies kind of picked people up as required as he got busy and so forth. vanR: Did Harry tell you what was going on?
Weese: Well, Harry was… What I did was work for him. When I left Harvard I would spend the summer in his office. I made a model of my sister’s house. We actually pre-fabricated a foaming concrete house, an experimental house that was poured flat with lightweight foaming concrete that encased air bubbles and then tilted into place. It’s a material that still hasn’t hit production in America. It’s called by various names; Ytong is the European name, but here we knew it as Thermocon. I worked on that with him, so he was always calling me back for work and then I would see in his office what he was doing, like the Cummins Engine company, via Eero again, who was getting too busy with large commissions in other parts of the country. The
13 work in Columbus, Indiana, by 1952, was falling to my brother completely. He was getting a lot… We probably ended up doing twenty-five or thirty buildings—anonymous buildings, you see, because it wasn’t front-line competition. vanR: As an undergraduate or in your graduate work later on at Harvard in the 1950s—were professors or students talking about social concerns such as urban flight to the suburbs or how cities would develop after the war?
Weese: Yes. Of course, it was the beginning of the urban renewal movement, and maybe this was exactly where Corbusier’s concepts came on in the abstract, because everything was about tearing things down and replacing them. There were these grandiose plans, but you played along with it. You tear down East Boston and you do it right, you know? We were doing Robert Taylor Homes probably about that time in Chicago. So there was discussion, in a utopian sense, that was brought in. I can’t remember the names of the planners, but there were certain English planners that were brought in as part of the English CIAM movement, when Gropius was there. People like Wells Coates and Maxwell Fry, we had those people who had certain planning experience. But they were getting ready to tear everything down. vanR: Did you buy into that philosophy?
Weese: Inadvertently. You know, as a student, you don’t have that much perspective. You observe it and you play the game. I was probably doing bad things at Harvard already. I put a Mansard roof on one of my projects and Serge Chermayeff said that that was totally willful and arbitrary and you couldn’t make a Mansard roof. It was a curved piece of sheet metal with standing seams. As a student, you can’t respond to Serge because he always got the last word, but, I mean, that’s ridiculous. I even knew it was ridiculous, but you can’t come back if the guy’s got the stage. Serge Chermayeff, to me, was a blow-hard I’ve got to say. You can print that. I mean, he was a poseur. He was very talented, but I think he was lazy. He was also mean. There was a party at my mother’s house that she gave in 1942,
14 when he was at the ID. His dog came in and got into the kitchen and he ate the roast beef. And Serge was laughing and my mother was very angry. She was a very kind person but she was angry. So, that was Serge. Sorry, that’s an aside. vanR: That’s quite all right. That’s what makes the interview more interesting—to get the underside of these things. So you got your undergraduate degree, your bachelor of architecture, from Harvard in 1951. Did you feel that was an adequate preparation for a career?
Weese: Oh, no. That was just the beginning. Then I did two more years and then they changed it to three by the time I left. Parallel to all of this I was very involved in social issues on a very grass-roots level. I worked with the Philips Brooks House down in East Boston in settlement houses. I became very interested in the Quakers and I used to go to Cambridge Meeting, a very profound Meeting. In the summer of 1950 I was in a Quaker work camp when they attacked Korea and the Chinese entered it later and I think I was converted to pacifism. I’m not sure that I’m a totally good practicing pacifist, but the Quakers turned me to that cause and by 1952 I’d become a conscientious objector. vanR: And you did alternative service with the Brethren?
Weese: Yes, in 1952 I was drafted, as I mentioned earlier, and I dropped out of architecture for three years. I went to work for the Church of the Brethren. As an alternative service candidate, you had to pass the muster that you were of a religious conviction and you were genuine and I met several levels of inquiry on that, including a judge in Boston and he cleared me. I then went to work for the Church of the Brethren, which was headquartered in Elgin, Illinois, but they sent me overseas, eventually, for two years. They sent me to Germany to work with refugees. These aspects of dropping out are very profoundly influential on me. vanR: Can you elaborate on that?
15 Weese: I saw the seamy side of a lot of trouble. I was in very simple circumstances. The longest time I had I was working in a refugee transit camp in northern Germany, which was a former prisoner of war camp that had been converted because of the influx, the continuous influx, of single kids. We were processing East German refugees who were coming all the way from Silesia and the Russian steppes. They were being kicked out. It was the kind of ethnic cleansing that also purified Poland and purified Czechoslovakia. It probably—unfortunately or fortunately—created the kind of stability that we see. There are no German minorities in Eastern Europe now, to any extent. They just sent them all west and we were processing them. The impact of that was fundamental to me—you’ve got architecture but you’ve also got some very fundamental underlying problems. vanR: So were those issues of social angst addressed in your architecture later on?
Weese: Yeah. I thought I never could get too far away from that. I have a very hard time doing a house for a very rich person.
[Tape 1: Side 2] vanR: So you spent two years working with the Brethren and formulated some kind of philosophy about social responsibility.
Weese: I felt that it was maturing in me that I could still practice architecture in a certain segment. I could do both. Actually, there’s a struggle in your life when you’re young, as to whether it’s all or nothing; whether you’re being honest to your social concerns and can still do something that is a high-level aesthetic… You know, most architects, historically, have been very closely allied with the elite. Maybe that is, then, my lasting interest in vernacular. By coming through that door, you can honor anybody for their craft and then it’s quite fundamentally beautiful, whether it’s Shaker or Amish, or whatever. You can see that there’s a dignity, that the life of a person and their craft can be rather democratically expressed, I guess.
16 vanR: When you finished your service with the Brethren, you went back to Harvard to finish your master’s degree. Did you find that there was any kind of disjunction between what you were being taught at Harvard and this philosophy that you had developed outside of that system?
Weese: I think so. I had nine months in my brother’s office before I could get back to Harvard. vanR: Your brother Harry’s office?
Weese: Yeah. So I was thrust back into the real world finding out what they were doing. We had a small office on the fifth floor, right under the Kecks’ office at 612 North Michigan—I think there were seven or eight people there. I was kind of being reintroduced that way. Yes, it was a struggle. I started by living with my friend, Paul Gardescu, who was the caretaker at the Friends’ Meeting in Woodlawn on 55th Street and he lived in the coach house. So I started reentering Chicago with my Quaker friends on the South Side. There was a definite sorting process of how I was going to apply, if I could, the opportunity with my brother. By that time he was getting some nice work, which gave me the chance to play both sides. vanR: Was he sympathetic to your philosophy?
Weese: No. I had a real hard time getting back with my family. vanR: But you said your mother had come from this kind of background.
Weese: Yeah, that was historic. My mother was very… She was a total Democrat and my father was Republican, but she voted in secret. She had all these concerns, but you know, women didn’t make a lot of noise in that generation. So my mother was totally supportive, but on the quiet. The first reunion was a real argument for me, having just seen some refugees… I saw some young people who were in bad health—even the conquering German master race—and
17 these kids are mostly dead now because they had tubercular and vascular and joint problems, all sorts of real terrible things. My family was on the crest of the huge development of the 1950s. They were out building in suburbia, taking ski trips… We got into a big argument about whether we should ski or go to church. I don’t know… vanR: So you were a radical from an early age.
Weese: I was a thorn, I was a burr under their saddle, yes. vanR: But you decided that you would reenter the life at Harvard. Was that hard for you to do?
Weese: Well, it was my only course. I went to MIT and they said, “We don’t like your credentials, you’ll have to spend an extra year”. I went to L. B. Anderson, you know, the famous dean down there said that to me and that cooled me off. I was stuck with Harvard, I mean, stuck with Harvard? I wanted to get it done with. But my European experience had enriched the… You know, when I wasn’t working in the refugee camp, I saw a lot of architecture, mostly Lubeck, Hannover, etc., the north German Backstein-Gothic stuff. I was kind of looking at that. But the situation had vastly changed at Harvard because José Lluis Sert was there and I was just getting through, I guess you’d say. I have to tell you, to stop school and to start over again, every kid should remember that it’s two different experiences. It’s very rewarding because I have two sets of friends, two “generations” of architects. There’s the strict Bauhaus group and then the kind of Spanish CIAM influence of Sert. But the really big thing that happened to me at Harvard was that Giedion retired and they brought in Eduard Sekler. Eduard Sekler, to me, is one of the finest people and finest historians. I became very close to him and we are still close friends. He went to the Warburg Institute and he studied with Wittkower, but what his relationships with people like Gombrich are, I don’t know enough about it and haven’t even asked him yet. But he has such solid scholarship in that area and it’s so much ahead of Giedion and his propagandistic positions that we have to… My chief disappointment is that
18 even Harvard can’t measure up to a Sekler any more. I guess we’ll get into that later. vanR: So you found a bit more freedom when you went back to Harvard to pursue your interests?
Weese: Yes. It was tempered by the southern influences of Sert. He brought in another whole list of people, a lot of South Americans, actually. vanR: Can you recall any of them?
Weese: Not readily. Well, I can remember the Spanish engineer, Eduardo Torroja. No one’s every heard of Torroja. He’s been displaced, I guess. These were friends and colleagues of Sert. It was a total different flavor, a total different generation, and a different thrust. To me, Sekler’s methods… He was trained as an architect, so he understood architectural programming and the purposes. The differences would be between Conant discussing the abstract aesthetics of the façade of some Romanesque cathedral versus Sekler being able to tell you about the intricacies of the daily life of a Cistercian monastery and why the buildings are placed where they are because of those activities. It was functional. It made it totally clear that the aesthetic was actually evolving out of the function. vanR: Is that the medieval version of “form follows function”?
Weese: Yeah, it was, an iteration of that issue. vanR: Can you describe your final project?
Weese: Yeah. I think we destroyed one of the mill towns. It was either Lynn or Lowell. Yeah, I think it was Lowell. We tore down all of the factories and we did urban renewal. By that time my brother had been working with I.M. Pei and Zeckendorf and we were doing the Hyde Park urban renewal project. That was one of the early ones. I had participated in that in my
19 peregrinations between Chicago and Harvard. So I just cranked out a bunch of townhouses. vanR: Were they similar to what you had done in Hyde Park?
Weese: Yeah. vanR: What did your professors think of that?
Weese: They were impressed. They left me alone. I was not a favorite of José Lluis Sert’s. I really didn’t understand this man until very late. You know you have to wait to understand. Actually, on a recent trip to Barcelona I saw a building of Sert’s that even he had never seen. It was the tuberculosis sanitarium that he had finished in 1936 and then he had to leave. He was a republican, I’ll give him that. vanR: And we know what happened in Spain. vanR: He didn’t see that for another forty years! After Franco was gone in 1976 he went back. This is a wonderful, integrated piece of architecture in the city of Barcelona. It was beautifully placed in the urban fabric. The stuff he did in Boston just didn’t belong, in my opinion. His stuff in Boston is a southern architecture in a northern climate, so I just didn’t understand what he was doing until I saw his native work. vanR: Did that help you think a little bit more about what some people call contextualism and what is and isn’t appropriate?
Weese: Yes, very much. I felt that contextualism was important. I had an innate feeling that something was wrong to put an isolated building down in a given medium or context that’s so overwhelming, as Boston even is. Boston is a tough, little, intricate city and you can ruin it in a hurry. It’s been pretty well ruined. But then you go to the South End and they understand now. I had a feeling that I didn’t like what Sert was doing, but he was doing
20 something more bombastic than he did in his early project. One of the rules is that you should do small projects because big projects are pretty difficult. I mean, the scale of any project—it becomes difficult, even for the best architects. vanR: Do you think that has an application in the highrise versus residential practice? You seem to have done more work on the small scale.
Weese: Yeah. I’ve done some highrises. I think that the highrise is a product of some mechanistic, repetitive… I think it’s the repetitive aspect of the highrise that even the early Chicago School understood the economics of. It was win, win all the way, just repeat the floor plate ad infinitum. But what are you doing in the meantime to everybody else? To the guy down the block, or whatever? vanR: Is there anything else that you’d like to add about your time at Harvard?
Weese: Yes, we can go back to Harvard. Appropriately, I really did want to underline the contribution that Eduard Sekler made to the humanistic because he did end up working with UNESCO and trying to save monuments in Kathmandu. He always has been, I think, very gentle, thoughtful, totally scholarly. As Giedion said, he was “the best man in Vienna,” when he advised Harvard to hire him. I think that Harvard has, in some ways, lost some of that true history. Just to mention, I saw Peter Rowe four or five years ago and I said, “Gee, it’s too bad that you don’t have a survey course where you really get hammered all the way from A to Z in architectural history.” He said, “Well, we’re going into case studies.” I said, “Gee, how is any kid going to understand where to hang his hat or what to do? It’s kind of a willful thing because it’s very easy to study case histories. For the professor it’s a slam-dunk. But to teach a survey course is something that I’ve got to give a lot of respect to. You may not be interested in something, but you’ve got to know where to find it. If you don’t have that, I find that education is going to get scary because it becomes arbitrary, willful and back into the Giedion mode where you can go romping from the beginning of time up to the present with thirty-eight examples. Giedion
21 thought that it was not necessary to get to what he wanted to talk about with any more than thirty-eight examples of historic work. vanR: And that leaves out a vast quantity of architecture.
Weese: It’s elitist! vanR: Perhaps that’s one of the problems that made Harvard reconsider its present approach. There may not be enough time in the year to do a survey of all cultures and all architecture.
Weese: You still have to try. I was just reading James Fitch’s book on Banister Fletcher. You know, Banister Fletcher is interesting, but he’s got his bias and you have to see through that. Banister Fletcher didn’t give a hoot about eastern cultures or any of the Asiatic southern hemisphere activities and this is pretty blind. It’s imperialistic. vanR: Then perhaps you can you explain now why you decided to spend a summer at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau?
Weese: Oh! Yes. vanR: That would strike some people as a rather elitist institution.
Weese: It was a free ride. I was a full-pay student at Harvard, which wasn’t too bad in those days. Huson Jackson came up at the last minute and said that I’d won an award. I said, “Fine. What does it entail?” He said, “You have to go to Fontainebleau.” Jackson was Sert’s partner, rather Dickensian, a looming, gaunt fellow. But he had good news. And so I flew overseas. Chermayeff was on the plane, actually—he was doing nothing and said that he wouldn’t even photograph anything anymore, he just bought postcards. We stopped in Iceland and eventually we got to Paris. The Ecole was a very good experience because there were all of the arts, again, but with a definite tinge of the Beaux-Arts, although Corbu was still around and they had everybody
22 paraded to us. It seemed like there was an awful lot of money there. We had all the French guys that were building the big slabs in the moderne style outside of Paris—Beaudouin and Lods, and Guillaume Gillet. The head of the school was André Remondet and there were some famous people who came through. But they also gave you a chance to do other things. I did paintings and I sang in a chorus with Nadia Boulanger. I mean, the fact that Nadia Boulanger would actually like to direct an amateur bunch of Americans. That was a profound experience. I was playing around because everything was there—these studios were all mixed up—so that was nice. Jacques Villon was there. vanR: You say there were remnants of the Beaux-Arts system, so was there a greater emphasis on, say, the art of architecture, in terms of rendering?
Weese: No, they’d been captured by modernity, but half of the professors were Beaux-Arts educated and kind of infected indirectly by Corbusian geometry and all of his theories. vanR: In terms of the practical aspects of learning, at Harvard and at Fontainebleau, were you doing more model-making than drawing?
Weese: Well, Sert was promoting models more than the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus models, if they existed, were very elemental. You know, there wasn’t much to show. They were just massing models. So Sert insisted on modeling. At Fontainebleau, my roommate was William Turnbull, who recently passed away. He was a wonderful kid—he’d just gotten out of Princeton. We shared a house because all the kids were sent off to live with families. We traveled a lot and we saw all of the major monuments. vanR: In France or the rest of Europe?
Weese: We went to see the Marseilles block. We went to Ronchamp, which was only two years old and we couldn’t drive to it yet directly as you now can. You had to do the pilgrimage on foot up the slippery slope. Being hard to get to it
23 was therefore more valuable upon arrival. The most influential visitor at Fontainebleau was probably Jean Prouvé who worked sometimes with Corbu and did intricate structures and even furniture. vanR: By this time were you becoming more comfortable with drawing, or did you prefer to work with models?
Weese: I like models. I’ve always considered myself a pretty good draftsman. I could draw freehand and, again, my brother taught me that, probably when I was eight. He taught me perspective just by putting your finger down and aiming at a point, a vanishing point. So I could draw perspective and I took life drawing all the way along the line. I took life drawing, I think, at Fontainebleau. I took it at Harvard. So the drawing thing, the sketch, to me was important but the model is the way of confirming things. We do a lot of models. vanR: Did you do a final project in France?
Weese: Yes, we destroyed the Gare d’Orsay. The project was the Gare d’Orsay and William Turnbull won the big prize by putting up four highrises. I was at least discrete enough to not get above the Mansard roofs. I did a low, snake- like building. My predilection was that you couldn’t build a highrise on the Seine, across from the Tuilleries and the Louvre! vanR: So you would have still knocked down the whole building and reused the site, but just kept to the cornice-line of the neighborhood?
Weese: We did that. The building was derelict. And, you know, even the remodel of that building has been problematic and wasn’t a slam-dunk. I think we could have sensed the Paris suburbs and what fate was awaiting us with modernism.
24 vanR: I guess it’s true that parts of Paris have suffered an unjust fate under modernism. So you spent a summer at the Ecole? And then you came back and finished up at Harvard?
Weese: Yeah. I spent a summer with a list of buildings—you know there was time before and after the program—and the list of buildings was by Sekler. He got me to places like Les-Baux in southern France and Turin to see the late Baroque, Guarino Guarini’s Sanctissimi Sindone Chapel, etc. So I got my list and I was under the guidance of Sekler. vanR: So this was your grand tour as the Ecole would have done years ago. You finished at Harvard and got your master’s in architecture in 1957. Then you returned to Chicago. Was that a voluntary move?
Weese: I wanted to do it a little slower, but Harry said, “You’ve got to get back here and get to work.” He was worried that I was becoming an effete. vanR: Even though you were so concerned about social issues?
Weese: Oh, well, I kept that to myself, more or less. You didn’t always bring that up at every discussion. I retreated out of the East Coast by visiting the sights, figuring that I wouldn’t be back for quite a while. I went down through New Caanan and saw Breuer’s houses and some pretty bad buildings by Philip Johnson. In fact, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a good building by him. I’ve never climbed the fence at his house, so I’ve never seen the one at New Caanan. I wended my way back to Chicago in 1957 and we immediately jumped into a lot of issues. Some of them were very exciting, like McCormick Place. vanR: Will you explain that situation?
Weese: I think that was the first public confrontation we had with the city at large. The railroad yards were gradually being abandoned but the Tribune had gotten into its head that there was only one place that they wanted and it was
25 on the lakefront where they had sponsored the 1949 railroad fair. They had gotten all of the Metroliners and everything that they could get in a show there where the McCormick Place was eventually built. There was some kind of a tie-in—I never understood—some kind of hanky-panky, where it had to go on the lakefront, contrary to all the Montgomery Ward decisions. So we got into that one real heavy. We did a convention center scheme on the railroad yards, where the housing is now. I worked on that one very hard. Gapp and Newman covered it in the Daily News. It was fun but we lost. But, you know, things don’t happen if you can’t get the timing right. That probably would have been the place to put the convention center if the railroads hadn’t been there—you know what I mean—because of the on- going connection problem with shuttling back and forth. And it’s the one big blemish on the lakefront, unless you think that Navy Pier is now a blemish. vanR: McCormick Place is also one of the last examples of the really big, Miesian megastructures—the large mass in the middle of a landscape.
Weese: Someone tried to tell me something—it was about Gene Summers, who did McCormick Place—he got that commission and—I don’t know who told me this—Helmut Jahn was his assistant. Gene got the job and he was a little scared of it so he offered it to Mies and Mies said he wouldn’t take it. Is that the truth? vanR: Well, yes. Gene tells that story in his own oral history.
Weese: It seemed to me unusual, that there was some kind of friction there almost, like “You do it, but if you do it badly, I won’t talk to you,” or something. Around Mies you get so much kind of hagiographic thinking on one side and then muffled critiques. Like the people who went to see the Barcelona Pavilion rebuilt—the IIT faculty apparently thought it was a terrible building when they visited it—I’ve only heard this—that it was “non-Miesian,” or something. I think it was a very meticulous reconstruction, wasn’t it? vanR: I don’t know that much about the reconstruction.
26 Weese: But it’s a pavilion. It has no function. Nothing shows. There are no doors. There are no light fixtures. Mies, for the life of me—as an Anabaptist dissenter, I guess I have to start by saying—why would you want to subject your life to an authoritarian figure like that? It’s not just the architecture that is disadvantaged, the whole person is disadvantaged, the buildings are disadvantaged. I don’t understand. It’s like moths to flame, they keep wanting to go back to this mecca or this holy grail. There’s something psychological that bothers me fundamentally. I tell my son—who has to take all of his out-of-town friends to the Farnsworth—I tell him, “You can’t call it a house. It’s a pavilion. You call it anything you want, but it’s not a house.” You have to get that straight. vanR: Well, people have made the same argument, too, about Frank Lloyd Wright and the cult of personality and what it does to followers.
Weese: How many centuries will it take to set history straight? History is so wonderful if you don’t destroy the evidence. You know, I’m a revisionist. I was just looking at James Marston Fitch’s book, one of the three that were written around 1961. He does a very intelligent critique of what the problem of glass is in architecture. Glass is really difficult because it doesn’t make shade or shadows, it makes reflections and it makes transparencies, all of these things that are really difficult to handle. They are actually anti- architectural in the kind of sense that they are ephemeral. It is all ephemera. To see Mies buildings that have been put there as icons and then to try to live with them—and you mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright—the burden of living in one of these buildings is anti-human. I talked to the people at IIT who try to live in Mies’s mid-rise dormitories. There’s nothing right about them environmentally. If the Robert Taylor Homes should be torn down, then these things have the same problems. You know, the real millstone around the neck of IIT is trying to keep those buildings going. vanR: Well, there seem to be problems with leaking roofs and windows.
27 Weese: And sagging slabs and no heat control, no sun control. I mean, if we’ve lost the firmness and the commodity, where’s the delight? vanR: I was going to bring this up later, but perhaps we can talk about it a little now. You wrote an interesting article that was published in 1974 or 1975 where you debate Stanley Tigerman in terms of highrise buildings. You talk about Lake Village and Stanley’s highrise buildings. You commented in that article that you didn’t know where people would put their chifforobes in Stanley’s buildings because the walls are all glass and you can’t put a wardrobe against a window.
Weese: That’s right. Well, if you look at the floor plans, there’s some magic formula that says that there are six or eight units on a floor, and the elevator goes here and by the time you’ve finished, there’s nothing you can do. Even the way it’s delineated, the bedrooms at 860 Lake Shore, in some cases, end up in a corner where the living room should be, so that you have one wall—you have a wall of bi-folds and you have two walls of glass. I actually went into someone’s apartment and they were living there in a kind of beleaguered state. But also, I’ve been up on the twenty-eighth floor and it’s like you’re falling into Lake Michigan, and it’s scary on a winter’s day, with the water roiled up—it’s a disconcerting kind of experience. I climbed up 860, in 1952, on ladders. Back then you could easily get into a building under construction. The steel frame was by that very radical engineer helping Mies, Frank Kornacker. The wind off the lake was causing the skeletal frame to creak—it was moving and it’s still moving. It has movement because of the very narrow and thin connections that they desired at floor slabs and at the outside corners and so forth. So, isn’t living supposed to be easier? vanR: Well, your Lake Village building, for example, is not glass and steel. It’s a very solid brick building. The floor plan is irregular, to make the building less modular than a Mies highrise.
Weese: I thought, in talking about why I did that, or why we did any of those… I worked on that and it was the influence of Aalto, having seen that you can
28 work organically from a floor plan rather than from a structural system. The argument is always, “Well, the structure comes first.” But the structure really should be subservient to the plan, to the shape and sizes and allocations of space. The Lake Village building has thirty-eight sides. That was the first one I tried and it was a gamble. What I told the developer, who wanted… This was a subsidized 236-FHA, which was not a high-cost building. I evolved this theory that if it had less perimeter, which is expensive to build with brick or even glass, I could push it more toward a circle, which is the perfect enclosure of the most space with the least perimeter. I then did a series of studies on rectangles and even squares that were not as efficient as the ultimate plan. Then you freely plan a two-bedroom so that the living room is bigger and for the two bedrooms than the living room for a one-bedroom. Everything can be made proportionally. You’re molding it and then you can put in the columns wherever it is convenient. I thought that this was an interesting idea, but people don’t do that—even today they don’t—they force their buildings into rectangles. I’ve done enough of those, even after we left Harry’s office, we were still manipulating walls in a way that you can make each unit do something. The other thing that I learned was from Bud Goldberg’s Marina City. In Chicago, the rents used to be about fifty percent higher if you could see the lakefront and Lincoln Park instead of the stockyards. But on the backside of Marina City, no matter where you are, you get a view of the lake. That, to me, was a revelation. On the back side of that building at 47th and Lake Park, which has got thirty-eight sides, even when you’re facing west, you get a view of the lake because of the manipulation of the building shape. The last thing is—maybe not the last—but the most important thing is that when you look at something that’s going away from you, that it doesn’t overpower you, like if you look at a total slab at once. But if you see a building that has diminishing and receding planes, that’s a three- dimensional, optical truth that this building is going to look smaller and be less intrusive on the surrounding terrain. vanR: When you built Lake Village did you expect that the rest of the neighborhood around it would be developed to help support that tall building?
29 Weese: Oh, we had a whole plan, all the way back to Woodlawn Avenue. We had a complete urban renewal plan down 47th Street. vanR: You’ve obviously done a number of smaller, self-contained projects in Hyde Park…
Weese: Yeah, some of them came to pass. On 47th Street we had an axial, internal pedestrian spine because 47th Street frontage was really the edge of the world. North Kenwood was the frontier of the renewal movement at that time. South of 47th and 48th, we built some townhouses, but it didn’t form a cohesive whole. There was a plan but it didn’t materialize. And then our poor client got sued by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers project to the south. It went on forever and our clients won the suit finally. vanR: What was the suit about?
Weese: The Amalgamated Clothing Workers did that pair of parallel buildings south on 48th and Lake Park. vanR: The ones that the Kecks designed?
Weese: Yes. They said that because Lake Village was a FHA-236 low-income subsidized project, it was going to go all black and it would not be integrated and would jeopardize their project. Well, the truth of the matter, if I’m not incorrect, was that their building had more difficulties and was much less integrated than ours. So it was one of those rulings with very arcane and weird discussions about racial mix. But it was debilitating, let’s put it that way. vanR: Shall we go back to your time with Harry right after you left Harvard? Why did you decide to work with Harry and not with another firm?
Weese: Well, I worked briefly at one other firm—I worked one fall semester for The Architects’ Collaborative. In fact, I was in the same room with Gropius.
30 vanR: In Cambridge.
Weese: Yeah. And then I got too busy and Gropius was there trying to do the downtown government center and they really gave him a hard time—this was my impression. The young partners gave him a hard time. That was the only other place I ever worked. But Harry, I think wanted me to come back and a lot was happening. The Accra Embassy had just been completed in 1956 and there was a big Time magazine article on the whole foreign building operation (FBO). Then the Columbus, Indiana stuff was taking off. So there was a lot of work to do and you could do it kind of independently. What really evolved over the years was that I could fill in a niche where I could get a job and do it myself. The first one I probably did around Chicago was the building at 235 Eugenie Lane. It was a project that I did with Jared Shlaes. He is still a friend, I might say. He was a client but we still see each other a lot. That was a lot of fun. Then I did the housing subsequently with Jerry, Lake Village at 47th and Lake Park, he was a partner. Then there were the townhouses between Kenwood and Kimbark, south of 55th Street, which were quite successful because Jerry was really a concerned citizen and he wanted to do a good job. I don’t think that he ever really made any money on that project. vanR: Well, living in that neighborhood, I should say that those blocks are really quite nice.
Weese: They are small in scale and we learned later to try more to match the height of adjacent buildings. In this case we raised them up above the street a bit just to define a precinct. The thing at Harry’s was to be able to kind of peel off certain jobs. There were many jobs that I had nothing to do with. But there are also a lot of jobs that are attributed to Harry that I actually did and I want to make that a little clearer. We were very casual about attribution and that was the kind of one-for-all and all-for-one atelier-type thinking and it’s gotten to be different now—with copyrights and patents and lawsuits and that—about attribution. That wasn’t taking place. But to be historically
31 correct, for example, I designed the Northside Junior High School, and then I worked with Harry in various ways… Northside was a big square building that Leers Weinzapfel have made a recent addition to but I haven’t seen it. It was a sober post-Sputnik, three-story building when Perkins and Will and most others were doing one-story finger plans that were wasteful even of suburban land. So we did a very compact Spartan scheme. It was my parti in design and then I worked with Harry on the reinforced brick arches, but I carried it all the way through. So I was able to do independently what I thought was my kind of work. I hardly did any commercial work or high-end houses or some of the more flamboyant work at Harry’s office. I worked around the edges. vanR: Did you actively solicit clients?
Weese: I was given a number of clients and then there would be repeats. I think that Jerry Shlaes came to Harry but I did the work with him ultimately. The office started work with Cornell College in Iowa and I ended up working on that for twenty-five years. So you get introduced and… Drake University was the same thing. I ended up doing most of the work there. That was one where Eero Saarinen did some very nice early buildings. He did a little chapel that was a precursor to the MIT chapel. But then he got totally involved everywhere, you know.
[Tape 2: Side 1] vanR: Today is the 29th of April and I’m with Ben Weese at his home in Chicago. We left off yesterday while talking about projects that you had worked on while you were in your brother Harry’s office. You were talking about some projects that you had done in Columbus, Indiana. Are there any other projects during that time that you’d like to speak about?
Weese: Yes, but first some background. When my brother’s design archive was largely removed but not totally—I think they’re spread out in a number of places including Columbus, Indiana, and the Art Institute—they went to the
32 Chicago Historical Society and were separated out from the files of the firm. Unfortunately, I wasn’t involved in the distribution of these or the selection of them so they went to the historical society. I subsequently got the list and I haven’t worked in detail with this list yet, but there are probably fourteen or so projects, roughly, that were actually done by me. Those people who separated out the drawings assumed that they were my brother’s because our free-hand drawing is similar. It takes someone knowledgeable, i.e. myself, to look at the sketches to tell. So, in retrospect… As I mentioned during our prior session, during the 1950s and 1960s and up through the middle-1970s, until I left in 1977, attribution wasn’t given much attention. We were acting as a collective under Harry’s name. And then I think I mentioned that I inherited a number of projects when my brother’s interests went elsewhere. In lead design we had Harry, myself and some other talented people. I had an opportunity to see some of the historical society drawings to identify those that were not done by my brother but by other architects who then went on to other offices, people such as Robert E. Bell and Martin Price, to name a couple. They were some very talented architects whose work was shown recently in the Harry Weese retrospective show there but they were not Harry’s drawings. So I now feel a bit obligated to identify the diaspora. Then, back to your question, I did two projects pretty much on my own, with Harry critiquing—the North- side Junior High School and then a townhouse project in two half circle arcs across the street from the Northside Junior High. And I helped in other minor ways. Probably my first independent project in the office was the Irwin Union Bank in Hope, Indiana. Then followed Jerry Shlaes, whom I mentioned earlier. Our first Chicago building together was Eugenie Lane Apartments and then we went on to Kenwood Gardens and the Lake Village project at 47th Street and Lake Park with the 38-sided building. I can’t remember chronologically, but I inherited all the work at Cornell College, which went on for twenty-five years. One of the more interesting buildings there was Cornell Commons. I think I was heavily influenced by Alvar Aalto at that point because he had come to visit in 1961. Harry was out of town and I tried for a week to show him architecture around Chicago. I subsequently visited Finland, for the first time, in the following summer.
33 vanR: When was that?
Weese: He came in the early spring of 1961. Following that summer I designed the Cornell Commons. I was influenced by some of the problems of siting on a very sloping, wooded site and tried to break up the plan à la Aalto. Then I really got into housing. One of the most unusual buildings that I did was the John Knox Home in Norfolk, Virginia. It was a Presbyterian home for the elderly situated on top of a small shopping center. Another thing I did then was to really do a whole urban design master plan with street layouts for the Ghent urban renewal area in Norfolk. I was principal designer on that one. The John Knox Home was part of that. vanR: How did you come to have that job? Was it through your brother?
Weese: Well, as I say, all of these jobs were “pass through.” My brother piggybacked off of Eero Saarinen’s good fortune. If Eero got too much work… You know, he got the General Motors technical center and he’d get other large commissions. But he was committed at Drake University, as I mentioned, and he was committed at the University of Chicago and he was committed, prior to all of these, at Columbus, Indiana. My brother inherited, due to a common trust and friendship with Eero Saarinen, a huge amount of work. In Columbus, all of the Cummins Engine work. At Drake University Harry started with the married student housing and dormitories and when Harry in turn got too busy I ended up doing the fine arts center and the student union there. So it kind of passed on through. At the University of Chicago, Eero had done the law school and the dormitories, which lie just south of the Robie house and then he got too busy and recommended Harry who did the yet- unfinished Pierce Hall at 55th Street. So this kind of—what do you call it—funneling through? It’s nice to have friends in high places. vanR: In terms of the work that you did on your own at Harry’s office, you say that he critiqued some of your designs. Can you describe his input?
34 Weese: Yes, he did. He did it sometimes while I was on vacation, which annoyed me. vanR: Did you seek out his opinions or were you happier working on your own?
Weese: I was very happy working on my own. For instance, on the Kenwood Gardens project, I was very concerned with a centralized motif on the townhouse in order to identify ownership or separation. I came back from my vacation once… If we look at one of the Kenwood Gardens row houses it has a brick corbel projecting motif on the second floor—a concentrated motif in the center of a rather blank wall. When I returned from my vacation, Harry had taken the central motif and pushed the windows to the party walls so that you had a confusion of identity with the adjacent units. Strangely enough, he kept this idea and he finally executed it on his own townhouse project on Willow Street. I think he wanted to bring the light across the length of the interior walls, which is a wonderful idea. If you get a window close to a long, white wall, you can use it as a kind of a reflector, you know. And so he did that. The disadvantage is the lack of centrality in a row of houses and also some sound leak, probably, if the adjacent windows are open at the same time. So he finally accomplished what he wanted to do and I accomplished what I wanted to do. There was, as we discussed before, a certain gradual moving apart in our principles as time went on which I think I can probably describe. But in other projects subsequently, I was really exploring the concept of the building that was pushed together close to a circle. It really starts from the concept of the floor plan first and then the structure later. It was very interesting because you can really make endless permutations. Each unit can be different. vanR: You’ve described that as a benefit in apartments because it gives potential owners or renters variety and choice in the units that they will be living in.
Weese: Yeah. They’re almost totally customized. Then they are, of course, replicated. As I mentioned, the great economy is to multiply the floor plan, if you multiply a contorted plan high enough. The reinforcing bars are very complex on the first slab, but the guys who are ironworkers finally learn their
35 role and they pick up speed if the project is tall enough. I’ve done a contorted plan on a three-story building where you pay dearly. In fact, the contractor went bankrupt on one that we did in our office. vanR: Which project was that?
Weese: It was Finley Apartments in Lombard. It was a wonderful building with the same contorted, individualized plan, but it was only three stories high so you couldn’t recover the repetitive advantage. In the early 1970s in response to Harry’s desire to directly develop projects we created a corporation so the firm could pursue the design/build idea. It was called the Larrabee-Dickens Corporation. The first proposal being at Larrabee and Dickens for four townhouses, just around the corner from where we are now, at 2133 N. Hudson. It was proposed to Marvin Myers, the developer. But he took the whole project and did a huge townhouse development along Larrabee, urban renewal, again the scorched-earth removal of everything, good and bad. We lost these four units that we wanted to develop ourselves to the larger project. But I met Marvin Myers. You might say this was one of my first chances of getting a client on my own—and I said, “Marvin, it’s too bad that we can’t do these four experimental townhouses for Larrabee-Dickens, but would you give us another project?” Subsequent to that, he gave me three. One I did—a 221-D3 subsidized elderly housing—was on Grace Street, just off of Lake Shore Drive. This building was lying behind a bunch of apartment buildings fronting on the park. So I used the method again for twenty stories, one of those contorted multi-faceted buildings. vanR: A minimum-perimeter building?
Weese: Yeah, minimum-perimeter that’s right. That was the concept that I coined and I thought that everyone would say, “That’s great!” But what was interesting about that project—I used an aerial photograph and I rotated this minimum-perimeter building on the site in such a way that I could maximize the views through the slots of the existing easterly apartment buildings.
36 vanR: The buildings between your site and the lake?
Weese: Yeah, so I wasn’t just plunking down a rectangular given, I was using site- lines. As I mentioned, and maybe didn’t make clear, site-lines occur from inside a building and they also occur from outside a building, as to what you see or don’t see diminishing away from you. So you can make a very clunky building, even though they’re clunky looking in plan, maybe, look svelte in reality because planes disappear as they move back from you. It’s renaissance perspective. So, in short, those were the buildings I was working on. They were housing or they were institutional buildings for private colleges and universities. vanR: That seems to adhere to your philosophy of doing non-profit and educational buildings, not projects for elite private clients.
Weese: Yeah. I felt comfortable with that sort of client. I think I am not as “Hail fellow, well met!”—I’m a little bit private in my behavior, I guess. Harry and Kitty, his wife, were very socially active. They spent a lot of time in Lake Forest and they knew a very elite set of people, bankers and high-level… They were very close friends with Ben Heinemann, the head of Northwest Industries. Harry for a long time had vacationed in Aspen and was on the Aspen Corporation. So all of that socializing was… Kitty is a very out-going entertainer with Southern hospitality. So a lot of things were happening around them that produced a certain number of clients, but also it produced a certain danger—what can I say? You got on to a certain level of, should I say, intrigue with getting jobs or not getting jobs and so forth. I was taking a simpler route, I guess. vanR: It was a conscious decision to pursue your own path?
Weese: Yeah, it was just my personality. I think I mentioned, maybe a little bit pejoratively, that I didn’t like to do houses for rich people. Although, when we get down to it, I’ll have to mention some very fine work that Cindy has done and we can get to that. It didn’t suit my idea of making elite houses in
37 Aspen for somebody, although some of these people are really wonderful. Harry did a house for John Baird and John and his family are the greatest people in terms of public service and everything, so it’s not all bad. You just can’t be knee-jerk about that. vanR: I assume it gave you a chance to develop your own reputation and your own circle of friends and separate yourself from your brother, in a way.
Weese: Yeah, yeah. The problem of separating yourself from your brother produced a certain amount of underlying friction. My brother really never wanted any partners and he had several forays into that area, including long discussions with people like Jack Train. There was actually stationary printed up that read, “Adams Weese and Van der Meulen”—I don’t know in which order the names were. vanR: That must have been very early on, because John Van der Meulen…
Weese: And Brewster Adams. vanR: We have a short oral history interview with John Van der Meulen.
Weese: You do? That’s wonderful. I hope that the Art Institute gets those archives because John Van der Meulen and Ralph Rapson did some very interesting things. John was a very retiring person and very negative, and I worked with him in Harry’s office, but he was extremely talented and felt his work was not valued. I think it’s very dangerous when an architect gets that negative, because he does put buildings in place that last. We live with them, you know? Someone ought to know about them. vanR: In fact, didn’t John Van der Meulen and Ralph Rapson do one of the very first modern houses in Hyde Park after World War II?
Weese: Yes, in Kenwood on Woodlawn, the Gidwitz house. It still stands.
38 vanR: Well, that’s an aside. But Harry was entertaining thoughts of partners at some point?
Weese: Yes, I guess what I want to say is that he had a certain artist’s tendency to be a little under-organized and not wanting to have a business partner, which might have been Jack Train. He had Hans Neumann, who was there for ten years and then realized that it was not for him. He went out and became a partner immediately at Murphy. So you go down the line and that was the beginning of a certain kind of understanding on my part that Harry was probably not interested in being a partner with me, ultimately. That goes all the way to 1977, which we can get to. So to go back to your question about what buildings… I rehabbed a… I think I’ve already confessed not to be a historic-preservationist, but we did an adaptive reuse of a chapel at Cornell College, which got me into an acoustic musical thing and we had a pretty nice organ in there. Olivier Messiaen gave the opening concert and I was really angry that the client never told me about this. vanR: Would you have wanted to hear him?
Weese: I would have gone anywhere to hear him. But the original documents of the Cornell Chapel—which one can see because it’s a very prominent building on the hill, you can see it for ten miles—was a scroll of the architect, linen drawings on a rod with an oil-cloth cover. The most interesting thing about that was that the architect out of Chicago did a front facade and a west façade and on the drawings he says, “the builder will complete the other two facades accordingly.” You go and see that building and you don’t know which one is which. I mean, the architect gave the lead idea but the builder was competent enough that his facades were just as good or better, with oriels and circular stair elements. It is very volumetric, made out of the local yellow Stone City stone. Grant Wood made the quarry famous later with his summer art colony near there. I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that this architecture that was done in the late-eighteen nineties was achieved with great help for the architects from the builders and skilled craftsmen, which we don’t have now. Big contrast.
39 vanR: You said not too long ago that you weren’t a preservationist and you did these adaptive reuses. One of the other things that was also going on during this time was that you became increasingly involved in civic activities and particularly in saving the Glessner house. Can you describe how you came to be interested in the Glessner house? You joined forces with a number of other important Chicagoans, such as Tom Stauffer and Will Hasbrouck and Richard Nickel and Marian and Leon Despres. We also talked a little bit yesterday about Alfonso Iannelli.
Weese: Yes. Well, in 1957, when I came back from Harvard, Chicago had its Land Clearance Commission, which was a brutal description. Buildings were falling at a huge rate. I think the only thing I really resent my father never showing me was the Marshall Field Warehouse. If it got torn down in 1938, he could have jolly well taken me around there to see it. vanR: Do you think he knew about its importance?
Weese: Probably peripherally. I think that to tear down the Marshall Field Warehouse for a parking lot shows no foresight at all, you know? Anyway, buildings were falling. Dick Nickel was so depressed by this that he would just go around photographing everything. Tom Stauffer worked for Mortimer Adler and the Great Books program, so he was a very bright guy, and he had kind of this foresight to say, “Look, we can do something about that.” So the Chicago Heritage Committee was formed, I don’t know, in the late-fifties, around then. And there were some terrible events and we lost a lot of buildings. vanR: The Garrick Theatre was a major battlefield.
Weese: The Garrick was key to that. But there were other little battles, like we saved the Red Star Inn, just south of the Germania Club, about three times. We went over and tried to save Pond and Pond’s beautiful building at Hull House—now, the sequence to all of this is—this is exactly what they’re trying
40 to build now, the kind of Yale quadrangles. We lost that one, big. They had to take three square miles for a suburban campus in an urban setting at UIC. These things were happening and it was just heartbreaking. You had to do anything you could anywhere. The Garrick Theatre was a huge loss because it would have been a much better theatre center for much less money than what they’re trying to do with the Goodman and others today. It’s the timing that’s just off by a few years. If you could have moth-balled it or bought it away from the guy who ultimately made a parking garage on the site. So this was insidious stuff and it would just make me mad. So we were in the street picketing and we were writing letters to the editor. We had a lot of help from Ruth Moore and Paul Gapp and Bill Newman. vanR: Those were newspaper writers.
Weese: Right. Ruth Moore was the Sun-Times and Paul Gapp and M.W. Newman at the Daily News, at that time. So Stauffer and I formed this little group and we’ve mentioned some of the names. Georgie Anne Geyer was a part of it when she was just working for the Tribune, and Hugh Dalziel Duncan, a professor at the University of Chicago, and other youngsters, like John Vinci… The picketing of the Garrick Theatre brought the daughters or the granddaughters of Adler, and they came down in a huge black limousine from Milwaukee. It was a great lift to see these women standing up—they were not young—and being proud descendents of an under-appreciated Dankmar Adler. So the prophetic statement was from Stauffer who said, “We’re going to lose this building but we’ll get a landmarks ordinance.” And lo and behold, the city… People like Ira Bach and a few other enlightened people got together and formed a landmark law. Unfortunately it was without teeth so we were still losing buildings, even though it was getting harder and harder. Then the Glessner house was empty and what happened… I mentioned earlier that Alvar Aalto, the friend and on-and-off correspondent and furniture purveyor to Harry and Kitty Weese, came to Chicago in 1961. As usual, my brother was out of town and I was given the job of shepherding him around. It was very difficult because he did not want to look at any buildings—he was not interested in Sullivan or Wright. I took
41 him to Crown Hall, which had been recently done—it was maybe five years old at the time—and I got out of the car and walked up the steps and Aalto sat in the car and I thought he was suddenly sick or maybe indisposed and I came back and said, “Don’t you want to see Mies’s latest work?” He said, “No, I already know what it looks like on the inside.” Aalto had a command of four or five languages but maybe only a few hundred English words. He used them so effectively. I was getting desperate and so I said, “Look, we’re close to 18th and Prairie so we’ll go and look at a derelict building by Richardson.” We got there and Aalto got out in the street—there were trucks going down to R.R. Donnelley’s delivering printing material and stuff, I thought he was going to get killed—he was standing in the middle of the street and he couldn’t stop looking at Richardson’s building. Then, click!—the idea that the Richardsonian was the backdrop for the Finnish National Romantic architecture he grew up with. I suddenly saw the touchstone and in my young, kind of overheated brain, I thought, If this guy comes all the way from Finland and risks getting killed in the middle of the street, then we’ve got to save this building! It was the bee in the bonnet. vanR: At that time was it abandoned?
Weese: Yes, or nearly. It was in desperate shape. So that brings us to 1966. It was actually initiated by youngsters fresh out of school—Paul Lurie and his father-in-law, Irving Berman, and Wayne Benjamin we can add to that. I don’t want to take complete credit, but we had a certain amount of clout and I really jumped on that one, with Harry’s help, too. They got a contract to buy this place for $35,000 from some group in Pittsburgh that owned it. vanR: It was some kind of a graphic design firm, wasn’t it?
Weese: Yeah, the Graphic Art Technical Foundation, and there was a limit on the contract. I remember the only time I ever conversed with Philip Johnson we were running—because he’s a pretty fast walker—down Fifth Avenue and Harry said, “Look, you could really help on this thing, be a bell-weather, and get something started.” Philip, in his usually flippant way, said, “All right!
42 I’ll give you $10,000. But what’s good about that building is only the stones. If the roof falls in, it’s okay. It’s the stereotomy that counts.” The $10,000 then was the leverage with which I then went about and browbeat a lot of people like Bill Hartmann… John Entenza never forgave me because he was being clouted—he wanted to give all of the money from the Graham Foundation to whoever he felt like and he didn’t want anybody telling him where to give money. So I was persona non grata with him, although the Graham Foundation finally gave $5,000. Larry Perkins gave $5,000 but his parting words were something like, “This is money down the drain. You can have it, but the project will never work.” Bill Hartmann, who was Harry’s classmate from MIT and was at Skidmore, gave and the Murphys gave. So we got attention. Stanley Tigerman, even though he didn’t have any money, gave $1,000 because his heart was in the right place. So we got the building, but that was only the beginning of the problem, you know? I can follow up very quickly on your question about why we were not true preservationists, because we were just trying to keep the building together. There were a lot of early events that happened that probably were invasive to the fabric of the building. We had a wonderful Arts and Crafts show from Bob Peters and we repainted the walls or did something so that the preservationists got on our case. The worst thing that happened was when I came down one day to the Glessner house after we’d purchased it and the house next door, whose wall was enclosing the Glessner garden, was being demolished. The house was almost down but they hadn’t gotten to the wall yet, so I called this guy and I said, “Please stop, we’ve got to support this wall before the winds start piping up.” It was a blustery spring day and there was this thirty-five foot wall that could have easily blown over and if a wall enclosing the Glessner garden blows over on a nascent, penniless foundation, it would have finished us. Sumner Sollitt, who was the great hero of the Auditorium Theatre, came down and braced that wall on a late Friday or early Saturday with cables and weighted drums and then he invented a stiff-leg that’s there today that supports the wall. That kind of heroics at the last minute was what it was all about. Therefore you can’t say that we were precious preservationists looking for which layer of paint to use. We were not that.
43 vanR: Well, I don’t know that that level of sophistication existed in the practice at that point. Were there that many people who even knew about paint sampling?
Weese: Well, they didn’t have a lot of buildings to work with. The first step is to save a building in whatever condition you find it. Then you can go to the second step, which is to sort it out. The Auditorium Theatre was probably the same case. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill had a six million dollar number that they were never going to raise. I think that Harry in his kind of “walking at the edge” manner said, “We can do it for a million”—well, I don’t remember the actual number, but it was tangible. And they opened the place for a million and they left a lot of things alone. The outside structure was still settling and these connection bolts were popping as they were stressed on the interior columns that were not settling. As the outside settled they were pulling apart. I think that some engineers were saying, “Well, this building is structurally unsound.” Then the great engineer from New York, Fred Severud, said, “No, these are erection bolts. It’s when a cage is standing all by itself that it will blow down. When it’s supported, ultimately, by the outside walls, you can just take them all out.” So they took out a number of them that were stressed. These kinds of inventive, creative ideas that work, for no money… I went on later to consult with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City since we’re talking about engineers and Fred Severud’s partner, Hans Karl Bandel, saved the Guastavino dome at St. John the Divine. I was just reading James Marston Fitch and he has a separate chapter in one of his books on how to finish St. John the Divine. But in 1961, he quoted Guastavino that the dome was built as a temporary solution. By this way it was the largest Guastavino dome ever built. Guastavino was the guy who could do the flat tile, lapped domical arches that are all over New York City. He did it as a temporary stopgap to cover the crossing of this huge cathedral that was struggling to get built. He said it could last ten years. Fitch came back in 1961 and said it was fifty years old and in danger of falling. In 1972, when James Parks Morton took over the deanship of St. John the Divine—he previously was on the South Side here in Chicago and that’s how I became friends with him—he called, “We’ve got a crisis. They’re tearing down the
44 Guastavino. The fabric committee says that it’s costing a quarter of a million to tear this down and we don’t have any money and we don’t have any solution for putting anything back.” I said, “Wait a minute. I know a pretty good engineer.” Hans Karl Bandel came to the site. What was happening was that the dome was dropping large shards a hundred feet on the heads of the fabric committee and it hurt. Bandel said, “Wait a minute, we can solve this.” The dome was sitting on granite piers and was affected by seasonal expansion and contraction, rubbing against the bearing points and dropping the shards. He said, “Insulate the dome. Put it under constant temperature and put a new roof on it.” So, contrary to what Fitch thought of the problem—Fitch is good at technology but he hadn’t looked at it like these creative engineers. So we insulated the dome in 1972 and it’s still there today. We put a hairnet on it, something like the bag you carry your oranges home from the market in, just as insurance. It’s the same color as the terracotta. Now they probably should keep it as historic because it’s another almost four decades of the Guastavino. That’s just another interesting example of creative collaboration… vanR: Unorthodox…
Weese: Yeah, unorthodox preservation. vanR: Just to get back to the Glessner house for a moment—your goal was the save the house. Did you have a larger goal of, say, educating Chicagoans about what already existed in their neighborhoods?
Weese: Well, I was a front-liner. I was president or chairman, or whatever you call it. We were using the power of Harry’s office; we had some clout. The thing that came out on the education front was the vision of Marian Despres. She went to the Gamble house out in Pasadena—the word “docent” was unknown to me—and she came back and we had the first most brilliant docent graduation class on the north steps of what is now the Chicago Cultural Center. It was symbolic because the building at that time was closed—it had been the Chicago Public Library—and there was this huge battle about what to do
45 with the building. Marian and her minions put together some really important people. Devereux Bowly was one of the first docents, and Bob Irving from IIT, very brilliant people. Instead of looking at the cracks in the sidewalk, their heads were up. I was in charge of trying to keep the foundation going. We went through several directors; the management problems were terrible. We tried to get anybody in there. We got the AIA in there and we got the National Trust in there, just to pay rent and to occupy the building for safety purposes. Everything we did was very ad hoc. But it is interesting to see the foundation transform and now it’s ultimately transformed and split into the parts, into an historic house offering educational services and the downtown Chicago Architecture Foundation. But that was a very important split in terms of their functions. I left way before that when the Kenilworth Garden Club decided that they would have a benefit down there. I knew I’d done my task and I dropped out. vanR: Because it had achieved a certain level of recognition?
Weese: It had received notice. It was the only time I tried to… I think we were fairly successful. I think we were turning the corner in getting the attention of the large foundations in this town such as the Chicago Community Trust and the Tribune Foundation, and Suzie Morton Davidson was very helpful. So we got some wonderful people to lend their clout to what this thing became. I can’t believe what it is now. It’s got a huge budget and Larry Perkins was wrong. There was a certain fixation with modernity and we were going through a crisis of identity. That’s why I think that if you say anything about history, you can’t say, “I’m new and that’s old.” To cut your roots and to destroy continuity is wrong… I can use Eduard Sekler, as I mentioned earlier, as a person who believed in history in opposition to Giedion, who was reinventing everything for the first time and there’s a certain amount of hubris there that’s just not proper.
46 [Tape 2: Side 2] vanR: I would like to have you think about the role that you and Harry had taken in redeveloping, for instance, parts of Hyde Park. That involved tearing down the structure that had been there before and then building modern buildings, as opposed to what you were just saying about valuing the fabric of cities. How did you reconcile that?
Weese: Well, there was hardly a conflict in Hyde Park because it already had been torn down. We had no say over picking and choosing buildings. They tended to think that no developer would come back into the city unless they had a kind of a tabula rasa of wide open… It was hard. I think that Zeckendorf himself, who did the project, was a pioneer. They were inventing things like party walls. Townhouses were radical; they hadn’t been built since pre- World War One. There had been a thirty-year hiatus, a lacuna—I like to use that word—isn’t that a good word? vanR: It’s a very good word to describe that. And in the meantime everyone had turned to building highrises.
Weese: And Frank Lloyd Wright had also turned to Broadacre City, so you know… So I was amused that the lawyers couldn’t describe fee simple when there was a party wall. They had to go back and do research. That was kind of a symptom of how bad it was. So we didn’t have a chance to weigh in and pick and choose. I did have that chance and lost it in the Ghent urban renewal in Norfolk, Virginia, which I mentioned earlier. There were some beautiful Tidewater houses intermixed in this grand old neighborhood and the urban renewal department had no means of saving them as parts of the fabric, so we lost them. It was tragic. We did bring one building back—they took a ferry terminal there and disassembled it because they had built bridges and they didn’t need ferries anymore. So we put back a ferry terminal building as a kind of a community center in the middle of Ghent. That was the only old building because it was dismantled and palletized. So, to your question, urban renewal was bulldozers. You have to say that urban developers just
47 weren’t there. They had to entice developers to participate. It’s not like it is today. vanR: One of the things that I found in the research for this interview was a clipping that Newman wrote about an exhibit that you did called “Chicago: The way it was and is.” Can you speak about that? It was an exhibit of photographs that showed what buildings had been on a site and what current architects were building on those sites now. You criticized people like Murphy and Jahn and SOM. Even your brother Harry came in for a bit of criticism. What was your thinking behind that exhibit?
Weese: Oh, yeah. Well, it was a little pernicious, probably. I felt that we were losing visual contact with… I, even myself, can’t remember what was on which corner when. I get lost in the city because it’s kind of a wonderful continuum of texture, but you’re not quite sure what was on the corner of Madison and whatever. I wanted to give a visual lesson about the deprivations we were suffering. The one that I did that was probably unkind to Harry Weese and Associates was the panoramic of the old Time-Life building. It had the beautiful Diana Court with the Carl Milles sculpture. It was actually the building where Baldwin Kingrey had their furniture shop. There was this raking shot, but then it picks up the bridges and it picks up the cornices and it picks up the streetlights and you realize that the whole infrastructure has gone kaput. The whole situation is depraved and deprived and so I… The show was not influential, although it traveled a little bit. It was kind of my own cri de coeur, as they say. It was fun. I got a chance to visit some old photographs. The most disheartening was the Red Star Inn, which was a marvelous German restaurant. Okay, so it was kitsch and Giedion would say that it’s worthless, but it was a very incredible restaurant with ambience and it was taken down to widen the access to an Arthur Rubloff building. What kind of trade-off is that? You know, you try to use any means of shock value that you have, in a sense. One of the very wonderful things that happened is that Ruth Moore helped us turn the corner when she lobbied for a landmark district around the Glessner house. R.R. Donnelley Company, Charlie Haffner really, understood what was happening because Donnelley owned
48 sixty acres down there and there was a land value of forty cents a square foot all the way down to Cermak Road. Ruth said that she needed some help, you know, “We’ve got to save some of these other buildings.” They subsequently saved the buildings across the street, the Kimball and the Coleman-Ames houses. The meeting in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s office was great because Ruth stood up—she’s about four feet ten—and she commanded the scene. She said, “You’ve got to do this!” And Daley conceded. I was there. Then we realized that tourism comes to this town and we’ve got riches. Now we’ve got people living all over downtown and near downtown. We’ve come a long way. vanR: I think part of what you’ve expressed so far is a sense of the struggle and difficulty in finding an identity, as you’ve put it, in Chicago. May we move up to the period of the late sixties and the early seventies? This was a period that was tumultuous throughout the United States, not only in Chicago.
Weese: Yeah, right. vanR: There were so many national crises—the civil rights movement and Vietnam and the assassinations in the 1960s.
Weese: Good point. vanR: There were student revolts on campuses and a sense of turmoil in many levels of society.
Weese: That’s right. vanR: It was a time of disenchantment, I think, and it seemed that the status quo was under attack. One of the things that you did in the 1970s was to join forces with a number of other Chicago architects—you’ve already mentioned Stanley Tigerman. One of the early results of this grouping was a counter- exhibit called “Chicago Architects” that was in protest to a more doctrinal exhibit called “One Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago.” Can we talk
49 a little bit about that period? That exhibit was in 1976. “One Hundred Years of Architecture” opened in Munich in 1973, before it came to Chicago. Were you aware of that exhibition in Germany?
Weese: No. vanR: It eventually made its way to Chicago in a slightly revised form.
Weese: Like I said, I wasn’t following Mies like one of his disciples. vanR: Well, at some point you became aware of this exhibit because you joined with Stanley Tigerman, Stuart Cohen, and Larry Booth. Can you talk about how you came to join those architects? You knew them earlier, but why did you band together at that time?
Weese: Yes, Stanley and I were either on the same side or on opposite sides of a lot of issues. Stanley worked in Harry’s office for one year and he had a great ability to almost take the office over—it was wonderful. He had to be the lead on that because he wanted things to happen. I think he saw all of his New York friends and the New York Five was developing. But going back a bit, it’s really funny because I kind of compartmentalize this, but your introduction of this as the turmoil of the times reminds me. I was out in the country without a telephone when the 1968 riots took place with the Democratic convention, so for me it was like it didn’t happen. I was out in the country and we had two small kids and no telephone and no radio and we were having a great time. We came home and everyone was saying, “Don’t you know what happened here?” You’re right, the spin-off of this went through enough kinds of modulations so that it turned into the architects needing to do something, but it was translated through several permutations. I think that Stanley had to be the leader of that effort. I don’t know where you want to go with this now to discuss that. Going back to 1968 and the riots and the Martin Luther King thing, we got threatening phone calls—we’d moved over from Michigan Avenue to Hubbard Street and we had one guy sleeping
50 in the lobby all night with pails of sand because we’d gotten threatening phone calls. vanR: What were you afraid of?
Weese: Well, there was arson in the city on West Madison Street. You know, they’d burned down things on Roosevelt Road and all of that. It still hasn’t been put back. The general mayhem… You know, you anesthetize yourself… Unless you’re there… They talk about Berlin in the 1920s when the Communists and the Nazis were fighting in one street and people were having aperitifs two streets over. It’s a very strange atmosphere. I think you put it right, that it was kind of surreal. How that works is that we felt—I felt—all along was that there was a conspiracy of correctness with Mies and his followers and Skidmore, who was so dominant—completely dominant—for all the civic work and so forth through the city with Mayor Daley and everything. So you had a bunch of scruffy people picking up the crumbs, you know? Whatever happened, the show that you mentioned, “Chicago Architects,” I think it was a brilliant show. I recently reread the review by Ada Louise Huxtable and there was one in Newsweek that I clipped. vanR: Well, there was quite a bit of writing both about your “Chicago Architects” show and the other one.
Weese: I think at that point we were on the war path. Someone was stealing history. I think it was Stuart Cohen’s finest hour. He wrote a brilliant essay, I thought. He’s never done it again because he really wanted to be an architect, not a critic. vanR: But he had done a considerable amount of writing, nonetheless. When you say “we” do you mean the four of you?
Weese: Yeah, the four really formulated that. We really twisted John Entenza’s arm to get money from the Graham Foundation. My brother got us a venue for
51 the show at the Time-Life building because he had just finished that. We were cobbling it together. vanR: How did the four of you find each other? Obviously you knew Stanley, but how did Larry and Stuart come into the picture for you?
Weese: Well, Larry had worked for Stanley and we’d known each other. Stanley worked in Harry’s office in 1960-61 and this show was in 1976. We mounted the barricades sometimes together and sometimes opposing each other. vanR: Well, there was the article we’ve already mentioned from 1974 where you were on the other side of the argument with Stanley.
Weese: Yes, I was at contretemps with Stanley, which was friendly, but obviously we were in opposite camps. What angered him with me was that I said to him at one point, “Stanley, you’ve been on every side of every issue.” He has a mercurial capacity and he’s a brilliant guy and he’s a very good architect, but I think he has a selection problem. Well, between him and me it’s like the tortoise and the hare: I’m the tortoise and Stanley’s jumping ahead. The show was the beginning of my separation from Harry’s office and I don’t know how that worked, except that we were acting independently and we picked works. Some of the works that were shown in the show were attributed to me and that had never happened before, so I was flexing independence. vanR: Let’s talk a bit about the catalogs for both of those exhibitions. There’s a remarkable similarity between the two. For example, the structure and the graphic design of those catalogs are so similar. Was that deliberate?
Weese: Is that right? Well, you’re going to have to get that answer from one of the other participants. I was kind of the stage manager. We had these big stand- up models that were big photostats or photographs on cardboard and they were kind of like buildings in the round. We did that and some of the graphic things. I don’t have the Oswald Grube catalog so I can’t say.
52 vanR: I just wondered if one of you had seen the other catalog.
Weese: You’ll have to ask Stanley, then you’re going to get a much clearer picture. What I did was I steered Stuart to certain buildings that I said he’s got to include in his essay. One was the Abraham Lincoln Center. I had a certain prejudice that I was trying to promote. The overall thing was Stuart and Stanley and they really put the ideas into the catalog together. vanR: What’s been said about the “Chicago Architects” show, and what was stated very explicitly in the introduction to that catalog, is that it was a salon des refusés. The curious thing to me is that so many of you were also represented by at least one project in the “One Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago” exhibition and catalog.
Weese: Oh, really? vanR: You were all mentioned by name.
Weese: Well, thank you for enlightening me even if it is a few years after the event. vanR: You had the Greenwood Park Apartments included in “One Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago.” Stanley had work in it and so did Larry. I don’t think that Stuart did. Jim Nagle had work in that show.
Weese: Well, then we were overreacting, you could say. You have shown me something I have never seen, which is the Greenwood Park Apartment, which is a part of the 47th and Lake Park project done in collaboration with the Ezra Gordon and Jack Levin. We wanted to separate ourselves from the inevitable march of history, the Hegelian notion. I have finally gotten enough philosophy in my head to know that I am not a Hegelian. History is much more serendipitous. vanR: That it is not so much a continuous evolution, as Hegel argued?
53 Weese: Yes, thank you, right. vanR: One of the things that was written about the show, and there was a lot of publicity about it, was that some people accused the four of you of being rather self-promotional, that this was self-serving. How do you answer that?
Weese: Oh, we invented it, right? vanR: Was that a fair critique?
Weese: Well, of course. I mean, look what happens today when we have architectural magazines where the portrait of the architect is on the cover. Who cares what the architect looks like? We have nothing but self-promotion today. So if this was the beginning of self-promotion, I would call it rather innocent and modest compared to what’s happening today. But maybe we were striking a raw nerve in somebody. Of course it was self-promotional. Stanley got the venue at Cooper Union, which I think was the only other place it went. vanR: It previewed at the Cooper Union and at Harvard and then it came to Chicago. The premise of “Chicago Architects” was to present the other Chicago and you included a number of architects who were not included in “One Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago.” You showed, for instance, Pond and Pond, Dwight Perkins, the Kecks, Hugh Garden and Richard Schmidt.
Weese: Keck was not in the other show? vanR: Well, he was but you presented more of his work. You also showed Andrew Rebori and Ed Dart. You included Bud Goldberg, who was in the other show, and so was Harry Weese. You also included Walter Netsch and Bucky Fuller and Loebl Schlossman and Howard Fisher. How did you rediscover some of these lesser-known architects?
Weese: I think that Tom Beeby probably helped, because his uncle…
54 vanR: But he wasn’t one of the original four.
Weese: No, but I think he may have given advice. You know, Stuart and Stanley did it. I think you have to lay that on Stuart—he did a lot of scholarly research and came up with, I thought, the diaspora of architects. You know you can’t go and look at a city and say, “This building makes the city.” You almost have to turn that whole thing around and say, “This city is made by a bunch of buildings.” The whole gamut of things that you see passing on the streets and everything—there’s a tremendous hidden trove in this city. I think that the next thing that showed that so clearly was that AIA Guide to Chicago that Alice Sinkevitch did with the AIA. I was astounded by what I didn’t know and how great the whole world of architecture is. And, again, the whole series that the Society of Architectural Historians is doing state by state showing how rich they are. Now these things are leveraging. If work is shown in these books, maybe it leverages into being saved rather than torn down. The idea that the world is being saved by the Barcelona pavilion and structures in that idiom—that probably angers me at a very deep level. vanR: Can you describe that feeling more? You’ve alluded to your deep dissatisfaction with Mies and maybe now is a good time to speak more, since this is one of the very first concrete examples where you’re deliberately setting yourself apart from what was called the second Chicago School. The premise of “One Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago” was that there was the first Chicago School, with Holabird and Sullivan and Adler and then the second Chicago School was Mies and the structuralists of the International Style.
Weese: I mean, how contrived do we have to get? How contrived do we have to be? The idea that Picasso and all these people revered the innocent work of what they called the primitive—they couldn’t even find names for African art. The things that are the most sincere are the least contrived. Folk art, Grandma Moses, where do we come with the innocence to do this work? Modernity has made us so self-conscious. Mies got very close to working for Hitler. He’s
55 the cultural side of what Hitler was on the political side. I just feel that it’s so sparse and so kind of mean. What right do I have to criticize great men? But I think that history will probably try to unravel how we can exist in spite of great men. If the heavy hand comes down in the forms which they prescribed… There are certain funny things, like the fact that Mies never lived in his own buildings. He didn’t want to experiment with his life, but he experimented with other people’s lives, you know? I don’t have the right to criticize Mies or to take… I think that pluralism is a cop-out, but I think that the right of certain cultures to exist and to grow and to flourish in a less self- conscious way is probably helpful. I never wanted to meet Mies. I got to his seventy-fifth birthday party at the Arts Club, which had that L-shaped space, and I was in the lower leg of the L and I was just listening to the speeches. They were so sycophantic. I guess that’s why I kind of stressed initially my kind of Anabaptist dissenter background. We came to this country as refugees from the oppressive state of affairs in Europe. We wanted religious freedom. There are certain state mottoes like Missouri’s “Show me”… vanR: Or New Hampshire’s “Live free or die”?
Weese: I love it! It’s just endemic to my thinking. Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier, these guys were overbearing. We are all creative. And women are creative. Where do women fit in? Where did Lilly Reich fit in? Out there in the living room I’ve got a chair by Charlotte Perriand. Where did Corbusier really…? She’s still alive and I hope that someone’s getting her story. I want to see more creativity from more people. For instance, with native Indians, everyone knew how to weave—well, maybe some did better pots than others—but we’ve got to get back to everybody having a creative eye and creative participation. This elitist kind of kissing of hems and so forth I react to very basically. You know, the Quakers were sent to jail for not doffing their hats in front of royalty. There’s that spirit. vanR: You’re beginning to sound a little bit like William Morris and John Ruskin.
56 Weese: Really? I appreciate them but I also see the downside of isolating yourself. If you look at some of the later stuff I’ve done I think it’s modern architecture but it doesn’t leave the past forever behind. We have to triangulate our critiques—as I’ve mentioned earlier I think that the Farnsworth house should be called the Farnsworth pavilion because it doesn’t measure up as a house. One of the people who wrote a very, I thought, astute and overlooked critique—it’s just like once you reach hegemony, no one listens—is James Marston Fitch’s critique of Mies’s use of glass. Glass is one of the most ephemeral and difficult non-building products that you can deal with because it reflects and it doesn’t show shade and shadow and so it’s a very dangerous product. But everyone’s using it. You have these modern and neo- high-tech architects and they immediately grid their building and then go home early and go to bed. vanR: It sounds like you are arguing for a more complex approach to building with a variety of materials.
Weese: You bet. History can still be visited and reinterpreted. I go back to Eduard Sekler. He got away with it because Giedion was getting a little bit old, I guess. But in relationship to Brunelleschi he said that he really didn’t invent anything, it was the way he saw what was there and what he interpreted, so it was a way of seeing. In fact, I was asked to write a piece for Eduard Sekler’s festschrift, which was a great honor. I tried to show how history is a continuum and that modernity had a huge hubris to think that they could throw it away. I think that we have some support from the bio-psychologists, people like E. O. Wilson or Stephen Gould, who say our brains are wired and we’ve been this way, that we don’t evolve or change that quickly. There are a lot of things that are culturally or traditionally brought down in our genetic makeup in our heads. I did a lot of reading on Jung and the archetypes and all that. He is pretty wild but, again, I think that some of the archetypal sets that our minds keep wanting… You know, we like walls that are vertical and we like enclosure rather than danger. We came from caves and therefore some cave-like feeling of containment is probably the way we like to dwell—not on raw planes of slippery materials—and so on and so forth.
57 vanR: Obviously this sets you distinctly apart from Mies and SOM and the other architects who were getting so much work—you’ve mentioned that SOM was just such a dominant force. How did you feel about your position in Chicago and the fact that there might not have been room for people like you?
Weese: Well, I think what you have to accept is that if you take a certain position you are not jockeying for large commissions. What you have to understand in your thinking is, what do I have to do to satisfy my ego and produce meaningful work? I didn’t consciously do this, but I think I’m predisposed to “small is beautiful.” I then got some allies in my historic searches for architects who really haven’t done a lot of work. One of the problems at Harry’s office was that we were getting so much work that we were not attending to it very well. We were moving on to the next one and kind of guiltily neglecting our fine clients. We didn’t work as hard. You can turn into mass production. So you can name a number of architects on my list who were wonderful and who went deeper and more carefully into exemplary work rather than trying to build on every corner and capture every job. vanR: Would you give a few examples?
Weese: Yes, I’d start with Labrouste. He really has two buildings and maybe a bridge and then he was in charge of a lot of public work that he administered. But I’d give anything for that one building, Bibliotheque St. Geneviève. vanR: The library in Paris?
Weese: Yeah… Then there’s Mackintosh—he was a surly fellow. Sigurd Leverentz built a building every ten years. You know, Aalto never really built a big building and when he did a fairly big building like Finlandia it lost its cohesion. Big buildings have destroyed architects. It definitely destroyed Ed Dart. I was really disappointed when he said “I’ve got to do big work,” and he joined up with Loebl Schlossman and did big, bad work. He had a position and he forsook it. Gropius lent his name to the Pan-Am
58 building—what good is this? I think you’ve got to find a place where you can express ambition in conjunction with the client. Again, the real object lesson is the Glessner relationship with Richardson. I think that what I’m really saying is that I’ve resolved that I can express something that really matters. Well, you can look around my house here and a piece of furniture like that matters. vanR: You’re pointing to a cabinet that looks like it’s handmade.
Weese: Yeah, that was in a show, “Divine Details.” vanR: Did you design it?
Weese: Yeah, and I invented the hardware, which is all made out of wood. And I designed the stained glass there for the church. Our son is a very good potter. So what are we bringing back? We’re bringing back the Ruskinian and Morrisian trades as reminders. Obviously, it’s not a big power base, but it’s more meaningful to me. Asplund—when you see these people concentrating and not building on every continent, I think it’s very important to think of that. I think I understand why I’m doing that. And my wife, Cindy, who’s a very good architect, has concentrated in a few areas and done some very good work, but, again, not a lot. vanR: Well, she’s also spent a lot of her time teaching.
Weese: In the last five years she’s become dean at Washington University. She is a partner and she still has jobs in St. Louis and she’s working on a job in Chicago right now. But I hope it’s not an excuse. I think that, again, the inventors of CIAM and the people who came out of World War One, or before and after, they wanted to change the world. I think the better motto is to embellish what’s there. Corbusier wanted to tear down Paris and rebuild and we’re glad he didn’t. Haussmann went about as far as you probably should. James Stirling had a plan to tear down London and he came back three years later and reformed himself and said “I’m going to live with
59 London.” Thank you very much. And he said he’d do these little buildings or try to fit in. vanR: To return to these two exhibitions, you’ve explained that you weren’t looking for a huge client base for your career. So what were you looking for in the show “Chicago Architects”? You’ve agreed that it was self-promotional. You were trying on one side to reintroduce several generations of architects who had been overlooked, but were you doing anything for yourself?
Weese: Of course. I think there was polemic in that. It may be innocent. I don’t consider myself a great strategist—I think that Stanley is a superb strategist and he’s the guy who, somewhere during or after this show, showed up and sprung the word “theory’ on all of us. He went around the circle in a public meeting and asked us, “What’s your theory of architecture?” It caught me by complete surprise. vanR: Did you have an answer for him?
Weese: No. I didn’t have a theory of architecture. I probably still don’t. Architectural theory has produced another kind of divorce that I don’t understand. The trucking with Derrida and Foucault—I don’t see what that has to do with architecture. You have to go back to people who are more profound than I am for support. Again, I would quote Aalto’s recent book of writings that it’s pretty clear there’s no theory going for him. He’s a wonderful guy, he talks about the little man. Isn’t that nice? If that’s a theory, then I’m for it. The psychology—you know his encomium for Asplund about the hidden biological, psychological—that’s theory. I’ll go with that. vanR: Can you talk a bit about how you felt Chicago was being perceived by the East Coast elite or the rest of the United States?
Weese: With this exhibition, I think that Stanley was modeling his thoughts on the New York Five—you know, they were ahead of us. They have, outside of perhaps Hejduk, they have huge practices and they are very successful. I
60 can’t think of anybody in the Chicago Seven who’s as busy as they are. So we’re taking the middle position, again. Chicago is not a cutting-edge, if I dare use that word, scene for architecture. We probably wanted to promote ourselves. We wanted to speak out—we were in our forties and we wanted to kick the traces out a bit—but I don’t think that we had any grand schemes. Helmut is the only one who can claim an international reputation. vanR: Well, Stanley did some work in Japan.
Weese: Oh, yes. Stanley ran with the fast lane. He’s taken a totally different course, which I think is more admirable—the latest incarnation being this grass-roots education. It’s very fascinating. Chicago, I don’t mind being a second city. Look at Emory Stanford Hall and Barry Byrne with the Kenna Apartments or some of those other apartments—if that’s a second city, then I’m for it. You can take the idea of the little flowers that grow between the cracks of craggy mountain passes—that’s more interesting than the grand trees on the plain. There’s something about rediscovering and there’s a biological analogy that you can have all the hybrid seed corn that covers the Midwest but you’ve got to replenish your biological base with rugged Mexican wild strains of corn, or whatever. What happens with us? Where’s it coming from? I think that Chicago’s got to find whatever they have right here. It’s still here but we just pass it by and diminish it and devalue it. I’m not worried about being the second city. You can come see us in ten years or twenty years and you can decide for yourself. I mean, Los Angeles is so free because they have nothing to bounce their ideas off. There’s nothing there, so they can do anything they want. There’s no context, there’s no texture, there’s no nothing, as Gertrude Stein said. vanR: Well, I think there are some people in Los Angeles who would beg to differ with you.
Weese: Well, they are free to explore form in a privatized environment. They are struggling to put a few buildings downtown in L.A. What can you do that doesn’t involve getting in your car? This is fundamental. I’m sure they can
61 build individual monuments to the private sector somewhere. Now they’re going to try to build a cathedral and a concert hall.
[Tape 3: Side 1] vanR: “Chicago Architects” and “One Hundred Years of Architecture in Chicago” were both held in 1976. There was obviously an interest in keeping your group of four together afterwards. In fact, you added three more people, which would bring your number to seven. At that point, I think you began to officially call yourselves the Chicago Seven. You added Jim Freed, Tom Beeby, and Jim Nagle. Can you describe what your state of mind was after “Chicago Architects” closed? Were you satisfied with what that accomplished?
Weese: Yeah, I think you do those things and, you know, very often there’s a strange phenomenon where you get something published in a magazine and you say, “That’s fine,” and then you hardly look at it and you file it. You may not have even read the article itself. So there’s this kind of dismissive thing that takes place and then you get lonely again and you ask, “Well, what did I actually do?” You’re not a good follower of your own event. But I felt that there was enough moxie in the group that we kept meeting ad hoc, saying, “Well, what do we do next?” and “We have to have a follow-up.” I think it did produce enough energy and interest. I just have to say that, as far as I know, Stanley was the ringleader. He was most anxious to do something again and I can’t even remember what was next. vanR: Well, the next big thing after Freed, Beeby, and Nagle were added was to do the official “Seven Chicago Architects” show at the Richard Gray Gallery. That was in 1976. That was a rather conceptual show of individual houses. Each one of you contributed something that was quite different from the next person. Before we get into that, can you describe how the four of you came to find Freed, Beeby, and Nagle?
62 Weese: Well, we were looking for a wider base. With Freed, his connection was that he was dean at IIT. That was an opportunity to subvert the East Coast a bit on Stanley’s part. Again, Stanley would have brought these people in, I think. I’m surprised that Helmut wasn’t a part of that, but I guess Helmut was probably just emerging. You know, you have to think back to what was happening with Helmut. He was probably busy negotiating with the Murphys. But Stanley was trying to build a critical mass, I guess you'd call it. We had enough energy because the 1970s were an up-and-down time and there might have been time because, you know, some of our firms were not that active. There was a downturn and an out of control condo craze. vanR: Well, there was a recession in 1973-74 and then there was the oil crisis.
Weese: Right. That affected architecture, so you went into other realms to satisfy your energy level. vanR: Had you been aware of the work of Freed and Nagle and Beeby before this?
Weese: Oh, Nagle, of course. Nagle and Booth had been working together and they also had been employees of Stanley. And in 1976 it was still Booth and Nagle, wasn’t it? vanR: Yes.
Weese: So Nagle may have lobbied to join. Jack Hartray left Harry’s office in February of 1976. He spent a year looking around and he tried to put together Hammond and Beeby, and Booth and Nagle. He worked very hard on that, but he failed. There were too many… But then Freed was, obviously, some kind of a lever against the East Coast. vanR: The “Seven Chicago Architects” show, as I’ve mentioned, was a conceptual show of country houses. They were isolated houses, although a few were more urban. Some of them didn’t even have a specific site. Can you discuss the design that you entered?
63 Weese: Oh, yeah. That was a kind of a fortified agricultural establishment, along the lines of the German Hof. I think I spent enough time in Europe to study the concentration of agricultural buildings that form an architectural unity, as opposed to the Midwestern kind of dispersion of outbuildings on a typical Iowa farm, and so on. I was exploring what kind of forms you could take on a kind of bucolic… I guess in everything here I was running counter to what I thought the other people would do. I was trying to differentiate myself from the other Chicago Seven members. We were not a cohesive philosophical group. We were individuals and I think this reflected the pluralism of the times, you know, with Venturi’s book. The New York Five looked pretty cohesive because you could call them the Whites but then they certainly dispersed. Graves certainly peeled off—maybe he was the only one of that group. Then they had the Grays of Stern and that other group—I forget who they were exactly. But it was obviously showing a kind of dissolution of direction and therefore we were trying to do things that would contrast with each other. I was the carrier of the vernacular flag, I guess. vanR: At about this time, you had done a study of county courthouses, which was certainly more vernacular buildings.
Weese: Oh, yeah, that was a grant from the National Trust. The courthouse thing was another crisis, because not every courthouse was adequate for modern functions and conveniences. I’m not sure what the influence of the courthouse study was, but I got ten students and we went out and found courthouses that were in jeopardy and needed study and the students went out and studied them. Most of them were in prominent locations, like a courthouse square, in the middle of these small communities. Again, it was an issue of saving something before it got inadvertently destroyed. Maybe that corner gets turned as well, but it was, again, a context ripe for invasion and destruction. I think I get ideas, but I never followed up. I think the National Trust has done a lot of work, but I keep doing things at that level and then not finding out what happened afterwards.
64 vanR: Let’s return to your hof. You said you were trying to design something that would consciously set you apart from your colleagues. Did you have an idea of what kinds of houses they were going to do? If so, did you make yours more extreme than you would have done on your own?
Weese: No, I think I wasn’t into the experimentalism that I knew was probably going to be coming from them. I was trying to go backwards, in a kind of a roots thing. I was trying to imagine myself inhabiting the space. So it turns out to be that it’s not avant-garde, it’s anti-avant-garde. It’s building on some tradition. I guess I’m puzzled by the word avant-garde. I think it happened once in a context and I don’t think it happens now. It’s for anthropologists, sociologists, and others to define what the avant-garde is. At the beginning it was something, but I think a lot of people still use that word. I would probably have said to the rest of the guys, “Look, you’re not avant-garde. You are too comfortable.” vanR: Would you have said that to them before this show?
Weese: Yeah, if we would have had a private conversation. We were all doing it. We were not playing off each other. We were all individual entrepreneurs doing whatever would happen; we didn’t discuss it. We didn’t sit in one atelier and bounce ideas off one another. If Stanley would have had the additional idea of saying, “You’ve got to do all your projects in one room,” then something else might have come out of it. No one knew what we were going to do until the projects arrived. Then it turned out to be a kind of crazy quilt of stuff. vanR: Do you think any of the other six would have considered themselves to be avant-garde? Would they have been surprised by your feelings?
Weese: I think they would have tried to defend the position of being avant-garde, yeah. I don’t have much to say—I’m not a good historian, you are. But avant- garde is cold-water flats, it’s deprivation, it’s really being on the outs. vanR: The starving artist stereotype?
65 Weese: The starving artist! I mean, no one’s paid a price for this. vanR: You said they were too comfortable. Do you think they had too many clients and they’ve been too successful?
Weese: Yeah. You’re playing the role of being avant-garde. I think there are certain architects on the East and West Coast who want to invent something. I was too stricken by Sekler’s definition of Brunelleschi. You don’t invent anything, even Aalto says that. That’s novelty, that’s, “Okay, so…?” Disney can invent a theme park. What’s the difference between novelty and originality? vanR: Perhaps a depth of conviction or a deeper purpose?
Weese: Yeah, yeah. vanR: So is it fair to say that you didn’t think there were any avant-garde architects in Chicago?
Weese: I don’t think at this time there is any avant-garde. vanR: Did you feel that way in the 1970s?
Weese: I don’t think that we changed anything. We changed the surface of things. We were on the edge of bringing people back into the city, but that’s not avant-garde, that’s just resettling. I’m sorry that I can’t help on the word avant-garde. It puzzles me; it disturbs me. I think it’s a conceit. It calls for pork-pie hats and capes. vanR: À la Frank Lloyd Wright?
Weese: Well, Frank Lloyd Wright suffered a bit for his beliefs. He didn’t get all the major commissions in the beginning. Then he got everything or at least everything he wanted. I often wonder if the Guggenheim had been designed
66 by someone else whether it would be standing today. I mean, you have to think about things like that. vanR: As an aside, we haven’t talked much about Wright. Were you interested in him or aware of his work when you were young?
Weese: Well, it’s another case where I grew up in Kenilworth and there was George Maher’s house around the corner. There are probably sixteen or eighteen Maher houses in Kenilworth and Chicago. There are Wright or Wright- derivative houses all over that I grew up with. So Wright was around from the beginning. My father took my brother to see Wright but I never saw him. I didn’t like the atmosphere of either Taliesin. It seemed like some kind of thought-control situation and it really disturbed me. I think we’re still kind of uncovering the psyche of what happened there. H. Allen Brooks has done a great service by showing that the Prairie School was not the work of one individual but the work of a collective and then it got skewed. There were a tremendous number of talents that were feeding off of each other. That was more interesting to me than the individual genius of Wright. I saw some work of Wright’s that I thought was deficient, like the Unitarian Church in Madison, which fails in detail. I’ve never seen Fallingwater but I’ll take anyone to see Unity Temple and sit there in great reverence. So, you know, it’s just the hagiographic treatment of people that… We all have feet of clay and we do some pretty bad things, may the Lord forgive us. I grew up with Wright and knew his work on the North Shore. I didn’t know much about Oak Park but you go by the Ward Willits house and there are a couple of houses in Wilmette. vanR: You’ve spoken a little bit about your submission to the “Seven Chicago Architects” exhibition and how it seemed to be part of a crazy quilt of entries in this show. You explained that there didn’t seem to be any overarching philosophy in the show. It has been said that each of these entries was an aesthetic position paper. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
67 Weese: Yeah, I think you can see that in Stuart Cohen’s entry. It was a harbinger of what he wanted to do, which was very careful selective historicist work with a lot of knowledge. He’s a very bright guy. So there were a lot of directions. I saw Nagle’s continuation of his experiences in Holland and the De Stijl and the kind of hard-line Mondrianesque aspects of his work. Stanley is one of the harder ones, because he’s so facile. You saw personalities being expressed, but it may go back to what the 1976 show was. It was a collection of people and buildings that stood on their own merit or fell on their own merit, but they weren’t part of one school. But there are a lot of people who can’t produce schools of architecture. Take guys like Hans Poelzig in Germany. You can start naming architects who do very interesting individual work but they are not great spreaders of teaching, like Gropius was. But then you have to look at their work and ask, “How does it fit?” Maybe that’s what we’re looking at here. None of these people in that 7-11 group are professional educators. Freed was a stand-in and it probably frustrated the hell out of him. Stanley or Stuart are the closest… What was most interesting was that Stanley gathered everybody at Yale sometime later—you’ll get this from Stanley—it was the wildest scene I ever saw. He got the Yale students doing a townhouse and a country house in the manner of the Chicago Seven cum Eleven plus the New York Five plus the Grays. On top of which, Stirling was there. They had this jury that was so packed. The poor students, I don’t know if any of them are still in architecture. They were attacked mercilessly. It was a forum for people to get up and argue and the students were dismissed pretty quickly. That was one follow-up that you should ask Stanley about. Then Gehry was the only guy who wasn’t there. A lot of these students had an easy time replicating a Richard Meier house. The kid who tried to do something in my style had a hard time following what I was doing because I don’t have a continuous style. vanR: Each of these students was assigned one architect?
Weese: Whether they were assigned or they picked, each student had to do a country house and a townhouse in the manner of X.
68 vanR: What was the purpose of this exercise?
Weese: That was Stanley’s idea of extending the idea. I thought it was quite good, but it was a terrible thing to visit on his students. But everybody came. It was a hell of a gathering of glitterati—I love these words. vanR: One of the other things I’d like you do talk about is the fact that this “Seven Chicago Architects” show was at the Richard Gray Gallery, which is a place where one would buy works of art. In the catalog Seven Chicago Architects Dennis Adrian wrote that you were artist/architects. Did you agree with that position?
Weese: Well, I thought I was an artist. I did that painting behind you there. vanR: It reminds me a little bit of Keck’s watercolors.
Weese: Does it? I did that stained glass stanchion there and I found out I wasn’t an artist when I submitted it to the Arts Club and they said, “Oh, we’re sorry but you have to be an artist to enter the annual artists’ show.” I was a full dues-paying member of the Arts Club and at that point, I decided I didn’t need the Arts Club anymore. I was in the salon des refusés. I brought that to the exhibit. I designed that stained glass and then made these small transparencies and had the stained glass man put it in lead, but it didn’t qualify. So I guess I’m not an artist. So, what’s your next question? vanR: Well, was it a conscious decision to have this show in the Richard Gray Gallery? He was obviously a great supporter of your group.
Weese: Yeah. You’re going to find that out from Stanley or Stuart. It seemed to me like we were going upscale. It was on Michigan Avenue and I think I dressed up for the opening. Well, Larry and Stanley had done art. Beeby is a great delineator. It used to be that the Art Institute didn’t consider architects’ drawings worth saving. I don’t think that we’re artists, but it’s a means to an end. Everything we do is sort of illustrative of what should be built. As a
69 strict definition, we should not be called artists. We can hang our heads, you know. vanR: On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that during this period there was a renewed interest in architectural drawing.
Weese: Oh, definitely. vanR: Stuart has written about it. There was a fairly influential show at MoMA in 1974 on the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Weese: Yeah that was Drexler’s show, wasn’t it? vanR: Yes. There was a general rediscovery of the quality of the rendering of that period. I think that people like Tom Beeby and Stanley took in interest in the art of architecture. Did you?
Weese: Well, I think it was a moment. I think that Graves and some of these people actually have a pretty good price on some of their drawings. But, you see, we came out of the Bauhaus. I was alarmed to read in Elaine Hochman’s book that Gropius hired a guy to get him through school and to do all of his drawings. I guess Mies was a great draftsman, but I couldn’t see it. All I saw were his stick figures. I can do a better life-drawing figure than Mies. vanR: Well, perhaps there’s a difference between drafting and rendering.
Weese: Oh, there’s a definite difference between drafting and rendering. But we came out of a period that was culpable in their attack on the Beaux-Arts and cutting history off. They were very proud to do crummy drawings. The rediscovery—thanks to the Art Institute and John Zukowsky… I can’t remember when the Art Institute founded its architecture department, but it was rather recent, wasn’t it?
70 vanR: It was officially founded in 1981. The library had been collecting drawings prior to that, but they hadn’t been treated as art objects, as they are now. In fact, they cut up a number of drawings in order to microfilm them, which would never happen today.
Weese: Well, we rediscovered the medium of architect as delineator and illustrator. I think that’s important. We talked about John Van der Meulen and the fact that he was a very good draftsman. There are some wonderful drawings of his that are still around. It was the same with Brewster Adams. These guys could draw. I think that it’s one step in the process and a lot of things don’t get built but you can see them in the drawings. vanR: I’ve described the “Seven Chicago Architects” show as one of conceptual houses. You said that you were thinking of yourself as the client for the house you designed. Did you have any idea that this house might be buildable?
Weese: Yes, I wanted it to be buildable. I wanted it to be habitable. I was a drag on the system. I wanted to revisit not invent. I talked earlier about the centralized motif of the townhouse. My townhouse had to represent the purposes of a townhouse, which was something of yourself, for yourself, but also something that is shared, which is a street façade. I had to imagine it as part of a larger whole. Therefore I was in contrast to the concept of individuality. Maybe one of the worst things that has happened in our time is the idea of the individual building as an object. I think we talked earlier about the IIT symposium when Ken Frampton gave a serious paper contrasting Mies to Erich Mendelsohn. Mies’s buildings were an object detached, oblivious and dismissive of landform whereas, Mendelsohn’s buildings nestled, subtly integrated into the topography. The irony was that in the IIT setting, the symposium participants let the trenchant and scholarly Frampton critique quietly pass without comment! You talk to students in school today and they want to do an individual building. All those things that read as civilized places are a combination of parts. The parts are subservient to the whole. I’m willing to stand or fall on that principle. If you
71 do something, it has to be commensurate—that’s a good word, we haven’t used that. It’s a part of a totality. If you want to be commensurate with the city, you have to go to the least common denominator. If you take a wild building by some of the experimentalists, then the commensurate aspect of it is in the thousands, or something. I’d like to go down to a commensurate aspect of one, which would be like a brick or something. That would be the knitting together of everything. I really wanted to suggest that the townhouse suggests a city and we can’t forget the city. vanR: The “Seven Chicago Architects” show was in 1976 you were still in your brother Harry’s office at that time. In 1977, you made a decision to leave his office and open your own firm. Can you describe how you came to take that path?
Weese: Yes, I think a little bit of background on that is important. I think I’ve covered pretty carefully in our earlier sessions that I had a very close relationship with Harry and that he was a very helpful role model. He included me in a number of his activities as a very small child. So I looked at him very carefully and as a mentor and respected him. I think he really enjoyed me, for some reason. He referred to me as a farmer because I kind of enjoyed travelling with my father on his business trips and looking at rural landscapes and so forth, so the ties with all of that got me that moniker. I think that when I came back from 1957 to 1967 it was a sharing and learning experience between myself and my brother. After a while you know each other in a business sense and it was a very fast-moving office and we were very busy. You learn what the actions and reactions of one to the other would be. We learned to work together or to scrupulously avoid each other on certain issues. The working relationship with my brother, who was extremely talented and somewhat mercurial in his actions—I learned to how avoid or to work within those boundaries. He had great design facilities that I learned sometimes went beyond the need or discipline of producing a project. I was a pretty good critic on certain buildings, such as the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. At the last minute he wanted to revise his drawings with his next idea. He wanted to take this perfectly prismatic, triangular,
72 volumetric structure with sharp arrises and chamfer back the corners in order to get light through a vertical stack of windows which, I thought, would have really seriously destroyed the kind of pristine prism shape of what he had so carefully wrought. I only just suggested that he put a slot of light back from the corners and he accepted that. Sometimes I helped him clarify buildings by actually just disciplining them. In the 180 LaSalle building he suddenly wanted to take the structural columns that came down on a twenty-foot grid and remove every other column at the ground level to distinguish the arcade. But it was so anti-structural that I talked him out of it. He wanted to take the marquee off the Milwaukee Performing Arts Center at the very last minute. These kinds of reversals of direction on designs that had been developed carefully with models and with other designers working them through kind of alarmed me. There were signals showing up that there were other things motivating him. There was a certain kind of competitiveness with young designers. I think I also mentioned earlier that we had a series of these business arrangements of sharing of stock and other unfortunate organizational distractions. But I felt that if I was going to mature I would have to become an equal partner even though, in some sense, one is never equal. The respect that I thought my due seemed to be becoming elusive. I think I covered that pretty well—the design incursions that seemed arbitrary, rather than building up cases. Buildings that are supposed to last decades cannot be willfully altered. As long as I was able to do more sober, slightly more boring structures—they seemed to have a certain kind of recessiveness almost—I was happy while, at the same time, the management of the office became more complex. I assumed certain business management, which was also very distracting. We had an office towards 1977 that had one hundred and forty people, with satellite offices in Washington where we were deeply involved in the Metro system. We also had a satellite office in Miami because we had a light-rail system there. So the management, even the manpower allocations and allotments every Monday morning, became a real drag. So it was getting pushed down into management issues. The other issue is more difficult to describe but it was actually the merging problem of three issues. I think Kitty, Harry’s wife, could probably see that I was getting increasingly disturbed. So we had lunch together and I frankly told her that if Harry was
73 going to continue to use alcohol, which was part of the problem, and go into development of real estate or become his own client… It was very distracting because it also had to do with capital infusions which were in conflict with the use of office monies. We argued about those things. Then the alcohol thing was kind of a sleeper because my family was all teetotalers. My father and my mother never had any alcohol around the house. Harry, it turns out, was probably a binge drinker and had had this problem for a long time. But it was masked either by the niceties of social protocol or coming out of the World War Two popular novels where it was written that hard drinking was a part of life. But we now know a lot more about the medical and maybe genetic issues with that. It became a very difficult situation in the office. The other thing really was that Harry’s personality had changed and I don’t know how to say this in any sophisticated medical sense. I think it affected his general personality and he became more arbitrary and more self-oriented. There were a lot of disconnects. He actually blew a lot of client interviews by not listening and not concentrating on the programmatic requirements. We had a huge interview in Minneapolis for the First National Bank and it was the developer from the Hines Company out of Texas who came two days ahead and briefed us on what the program was. I was astounded to go to the interview and to see the program dismissed and another site picked by Harry. These kinds of disconnects really alarmed me and I said to myself, there’s something missing here. I guess in the long haul we were gradually seeing his personality change. He was not the brother that I knew. We had a couple of staged professional interventions and so forth and the family was suffering quite a bit. I just felt that after twenty years with Harry I had learned everything I could and nothing more will benefit me and I should go on my own. At the same time, my wife, Cynthia, was practicing. I had actually met her in 1963 when I was called to Washington University by my close classmate and colleague, Fumihiko Maki, who had just been recruited from Washington University, where he had been teaching for five or six years, to go back to Harvard. The command was “Come immediately!” He needed me to finish teaching his masters course. I met Cindy that spring. She was a student in another class. We were married shortly thereafter. She came to Chicago and finished her course and then started her own work
74 immediately in the community here with small remodelings. She was growing very successfully as an individual entrepreneur. She also had worked part-time in Harry’s office when charrettes came on. She also worked for Joe Karr, the landscape architect. So realizing that I was probably never going to become an equal partner, in a flash the Ides of March 1977 came, and I asked Cindy and two other people working in the office if they would like to join me as equal partners in a new firm called Weese Seegers Hickey Weese. They, of course, acceded immediately. I went to Harry on a Monday and resigned, withdrew my stock, and asked him if I could take the clients that I had been working with. He was very generous in that respect. I’m not sure I shocked him—I think he saw disillusionment taking place and his concerns were becoming more privatized. vanR: So you think he was aware that you were becoming dissatisfied?
Weese: Yes, we had had a number of run-ins about how the firm was actually going to be owned, with lawyers and things like that. It was getting very hard and it was counter-productive. I think the proof of what was happening and what had occurred was that I took a number of clients—institutional and housing clients—and with the exception of one client I took everything that I had been working on. The other kind of comical situation at the end, which showed a level of frustration but also a level of the kind of direction that the office was taking, was that one of my last tasks was to argue with the Marriott Hotel people. We had been involved for a number of months in the Marriott Hotel at the corner of Ohio and Michigan. The client was not a totally ideal client to say the least and I was arguing that we should collect our fee. I said to the gentleman that I was dealing with at Marriott that I was leaving the office but that I would be very happy to get this fee from you first, saying “I’m going to set up my own architectural practice.” The gentleman with whom we’d been discussing and arguing these things for a number of sessions—he didn’t even know I was an architect—he turned to me and he said, “Oh, I thought you were a lawyer.” I realized that everything was going badly. I wanted to get out of the Marriott, which is an embarrassment, and out of a firm that just took jobs just to keep the mouths fed. The firm had actually changed
75 character and my brother had changed character. I wanted freedom for me and my wife and the two young people, so we opened up our own office.
[Tape 3: Side 2] vanR: So you opened up your own office in Chicago with your wife Cindy, two people from Harry’s office, and many of your old clients. Did you continue to find new clients? Did Cindy bring in her clients?
Weese: Well, we came out running fast. We set up certain spoken or unspoken principles. One was that we wanted to run a small office. I think I mentioned earlier that I was not interested in megalomaniac projects but in projects that could be controlled. I had a semi-subliminal historical sense that the buildings that are small are better: they are more thought-out, they are controlled, there’s a closer client-architect relationship. So I set this up as a goal. Also, it was a way of probably acknowledging certain limitations. I’m not a totally public person and I can appeal to certain client types and we wanted to concentrate on that. 1977 was boom-time so we collected a lot of work. But at no time have we had more than ten employees. In the early days we probably did two- or three-thousand units of urban rehabilitation or new housing in such a manner and so quickly that we had to subcontract jobs. That was not totally effective to subcontract work to other architects to either do the construction drawings or the supervision, but that tapered off after a while. We had projects in Norfolk, Virginia, and in Iowa I had ongoing college clients. So the work that we took with us, including highrise apartments on the North Side at State and Chestnut and Clark and Chestnut… We had essentially not-for-profit clients, this turned out to be where we were. These were carry-over clients, but shortly some very nice things happened in terms of the word spreading. Stanley Tigerman was very happy that we’d opened up our own office. I think it was kind of a sign—well, back to the Chicago Seven—of us spreading our wings a little bit. So he brought James Stirling in very early on to show him our vest-pocket one-room office. The other thing was that we didn’t want to have private offices or a hierarchy so we had, and still have, this one room. I’m not sure
76 you always communicate even though you have one room, but at least there’s maybe a little less privatizing of one’s activities and shutting the door and creating the hierarchy. I guess I was really concentrating on a democratization of the office. I don’t think that my partners really could say they were equal to me because I’d had twenty years of experience and together they had a combination of twenty-five. So they were quite pleased with this open-ended kind of situation. But the nice things that started happening if you look forward in our practice was that we were getting really good work. We were getting some very nice libraries. I’d done the Williams College library in Williamstown. So I really picked up the library work as a specialty because for better or worse things were starting to get specialized. And we’d done a number of libraries at other colleges and universities. Then I got a call, cold, about doing a chapel at Illinois Wesleyan, the Evelyn Chapel. That raised our effort for quality and intensity to a much higher level. This was 1979, maybe early 1980. The thing is that I really regard the client there as being noble and fully foresighted. He never asked whether we’d ever done a chapel before. vanR: So how did he come to you in the first place?
Weese: Well, it was a connection. We had done the library at Grinnell College, where we’d rehabilitated a Walter Netsch library of 1960 and we got that job on the strength of sending clients to see our other work. They went to Williams College and we had done a lot of really inventive furniture there—some of which has been patented, actually—with the two-story carrels and different ways for students to study intensely at large surfaces in privacy or together. So instead of just throwing furniture in, we actually designed libraries around the furniture. This was a whole new area of exploration and it really made libraries places where people wanted to be and it increased their attendance tremendously. The clients, seeing Williams, figured we could really build on that and Grinnell did that. I met Walter Netsch on a plane once going to Washington and he said to me, “What are you doing to my library?” I said, “Well, Walter, it was an interesting project…” You do find there are certain rigidities in modernity where he’d done certain strange
77 circulation patterns that they had been unable to live with. We were trying to be rock-bottom functional. We did long interviews with the students. We’d go prefabricate mock-up carrels and we’d set them up in the library as kind of anticipatory events. We did this at Williams and then we carried it over to Grinnell because the client was interested in that. We set them up to test what the students would like. They filled out these forms and we found out that left-handed students liked certain things and right-handed students liked it another way. We got great feedback and great loyalty from this whole interaction. Walter’s library was pretty rational—much easier to fix than some of his other projects. He’s taken a lot of hits. He’s a really wonderful guy but his hard-headedness as an abstract designer produced this kind of architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and these fan- shaped library stack systems at Northwestern or Regenstein Library at the U of C. So he’s coming in for a lot of revisionist tries to fix his buildings. We’re very good friends because I really respect him but his buildings—the problem with them is that time catches up with them and they fail or succeed in use. So to get back to the Evelyn Chapel, the gentleman who hired us at Grinnell College was a business manager who had then transferred to Illinois Wesleyan. He put us on a list for a brand-new chapel. It’s a very strong Methodist school and it had never had a chapel. We competed against Skidmore and won that commission. The president had studied every Methodist church and he’d gone wherever John Wesley had preached in England. He threw this whole pile of material on my desk and he said, “This is what I’ve seen and I’ve been everywhere, but you have to design it.” It was a most wonderful experience. You always look for a client who has sensibilities but who realizes that they’re the client and you’re the architect. vanR: So did you use his material as a background for your design?
Weese: Yeah, I read everything. I read Wesley’s journals. He grew up right in the midst of Christopher Wren, but he was a proselytizer. I was looking for architectural insights or comments and there were two, I think. One was that he was preaching in a large livery stable, or something. You know, he did a lot of preaching in the fields and the open air in conversion-type
78 arrangements. So he made no mention of Christopher Wren or the high level of architecture that was taking place. One comment was about some barn that had bad acoustics. But I took other hints and clues. He had a second conversion in the Moravian colony at Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I think the chapel was a revisiting, a reanalysis, of historic events reinterpreted. You know, churches have to have a certain presence. I think that Skidmore lost the commission because they fought with the president about where to site the building. They had it all wrong. I don’t know where they came up with the idea. I said, “Look, maybe the president knows where to put this thing.” And he was dead right. He wanted us to put it on a street, facing the campus, with the front of it across the street from the campus but on axis with a very long mall. So it had a public presence and a campus-dominant presence. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill wanted to put it internal to the campus so that the back end would actually face the street rather than the entrance. They didn’t get the totality of what the president had wanted—that was the one specific input he had as a somewhat visionary thing. I guess what I’d like to say is that this church led to another church, which led to another church, which led to another. By means of clients seeing what we were trying to do and by embedding ourselves in the existential needs of wherever we were and what the needs were and close listening. I’d like to fight the idea that our churches are eclectic. They are different, they don’t formulate as abstractions, they respond to situations. The next church was in Peoria and they said, “We like that church in Bloomington and we want one just like it.” But after we discussed everything and it came out that their input changed what we did. Then we went to Wartburg College in Iowa. But I liked these—they were intense, deep, non-profitable projects, but they worked and I think they are modern. If you go in and see these spaces, they are light-filled and very discreet in detail. We revisited everything and we revisited the needs and the liturgy and so forth. vanR: The Evelyn Chapel, one can see at the outset, has some historical features. But the details are very clean and crisp.
79 Weese: Yeah, I wrote a piece in defense of what we were doing in Threshold magazine, the UIC publication. I thought I was trying to be clear and non- jargonistic in writing that. One of the problems of modernity is that there is nothing you can do. If you’re totally reductive, there’s nothing to engage the cultural mind. The Mies IBM building gives you nothing back. You look at it and you say, “Okay, I’ve seen that one. And in fact, it’s a little threatening because I see too much of it.” Louis Sullivan may be an eclectic or an aberration, or whatever, but you look at the Wainwright building, which is only ten stories high—I have to count it each time because I don’t believe it—and it engages you so wonderfully with its base, middle, top and your eye scans it and revisits it. We need that, we need some cultural feedback. vanR: This brings up an interesting point and perhaps now is a good time to address it. You mentioned Venturi in passing yesterday. Venturi, of course, is known for his very influential book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. That was done in the 1960s and funded in part by the Graham Foundation, which you have been on the board of. Can you talk a little bit about what that book might have meant to you? Did you read it? Did you agree with it?
Weese: Yeah, I think that Venturi wrote his book in 1967 and I think I finally got around to reading it in 1977. I don’t think that it affected me that much. In fact, I probably disagreed with it and I probably was hostile to it and I think I’ve become more tolerant to it in time. I felt like modernity, if it could be toppled by that thin a volume of material, then there must be something really wrong with modernity. I thought it was facetious. I think he was right, but for the wrong reasons. vanR: Would you explain why?
Weese: I think he’s carried on that way. His work is messages given in two dimensions. I was on a jury for the Louis Sullivan award in D.C. Venturi put in way too many projects. You know, Louis Sullivan had the idea of how you use decoration or ornament in architecture. But Venturi showed a lot of
80 buildings that were just bathroom tile laid on top of… There was a computer building at Pennsylvania University and the jury went on forever. There was an obscure architect in Lubbock, Texas, who really used brick in a very nice way and the jury really didn’t like Venturi but they knew him. So after a lot of argument back and forth, the jury gave the award to Venturi because he’s a known entity and you won’t go out on a limb giving it to some guy who really works with brick and ornament and shape and shadow… That’s what juries do. vanR: Do you recall who the architect in Texas was?
Weese: No, but I can figure it out. He was a good regionalist but it takes a lot of guts for a jury to go against popular opinion. There was a certain propaganda thing. That disappointed me because what Venturi did didn’t seem to fit into the high level of… Maybe we shouldn’t have even given an award. Anyway, that’s just an aside. Why does architecture have to have a certain expression of comic-strip approach? I think that Venturi’s houses were of great import. They were so small, you see, but that’s okay. They were very interesting, the ones out on the East Coast, the shingle revival or revisit. But the institutional work, I’ve not seen a building that satisfies me. I think it’s a superficial application, maybe tongue-in-cheek—I don’t want to say insincere. There’s a certain light-heartedness—there’s not enough gravitas for me. vanR: That is certainly one of the aspects that some people now identify with postmodernism, that sense of humor or wit. But that didn’t appeal to you?
Weese: Well, no. I’m too heavy-headed. Architecture is supposed to last. I think that Aalto’s statement is “Let’s not talk about this architecture now. Come back in thirty years and see what you think.” There have been many pitfalls. You’re building not just for yourself. We don’t have to use Mies’s quote or anything to say that you’re building for a community where even such questions as redundancy are important. We had an engineer in Chicago who wanted to build highrise slabs with a five-inch thickness because he knew he could do it. But he didn’t know everything else that doesn’t work with that, including
81 acoustics and deflection and placement of other elements like electrical conduits. That’s not the point—you shouldn’t look at the edge of a slab and say, “Oh, that engineer is a genius because he used a five-inch slab.” We have to go at some cultural level that is anonymous and say, “Well, this is going to last longer than me and it’s going to be here and it’s going to have some use beyond the moment.” Because they’re mortgaged for forty years. vanR: That’s a very pragmatic attitude.
Weese: It’s pragmatic and it’s boring, I guess. Even Venturi says boring but he’s not boring because he’s confrontational with his signboards. vanR: Besides pragmatic one of the other words that comes up in this period is romantic. That word has been applied to some of the Chicago Seven. Did you see your work as more romantic than modernist?
Weese: Yeah, I think that Stuart Cohen used that word quite effectively in what I think was an important piece of research—at the age of thirty-four or whatever it was. I think it can be misused. But if it suggests a tactile and friendly it could bring certain allusions to mind—a sense of place or history and all those things that can attach to it. I think it’s wrong to overuse words. We overuse the words vernacular and contextual. Words get twisted and actually misused. Gosh, I misuse a lot of words. I tried to look up the word bowdlerization the other day. It’s a dangerous word because it’s very specific and we use it. I wanted to use it irresponsibly and it was a lot of fun. I found out that Bowdler was a man and he was cleaning up Shakespeare, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted to use the word in the sense that everyone puts pediments on buildings and they are just overused features. I wanted to revisit and redigest—I see other architects doing that. The Scandinavian work of Asplund or early Aalto is very sincere and it works. It’s a reconstructing or a reconstituting or reorganizing of some very powerful features. And they’re plainer, they’re proto-modern. Look at how everyone’s hung their hat on Richardson. Richardson went back to Romanesque, but what did he do with it? They call him the “father of
82 modern architecture.” Can’t we understand that? He didn’t start from nowhere. He went back and he revisited and he put Romanesque back into other uses. I’m not sure, but he probably failed in terms of his public buildings, because the New York state capitol is kind of a scary place and it’s dark and doesn’t have that light-filled sense of open justice and non-collusive government or whatever, that simple Greek Revival does. So the symbolism isn’t quite there. But he was using all these past forms to be modern. Between Labrouste and Richardson and how their libraries relate, we cannot discard our past. I think it’s an illusion to say that we start with a blank slate. I’m really against that, I can say that in a number of ways—not effectively, but with me you start with some kind of tradition, especially with religion. But you can bring it alive again and we’ve been doing that for two thousand years. What’s the Christian church doing in a Roman basilica? Who knows? Good grief, we forgive history—the farther away, the more forgiving we are, I guess. We beat ourselves to death on all sorts of weird, non-sequential relationships. I think they have to be invested with real meaning. The borrowing, the eclecticism of Howard Van Doren Shaw or the rather sophisticated eclecticism of Robert A. M. Stern—their personal architectural libraries must be fundamentally incredible. They’ve got these huge folios. They look at them all the time and they’re combining elements. I don’t do that. If you look at any detail that we do, we look at it more in an optical sense. In the chapel, I wanted to avoid the question of the pediment, so we did a hipped roof which is more like a barn. You get out of the pediment and you get out of the portico by pushing the entry back into the facade. So you end up with one volumetric total. And the chapel at Wartburg had certain rhythms on the frieze around it, appliques that force your eye towards the middle of the building due to the in-tilting relationship of the appliques on the frieze. These are all optical phenomena, but if there’s nothing to engage you, in a curtain wall gridded highrise with the reflective glass, then you’re dealing with ephemera. Architecture cannot be ephemeral! Let’s face it. As I say, I think the strange relationships that I look for are unexplored connections. I think that in Leonard Eaton’s book American Architecture Comes of Age—he’s been accused of not being scholarly—he pointed out a very fundamental phenomenon. He showed how America, for the first time,
83 exported an indigenous architectural style back to Europe so that when Richardson died in 1886, the Finnish Romanticists, and to a lesser degree the Swedish and Danes and other Scandinavians, used American architecture of this type as a launching point. This ties back into my experience with Aalto, which I mentioned earlier, and the Glessner house. Why didn’t this come out more clearly? Eaton is not the most important architectural historian, but he had a very important, fundamentally interesting idea. So we look at all of these juxtapositions, I think, which is enriching. Maybe it’s not easy to do that. It’s easy to go to the pattern books and, in kind of an insincerity, to pick up elements and decorate buildings. I’m not sure that Labrouste’s treatment of the façade of St. Geneviève in Paris is decorative. I think it’s carving—he takes a volumetric chunk and carves it back. He embeds things back into the façade and he carves back into this building. You can’t call that applique. The walls would fall if you took it away—it’s integral. The Marshall Field warehouse is a primary perception of a volumetric total and then everything is carved away back into it. This, to me, is a fundamental lesson. To say that McKim, Mead, and White’s Boston library is an homage to St. Geneviève is laughable. What’s even more laughable is whatever Philip Johnson did to it. Architecture is gravitas. It can be elegant, beautiful, and inspiring, but it has to be really sincere. Well, I guess I’ve said enough about that. vanR: Perhaps we can make a nice segue from that, in terms of the history of architecture and what are the core values of architecture in our society. One of those forms that you’ve talked about is the townhouse ideal, as opposed to the highrise, for urban living. The townhouse reappeared in various forms in the work of the Chicago Seven in the late 1970s. Perhaps we can go back to the Chicago Seven and talk a bit about the “Exquisite Corpse” exhibition at the Walter Kelly Gallery. The “Exquisite Corpse” show was held in December of 1977, the same year that you split with Harry. Can you talk a little bit about how the seven of you decided to do this show? Perhaps we should explain here that the “Exquisite Corpse” is a Surrealist exercise where each member of a group would add to an unseen drawing a portion of a body to end up with a human figure that was a surprise to everyone. The
84 Chicago Seven used that as a metaphor and each of you contributed a townhouse as part of the “body.” How was that exhibition organized?
Weese: Oh, that was one of those drunken sessions—you know, a gathering in some place which was usually with drink, stimulates those events. We used to meet and try to dream up the next idea. There was a lot of yaking back and forth and stealing some concept that we could build on. By the way, I think I was very happy to be with the Chicago Seven. I think that Stanley was happy that… Part of the impetus was that architects were identifying themselves. Cindy and I were happy to have a platform to express ourselves as distinguished from and breaking away from Harry’s practice. It was a good platform, let’s put it that way. So you can say we were doing what we could with these things. We were not as sophisticated as promoters we see today, but that was certainly part of it. These are all serendipity. It’s not logic, it’s kind of right brain messing around. I think that the “Exquisite Corpse” thing was surreal, or whatever you want to call it, because we did a sketch for the opening invitation using that technique. I do remember the sketch was fairly humorous for the flyer. But putting together the buildings… My polemic point for the group, as I mentioned earlier, was that I thought we ought to at least relate as neighbors. But we were pretty chaotic. vanR: The outcome of the “Exquisite Corpse” show was that each one of you contributed a townhouse to the exhibit. They were to be shown side by side as buildings are on an actual street. How did you come up with your design?
Weese: Well, I didn’t want to be a revolutionary. vanR: Why?
Weese: I wanted to be evolutionary. Well, you can only go so far with party walls and you have one means of expressing your face to the street. You cannot break out of the kind of obligation to the street, I guess. I can quarrel with most of my colleagues on that, but the point was “let the best person win” or
85 whatever. I have feet of clay—I guess I just have a sense of responsibility that dulls my efforts, I don’t know. vanR: Well, you were the elder statesman of that group.
Weese: Was I? Hey, you’re right. vanR: Most of your colleagues were a bit younger. Stanley was a year or two younger.
Weese: And Freed was about my age. vanR: He’s a year younger than you.
Weese: Yeah, the generation segments get very small. I think I’m different from someone five or six years younger than I am, like Jim Nagle or Larry Booth. They were born in 1936 and 1937, I think. Actually, we’re a different generation. I don’t know how you want to express generation—it doesn’t mean that you’ve produced children or anything, but you’ve lived in a different cultural context. So I apologize publicly for being a kind of foot- dragger on the purposes of a townhouse, but what pleases you is the kind of really well-wrought, well-thought-out elements that are few in number that you can apply to a domestic piece of architecture. Domesticity represents a very traditional thing. Even with the selection of materials, I don’t think that you can live in a steel and glass house for very long, you know. I think you live in fired mud materials. We came out of caves and we still need that sense of enclosure. All of that feeds my psyche. vanR: What did you feel was the purpose of the show? Did you have an agenda?
Weese: Probably not. I think we were all participating on the cusp of the resettlement of the city. The townhouse was a subject of exploration. I mentioned earlier that in Hyde Park-Kenwood, nobody knew what a townhouse was. The stack of drawings that was transmitted between my brother’s office and I. M. Pei
86 was incredible. They were really desperately exploring the typology of the townhouse. That was in the 1950s and now we were twenty years later. You know, Stuart and Larry and Jim Freed had some pretty prime clients. I think they looked at it as an exercise in flexing their muscles. After the earlier stuff in Harry’s office, we hadn’t done any townhouses. Look at what I. M. Pei did after Hyde Park-Kenwood with the Philadelphia project down by the waterfront there. He took the Hyde Park plan and perfected it and it’s really much better. He did something that’s really quite sophisticated with the high windows. In Hyde Park they were kind of factory-like. The struggle with the entry and how to raise the main floor off the street—the clumsy front entrance—all of that got better. So I think that the Chicago collaboration incipient was an exploration. You can look afterward now and maybe we’ll find out what has really worked and what use it all had. vanR: Do you recall your reactions to the other townhouses in the “Exquisite Corpse” show? Had you seen any of them before the show opened?
Weese: No. Like I said, if we had worked in the same atelier, like you do as students in the studio, if we’d been isolated together for a charrette, something else entirely would have come out. This was a totally private enterprise and every man for himself. I was a little shocked, yeah. I thought some of them were quite facetious. vanR: Would you care to name names?
Weese: Well, the other thing I might say to you is that when you do a show or when you get something published, you dismiss it. Now, when a composer gets his music played—I was down in St. Louis the other day and the composer was still alive and Leonard Slatkin was directing… I thought anybody who would have his piece played would come to hear it, but he wasn’t even there. That’s really frustrating. I confess I did not study these townhouses to that extent, so I can’t remember. I can see one in the brochure here that was Stuart Cohen’s Tuscan order and another pretty fragmented façade that was postmodern yin-yang, I guess. There’s one in the middle of the row that was Stanley’s,
87 that I probably disagreed with because it’s an unlivable space. But it was Stanley exploring three kinds of steps and risers. So I was trying to put the brakes on. I knew I was going to be the foot-dragger, or whatever you want to call it. So I didn’t spend a lot of time with them. I was yaking with my friends. We didn’t analyze or even critique our work. vanR: So you didn’t get any feedback from the others about your entry?
Weese: Well, I got asides. They knew what I was going to do. Everyone knows pretty much what people are about. vanR: Do you recall what they told you?
Weese: Well, Stanley will give you the best answer on that. Kind of shaggy, longhair, that kind of thing. vanR: This exhibition got a lot of notice in the press and one of the criticisms that came up was that it was too arty and intellectually self-conscious. Do you think that was true?
Weese: I don’t know who said that, but I’ll buy that. vanR: It may have been Nory Miller or someone else writing in Inland Architect.
Weese: Yeah, Nory was tough. She’s a realist. Yeah, I would agree with that. That’s something you can bring right on to the present, you know: “art for art’s sake.” We don’t want that. We’ve been there. I don’t want that at all. vanR: We’ve discussed your pragmatism earlier. Did you feel that your townhouse was buildable?
Weese: Oh, yeah! Oh, I wanted it. vanR: Did you ever envision it actually being built?
88 Weese: Yeah. The idea of a deep townhouse with a court is buildable. The size lots that we were given were quite deep and I think the program was huge. I extended it to the fact that the townhouse was split in half, which may be a response to the historical fact that in Chicago they built the first house on the back of the lot which was often a very modest bungalow and then they built the next house up front. The zoning at the time allowed you to put two houses on a lot with one in front of the other. They usually built the cheap one first. In a lot of cases you can go around Chicago and see a huge front yard and then the house is right on the alley. That’s a pattern in Chicago, which may be quite unusual but shows an unrealized intention, I don’t know. They never got around to building the front house. Or they’d take the back house down. What I was saying was that you could have an en filade house or you could have a court with a narrow passage beside it, which is like the Roloson row houses that Frank Lloyd Wright did in the Gap area. They are quite fine because it’s Wright in his urban period. Then he got horizontal and he got to using a lot of land with Broadacre City. vanR: Why do you think there was so much effort spent working on projects, on unbuilt designs, in these exhibits?
Weese: Well, I think I mentioned yesterday that at the time they were handing out a lot of Ph.D.s suddenly to people who were in literary theory jumping over into architectural theory. As I told you before, I’d never heard of the word “theory” until Stanley sprung it on me. He should at least have given us warning. But I think there were a lot of critics and a lot of architects were seeing their work in museums, which they had never seen before, you know? It was a new idea to collect Michael Graves’s drawings or to consider yourself a painter.
[Tape 4: Side 1] vanR: In fact, the “Exquisite Corpse” show then mutated into another show in May and June of 1978, just six months later. That show was called the “Townhouse
89 Competition” and was held at the Graham Foundation. It later traveled to the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis and a few other museums. The “Townhouse Competition” was, basically, your “Exquisite Corpse” show writ large. You invited a number of other architects to also contribute townhouses and then you opened it up to a competition for younger architects. Not only was the Chicago Seven involved, but you invited Jerry Horn, Helmut, Ken Schroeder, and Cindy to also contribute townhouses. How did this second exhibit come about?
Weese: Again, I was not a prime mover, but I think that on top of that, wasn’t there an open competition where people would…? vanR: Yes, it was opened up to younger architects.
Weese: I don’t know what they had to submit, maybe just drawings, but there were some young draftsmen. Some of them were brought forth. I don’t remember the names of the people who won these places. There were a certain number of positions open for more townhouses. vanR: The list of winners included Deborah Doyle, Robert Fugman, James Goettsch, Steven Gross, Anders Nereim, Joseph Poli, Peter Pran, and Frederick Read.
Weese: Okay, but weren’t there others? How many came in all together? vanR: There were a larger number in the first entry, but I believe the names I just read were the entrants who were invited to carry their drawings forth into models for final judging.
Weese: I don’t remember if it was open or invited. vanR: It was open at the first round and then you selected those who would be invited to make models.
90 Weese: The total number I don’t know. It seems to me that the theory behind this idea was, again, Stanley’s. He felt that there was always strength in numbers. It was also generous of him—these were all young kids. Some of them were draftsmen—well, maybe it was collusion because some of those people, like Fugman and Doyle, had worked in his office. So there were a lot of ringers in there. Stanley’s idea, which was not wrong, was that he wanted a critical mass, he wanted more people. He wanted action, he wanted younger people to be recognized. It was very generous of him. It actually led, ultimately, to the revival of the Chicago Architectural Club, although you had to be invited, so it was a little tough. But it was a broader diaspora of architects discussing things, which is still going on today. vanR: With this townhouse competition, your wife Cindy entered a townhouse. Do you recall conversations with her about all this?
Weese: No, I think we affected each other’s work. Our styles were not that different. But she’d done a lot more townhouses than I had and she’d remodeled some, which was really interesting. She remodeled them to put in a proper kitchen and a nice back veranda or sun parlor, or whatever. She made a lot of people richer. She had a lot of townhouse experience. vanR: Just as an aside, I wanted to ask if you were at all aware that your townhouse competition was similar to a townhouse competition that had been held by the Chicago Architectural Club in 1885?
Weese: No, I didn’t know that. I wonder if you’ll find out who knew that. I didn’t. vanR: It may have just been an odd coincidence.
Weese: Well, that’s why history reinvents itself. There are times that are just right. You know, there are all sorts of good historic theories and times are ripe for repetition or cyclical replay. I certainly don’t believe in the inevitable forward movement of history.
91 vanR: Yes, we discussed Hegel yesterday.
Weese: Well, you know, the Darwinian thing—evolution is much more complex than that. vanR: There was a symposium in conjunction with the townhouse exhibition at the Graham Foundation to discuss these solutions. In fact, there were a number of architectural symposiums in Chicago in the late 1970s. Do you recall that Graham symposium, where people gathered to talk critically about what was going on? Mies always said, “Build, don’t talk,” but the Chicago Seven was inviting people to talk.
Weese: Well, please enlighten me. I can’t remember. vanR: Well, you and those who entered the “Townhouse Competition” gathered to talk.
Weese: Seriously? I’m sure I contributed the least. vanR: There had been an earlier symposium in the fall of 1977, just before the “Exquisite Corpse” exhibition, called ‘The State of the Art of Architecture.” There were a lot of these symposiums going on. You were all talking about where architecture was and where it was going.
Weese: Did anybody come? vanR: Well, yes, as a matter of fact. “The State of the Art of Architecture” gathering was at the Graham Foundation and it included Eisenman, Hejduk, Meier, Stern, Graves, Turnbull, Jencks, and Gehry, as well as all the Chicago Seven. It was full of luminaries.
Weese: Oh, well, there was one conference where we had to show a work. It was probably the one in the fall of 1977. I was there.
92 vanR: Yes, you were discussing current unbuilt work.
Weese: Yeah, I showed a subsidized solar-energy residence to train handicapped persons for independent living. There was a huge crowd because there was a real collection of architects. It was nasty in some respects. Hejduk got claustrophobia, or something like that and left early; he got mad. Eisenman got up and said, “I’ve never done a building, but I’ll tell you about my theories.” He accused Helmut Jahn of being a Nazi, even though Helmut was only two or three when the war ended. It was vicious. Stirling and Jencks got into something totally private about some past run-in that didn’t seem very apropos, but they started arguing. Graves got up with the cognoscenti and started talking about some medieval triptych that was the key to everything. The only people who nodded were the New York Five, because they’d prearranged that, I guess. It was kind of comical. My contribution was that I think I started by saying… I was last because my name begins with a W. I think that people had left by that time so I could actually breathe the air a little bit. I started by saying that Giedion had told me in my youth that the stairway is the measure of a civilization. It’s a quote that he probably borrowed, like no one knows where Mies borrowed all of his stuff, but he borrowed it mostly from Semper, or somewhere. Anyway, I had to confess that my building was great because it only had ramps. This was for handicapped. I was trying to get off the hook because it was a modest building. It had a huge active solar-panel system that actually failed about two years out and actually poisoned some poor guy who was trying to change the fluid, so they abandoned it. So much for architectural technology. The meeting in 1977 was a memorable evening, for the frictions and the jockeying. vanR: Did you feel that the Chicago Seven were not in the same league as the New York Five, or that you had different goals?
Weese: Yeah. I think you’re probably closer to saying it with “not in the same league.” Whatever these people have done in the meantime, they have succeeded tremendously with their public relations avalanche. With the
93 ability to publish a lot of material and to quickly get to the press with a lot of exquisite monographs, funded by them but published by Rizzoli. I can’t remember in earlier times that architects had monographs. If you look back at the magazines, when did color come in? I mean, in the 1970s you might have one color spread of a Paul Rudolph building or something, but everything else was black and white. The whole issue of how people presented themselves was being worked out there. I think you’re right that Chicago got left behind. Maybe it’s not all bad. It’s the publications… But that isn’t proof of anything. vanR: Well, that brings up an interesting point. In Chicago, Inland Architect was a critical publication. Your brother Harry was very much involved in that publication. Inland Architect was a prime source for material—articles, letters, controversy, discussion—about architecture in Chicago and the Midwest. How did you see Inland Architect’s role?
Weese: My brother ended up spending about forty grand a year on that; it was his hobbyhorse. It was his outlet in moving several different directions at once. It was one of his pets. I didn’t read it regularly, but I think I’ll go back and read it probably because I think that people did say that a lot of stuff came up there as a regional publication. It was tragic the way it’s not survived but everything has its moment. I don’t read contemporary architectural press too much, so I’m not good on that. vanR: Is that by choice?
Weese: It’s an accident of… If I get something published, I may or may not read it too effectively. I think that a lot of some of the stuff that I read about my work is so off the mark. An article was written about the church in Peoria that was totally fantastic, it was fantasizing about it. They decided what I had thought about when I did this, but it was not an in-depth interview, it was someone just going off and saying what this is, so it kind of bothered me. So I’ve been a little circumspect about what’s happening in quick, contemporary, critical journalism. So I’m sorry, I have not read… Historic monographs that are
94 researched and footnoted to beat the band, those are very interesting to me. You realize that someone gave their life’s blood for that and that’s a different order of business. I do read that. vanR: It’s also interesting to note that your work has not always been published as much as other members of the Chicago Seven. Perhaps that’s a reflection on your own personality, that you didn’t seek the spotlight.
Weese: Well, yes. vanR: Stanley, for instance, must have had a lot to do with the number of articles that have appeared about him.
Weese: Stanley is hot property. It may concern him that he’s not such hot property now, because there’s always a tapering off, you know. But I think he’s adjusted nicely. But he’s not published that much either. Publishing is important, at least to identify somewhere in some catalog fashion. The magazines that actually have an annual index, gosh, that’s so important. You try to find something without one! Hedrich-Blessing helped us get a lot published. Jack Hedrich would roam around and he got a lot of things published that I never had anything to do with. I’ve published in foreign journals—if I want to get some churches published, I do it in this Italian journal called Chiesa Oggi. They do everything, they put many photos in there and the plans and the sections… So the frustration of what happens with publicity—I may have already told you that I’m tired of people’s portraits on the fronts of architectural magazines—that has nothing to do with architecture, that’s show biz. It’s important, I think, to publish. But how it’s done is somewhat disconcerting. Cindy actually had a project published upside down, if you can believe it, in a Brazilian magazine. Larry Booth had a project on his Lake Bluff house where every image was published backwards. Boy, that’s tough. The plans were there and if anyone looked at this analytically, it’s terribly embarrassing.
95 vanR: Another aspect of publishing in Chicago came out of the Chicago Architecture Club, which was revived in 1979, and the Chicago Seven served as the executive committee. Perhaps one of the most lasting outlets of that club has been the Chicago Architectural Journal. They published a lot of material on the Chicago Seven. Would you describe your role in the revival of that club?
Weese: Well, I seconded Stanley’s effort to broaden the horizons and bring young people in. It was a little stuffy because he had that veto power of who could get in and out. But it had to have some pattern of growth otherwise it diluted quickly. He set it up as a confrontational effort, which is the American weakness, to have a kind of a litigious situation. There were some interesting meetings and then there were some unfair ones where Stanley would set it up as an opposition. One of the more interesting oppositional ones was the building at Oak Street and Michigan, where Bruce Graham did the bottom and the Dick Barancik did the top. He had them both there and it was a marvelous argument about who did what and where the columns were supposed to go. “My housing is being screwed up by your structural grid.” It was almost violent. He set up Jerry Horn against Tom Beeby and Beeby was totally articulate and Jerry mumbled something, but he won, by saying nothing! Beeby said he’d given too many reasons about why he did something. These confrontation things—after a while you sort of wear out. I think that Stanley got into a lot of trouble by putting totally incompatible teachers together at Circle, you know. He’d punish somebody by joining them as co-critics. vanR: That must have been very hard on the students.
Weese: The students, yeah! What is the student supposed to get out if it? The student becomes the guinea pig. I think what you’re probably leading up to is the Tribune Tower show. vanR: Let’s stay with the revival of the Chicago Architectural Club for just a little bit longer. That seems to have marked the end of the Chicago Seven as a
96 discrete group. I wondered if you saw the Chicago Architectural Club as a logical conclusion to that period of the Chicago Seven?
Weese: Yeah, we might have called a few more meetings and no one would have come. We were exploiting the situation. At the same time, it leaves a certain amount of residue that may be important. There was some thinking—I’m not sure that all of it was totally sincere—but we had probably exhausted ourselves. But we were really invigorated with this next step. I’m not sure what year it was. vanR: It was 1979.
Weese: We were in Stanley’s office and it was in the building that later got torn down to do the Oak-Michigan building and we were looking out at the lake and drinking beer or something and trying to figure out what to do next. My only contribution was to say, “Gee, let’s do the Tribune Tower over again!” But it actually resonated because the Tribune Tower was a stylistic watershed. Everyone used it mercilessly. Giedion used it absolutely incredibly to promote Gropius. When you started looking back at the Tribune Tower it was a conflict of styles. I thought that was probably worth exploring again. Maybe we should do the Tribune Tower over again, I don’t know. vanR: Well, your idea turned into the “Late Entries” exhibition, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980 and became a watershed in that time period. And you are given credit for having the idea.
Weese: But I couldn’t have carried it out, you see. So Stanley went at it again. vanR: Was it your idea that the outside architects would contribute as well as Chicago architects?
Weese: Oh, yeah. I think the idea was, which really proved out… If you look at that catalog, everybody participated except… did you notice?
97 vanR: Well, there were a few exceptions.
Weese: Who was it? Stanley had had a major falling out with the New York Five. I don’t know which one of them entered, maybe no one. vanR: Well, some of the people who were absent were Goldberg, Harry, Goldsmith, Bruce Graham, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Venturi, and Eisenman.
Weese: Well, Stanley will tell you who did what to whom. Did Graves enter? vanR: No, Michael Graves did not participate but Bob Stern did.
Weese: Well, Stern was not a New York Five. Did Gwathmey? vanR: Gwathmey did not.
Weese: Well, I have a lingering notion that Stanley was on the outs with them. That might have removed some of the New York Five. You know, this was kids’ stuff to serious structuralist architects like Bruce Graham and Myron Goldsmith. vanR: But Walter Netsch entered.
Weese: Yes, Walter did. Walter has a youthful kind of interest in experimentation. vanR: Wasn’t he one of the very few old-guard Chicago architects who showed up from time to time with the Chicago Seven and the Chicago Architectural Club?
Weese: Yes. But you got together with Walter in those years and all he could do was complain about Bruce. He had a hard time, internal to his office. vanR: So do you think he was looking for another group to relate to?
98 Weese: Yeah. He wanted to talk to somebody. vanR: And all of you welcomed him?
Weese: Yeah. His wife, Dawn, of course, she’s so wonderful—we’d always go out and support whomever she told us to vote for. vanR: The “Late Entries” exhibit was held at the MCA, which was an important museum. Was that a mark of acceptance that your show was finally being seen in a traditional art museum?
Weese: Oh, yeah. I think so. vanR: How did you convince them to host the show?
Weese: I didn’t do that work, Stanley did. And Stanley got the essayists. I was riffling through that catalog and the critics that showed up…! I mean, George Baird; Scully; Norris Kelly Smith, the really great sorehead from Washington University; and Juan Pablo Bonta, the wonderful guy… These were serious scholarly efforts. I’m sure they didn’t get paid, you know? I can’t remember who supported them, probably the Graham Foundation again. Anyway, the exhibits were impressive and the Art Institute and maybe the Historical Society picked up a number of them. vanR: Yes, the Art Institute has a couple.
Weese: Some of them were very tongue-in-check and done in five minutes, you know. Gehry’s is probably the most valuable, but he probably took a minute and a half to do it. vanR: Since some of them were less painstakingly done than others, did you see this as an exhibit that might turn into something that was less serious for some architects? Were you expecting that?
99 Weese: Well, they either benefited or looked stupid in doing all of this. Well, you know, Sullivan wrote that thing, “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered.” It was a very seminal moment. It explained what he had done or what he wanted to do. I think that this could have been a time for exploration. That’s what I used it as, I was too serious. I can see that. I used it as a question about what happened if the Prairie School tried to do a highrise. So I tried to develop a very sober thesis. But if this is an illustration of what the times were like, then Beeby’s symbolism of wrapping a volume in the American flag and other totally cartoon-like entries… But that’s what happened the first time around—the cartoonist at the Tribune made his entry. vanR: How was this a true reflection of what was happening in the architectural world if it was an invited competition?
Weese: Oh, it was open. We announced it. vanR: Then why did some people decline? So perhaps it was somewhat self- selected?
Weese: Well, look who got in there: Ando was an unknown, Fumihiko Maki, who’s now very famous, a Pritzker Prize winner and all of that. There were some pretty impressive names. But it’s spotty, because there were then people who were students that I think Stanley encouraged. You have to ask what he did because he was the guy who probably tried to spread it around more. There were some people in the show that I didn’t know at all and I think that Stanley can tell you more about who they were. The idea was to bring in as much serious stuff as we could. The vehicle of a highrise which is an isolated building but which expresses your culture, is a sculptural object and is pretty potent medicine. I think we still do highrise buildings, but, gee, the onus of trying to design a highrise building today is tragic. There’s just really nothing left. We’ve lost our symbolism, or whatever. vanR: Perhaps it’s fair to say that the Chicago Seven were not known for doing highrises. You were residential, small-scale architects.
100 Weese: Right. Well, the only one was Helmut and then Stanley did the Bar Association building. vanR: In fact, one architect, Rob Krier, refused to participate because he said that the skyscraper had fallen from grace and he didn’t want to be part of it anymore.
Weese: Well that’s kind of a nice statement, yeah. Krier has been consistent and he’s been trying to preserve the fabric, as he sees it, of European cities that are very often more livable. They still somehow can get molded and some people say destroyed. But I’m always amazed by how modernity can still exist in some pretty ancient cities, side-by-side, like in Paris or Vienna. vanR: One of the other things that was said about this show and that has now been written into the history of the show is that this was one of the great examples of how postmodernism was taking over the architectural world. Can you talk about your reaction to that word and if you think that applied to this show?
Weese: Well, I’m trying to get used to modernity and modernism and the mistakes it made. So if you put a mistake on top of a mistake, what do you have? Modernism was an abstraction. Postmodernism was a very sloppy response to it. But, again, it happens. Postmodernism really means that whatever modernism was, we’re disaffected from it. But you can’t go anywhere with those things, except to say that something’s happened, but I’m not sure what. I was just reading in Gombrich’s book about Impressionism and these guys were all doing it but some critic had to come along and label it. If you’re really sincere about doing something and it’s so rich and its possibilities are complex, if you can get it to that point, then it’s very hard to abstract it into a label. They become pretty meaningless, I think. Modernism implied eternal progress and technical fixes. Well, we’re pretty scared of all that stuff now, so we don’t have that. We have a confusion of “Well, maybe that wasn’t so good. But what do we do now?” We still live in air-conditioned, highly
101 technicized structures with an infrastructure that are even scarier with transportation systems and stuff. We’ve accepted it, but we live uneasily. vanR: With this show and all its eclectic approaches to this problem, how did you feel Chicagoans reacted to this? Or did you feel any reaction from the Miesians?
Weese: The Miesians were pretty quiet. I think we wanted to stick it to them. I mean, how many more buildings of that type, even if they’re done by the master, do you want? The clients were certainly saying that. So it was a watershed. We were trying to stick it to those people and they were mute. At the time, there weren’t any highrises getting built, I don’t think, so we were coming in on the end of things. It was tapering off anyway because there was a recession that pretty well halted everything. It was an opening, probably, to the chagrin of the purists, because Skidmore did some very fine early buildings, like Inland Steel, Hartford Plaza, and Brunswick. Those were all pretty good buildings, but they’re smaller in scale and they keep getting bigger and then the outsiders came in. When I was young, one of the rules of Chicago was that Chicagoans would build here because we do it differently and we have our own in-house engineers. There were all sorts of reasons about why Chicago builds its own way. Then Ed Stone came and he did the Standard Oil building and then when Richard Nickel died in the Chicago Stock Exchange building, it was such tragedy and trauma that large Chicago firms actually turned down the job to design the replacement building, which was eventually done by some anonymous Texas firm. But then it picked up again. Lescaze blew his reputation on the Borg-Warner building across from the Art Institute and Philip Johnson came in and gave us his silly reminder of the Womens Temple building and then Kohn Pederson Fox did a very good building, the 333 West Wacker, which they’ve since disowned. Bill Pederson says, “I don’t believe in that building anymore”. And then he does these dogs, three or four of them in a row. I guess Chicago was getting defeated by these outsiders. They were so proud that in the great Chicago School period, from the 1890s up to the 1920s, this was a Chicago architect’s town. Yeah, McKim, Mead and White did a fancy townhouse on Astor Street and Cram
102 did the fancy Fourth Presbyterian, but nothing of any magnitude entered the sacred precinct of the second city, and that was great. And then you come in with Bofill—I think he’s got another commission coming up and someone should stop this nonsense, with these pediments stacked up. Does this man really understand what Chicago’s history was about or what it should be about? The tragedy is that the symbolism of the highrise has been destroyed, decimated. This show was perhaps a harbinger of all of that confusion. vanR: So do you have mixed feeling about it now?
Weese: No, it was somewhat of a mockery. I mean, Raymond Hood went on to do some really interesting buildings and he left us this kind of homage to the twelfth-century thinking of Robert McCormick, the medievalism of Robert McCormick’s mind. I think it was a catharsis—these were exercises and in downtimes you’ll get architects itching to do something and you’ll get all sorts of weird things just to pass the time. vanR: One of the other lasting elements of this show was a large catalog that was done in the same format as the original 1922 competition. The catalog was published by Rizzoli. Rizzoli had a long relationship, also, with the Chicago Architectural Club. Do you have any thoughts about Rizzoli and their role in promoting this work?
Weese: Well, I have to lay it to Stanley. I think that Rizzoli has done a service in this respect: these are losers all the way. How they survive, I don’t know. vanR: You mean these publications don’t make any money?
Weese: Oh, I don’t think so. I think that this Late Entries catalog is an interesting document. Actually, I think that the essays are fine. The one by Norris Kelly Smith is a real finger in your eye. He’s taunting everybody and I love that kind of outsider historic look—he’s serious, but he attacks architects and the culture in which we find ourselves with a lot of purpose. Someday Norris Kelly Smith will be appreciated. He’s a man of culture. His book on Frank
103 Lloyd Wright was trying to divine what Wright was really reading, whether it was Emerson or whatever. He tries to get at what’s in his head that way. It’s not a eulogy or anything else, I think it’s a serious, coming-in-from-a- different-angle scholarship. So I think that the essays will outlive the images. vanR: Do you recall what people said to you about your work in the “Late Entries” show?
Weese: Nothing. vanR: They didn’t say anything or you don’t recall what they said?
Weese: I think that my entry was not popular. But I wanted to try to explore what some of the motifs of the Prairie School applied to a taller building might have been. Actually, what I think I went through was a revisiting; there were five or six entries in the 1922 effort that were in that mode. I think it might have been Drummond. vanR: Yes, Drummond had an entry.
Weese: And I thought those might have made good buildings, but we never had one. vanR: Yes, the Prairie School never really did build tall buildings.
Weese: Yes, they never went with power. They were not overpowering empire- builders. They didn’t meet the right people, you know. vanR: Well, perhaps they had something in common with the Chicago Seven?
Weese: Yeah, sure. You know, the Chicago Seven, what I tried to justify is that by doing small buildings—I think I’ve said enough about it—is not necessarily either a disadvantage or a second-rate position. I mentioned before, and I can add to the list, those architects who had a very small oeuvre but who are very influential. We didn’t talk about Adolf Loos or Voysey, who never did
104 anything except houses. He did one wallpaper factory, but he’s the model, he’s the prototype for effective inclusion and evolving along a historic path. But Voysey got attacked, or he got misinterpreted—he didn’t want to be a modernist, but everybody said, “Oh, that guy’s a modern architect.” I think you can find quotes in his writing of how he was being shanghaied. He didn’t see himself that way at all. Again, I think there’s enough examples of this kind of strangeness of attribution or where things come from. There is a cyclical revisiting of architectural functions and form—it’s a perfectly natural kind of reseeding of ideas. What was really bad was the total break, saying that you can’t go and look at history. That’s really bad. vanR: Which was what Giedion was saying.
Weese: And Gropius was really saying that. Hudnut was more tolerant and more inclusive and maybe ultimately more right. vanR: A prophet without honor.
Weese: That’s okay. That’s why you historians have to plumb these things and get it right. It takes a lot of reinterpretation. Until a closer, final resolution—which is never a final resolution—or enrichment of evaluations are added; revisiting must be an ongoing process. You know, the intolerance of modern architects—Hannes Meyer, for example, one of those that let his Marxism completely dictate something that’s more complex than a political theory. It really is.
[Tape 4: Side 2] vanR: After “Late Entries,” the next major exhibit that we should talk about is the exhibit “New Chicago Architecture,” which opened in Chicago in September 1981. The exhibition opened first in Verona, Italy, and it then came to the Art Institute. It was co-sponsored by the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute, which had just recently been founded. You were included in the show, along with all of the other Chicago Seven architects, with the exception
105 of Jim Freed. There were also other Chicago architects included. How did this show come together?
Weese: Well, I presume that John Zukowsky had gotten to the museum by that time, hadn’t he? vanR: Yes, he had been there since the late 1970s.
Weese: He was interested in things that were growing at the edge and happening contemporaneously. I think he picked these architects who mostly showed a lot of conceptual work, but also some built work. Looking at my entrants, it was mostly built work, or at least things intended to be built—it was not theoretical. Going back to where I guess I was coming from… I guess I have a predilection against competitions, to viscerally expend all that energy and maybe not have any product at the end of it. The same thing would be about hypothetical thinking, maybe that’s somewhat a deterrent to my explorations in the earlier Chicago Seven shows, where I seem to want a physical product, at the end of the process and hopefully that it would last. vanR: You mean a built project?
Weese: Yes. It’s one of the kinds of difficulties of modernity that we almost don’t allow ourselves the thought of architecture in time. It’s a revolution and it’s expressed by the way we build, not as fundamentally sound as historical architecture, so we’ve almost written our own epitaph with certain architecture that is not going to last. I think it’s difficult now to preserve some modern architecture. It’s extremely expensive and it happens more frequently and more quickly that you have to invade or correct some of the buildings that have been built. I guess I’m just building up to my philosophy of redundancy of structure. Historic preservationists are going to have a hard time preserving delicate modern structures. That shows up in the Centre Pompidou and the very expensive redos so soon after construction. Just to bring this into focus, we’re looking in the “New Chicago Architecture”
106 catalog at buildings that I did with my team that was, at that time, Weese Seegers Hickey Weese. vanR: Did you have any input with the organizers of the show about which of your projects would be included?
Weese: No. I think that John’s pretty clear about what he wants and sometimes it wouldn’t be what I would want. He has a certain thrust in his head of what direction he wants to establish and I think it’s in an exploratory area. Again, I don’t think that my work helps him much in that area since there’s a certain amount of drag in what we do in the way of looking back as we go forward. The first building here is a very ugly-looking three sides that were never supposed to be seen by the public, except it’s a tall building that’s facing the Gold Coast and it’s had advertisements for cheap rooms and so forth. It was 32,000 square-feet on the back and sides of a building on LaSalle Street that was a perfect place to proselytize through art. We got in touch with Richard Haas and he made 32,000 square-feet of trompe l’oeil, which was his largest mural project to that date. It was called Homage to the Chicago School. We tried to place it as a billboard, but in an art form, and recalling those structures that had been destroyed too soon in time. vanR: Did you have a say with him about which buildings would be represented?
Weese: Yeah, it was kind of a dialogue. It was mostly Sullivan, the Transportation building, and then the four portraits of the leading architects—Burnham, Root, Sullivan and Wright—on the principal façade. The cartouche up on top is from the Poweshiek Bank in Grinnell, Iowa, which still exists. It was a nice way to end this phantasmagoric elevation. The east side had faux bay windows and a woman who came to rent one day was totally fooled. So it was kind of fun and it’s a reminder on a large, blank façade to raise one’s sights and look at and think about architecture. I thought it was kind of a nice idea that we did that. The other building in the show was inexpensive subsidized housing. Again, I was going back to the fact that I tried to do a stepped back and irregular plan-generated floor plans for housing with the
107 disadvantage that we mentioned earlier that it’s only three stories high so that the replication of a complicated floor plan can’t be amortized over a higher building. It’s not financially viable, although this was not too radical because this building was on a corner site where you try to break back the mass by offsetting its extensions in blocks stepped back. vanR: Does that give a certain amount of privacy to the residents?
Weese: Well, it gives two things. It gives multiple views up and down the streets, instead of just blinder views. It does give a sense of identity in what would otherwise be blank-faced, repetitive, over-scaled buildings. Yeah, it’s an attempt to moderate the scale of a building. I think that’s all valid. It has to do with the optical—setbacks diminishing through perspective the frontal impact. You know, most buildings are viewed from the street. All of the historic preservationists are most interested in what can be seen from the public right of ways. If you go down the alleys it’s really exciting because anything goes in the alley. That’s an interesting aspect of how we view our cities and the channels we go through to visualize all of this. Actually, on the next page of the catalog is the building that really bankrupted the contractor because it was a true kind of manipulation of the facades where each unit was a different design. It was a multi-faceted three-story building, even though I think that this one was one of our more successful ways of expressing a quality of individuality or difference in a subsidized project—it was the Finley Apartments in Lombard, Illinois. The next project still was built at the site of the big 1968 riots that burned everything down—the Community Bank of Lawndale. We purposely and maybe incorrectly reproduced what we thought was a pared-down Sullivanesque… I think it was a little crude, it was built crudely, but it was an attempt to reestablish some kind of economy in the beleaguered West Side. It’s probably performing its social function. We tried to lift up the aesthetic of it as a “Sullivan” bank. vanR: Why do you think it was incorrectly done?
108 Weese: I think the contractor kind of cut corners. I can’t speak to the social function, although it’s terribly important to have a bank with a presence right where Sears had just left, near Homan and Kedzie. This bank is just north of Roosevelt Road. It’s still there—I was just going by there the other day and this is almost twenty years since it’s built. vanR: Do you think that it has served as an anchor in that neighborhood?
Weese: Oh, yes. I’m sure that their intentions are correct and they’re making loans in the community. The next project was a good one, I thought. It was an abandoned expressway project in Milwaukee, which was never built. The community rose up because it cut them in half but they had already torn all the buildings down. So the process was to take something that was three hundred feet wide and five miles long and turn it into a linear housing concept, which would have been very exciting. We just lost the political struggle there, but we had a lot of interesting building types and inward- turned views and I thought it would have been a wonderful project. vanR: How did you get that job?
Weese: Oh, we had a developer who showed up from Connecticut who liked our social slant on things and we liked his social slant. He was a true liberal and a believer in housing for the poor. I think he was poorly organized and not politically connected enough in Milwaukee. So we actually did two or three projects with him that never went anywhere. One was in Connecticut for the elderly and they were all, in concept, really quite wonderful, but he was unable to deliver the nuts and bolts on the practical side of all of that. vanR: You were disappointed, I would guess, by all that.
Weese: Yes. The knitting together of a really competent and, at the same time, really idealistic client and then a competent and idealistic architect takes a lot of integration and it doesn’t often happen, unfortunately.
109 vanR: One of the things that this exhibit has been noted for historically is that it helped further codify what some people called postmodernism. The works presented in this exhibit were more eclectic and more historically sensitive or vernacular. Were you aware of that slant to this exhibit?
Weese: Yes, I think I was. I think the advantage or the disadvantage of postmodernity is that it was kind of popularized by certain design motifs that are more easily replicated or copied. I guess it’s classicism that tended to dominate the situation, but I could be wrong. Let me look through this catalog again. It seemed to me that other forms of moving forward are more obscure and maybe hard to actually promulgate. So if one looks at this historically, I think I can say that the classical pediment and modifications of the classical orders may be a way to meet popular culture halfway and also be creative. I think that probably goes back to Venturi, who used those forms effectively. They are easier forms to take off on. I’ve gotten close to utilizing historic forms, but never that close. vanR: What about something like the bank in Lawndale that does use specific historic forms?
Weese: Yeah, that may be making me feel a little bit uncomfortable that we used the Sullivan arch in some of the framing, crudely. vanR: Well, the Sullivan bank is truly iconic.
Weese: That’s right. I think we were probably not stepping up to the plate, totally, in response. It was a difficult development because there wasn’t a lot of money. I’m not sure we weren’t playing that game a little bit to piggyback and I was a little concerned about that. vanR: Since your clients are not typically elite or truly wealthy, and are more often non-profit organizations or institutions, do you find that not to have a program dictated by a client who wants to create a certain image gives you more freedom to experiment with your architecture?
110 Weese: Yeah, I think you’re right on with that question. I’ve never felt really pressured to do something. We’ve had to bail out a client, in a couple of cases. We did a building in Cedar Rapids that was for Coe College that was named after the donor, Ray Clark. He actually designed the building but we were doing it to help the institution and to help the president, who had a very difficult client and we were just trying to get the building built. So we stepped back and the building is unpublishable. But that’s an exception. It seemed to me, in retrospect, that I have never really gotten into a design argument and that’s really quite an accomplishment. We discuss functions, either psychological or physical, or whatever—the whole gamut of functions broadly defined—and we move from that. The question of what style it is has been most disturbing when someone tries to write an article about some of our churches and presupposes that we were looking at some buildings and copying them or taking off from them, which was not true at all. We were really trying to develop something from the ground up in the situation. I guess you could call it existential. The argument about design or style or the client saying “I didn’t want that. Take it off!”—we’ve been able to avoid that. I think that we try to build up a very careful case, by building models, and by explaining why something looks like it does, functionally, or practically… I’m happy that we haven’t gotten into those arguments. vanR: May we move into 1982, when there was a recession? How did that affect your work?
Weese: In 1982 there was a big hiatus in activity. I think at that time in 1983 our first partner left. Internal to our office we were cutting back and reorganizing. We had housing in great numbers to begin with, but by 1982 we’d shifted into institutional work, which was not as affected so directly. They’re always related to long time frames of fundraising and cornering their donors and so forth. So by 1982 we had the Grinnell College library and we were getting ongoing work at Cornell College and we were very active in the state of Iowa. We had the Illinois Wesleyan chapel by that time so we were probably more into these other types of commissions. I can’t remember when the
111 condo craze hit, but the client with whom I’m still friendly, Jerry Shlaes, is a real estate appraiser who has a complete list of the real estate recessions from when I first knew him in 1959, more than you think. All of these blips took place and were very sensitive for the architectural profession. We’d always wake up later and say, “Where did that commission go?” vanR: Well, one of the things that some architects did during these periods of downtime was to think about more conceptual projects. One of the next major examples of contemporary architecture exhibitions was the “TOPS” competition, which was sponsored by the Chicago Architectural Club in 1983. That was a project in which members of the club, and some invited architects, submitted conceptual proposals to add new tops to any Chicago building that they chose. For the most part, the buildings chosen were Miesian—the Amoco building, Sears tower, the Hancock—buildings that had no tops, so to speak. Now, you were not in that competition. Can you explain your feeling about that?
Weese: Yeah, well, I just misread the intention of the show. I thought it was silly and maybe I was being too serious and saying that they were trying to further underpin the highrise industry. I was out of synch with this show. At the same time, you could spoof… I think it was a spoof, probably, and a well- intended one. So I just dropped out. When Martha Thorne asked me just last year to enter the “Views of Chicago: Travel Sketches by Contemporary Architects” show, it was such an inside-out request. I don’t travel in Chicago and I don’t use it that way. But she kept coming around, so at the last minute, I said, “Okay, I’ll do something.” She was bugging me and I was desperate. So I did some cartoons that I felt finally hit the point of me as the hypothetical traveler in Chicago and I think it worked out all right. But that show was kind of weird because some people were giving undue obeisance and genuflecting in front of our stuff. The “TOPS” could have been fun. Let’s do it again. vanR: Would you contribute this time?
112 Weese: I’ll join! In fact, with Richard Haas, our second connection with him was to do the lobby of 850 N. State, the Chestnut Place apartments. We asked him to paint the penthouse, which is kind of like a shed building on the top of this building and he did something that made it look like a cuckoo clock. I’m happy to say that we’re now painting it out in a color that would just call less attention to this silly thing with a faux hole in it. We asked him also to paint a cornice on the top of this building, so we were also concerned… I think we’re deficient when you say that something is no good anymore because then you have no means to express or ameliorate certain conditions. The tops of buildings really are very important. So I think I was wrong on misjudging that show. We should seriously do it again. vanR: Which building would you choose?
Weese: Well, actually, it might be interesting not to choose the tallest building, because they are too tall already, but to choose some intermediate building that would be more within one’s sight lines. You know, as I get older, my neck gets stiffer and I can’t look up at more than a fifteen-degree angle. But how did Louis Sullivan make a ten-story building seem like a skyscraper? As I’ve mentioned before, I always stand astonished and start counting the floors. “Is it only ten stories high?” There are some lesser examples in Chicago but the Wainwright is just an extremely tall-feeling building and it ends in a very prominent top. And you can see it within your normal vertical range of sight. vanR: So you’d pick a medium-height building and then add a top?
Weese: I’d pick a medium-height building and you’d also try to add some irony. You know, the more I think of it, my capacity for irony may be under-exploited. I want to express some things and I finally did in that travel sketch show and I feel good about it. I was getting tired of Claes Oldenberg, because he’s just coasting.
113 vanR: What you did for the travel sketch show was to draw a barstool over the Chicago Water Tower. Actually Blair Kamin, writing in the Tribune, picked that out as one of the most prescient and clever entries.
Weese: Well, Claes Oldenberg’s baseball bat—he got that idea thirty years ago. Robert Hughes, the Australian critic who quoted Oldenberg as saying something like “I don’t want to make just any old dumb piece of art that sits about in a museum”? Then Hughes came back saying, “but that’s what’s happening to Oldenberg’s art: it’s just dumb art sitting around in a museum.” He hasn’t had a new idea for the last thirty-five years and I’m getting tired of oversized lipstick and soft electric plugs and floppy bicycles, you know? How far can you carry that idea? I think you have to have a counter- movement. I think it’s an affront to genuine historic monuments. But there is that city of Chicago traffic study that said they had to straighten Michigan Avenue and so the Water Tower had to go. That was written in 1919. So I’m glad they saved the Water Tower. It’s the only thing that is a kind of focal point on a very difficult street. It’s not being helped by the very shiny, over- scaled, under-detailed work. There are a few buildings left on Michigan Avenue—a couple of them are by Philip Maher, like the Womens Athletic Club—and they just sit there like frightened refugees. vanR: In seventy-five years, it will be interesting to see if preservationists put up a fuss about tearing down Water Tower Place or 900 N. Michigan.
Weese: You’re right. Will we get used to it? The developer houses of the 1920s and 1930s, or the Sears package houses, the bungalows and things, and the recent revisiting of Morris Lapidus and his Miami hotels, and the 1950s breezeway- style ranch houses, I still think that they’re deficient if you look at the details. The builders’ houses of the 1920s and the 1930s—I was traveling through the Bronx just last week and they’re full of very ornate and serious detail permutations—they’re not just wipeouts. I think you may be right and we’ll get more tolerant of these things. Bob Bruegmann was trying to idolize the shopping center. Venturi has been dragging us through that. I don’t know how far you can go before you say, “Hey, wait a minute. We’re just falling
114 victim.” But you see, you have to keep it open because taste cycles and I’m willing to look at it that way, too. That’s why I want to preserve some of those wonderful people like the architects Mayo and Mayo on Hawthorne Street—that’s the best building on Hawthorne Street on the North Side here. It’s just a beautiful house that’s in the neo-Georgian tradition, but it’s been revisited in a very interesting, very plastic, convincing way. It’s well done. By who? Mayo and Mayo! vanR: You’ve talked about how you didn’t quite understand the purpose of the “TOPS” competition and you talk about how you felt you were dragging your feet in relation to the work of some of the Chicago Seven. Did you feel increasingly detached from them during this time? Was your path taking you on a different route?
Weese: We’re all good friends, I never felt totally… In thinking about the work of my colleagues, it was predictable what I thought they would do and where they would be, as time marched on. I didn’t feel that I could identify with any of them as mentors. I felt that probably the most interesting work was maybe by Stuart Cohen in his extreme knowledge and his pursuit of form in these small houses that are quite interesting and quite refreshing, even though they are dealing with historic motifs revisited. I think I could be most sympathetic to that. The other colleagues were either extensions of modernity or… I think that Larry Booth jumped into a lot of postmodernism, which I think he came and left. Stanley was experimenting with everything. Helmut was going into hyper-modernity. I felt there was a place for us, a niche. It’s not giving up on the old, not jumping into the new—some kind of hope for the new, in spite of modernity, the huge breaking point of modernity. vanR: Do you recall having conversations with the other Chicago Seven about this time? Or did the Chicago Architectural Club dilute the discussion somewhat?
Weese: We had kind of joking, jiving, drinking bouts. I think that one thing Helmut said one time as we were cooking up the next event was, ”I’ve got to keep going this way because my time is short and people may forget who I am.
115 I’ve got to take advantage of every situation.” It was shocking because he probably had as much work as everybody else combined, you know? It was this kind of frenzy not to suddenly be forgotten. It may be the Achilles heel of architects who become more personalities and who are driven by the public image. That was kind of unsettling and I felt badly. It’s a tough life. vanR: And not one that you’ve chosen?
Weese: Hey, I’ve fought the whole thing all the way through. When I was young, I couldn’t combine the idea of the aesthetic and the social concerns. That was a dilemma. I think I kind of elided it in a way, the aesthetic and the social. I got attacked by Cindy’s South African head of her graduate program, Jo Noero. He said, “How can you do anything with the Graham Foundation? Don’t you know that’s an elitist organization? They’ve got this fancy house on the Gold Coast. They should be out supporting social causes!” vanR: How did you answer that?
Weese: Well, I’m not good at a quick lawyer response, but I eventually said, “Look, it’s important to save something that is extremely well done, even though it’s been done for robber barons or very rich people.” You think of the Glessner house and it’s a public house and now you can take it for what it’s worth. It gives a whole social panorama of the relationship and the lifestyle of Prairie Avenue. The Graham Foundation is open to the public. It’s an extremely elegant building now devoted to public purposes. I think I advanced that argument. It was going to be bought and be another one of those glass box highrises. vanR: One of the very first letters to the editor that you wrote, maybe in 1962 or 1963, was when the Madlener house was up for sale.
Weese: How did you know that?
116 vanR: I read it in some of the research I did for this interview. Somebody mentioned it and noted that you were a force to be reckoned with.
Weese: Well, we tried to man the barricades in a way that was not totally obtrusive. But we put people on notice. I forgot about that completely until I was rifling through a scrapbook at the Graham Foundation and I found that letter. You don’t remember that you do those things—I had totally forgotten that I had written that letter. But I thought that for a right-brained person it was at least grammatical. One of the worst things that modern architects—Bruce Graham and those people—wanted to do is rid themselves of things like the Underwriters Laboratories because they thought they could do better than what had been done. They wanted to erase them. It was like genocide. Archicide! It’s an invidious comparison to have a pared-down, detail-less building next to something as complex as Underwriters Laboratories. The history of the Underwriters Lab is a series of additions. It ends up looking like the Pitti Palace, but it was done in four or five expansion campaigns. It always became a composition no matter how they expanded it. It was very easy to use that as a foil. It may not be totally good, but the building they planned caused us to do something. We delayed that project for a whole year because we put it on the National Register. We, Larry Booth and I, took Bruce to lunch because he was totally angry. He went down and got it off the National Register by overriding us through the U. S. Senate, or something. He said, “How can you do this to one of my best designers?”—Joe Gonzalez. vanR: Well, maybe it’s good that you can laugh about it after all these years. One of the next things that we should talk about was the last gathering of the Chicago Seven.
Weese: The Last Supper? vanR: Well, I didn’t put it that way. In April of 1987 there was a symposium called “7+11” at the Art Institute. It was given that name because it included the seven of you and it had been eleven years since your first exhibition together. In that symposium, you all gathered to discuss the past, present and future.
117 You each showed the country house you did for the 1976 exhibit and then a project that you were currently working on. You showed the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Peoria. Just as an aside, I thought it was interesting that of the current projects that were shown by all of you, a number of them were religious buildings or libraries or other public buildings. Do you recall that symposium?
Weese: I recall some of that. It was ironical in a sense because I think that Michael Sorkin was the master of ceremonies. Was that so? vanR: I’m not sure. The symposium was sponsored by Threshold.
Weese: Yeah, and Sorkin tried to keep us going there. I don’t remember the details. In fact, I don’t even remember having read the article you just showed me. The room was dark and it was a large room and I think that people started wandering out on us during the second half because I’m not sure that we were hitting our stride. Maybe we were just getting into the trenches and defending ourselves and going over old ground. I think I did say something like I wasn’t totally interested in architecture if it wasn’t going to do something. Otherwise I was just as interested in growing beans. This was only to try to cut into or get around the discussions of aesthetics or abstractions or theories that may have been coming down on our heads by that time. So I’m not sure that I can reconstruct anything except that it could have been a ploy, I could have been estranged from the directions that our colleagues like Jim Freed and Helmut were going. Jim was there and, of course, his practice and Helmut’s practice were huge and all consuming and I guess I was trying to defend the turf of the little guy. vanR: Do you recall your feelings about the initial proposal for the seven to get together and talk as a group?
Weese Well, yeah, it was put together by Ed Keegan and his sidekick Eric Adams. They wanted to keep the juices flowing and keep a little conflict going and I think it’s like stepping up to the plate and saying what you feel like, just like
118 this interview. I appreciate your considering all of our inputs that important. It’s not just our architectural oeuvre, it’s how we feel about things and how we might have affected things that we didn’t build. So that’s why I appreciate this attempt by you and maybe by Keegan and those people who are trying to keep certain issues—even if they are poorly formed and poorly defended. Something hidden may come out of that. You’re reinterpreting something that may not be well said or well argued or well articulated by us, but that means that there is some continuity to history. We can go back and revisit things and reinterpret them and they are of value. What scares me is to erase history. We’re struggling to talk about these issues and I’m not being specific. In that symposium we did try to bring back, at that time, things that we did before and try to establish whether we were totally turncoat or chameleon in our aspects or whether we felt there was something ongoing, some kernel that we could keep nurturing. That’s what I want to say, that there’s a kernel of architectural thought or activity that stretches out. That’s why my whole family is in it; that’s why my son is in it. I think he’s better than I am, by far, and he’s careful and concerned in lots of ways and capable to continue the discussion and the argument generation-wise.
[Tape 5: Side 1] vanR: One of the things that I just mentioned when I introduced this symposium was that the majority of you were presenting work for non-profit institutions as your current work, rather than private houses, which is how you all had started. Did that strike you as an important outgrowth of your work?
Weese: Oh, yeah. But I guess what you’re saying didn’t fall out to me then when there was a lot of other institutional work. But now I see it. vanR: There was a library, a synagogue, and two churches.
Weese: You’re bringing something out, you see? I think there’s a certain tension in a symposium like this that you’re trying to defend your turf and you’re not thinking too logically and you blurt out certain messages and there’s a certain
119 self-consciousness about a meeting like that. I’m not sure that that discussion was recorded, was it? vanR: I don’t think so.
Weese: Well, there were a certain number of lengthy quotes. I think that Threshold’s article was the one that I saw and it came out way late—about five years later or so—and Keegan and Adams put together some quotes. But it’s hard because architects don’t argue logically like lawyers. So a lot of this stuff comes out kind of heterogeneous and strange and serendipity. It’s hard to come out logically. But I think that the way you’ve put these things together and pointed out the institutional thing meant that I guess our firms were maturing and we wanted to show that we were legitimate. vanR: That brings up another interesting point about the heterogeneous discussions, in particular. There were people like Stanley and Stuart and Tom and Larry Booth, to some extent, who wrote about their philosophies. I don’t think that you ever really did that. Was it a conscious decision on your part not to create these position papers like they did?
Weese: Oh, I’d like to. I think that Beeby wrote some pretty scholarly stuff. I would like to, but I think mine are more aphorisms and cartoons, like I’ve mentioned. I think that the most serious piece I wrote was justifying legitimate detailing of buildings. I called it “Detail Versus Ornament” and it came out in Threshold, the UIC publication. vanR: That was the article about the Evelyn Chapel.
Weese: Yes. I’ve looked at it subsequently and I think it still holds, more or less—you know it can always be cleaned up grammatically. I think that was the closest I got to trying to describe it. It’s a non-theoretical discussion and it’s not design but a process. I would still like to argue that architecture is a craft, you know, and it’s not a science or anything. It comes out of these intuitions that are established in a dialog of the process of construction. I’ve gotten a lot of
120 support from a lot brighter people—Aalto has certainly said that. Historically, we find little nodes of thinking of that sort. Hugo Häring was thinking about that and his position earned him exclusion from CIAM. Le Corbusier and Giedion were happy to see him disappear. So it doesn’t produce a school of thought or a Miesian projection into the next project because each design is formulated around an existential situation. So you say to yourself with each new project, I’ve got to start over again and think about these problems. I think that certain architects like Ralph Erskine in Sweden are locally inspired to do things for the situation and therefore it’s very hard to produce a school of thought—I guess that’s my point. vanR: Did you feel by this time that the Miesians had been discredited in Chicago?
Weese: No! vanR: Do you think they ever will be?
Weese: Maybe not. It’s not quite like the Flat-Earth Society, but I find that you can almost say it’s an analogy between the creationists versus the evolutionists. Maybe that’s a good analogy. Because the creationists said—and that’s the way the ancient faculty at IIT treats it—that the religion has been revealed and now all we have to do is follow it. But the evolutionists have got the upper hand and you can believe anything you want. But what’s useful? What’s workable? What’s really going on? Are we alive? Or are we frozen in time? There will always be people who wonder and gawk at the purism of the Farnsworth pavilion. I think we’ve agreed we’re not going to call it a house. You pay fifteen dollars to see it, but who ever successfully dwelt there? The Miesian or the Wrightian thing is a religion. vanR: And you’re arguing for a more ecumenical world?
Weese: Yeah! That’s why I like the SAH historic survey uncovering these buildings in these obscure locations in every state in the union—the wonders to behold. God! It makes me want to get up in the morning. If you take the Blue Guide to
121 Europe, they’ll tell you there’s a town in Portugal where King Edward or somebody got sick and therefore it’s no good. But Figueira de Foz is a little port town in Portugal and it’s just the stupidity of the Baedekker mentality or the Blue Guide mentality that “this is important to look at and it’s the supreme example.” The 10 Best Buildings in the World—give me a break! Figueira de Foz is one of the most interesting vernacular, localized, exciting pieces of urban architecture anywhere. I don’t use guidebooks, I go and look for myself. vanR: Thinking about the best of lists, just recently, in the fall or winter of 1997, the Chicago Seven were included in the Chicago Tribune’s list of the most notable contributors to the last 150 years of the arts in Chicago.
Weese: Really? vanR: Yes, you were right there with Burnham and Sullivan and Wright.
Weese: Gee, I’ll have to get my clipping service going. I missed that. vanR: Well, I’ll have to tell you then that the entry read, “This group of rebels opened the way for a more inclusive version of Chicago’s architectural history, including tradition-minded architects and unorthodox modernists left out of the standard modernist canon.” Do you think that’s an accurate summation of your accomplishments?
Weese: Oh, gee. Yeah, I would want that to happen. I mentioned Aalto and his pleadings for the little guy, the little man, the little person—not to treat them as consumer objects or people to be exploited, but as people to be understood and people to be learned from. I’m all for that. I think it fits into my whole kind of constellation of social values, that we can learn from craft tradition and everything else that follows. The dignity of individual activity, individual art… You know, the study of anthropology certainly has helped us, whether it’s Levi-Strauss or whoever, Ruth Benedict, or Boaz, where these people tried to show that a self-contained society was perfectly organized
122 and had a lot of meaning. We still have to retain that kind of continuity. Evolutionary biology is helping us, because the human body… I think we’ve changed a lot, but if Alexander the Great walked through the door, he’d look like a human being. He’d still be a lot more like us. We haven’t changed that much. With the cultural tools we use, we have to be careful that they change only to our advantage and not to our disadvantage. I think there’s a lot going for this whole constellation of thinking of inclusiveness. vanR: One of the other things that I noticed in this quote is that what’s missing is any mention of your own work, the actual work of the Chicago Seven.
Weese: Yeah, that was almost a quote from what Stuart Cohen had done with the first show and the group that he brought out of obscurity. vanR: Do you want to be remembered more for bringing those architects out of obscurity or for your own work?
Weese: You bring up a very interesting question that really bothers me. It goes back to Helmut’s need to do something now in order that he might not be forgotten. The more we strain to do things that we think are important, the more it’s probably misguided, because I’m not sure which building that I would prefer to be remembered by. History is very fickle and I think what I would like to start first with is the idea of redundancy, which is making the walls thick so that the building might last and might be worth rehabbing, even though it may have different uses. That was my earlier critique of modernity—it’s so delicate, so fragile, that they melt into the ground. Bud Goldberg has lost a number of buildings because he was so experimental—they didn’t last and they just rotted and disappeared. I would leave to history what would be remembered. I’m not afraid. I think that some institutional buildings that we have done will last because they’re protected under the aegis of the church or the university or the college. They become precious. That’s the best sign. Commercial architecture is really scary because things like storefronts are so ephemeral. Adolf Loos’s American Bar in Vienna is such an exception. Things just go up and go down. That’s why I
123 don’t like temporary shows or competitions or world fairs. All of this effort—in the days when you were experimenting with modernity and the breakthroughs of technology, I’m wrong in that respect—but now it’s just establishing the hegemony of some commercial interest. We’ve done all of that, so you’re really establishing Crate and Barrel or Pottery Barn or something else as the measure by which everything is measured. You know, it’s commercialized, it’s not experimental so much. vanR: If you had to do it over again, do you think you would join the Chicago Seven?
Weese: Oh, it was stimulating. I think I mentioned that if we’d done everything in the same room, we would have influenced each other, but we went back to our separate studios. I would do it again. I respect that process. I think it was helpful. I don’t know who put that Tribune quote together—was it Blair Kamin? vanR: It didn’t have a by-line, but probably.
Weese: I think that we tried to raise the standards of excellence, to build a building well. If Mies was trying to do that, then I’m for him, but in a lot of ways, he worked against his own principles. To put all of the structural frame and steel on the outside of a building is not normal. We were going by the Benjamin Marshall apartment building the other day at State and North at the park and it has the frame exposed for some repairs. I think my friend Jack Hartray said, “Well, the only thing Mies did was to take the terracotta and all the protection off.” You’d have the frame. But that’s hard, that’s inviting trouble. vanR: Do you think that the changes that the Chicago Seven brought around would have happened anyway? Was that evolution away from Mies somehow inevitable?
124 Weese: Boy, that’s a humdinger. I don’t know. I don’t know what the forces of social change really are. You can have little stimuli, but the trend probably would have taken place but maybe not as quickly or as overtly. Yeah, do you march on the capitol for civil rights or for AIDS or is the thing going to be so pervasive in small ways that it gets done anyway? I don’t know. I think I’m an activist enough to think I start to think about those things, but I’m not continuous. So I don’t know. Boy, my answer was pretty obscure. Your question is unanswerable, I think, but it’s a good one. vanR: I just thought your opinion would be interesting.
Weese: It’s a good question, because what you’re really asking is “What can one do to change things?” I believe very much that you can change things. But whether it’s in little ways or whether you go out and assassinate somebody you don’t like… I took these stickers, for instance, because I got so mad at sports utility vehicles that I said, “I have to do something directly.” The most direct thing I can do is get these stickers and put them on the driver’s window and then run, you know? vanR: Just for the record, would you describe what you wrote on the stickers?
Weese: Yeah, I wrote “Save the planet. Get a small car.” I think they’re collector’s items now. I didn’t form a committee. I actually dropped out of the talk radio and television appearances because that wasn’t what I was trying to do. I was just saying, “Hey, why don’t people think more about what they do?” Not that I was going to stand on every street corner and flag them down, but it was just a recognition that we should be more conscious of what we do. The latest thing I did was to send a set of stickers to Russell Baker at the New York Times and I sent a complimentary pad to Mary Schmich at the Tribune. I think I’m saving the rest of my four thousand to send to people of great influence, like these columnists. It’s coming out. What you do is you spread a little bit of this around, as a tickler, kind of. I can’t form an international committee against SUVs, they’re going to fall by their own weight.
125 vanR: Well, what you’re doing sounds like the definition of grassroots activism.
Weese: Yeah. But then you’re off to something else. I had to turn off these guys who got mad at me because I wouldn’t talk on the radio shows anymore. vanR: So do you think it is possible for one man, or seven, to make a difference?
Weese: Yeah. We’ve all survived in our own way. Architecture is not a huge, winning way of making a living. If you get together with the AIA, they’re always lamenting the cost of liability insurance. So they take a lot of fun out of it. It is risk-taking to survive as individual entrepreneurs, which I think we have, and some of them very successfully. Some maybe to the point of compromise because you can be too successful and anything that comes through the door, you’re going to do and you’re with it. No, I think that to make our statement, to maintain our independence and integrity if we try to define it and hope that it’s there, that’s the best that we can do. vanR: I’m thinking for a moment about the AIA and the larger world of architects. How did your work in Chicago influence or reflect the larger world? Do you think the AIA was helpful to you?
Weese: The AIA, the umbrella organization in Washington, is so distant and politicized, it’s hard to say that it helped locally. But the local chapters are very useful and I think that we have some great leadership. I think that Alice Sinkevitch, right now—I’ll give her whatever any kudos anybody could give for doing the AIA Guide to Chicago. It was a tremendous organizational task and she got a lot of volunteers to help. I think that was maybe her lasting contribution. But there’re all these other efforts that do get handled on a local basis. My wife, Cindy, was running for national president of the AIA, which alarmed me fundamentally as a kind of a titular post of one year in which you get used for ribbon-cutting and saying nice things about things you don’t know anything about. So the relationship of the local to the national is tough. Design awards, if you go back over the awards historically, they may not have picked the best because it’s so instant and so full of publicity—a
126 “whatever you know, you’re safe with” kind of mentality. It’s very hard to be that correct. I think I can be pretty clear on that—if you go back to what people ultimately sort out it will be different from the awards. vanR: Well, you’ve been given a number of recognitions from the AIA yourself.
Weese: Right, but not for the buildings that I think are most important. They charmed for reasons that they are very photogenic or other reasons. So it’s tricky. I’ve been on a number of juries and the politics of awarding the known versus the unknown and taking risks—it’s political. So you tend to reinforce the trends that the magazines have already shown. It’s kind of convoluted or circular. On the other hand, the AIA documents, some of the basic nuts and bolts, are what we live or die by. The basic contractual form tries to give the architect at least an even hand against all the lawyers and clients. So I became fellow of the AIA in 1974. Stanley Tigerman sponsored me and he said, “You’ve got to do it.” I was very resistant. But if there’s something that you haven’t got, then people want it. The FAIA is a slightly diluted group of politically acceptable architects. Just remember that Keck and Keck resisted the AIA and you have to remember what their thinking was and maybe it hasn’t been adequately addressed. They thought it was kind of going to the least common denominator. I have not been hostile to the AIA, but I have not been a great participant. I was on the planning committee when Paul McCurry was president. He did one thing the year he was president of the AIA in Chicago; he stopped the Crosstown Expressway. I helped him because I was on the design committee. That’s the one task that we accomplished. I always respected him for that because he didn’t go all over the place glad-handing everybody. So there are things that the AIA can do, the kind of emergencies like that, that they have done. I don’t know them all, but let’s give them credit. vanR: I’d like to have you talk a bit about the future of architecture and students of architecture. I know that Cindy is very involved in teaching and you’ve been a visiting critic at a number of institutions. You haven’t been a professor like
127 Stanley or Tom or Stuart, but what are your thoughts about the future of architecture for students today?
Weese: Yeah, it’s a necessary process. Unfortunately it’s been heavily weighed down by the bureaucratic National Council of Architectural Registration Board (NCARB) and then the requirements to get licensed and so forth. My opening statement on this subject is that I don’t think that architecture can be taught but I think it can be learned. Maybe it goes all the way back to the fact that I was learning it informally with the help of my brother at a very early age. So I was pretty well versed when I got to school, but you still have to go through school these days. It’s the mix of very talented fellow students that really spurs you on, rather than some of the craziness of the tenured faculty. I’m not a professional teacher. I feel that students suffer under my wanderings when I do teach, but I’m terribly interested in the students as people. I guess in a more informal sense I’d like to see them motivated and fill out their destinies. Cindy was drafted—she’s an alum of the class of 1962 and then 1965 from graduate school at Washington University—I don’t think she would willingly take on another job, but she was drafted by her alma mater and she takes it very seriously. She’s produced a real enthusiasm down there and she’s got some very good professors. I’m excited about that for the institution and she’s got Fumihiko Maki to design the new Arts and Architecture Center down there on the east campus. So I’m a cheerleader on all of that. I am fascinated by the whole environment of learning. But kids just don’t look at buildings now—the first thing you should do if you’re interested in architecture is start looking around—they sit in the studio. Stanley did something very curious and they accused him of this when he went to the American Academy in Rome—he spent all his time in the library instead of out on the streets. To use the living laboratories of buildings is most important. It’s the abstraction. I’m also against kids who want to build an individual building. Paul Rudolph got up once at IIT and said to a panel of all of the architects who were then famous—Pei, Franzen, Johnson—he turned to them and he said, “You guys can do the background buildings and I’ll do the foreground buildings.” That mentality—kids still want to do individual monuments, a thank-you to modernity, I guess. The learning
128 process is endless. What makes the field so exciting is the permutations of possibilities from building buildings as a contractor or preserving them as a preservationist or designing them or making them happen as a facilities manager. It’s still a bridging discipline. vanR: We’re coming to the end of our session and so I want to ask if there’s anything that you would like to talk about that we haven’t brought up.
Weese: Well, historically, I want to make clear that I have come from a very intense architectural background and family setting that I benefited from with the help of my oldest brother Harry and also the contributions of my highly- skilled middle brother John. But then, as one matures, I want to also make clear that we had a civil dissolution of our interests and a kind of a branching out that is part of the maturation process. I want to underline the fact that it was perhaps inevitable, but not necessarily unconstructive. It was useful. It brings me to another relationship, which is the kind of family operation in my office, which is collaborative, where the design is a process of interaction. Design is very precious in a lot of people’s eyes but there’s so much that creates the situation to make it valid that we sit and we trade ideas. I may have more experience or more knowledge because of my age, which can also be a disadvantage. I wanted to say that working collaboratively and interactively with my family in kind of a cottage industry—including my daughter-in-law, who’s a very competent graphic artist in the same space and who does a lot of work with us—leaves us as the modern model of a medieval guild. As I say, I appreciate the fact that the Art Institute’s Architecture Department has seen fit to honor the local roots of what has made Chicago famous. I’m glad they finally caught up, because it wasn’t that way in the beginning. We lost some crucial time in considering. I have a huge respect for history. Maybe the most shocking thing I think about is the chutzpah and the hubris of modernity. To think that you can jump outside of your skin. We all are modern, we all go forward in using technology and so forth, but we should use it more judiciously and carefully. Maybe the historic evolution of architectural form is the best thing that I can hope for. Does that bring us to the end?
129 vanR: I want to thank you very much for your thoughts and for your generous contribution to this endeavor. I think this will be a very important document for students and scholars for years to come.
Weese: Well, that’s very kind of you to say. I hope so. We can all benefit. I still will read and look and listen and observe—it keeps you going. vanR: This is not the end. It’s just a milestone on the way. Thank you.
Weese: Great! Thank you for your time.
130 SELECTED REFERENCES
READINGS ABOUT THE CHICAGO SEVEN Boissière, Olivier. "Le Concours du Chicago Tribune Revisité." L'architecture d'aujourd'hui 211 (October 1980):VII-VIII. Bourgeois, Denis. "Anciens Contre Modernes." AI Cree 179 (March/April 1980): 74-79,152. Casari, Maurizio and Vincenzo Pavan. New Chicago Architecture (exhibition catalog). Chicago: Rizzoli, 1981. Chatain, Elizabeth. "On the Town with the Lively Chicago Seven." Inland Architect 22 (February 1978): 22-23. Cohen, Stuart E. Chicago Architects. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976. _____ “Two Tales of a City: Chicago.” Progressive Architecture 57 (September 1976): 24. _____. "Late Entries." Progressive Architecture 61 (June 1980): 94-99. Cohen, Stuart E. and Stanley Tigerman. Chicago Tribune Tower Competition & Late Entries. New York: Rizzoli International, 1980. "Exhibition Review: Seven Chicago Architects." The Harvard Architectural Review 1 (Spring 1980): 240-247. Greenspan, David. "Letters." Inland Architect 21 (August 1977): 22-23. Grube, Oswald W., Peter C Pran, and Franz Schulze.. 100 Years of Architecture in Chicago (exhibition catalog). Chicago: J. Philip O'Hara, 1976. Houston, Andre F. "Opinion." Inland Architect 20 (September 1976):6. Kent, Cheryl. "The Chicago Seven: Retiring Rebels." Inland Architect 31 (July/August 1987): 5-6, 9. Klotz, Heinrich. Revision der Moderne: Postmoderne Architektur 1960-1980. (exhibition catalog) Frankfurt am Main: Prestel-Verlag, 1984. Knobel, Lance "Recent Work of the Chicago Seven." The Architectural Review (London) CLXVII (June 1980): 362-371. Laine, Christian K. "The Tribune Competition 1980." Inland Architect 24 (June 1980): 11-17. “Les Mysteres de Chicago ou l’histoire mystifiée.” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 186 (September 1976): XXII-XXIII. “Letters.” Inland Architect 20 (July 1976): 25-27. Miller, Nory. "War of Ideas." Inland Architect 20 (March 1976): 6-28.
131 _____. "Chicago's Design Yippies Stage an Art Show." Inland Architect 21 (March 1977): 10- 17. _____. "Chicago Seven Playing the Role." Progressive Architecture 58 (April 1977): 38, 43. _____. “Projections on Projects.” Progressive Architecture 59 (January 1978): 29. _____. "Chicago." Progressive Architecture 61 (June 1980): 71-72. Morrison, C.L. "Chicago: 'Seven Chicago Architects' Richard Gray Gallery." Artforum XV (April 1977): 73. _____. "Chicago: Chicago Seven." Artforum 17 (October 1978): 72. Pran, Peter. “The Diversity of Design Among Chicago Architects Today.” L’architettura 23 (December 1977): 434-74 Schulze, Franz. "Letters." Inland Architect 22 (February 1978): 24-25. Seven Chicago Architects. Exhibition catalog with essay by Dennis Adrian. Chicago: Richard Gray Gallery, 1976. “Seven Chicago Architects” Harvard Architecture Review 1 (Spring 1980): 240-259. "The Exquisite Corpse." A + U 93 (June 1978): 93-104. Tigerman, Stanley. "Modernism and the Canonical Chicago Architectural Condition." The Harvard Architecture Review 1 (Spring 1980): 171-180. Town Houses. Exhibition catalog with foreword by Carter Manny. Chicago: The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1978. Walter Kelly Gallery. (exhibition invitation). "Chicago Seven: the Exquisite Corpse." December 16, 1977. Woodhouse, David. "New Chicago Architecture." Inland Architect 25 (Nov./Dec. 1981): 36- 37.
READINGS BY AND ABOUT BENJAMIN H. WEESE “A Florentine touch: Chestnut Place Apartments, Chicago, Illinois.” Architectural Record 171 (July 1983): 96-97. “Benjamin Horace Weese.” In Chicago Architects Design: a Century of Architectural Drawings from the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1982. “Building with Brick.” Inland Architect 28 (March-April 1984): 24-25. “Collegiate Comfiness: Burling Library at Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa.” Architectural Record 173 (March 1985): 108-111. “From the Boards of Weese Seegers Hickey Weese.” Inland Architect 21 (December 1977): 16- 19.
132 Greer, Nora Richter. “Elegantly Detailed, Soaring Spaces: Wesleyan University Chapel, Bloomington, Ill.” Architecture 74 (January 1985): [44]-49. Harry Weese and Associates: Works, 1956-1970. Chicago: Harry Weese and Associates, c. 1970. “In Progress: Ghent Square.” Progressive Architecture 57 (May 1976 ): 44. Mahany, Barbara. “Taking on a Goliath in the War Against Sport Utility Vehicles, Post-Its is Mightier than the Sword.” Chicago Tribune, 29 January 1998. Miller, Nory. “Four Architects Who Set Up Shop On the Offbeat Side of the Street.” Inland Architect 16 (June 1972): 12-17. Newman, M.W. “Ben Weese’s Evelyn Chapel Recalls Past with a Purpose.” Chicago Sun- Times Show, 21 April 1985. Nesmith, Lynn. “Prairie Resurrection: a New Church Rises Like a Phoenix from the Ashes of a Devastating Fire.” Architecture 79 (February 1990 ): 68-70. “Reconstruction of Mears Hall, Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa.” Chicago Architectural Journal 5 (1985) 154-155. “Sawyer Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1975; architects: Harry Weese and Associates” Process: architecture 11 (1979): 112-117. Schmertz, Mildred F. “Design for Readers.” Architectural Record 164 (July1978 ): 89-[98] Solomon, Richard Jay. “A Panegyric on Chestnut Place.” Inland Architect 28 (January- February 1984 ) 38-42. “Weese versus Mies: Two Buildings, Two Architects, Two Points of View.” Architectural Record 157 (April 1975): 83-90. Weese, Benjamin H. “The County Courthouse: Rediscovering a National Asset.” Architectural Record 157 (June 1975): 114-116. _____. A Courthouse Conservation Handbook. Washington: Preservation Press, 1976. _____. “Detail as Distinguished from Decoration: the Evelyn Chapel, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois.” Threshold 3 (Autumn 1985): 118-121. _____. “Jung, Aalto, and Grant Wood: Confluences of the Subconscious.” Architecture Chicago 7 (1989): 21-25. _____. “What I Learned at Harvard.” In Form, Modernism, and History: Essays in Honor of Eduard F. Sekler, edited by Alexander von Hoffman. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1996. “Westminster Church in Peoria.” Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 38 (May 1990): 665-670.
133 BENJAMIN HORACE WEESE
Born: 4 June 1929, Evanston, Illinois
Education: Harvard University, B. Arch., 1951 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau, France, Scholarship and Certificate, 1956 Harvard University, M. Arch., 1957
Work Experience: Harry Weese and Associates, 1957-1977 Weese, Seegers, Hickey, Weese, 1977-1983 Weese Hickey Weese, 1983-1989 Weese Langley Weese, 1989-present
Selected Honors: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1974 Distinguished Service Award, Chicago Chapter, American Institute of Architects, 1984
Selected Civic Service: Co-founder, Chicago Heritage Committee, 1958 Chairman, Planning Committee, Chicago Chapter, American Institute of Architects, 1965 Co-founder, Chicago School of Architecture Foundation [now the Chicago Architecture Foundation], 1966 President, Chicago Architectural Club, 1985-1986 Board of Trustees, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1988-2000, 2001-present President, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 1995-1999 Commission on Chicago Landmarks, 1998-present
Visiting Critic and Lecturer: Ball State University Cooper Union Harvard University Iowa State University Kansas State University Miami University Renssalear Polytechnic Institute University of Illinois, Chicago Circle University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
134 University of Kentucky, Lexington University of Tennessee, Knoxville University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Washington University, St. Louis Technische Hochschule, Vienna
Selected Exhibitions: “Forty Under Forty,” New York Architectural League, New York City, New York, 1966 "Chicago Architects", Cooper-Union, New York City, 1976; Time-Life Building, Chicago, Illinois, 1976 “100 Years of Chicago Architects,” Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Illinois, 1976 “Seven Chicago Architects," Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 1977 “The Exquisite Corpse," Walter Kelly Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 1977 “Town Houses,” Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois, 1978; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1978 “Late Entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, 1980; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California, 1980; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1981; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1981; Fort Worth Art Center, Fort Worth, Texas, 1981; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, 1982 “Chicago Architects Design,” The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1981 “New Chicago Architecture,” Verona, Italy, 1981; Graham Foundation, Chicago, Illinois, 1982 “Chicago and the Way It Was-and Is,” Chicago ArchiCenter, Chicago, Illinois, 1983 “150 Years of Chicago Architecture,” Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Illinois 1985 “Chicago Architecture & Design: 1923-1993,” Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1993 “Views of Chicago: Travel Sketches by Contemporary Architects,” The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1997
135 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS
180 North LaSalle, Chicago, Illinois 73 Booth, Laurence (Larry) 50, 52, 53, 63, 69, 86, 235 Eugenie Lane, Chicago, Illinois 31, 87, 95, 115, 117, 120 33 Borg-Warner Building, Chicago, Illinois 102 333 West Wacker, Chicago, Illinois 102 Boston Public Library, Boston, 860 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois Massachusetts 84 28 Boulanger, Nadia 23 900 North Michigan, Chicago, Illinois Bowly, Devereux 46 114 Breuer, Marcel 25 Broadacre City (project) 47 Aalto, Alvar 9, 28, 33-34, 41, 58, 60, 66, Brooks, H. Allen 67 81, 82, 84, 121, 122 Bruegmann, Robert (Bob) 114 Abraham Lincoln Center, Chicago, Brunswick Building, Chicago, Illinois 102 Illinois 53 Burnham, Daniel 122 Adams, Brewster 38, 71 Byrne, Barry 61 Adams, Eric 118, 120 Adler, Dankmar 41, 55 Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York Adrian, Dennis 69 City, New York 44 Albers, Josef 11 Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut (aka American Bar, Vienna, Austria 123 Ronchamp), Ronchamp, France 23 American Bar Association Building, Chermayeff, Serge 13, 14-15, 22 Chicago, Illinois 101 Chestnut Place Apartments, Chicago, American Institute of Architects (AIA) Illinois 113 126 Chicago Architectural Club 91, 96-97, 98, Amoco Building, Chicago, Illinois 112 112, 115 (see also Standard Oil) Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois Anderson, Lawrence B. 18 45 Ando, Tadao 100 Chicago Heritage Committee 40 Asplund, Gunnar 59, 82 Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 44 33 Clark, Ray 111 Bach, Ira 41 Coates, Wells 14 Baird, John 38, 99 Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 111 Baker, Russell 125 Cohen, Stuart E. 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 68, 69, 70, Baldwin Kingrey, Chicago, Illinois 9, 48 82, 87, 115, 120, 123, 128 Bandel, Hans Karl 44, 45 Coleman-Ames (house), Chicago, Illinois 49 Barancik, Richard (Dick) 96 Community Bank of Lawndale, Chicago, Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 26 Illinois 108-9, 110 Beaudouin & Lods 23 Conant, Kenneth 8, 11, 19 Beeby Thomas (Tom) 54, 62, 63, 69, 70, Cornell College, Chapel, Mount Vernon, 96, 100, 120, 128 Iowa 39 Bell, Robert E. 33 Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa 32, 33 Berman, Irving 42 Cram, Ralph Adams 102 Bibliothèque St. Geneviève, Paris, Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield Hills, France 58 Michigan 4, 8 Bofill, Ricardo 103 Crosstown Expressway, Chicago, Illinois Bonta, Juan Pablo 99 127
136 Daley, Richard J. 49, 51 Gidwitz, Willard (house), Chicago, Illinois Dart, Edward (Ed) 54, 58 38 Davidson, Suzette Morton 46 Giedion, Sigfried 10, 12, 18, 21-22, 46, 48, 57, Derrida, Jacques 60 93, 97, 105, 121 Despres, Marian 45-46 Gillet, Guillaume 23 Despres, Marian and Leon 40 Glessner, John (house), Chicago, Illinois 40- Diana Court Building, Chicago, Illinois 43, 45, 84, 116 48 Goettsch, James 90 Doyle, Deborah 90, 91 Goldberg, Bertrand (Bud) 54, 98, 123 Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa 32 Goldsmith, Myron 98 Drexler, Arthur 70 Gombrich, Ernst H. 18 Drummond, William 103 Gonzalez, Joseph (Joe) 117 Duncan, Hugh Dalziel 41 Gordon, Ezra 53 Graham, Bruce 96, 98, 117 Eames, Charles 4 Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies Eaton, Leonard 83, 84 in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois 43, 51, Eisenman, Peter 92-93, 98 90, 91, 99, 116 Entenza, John 43, 51 Graves, Michael 64, 70, 92, 93 Erskine, Ralph 121 Greenwood Park Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 53 Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa 77, 78, 111 67 Gropius, Walter 10, 11, 13, 14, 30-31, 58, 68, Farnsworth, Edith (house), Plano, 70, 97, 105 Illinois 27, 57, 121 Gross, Steven 90 Finlay Apartments, Lombard, Illinois 36, Grube, Oswald 52 108 Guastavino, Rafael 44 Fisher, Howard 54 Fitch, James Marston 22, 27, 44, 45, 57 Haas, Richard 107, 113 Fletcher, Banister 22 Haffner, Charles 48 Foucault, Michel 60 Hall, Emory Stanford 61 Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Hammond, James Wright (Jim) 63 Illinois 103 Hancock Building, Chicago, Illinois 112 Frampton, Kenneth 71 Häring, Hugo 121 Franzen, Ulrich 128 Harry Weese Associates (HWA) 17, 29, 32, Freed, James Igoe (Jim) 62, 63, 68, 86, 87, 34, 38, 45, 50, 52, 58, 63, 72, 75, 76, 85, 86, 106, 118 87 Fry, Maxwell 14 Hartford Plaza Building, Chicago, Illinois Fugman, Robert 90, 91 102 Fuller, R. Buckminster (Bucky) 54 Hartmann, William (Bill) 43 Hartray, Jack 63, 124 Gamble, David (house), Pasadena, Hasbrouck, Wilbert (Will) 40 California 45 Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugene 59 Gapp, Paul 26, 41 Hedrich-Blessing 95 Garden, Hugh 54 Hedrich, Jack 95 Gardescu, Paul 17 Heinemann, Benjamin (Ben) 37 Gare d’Orsay, Paris, France 24 Hejduk, John 92-93 Garrick Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 40-41 Hockman, Elaine 70 Gehry, Frank 68, 92, 99 Holabird & Root 55 Geyer, Georgie Ann 41 Hood, Raymond 103 Horn Gerald (Jerry) 90, 96
137 Hudnut, Joseph 10, 11, 105 Levin, Jack 53 Hughes, Robert 114 Loebl Schlossman 54, 58 Huxtable, Ada Louise 51 Loos, Adolf 104, 123 Lurie, Paul 42 Iannelli, Alfonso 40 IBM Building, Chicago, Illinois 80 Madlener, Albert F. (house), Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown Illinois 116 Hall, Chicago, Illinois 42 Maher, George Washington 67 Illinois Wesleyan University, Evelyn Maher, Philip (son of George W.) 114 Chapel, Bloomington, Illinois 77, 78, Maki, Fumihiko 74, 100, 128 111, 120 Marina City, Chicago, Illinois 29 Inland Steel Building, Chicago, Illinois Marriott Hotel, Chicago, Illinois 75 102 Marshall Field Warehouse, Chicago, Illinois Irving, Robert 46 40, 84 Irwin Union Bank, Hope, Indiana 33 Mayo & Mayo 115 McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois 25, 26 Jackson, Huson 22 McCormick, Robert 103 Jahn, Helmut 48, 61, 63, 90, 93, 101, 115, McCurry, Paul 127 118, 123 McKim, Mead & White 102 Jencks, Charles 92, 93 Meier, Richard 68, 92 John Knox Home, Norfolk, Virginia 34 Mendelsohn, Erich 71 Johnson, Philip 25, 42, 84, 98, 102, 128 Metropolitan Correctional Center, Chicago, Illinois 72-73 Kamin, Blair 114, 124 Meyer, Hannes 105 Karr, Joe 75 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 3, 13, 26-27, 42, Keck & Keck 127 55-56, 58, 70, 71, 91, 93, 124 Keck, George Fred 69 Miller, Nory 88 Keck, George Fred and William 17, 30, Milles, Carl 48 54 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 3, 5, 6, 11, 12 Keegan, Ed 118-20 Moore, Ruth 41, 48-49 Kenna Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 61 Morton, James Park 44 Kenwood Gardens, Chicago, Illinois 33, Murphy, C.F. 43, 48, 63 35 Myers, Marvin 36 Kepes, Gyorgy 12 Kimball, William W. (house), Chicago, Nagle, James (Jim) 53, 62, 63, 68, 86 Illinois 49 Nereim, Anders 90 Kohn Pederson Fox Associates 102 Netsch, Dawn Clark 99 Kornacker, Frank 28 Netsch, Walter 54, 77, 78 Krier, Rob 101 Neumann, Hans 39 New Bauhaus, Chicago, Illinois 3, 6 Labrouste, Henri 58, 84 Newman, M. W. 26, 41, 48 Lake Village, Chicago, Illinois 28, 29-30, New York Five 50, 60, 64, 68, 93, 98 31, 33 Nickel, Richard 40, 102 Lapidus, Morris 114 Noero, Jo 116 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Northside Middle School, Columbus, Jeanneret 12, 14, 22, 24, 56, 59, 121 Indiana 32, 33 LeBoutillier, George Tyrell 11 Oldenberg, Claes 113, 114 Leers Weinzapfel 32 Lescaze, William 102 Pearlman, Jill 10, 11 Leverentz, Sigurd 58 Pederson, William (Bill) 102
138 Pei, Ioeh Ming 19, 86, 87, 98, 128 Shlaes, Jared (Jerry) 31, 32, 33, 112 Performing Arts Center, Milwaukee, Sinkevitch, Alice 55, 126 Wisconsin 73 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 43, 48, 51, 58, Perkins, Dwight Heald 54 78-79, 102 Perkins, Lawrence (Larry) 43, 46 Smith, Norris Kelly 99, 103 Perriand, Charlotte 56 Sollitt, Sumner 43 Peters, Robert (Bob) 43 Sorkin, Michael 118 Phillips Brooks House, Cambridge, Stauffer, Thomas (Tom) 40-41 Massachusetts 15 Stern, Robert A. M. 64, 83, 92 Poelzig, Hans 68 Stirling, James (Jim) 59, 68, 76, 93 Poli, Joseph 90 Stone, Edward Durell (Ed) 102 Pompidou Centre, Paris, France 106 Sullivan, Louis 41, 55, 80, 100, 110, 113, 122 Pond & Pond 54 Summers, Gene 26 Poweshiek Bank, Grinnell, Iowa 107 Pran, Peter 90 The Architects Collaborative (TAC), Price, Martin 33 Cambridge, Massachusetts 30 Prouvé, Jean 24 Theobald, Paul 12 Thorne, Martha 112 Rapson, Ralph 10, 38 Tigerman, Stanley 28, 43, 49-50, 52, 53, 54, Read, Frederick 90 55, 60-63, 65, 68-70, 76, 85-89, 91, 95-101, Rebori, Andrew (Andy) 54 103, 115, 129, 127, 128 Red Star Inn, Chicago, Illinois 40, 48 Time-Life Building, Chicago, Illinois 52 Reich, Lilly 56 Time-Life Building (aka Diana Court Remondet, André 23 Building and Michigan Square Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Building), Chicago, Illinois 48 62, 69 Torroja, Eduardo 19 Richardson, Henry Hobson 42, 59, 82-83, Train, Jack 38, 39 84 Tribune Tower, Chicago, Illinois 97 Rizzoli 94, 103 Turnbull, William 23, 24, 92 Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Illinois 14, 27 Underwriters Laboratories, Chicago, Illinois Roloson, Robert W. (apartments), 117 Chicago, Illinois 89 Unitarian Church, Madison, Wisconsin 67 Rowe, Peter 21 Unité d’habitation (aka Marseilles Block), Rudolph, Paul 94, 128 Marseilles, France 23 United States Embassy, Accra, Ghana 30 Saarinen, Eero 4, 9, 13, 32, 34 Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois 67 Saarinen, Eliel 8-9 Sanctissimi Sidone Chapel, Turin, Italy Van der Meulen, John 38, 71 25 Venturi, Robert (Bob) 64, 80-81, 98, 110, 114 Schmich, Mary 125 Villon, Jacques 23 Schmidt, Richard 54 Vinci, John 41 Schroeder, Kenneth 90 Voysey, Charles F. A. 104-5 Scully, Vincent 99 Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 112 Wainwright Building, St. Louis, Missouri Sekler, Eduard 18-19, 21, 25, 46, 57, 66 80, 113 Semper, Gottfried 93 Walter Kelly Gallery, Chicago, Illinois 84 Sert, José Lluis 18, 19, 20, 23 Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa 79, 83 Severud, Fred 44 Washington, D. C. Metro System 73 Shaw, Howard Van Doren 83 Water Tower Place, Chicago, Illinois 114
139 Webber, Gordon 6 Weese Seegers Hickey Weese 75, 107 Weese, Marjorie Mohr (mother of Ben) Weese, Sue (sister of Ben) 3, 5 2, 14-15, 17 Wesley, John 78 Weese, Harry Ernest (father of Ben) 2, 5, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Peoria, 7-8 Illinois 118 Weese, Cynthia (Cindy, wife of Ben) 1, Williams College, Sawyer Library, 37, 59, 74-75, 76, 85, 90, 91, 95, 126, Williamstown, Massachusetts 77, 78 127, 128 Willits, Ward (house), Highland Park, Weese, Harry Mohr (brother of Ben) 1, Illinois 67 3-5, 7, 8-9, 13, 17, 19, 24, 25, 30-33, 34- Wittkower, Rudolph 18 39, 41, 42, 44, 47, 48, 51, 54, 72-74, 75, Wren, Christopher 78-79 94, 98, 129 Wright, Frank Lloyd 27, 41, 47, 56, 66, 67, 89, Weese, Jane (sister of Ben) 3 104, 122 Weese, John (brother of Ben) 1, 3, 7, 8, 13, 129 Zeckendorf, William 19, 47 Weese, Kate Baldwin (Kitty, wife of Zukowsky, John 70, 106, 107 Harry) 9, 37, 41, 73
140